The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  The Martin family are descended from Huguenots who originated in the Picardy region of France and came over to England to escape religious persecution, probably in the late seventeenth century. The earliest Martin I have found is Esai Martin, who was born in France in about 1632, but was buried at St Mary Northgate, in Canterbury, Kent, in 1702. Esai is a Hebrew/Latin name also used in Spain, which is variously described as meaning ‘God is Salvation’, and ‘Gift’.

  His son, also called Esai, was born in France, and his grandson, Jacques, born in 1683, was the last of this line to be born there, so they probably left sometime between 1683 and 1702. Many Huguenots travelled together crammed into small boats, refugees not unlike those now crossing the Mediterranean. They brought the silk trade to London, and quite a few, like this family, settled in Spitalfields. Some refugees were able to travel back and forth, and Jacques died in France in 1793.

  David Martin, the great-great-great-grandson of the first Esai, was born in 1781 in Bethnal Green. He was a silk weaver and merchant in Spitalfields. He was Herbert James’ grandfather. He and his wife, Mary, had eight children, the first seven were born over a period of fourteen years and were baptised at the same ceremony in 1824, at St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green. Some of the children became involved in the silk trade, and one son became a Nonconformist minister. This latter individual was in 1851 the independent minister of Spitalfields Chapel. (Times change, though, and this building is now the home of the Brick Lane Mosque.)

  William Carson Martin was the sixth of those seven children. He married Charity Church and they emigrated to Sydney, Australia, in 1849 with their two daughters. They had nine further children in Australia. Charity Sophia wrote a remarkable history of her complex maternal Rowley family for the benefit of her daughters. It reads like a Dickensian drama, it is full of orphans and wicked uncles.

  After losing his wife in 1897, Reverend George Martin continued to work and look after a sizeable congregation well into his seventies. Many of those Australian letters were from George to his widowed sister-in-law in Australia, for whom it is apparent he had a very soft spot. Both of them were lonely and, I suspect, had it not been for the fact that they were getting older and were half a world apart in an era when travel was difficult and uncommon, they might have got together and solved their loneliness. George died in Lewisham in 1918 aged 90.

  The Martin family was obviously given to writing, what with George’s religious tracts and the Rowley family history by Charity in Australia. One of George’s grandchildren, Christabel (1895–1982), also wrote her memoirs, detailing life as a Victorian child.

  Herbert James, George Martin’s son, was born in 1862 and became a solicitor. He married Grace in 1889 and they set up home in Penge. They had three children. William Harrod Martin, the eldest, was born in 1890 and died in 1916 on the Somme, a lieutenant with the London Regiment.

  Amy Grace, the second child, was born in 1893. She married George Parr in 1918 when he returned from Rio de Janeiro, where he had worked as vice consul. They lived for some time in Chelmsford and then Northern Ireland, where his work in the Civil Service was as ‘Northern Ireland Comptroller & Auditor General’. He remained there for the rest of his life. He was awarded the CBE for his work.

  The third child, Dora Gladys, was born in 1896, married Alan Heath in 1927 and had two children.

  Herbert James Martin worked in Queen’s Yard in the City with the legal firm Martin & Nicholson. He acted as the Harrod family solicitor in much of their business. He is mentioned as executor for several of his sisters-in-law and their families.

  Grace died in a home in Cheam in 1941, aged 74, and Bertie died in 1953, aged 90.

  EMILY MAUD HARROD

  Emily Maud was the third child and daughter for Charles Digby and Caroline Harrod. She was born in 1868 in Hill Street, Knightsbridge. She was known in the family as ‘Emmie’. She remained single and lived much of her life in Purley, close to her sister Fanny. She died in 1933, aged 64.

  HENRY HERBERT HARROD

  Henry was the fourth child of Charles Digby and Caroline. He was born in 1870 in Hill Street, Knightsbridge. Most importantly, he was the first and only son. He was the most colourful character amongst their children.

  Henry Herbert, like his siblings, had a privileged childhood. The family were very comfortable by the time of his birth, as Harrods was already an extremely successful and increasingly profitable business. As the only boy, he would no doubt have been spoilt, not only by his parents, but also by his sisters. However, being the only boy did bring with it high expectations.

  He was educated at Merchant Taylors School between 1883 and 1889. He then went up to Peterhouse College, Cambridge and gained his BA in 1892. He qualified as a solicitor in 1897, but he never worked or practised. He remained a single man throughout his life, and spent much of his time writing fairy stories and collecting pictures and books. Jean Pitt remembers that he was ‘sweet but dreamy, a poet but no businessman, which was sad for Charles Digby Harrod as he could not pass Harrods on to him’.

  Henry Herbert’s lifestyle certainly did not fulfil his father’s expectations and he would have been a disappointment for his father. Charles Digby Harrod had spent his life working hard and developing Harrods, so having his solicitor son spend his life with fairy stories must have difficult to accept. Henry Herbert must have told his father he had no interest in the shop, and by the time he went off to Cambridge Charles Digby was already selling up.

  After the turn of the century Henry lived much of his life in private hotels in West London, not an unusual style for young men of the day who were ‘living on their own means’. From 1918 onwards, Henry Herbert lived exclusively in the area round the southern end of Earls Court Road. After the horrors of the First World War, London had ‘loosened up’ considerably and major social changes followed. Industry and population began moving out along the major arterial roads to the suburbs and those in London who could afford it were having fun.

  Henry Herbert wrote and published his first book of fairy stories, entitled The Lord of the Deer, and other Fairy Tales, in 1907. The publishers were Lamley & Co. and the illustrations were by Gilbert Ledward, then a 19-year-old student, but later to become a prolific and renowned sculptor. Henry Herbert’s bookplate was also designed by Gilbert Ledward, and was discovered during a visit to view Henry’s book and picture collection, which is housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

  Henry was fascinated by book illustrators and their works, and by sketches by well-known and less well-known artists, some of whom were contemporaneous. Over his life he built up an enormous collection of over 20,000 pictures, paintings, prints and illustrations, which he bequeathed to the V&A. Many of the illustrations were originally used in children’s books and fantasia stories, so it is no surprise that when Henry eventually published his second book in 1923 he produced his own illustrations. This book was entitled Nine Little Fairy Tales, and was published by A&C Black.

  After Henry’s death in 1945, the V&A retained only those pictures which filled gaps in its collection, numbering about 1,600; the rest were auctioned to pay for death duties. Letters between the executors and the Revenue, detailing the bequest and the tax payments, can be found in the National Archives.

  In 1958 the Times featured an article reviewing the V&A 1948 catalogue of acquisitions. These catalogues, usually produced each year, had been delayed by the war, and Volume II for that year is devoted entirely to the bequest from Henry Harrod. The article stated:

  Mr Harrod … was a collector on an omnivorous scale.

  The drawings in the Harrod bequest include a few by old masters, but the majority consists of English drawings, many of them sketches, mostly of the nineteenth century, though some are earlier, or later, and some are by Continental artists. Among them are examples of du Maurier, Keene, Leech, Linley Sambourne, Phil. May and other Punch Illustrators; of Cornelli and other designers of theatrical costumes; and of draughtsmen as variable as Blake, Sir Thomas Lawrence
, G. Cruikshank, Burne-Jones, Wilkie, Beardsley and Rowlandson – to name only a few at random.

  The value of this acquisition, which includes also examples of many minor draughtsmen, is clearly very great to an historical reference collection such as that of the Department of Engraving, Illustration and Design – and all the more so since the accent is on the nineteenth century, which so far has not been intensively cultivated by collectors.

  Most of the pictures and illustrations collected by Henry were unframed, so were kept in folders and files. One hopes he might have had some of them on his walls to admire them, however, as I discovered later, the majority were kept in Harrods’ depository. Further details of his collection can be found in the Penrose Annual of 1959, Volume 53.

  The Penrose Annual was a London-produced graphic arts journal which ceased publication in 1982. In Volume 53 there is an article by Harold Barkley which gives a detailed critique and listing of the Harrod bequest. It reveals the huge range of pictures which had been retained, including three Charles Edward Conder drawings. These included his ‘Imperia la Belle’ from 1906 and a ‘View of Porlock and Porlock Bay’ by Francis Towne, 1785, probably acquired because of the family’s interest in nearby Allerford.

  There are pictures from eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are drawings by Gustave Doré; Du Maurier drawings for Punch; ‘pin-ups’ by Coleman used by De La Rue on cards; designs for theatre and ballet costumes; and Max Beerbohm’s drawings of pre-First World War celebrities.

  I have seen many of the illustrations and books at the V&A and found many of the pictures were very attractive. I was blown away by the breadth and beauty of Henry’s choices. I particularly liked some illustrations: those by Randolph Caldecott from 1883, used as illustrations for his book,A Frog he would a-Wooing go; Edmund Dulac’s illustrations for ‘Beauty and the Beast’ from the 1910 book,The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales retold by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, and the same artist’s illustrations for ‘The Snow Queen’ from Stories from Hans Andersen, published in 1911. I was fascinated by sixteen drawings of ‘Comic Birds’ produced in Italy in about 1880 by the poet and artist Edward Lear, who was also famed for his very serious bird illustrations for ornithological reference books and the Zoological Society. Many of the pictures and illustrations can be seen on the V&A website, searching for ‘Henry Herbert Harrod’.

  Henry Herbert Harrod also collected a considerable number of nineteenth-century illustrated books, most of which were also left to the museum. The books are available in the National Art Library at the V&A, under the title ‘The Harrod Collection’.

  As a writer of fairy stories and collector of pictures and books, it seems impossible that he might also have collected firearms! However, to my surprise, I discovered an article from the Times archives of 1914 which gave the story of his collection. It was so out of character that I thought for some time that it must have been a different Henry Herbert Harrod, who I had been unable to find. The article stated that he had collected firearms for several years, and had a remarkable collection dating from 1700 which, with a total of about 800 pieces, was believed to be the most representative collection in the country.

  A chance finding by Sebastian Wormell, Harrods’ archivist, revealed further articles. One was from the Journal of the British Historical Small Arms Association of December 2006, by Clifford Bryant. This article quotes another article, from the Daily Express in 1935 with two photographs (albeit grainy, copied newspaper photographs) of Henry. Henry would have been aged 64 at the time of the article, and these are the only pictures of Henry I have ever found. This piece was headed, ‘ONE-MAN ARMS MUSEUM’, and subtitled, ‘£10,000 History of the World’s Battles’. It reveals that the collection was housed in a room 14ft by 20ft, on the top floor of Harrods furniture depository. The collection was then valued at £10,000, a sum equivalent to about £350,000 today. I suspect rare collectibles like these guns will have increased in value faster than inflation and so might be worth even more today.

  The collection consisted of a huge range of firearms of all ages, some early hand grenades and many bayonets. These guns had killed Frenchmen at Waterloo, Englishmen at Blenheim, Turks at Acre, Russians at Balaclava, English at Cawnpore and Germans at Ypres. The article states he had been collecting since 1906, and spent an average of ten hours per week cleaning and caring for them. The Express correspondent interviewed Henry for about two hours. Henry was dressed in overalls and gloves, and touched his treasures with the reverence of a priest with holy relics. He enthused about the items and the history surrounding each:

  ‘This belonged to George IV when he was Prince of Wales, silver and gold mounted, and this belonged to Tippoo Sahib, last Sultan of Mysore. But it did not save his life at Seringapatam, where he was killed in 1797.’

  Henry himself wrote little about his collection, apart from an article in a Country Life magazine of 1921, entitled ‘Early Gun Locks’. Henry’s knowledge of his subject was such that other firearms historians acknowledged his assistance when producing their works of reference.

  It is not entirely clear from the article or further research what happened to the collection. Photographs of pieces that were once in his collection appear in other treatises on the subject, and in 1974 and 1975 parts of the collection were auctioned by Wallace & Wallace. The lack of a mention of any guns in his will suggests it was dispersed before his death. According to the article, he did offer to present his unique collection to the nation but this was, amazingly, rejected. I have searched online for any evidence of remnants of his collection with no success.

  Henry Herbert led a pretty relaxed life. The family know that as well as writing fairy stories, he visited several children’s hospitals in London, including Great Ormond Street, reading and telling stories to the sick children. He was much loved by his nephews and nieces for the same reason. One of them, Digby Weightman, wrote in 1989 at the age 80:

  A character in every sense. An odd character. Never earned a penny having qualified as a solicitor. Income from father of about £400 on which he lived in a hotel in S. Kensington. Wrote several books on fairy tales. Very useful Uncle. Got invited to Sunday lunch and when the rest of the adults fell asleep, he told stories to the children. Spent much of his life going round London Children’s Hospitals telling stories to the children.

  Very little is known about his personal life. All attempts to discover more through his school, university or the many art clubs in London at the time has proved fruitless.

  Henry Herbert Harrod died in 1945, aged 74, at St Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington, London. His cause of death was given as uraemia (kidney failure) due to senile enlarged prostate. The informant was his sister, my grandmother Beatrice, then residing at the Ashley Court Hotel in Knightsbridge.

  Apart from the bequest to the V&A and some personal bequests, his will had a codicil which bequeathed some specific pictures and books to relatives.

  There is an interesting postscript to the story of his collection which comes from a further visit by Sebastian Wormell to the V&A archive in 2009 to look again at the Henry Herbert Harrod file. He found an autographed letter from Henry, dated from 1909, which was addressed to the librarian at the V&A. In it he offers to loan the library his ‘collection of the illustrated books of the sixties, 1855–1872’. The offer was rejected. What was remarkable about the letter was Henry’s bizarre handwriting. Sebastian said it was hard to describe – the letters were made up of narrow strokes and very broad strokes of the pen as the nib is pressed down, rather like an odd form of italic. Curiously, these bulbous broad strokes run horizontal, parallel to the line of script, creating something of the effect of a string of beads – very calligraphic and neat, but difficult to read. I am not sure what a graphologist would make of it.

  With some difficulty, the letter has been ‘translated’. After a while, it becomes more obvious. It reads:

  Dear Sir,

  I have in my possession a large and almost complete collection
of the illustrated books of the Sixties, 1855–1872; that is books illustrated with wood engravings after Winsham, A. Hughes, Tenniel, Rossetti, Middais, Doyles, Pinwell, Boyds Houghton, etc. The collection numbers some 200 Volumes, and I shall be very pleased to loan the same to the Library under your charge.

  Yours truly, H.H. Harrod.

  AMY CAROLINE HARROD AND THE WEIGHTMANS

  Amy was the fifth child and fourth daughter for Charles Digby, who must have been hoping for more boys. She was born in 1875 at Ditton Marsh, near Esher.

  A family photograph of her in her twenties shows her to have been a striking young woman. At the age of 32, in 1907 Amy Caroline married Arthur James Weightman at St Paul’s Parish Church in the village of Rusthall, near Tunbridge Wells. Amy had been living with her widowed mother in the Red House, Tunbridge Wells, and was given away by her mother, though she entered the church on the arm of her brother, Henry Herbert. Arthur was aged 44, and his father and mother had both died a few years earlier. He was living in his parents’ house in Croydon. He was the second son of James Milward Weightman, a solicitor.

  It had been almost twenty years since the last wedding of one of Caroline Harrod’s children, and it looks as though they went to town in celebration. Amy had seven bridesmaids; four were her nieces, Margery and Katherine Conder, aged 17 and 9 years respectively, and Dolly and Gladys Martin, aged 13 and 11 years respectively; and three were her husband’s nieces. There were 218 guests.

  Several newspaper reports of the wedding were shown to me by their grandson, James. One states:

  Yesterday afternoon, St Paul’s Church, Rusthall, a western suburb of Tunbridge Wells, was the scene of a pretty wedding. Artistic decorations had been carried out, and the ceremony was largely attended, the rain storms which threatened to interfere having ceased soon after mid-day … she wore a dress of ivory duchesse satin, in semi-Empire style, with Court train, the bodice and train being trimmed with exquisite Brussels lace, the gift of her mother. A fine Brussels net veil covered a spray of orange blossoms … The bridesmaids wore Empire Gowns of white Breton net, and Valenciennes lace, over underskirts of glace silk, veiled with chiffon. Their picture hats were white net and silk with white ostrich plumes, and their ornaments consisted of pear brooches, the gifts of the bridegroom. The bride’s mothers dress was of heliotrope Irish poplin trimmed with white velvet and beautiful old Flemish lace, with bonnet to match … The breakfast and reception were held at the Spa Hotel [conveniently only a few doors away from the Red House]. Later, Mr and Mrs Weightman left for Bournemouth for the honeymoon. The bride’s travelling dress was of fine cloth in Nattier blue, with hat to match, with shaded ostrich feathers, and a set of beautiful white fox furs were worn.