The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  It is to be hoped that both these gentlemen had the acumen to settle in England by 1939.

  It was Ernest who was finally given, by his quarrelsome cousins, the power to negotiate with Robert Stevenson (‘gentleman’), late of Fitzroy Square – then a fashionably bohemian address. Stevenson seems to have moved into Bankside anyway in the meantime. A lease on 49 and its waterfront was at last signed on 10th December 1932, making him ‘tenant for life’ in consideration of a transfer premium of £600 and an annual rent of £2.10s for 999 years. Two days later the freehold was sold outright to him for £55 (altered in ink from £50), which was the equivalent of only twenty-two years of rent.

  Since the freehold had originally been acquired by Moss Isaacs in 1873 for £1300, Robert Stevenson had either bought a heap of bricks from which almost all value had evaporated – or he had got a remarkable bargain.

  Robert Stevenson had a new roof put on and enlarged the attic, creating space on the leads at the back of it for a roof-garden. He also cleared the long yard to turn it back into a garden again, and installed French windows in the ground-floor back room which he used as a dining room. As if in ghostly re-creation of a very distant time, he put a small fish pond at the end of the garden. (Subsequent claims that this pond is an actual vestige of the Pike Garden are not valid.) More prosaically, the house got its first bathroom, in the top-floor closet over Cardinal Cap Alley. The restoration was otherwise a matter of stripping out the inner layers the house had acquired during the nineteenth century. Vincent Sells’s Regency fireplace was left in place in the first-floor front, but the wallpapered plaster board was taken away, exposing again the early Georgian wood panelling, here and in the stairwell. Victorian fireplaces, probably dating from the tenure of Edward Perronet Sells II or the Tuckfields who came after him, were removed, and Stevenson found to his delight that some original grates were intact behind.

  He also removed the sagging crust of sodden and dried-out Victorian ceiling in the basement and discovered the timbers of the Tudor cellars holding the whole thing up. Many of the old beams had to be replaced, but of those that were still sturdy enough to remain several were indentifiable as ship’s timbers: the re-use of these well-seasoned bones of old ships was common in past centuries. The idea of an ancient connection between the house and the sea appealed greatly to Stevenson, and it seems to have been during his occupation that a story became current about the house having once been the property of a smuggling sea-captain. A secret passage was said to run from the cellars down to the river, and there were tales of brandy casks. There is no evidence of any such passage having existed: perhaps Stevenson’s workmen had lighted on one of the old drainage ditches? In any case, a captain with a line in smuggling would have lived down in Rotherhithe or Deptford, not on Bankside above the constantly observed Pool of London. But if Stevenson made things up, it was also his writer’s imagination that led him to discern the house’s quality. While living there he wrote an historical novel, his only venture into hard covers, I think, called Darkness in the Land.3 It still reads today as a creditable and well-researched pastiche of an account by a well-born young man of the late seventeenth century. We have the Plague of London, his escape to the country and then to the Dorset coast, an encounter with an ‘Aegyptian’ (gipsy) princess, and his final escape from England with her to Massachusetts. A make-believe Introduction says that the author died in Boston in 1726.

  This book is dedicated ‘to Anna, with love’. What had happened, by then, to the shadowy Cecilie Stevenson? In the Electoral Register of 1933 she is there in 49 with her husband, but by the following year her name is replaced by that of a ‘Joanna Winifrith’.

  Admittedly, information on a first wife transmitted by the second is apt to be faint and partial, but it would seem that either Cecilie never took to the house from the start, or that the Art Deco scheme she imposed on it (all-white walls, divans, a mirror-lined chimney breast) were resented by Robert as inappropriate to the house’s eighteenth-century character. Or perhaps it was simply that he fell irrevocably in love with a rising star of Gaumont, Joan Boniface Winnifrith, daughter of a Kent clergyman, who was soon to re-invent herself as Anna Lee.

  ‘He was such a nice man. I should really have stayed married to him.’ Anna Lee herself, seventy years on and with two more marriages behind her, spoke to me from the bed on which she lay, in a pink silk robe, fragile but animated, in a pretty house in Beverly Hills. I had travelled across the world to see her, unable to resist the chance of hearing at first hand from someone who had been there at the time of the house’s transformation back into a cherished home. In fact, during the few years they lived in it, the new young couple made it not only a home but a famously daring and smart address. The rare tourist boat that went up the Thames towards Richmond or Hampton Court would announce through loud-speakers as it passed, ‘That is the home of Miss Lee, the film star.’ Over the front door, like a blazon in her honour, Stevenson put the entwined masks of comedy and tragedy. Film stars were the top celebrities of that day, and newspapers were eager to publish accounts and photographs of one living in such an ‘amusing … original’ place – somewhere, in other words, where most moneyed young couples would not have dreamed of living – ‘In Bankside, where the very cobblestones have echoed to the tread of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Goldsmith, is the home of a popular new movie star. She’s blonde, young vivacious. Her name is Anna Lee and she is one of England’s youngest stars, whose current screen appearance is opposite Boris Karloff in “The Man Who Lived Again”. Previously she scored hits in “First a Girl” and “The Passing of the Third Floor Back”. Shortly after she married Robert Stevenson, brilliant young director of “Nine Days a Queen”, she decided to do something about a home where she could loaf in the grand manner or entertain a la mode.

  ‘Anna, who loves the bizarre quality of the waterfront and the picturesque oddities of the river banks [read “dust chutes and cranes”] went up the Thames toward the Tower and on the south side of the river found Bankside, with its maze of cobbled alleys, little lanes, old buildings and giant warehouses …’4

  So Cecilie had been written out of the story. But, in Anna Lee’s defence, she really did love 49 Bankside (‘more than any other house I’ve ever lived in’) and in California in 2003 was eager to hear what I could tell her about the house’s subsequent history. She was most disconcerted that a modern photo of the place showed the house and its cobbles in front separated now from the river by a higher walkway: she said, rightly, that the house no longer now seemed to be on the water. She recalled for me, as if from another world, as indeed it had been, the dinner parties she and Robert Stevenson had given (‘Table-decorations by Constance Spry,’ The Lady reported). Guests included other stars such as Jack Hulbert, who had introduced her to Stevenson, Jack Buchanan, John Mills, Merle Oberon, Sybil Thorndike, and Jessie Matthews, who was then a dancer long before she became the lynchpin of the BBC radio serial Mrs Dale’s Diary. Michael Balcon, by then already embarked on his long career as a film producer, came as did the young John Betjeman, who presumably never guessed that he was walking into a house that had once been the territory of ‘Charrington, Sells, Dale and Co./ Nuts and nuggets in the window’. The crowning occasion was a Tudor-style water party the Stevensons gave in June 1937 for two hundred people, for which they hired a barge to take them all to Greenwich and back while ‘roast swan’ – actually goose decorated with swans’ feathers – was consumed.

  The following year Anna had a baby girl. ‘Anna Lee’s Baby almost born in House of Commons,’ announced the Evening Standard, since the baby had begun to make its presence felt while Anna, overdue, was sitting in the Strangers’ Gallery with her mother to while away the time. “In those days,” Anna explained to me, “very few actresses had babies for fear of hurting their careers.” In the course of a long, if chequered, acting career she was to have four more.

  In the 1930s married couples anywhere near the Stevensons’ income bracket still employed liv
ing-in servants. A Mr and Mrs Poole were incorporated into the house, with a sitting room of their own in the front basement. The kitchen had been established in the old ground-floor front room off the passage, which had earlier been an office. Mr Poole acted as butler and always wore a black leather glove on one hand – “no one dared ask why”. Mrs Poole was a good cook but was reputedly fond of the bottle: on several crisis occasions, when she turned out to be incapable of attending to the stove, Anna’s younger sister, fresh from a domestic-science course, was summoned to help. This sister recalled for me that as soon as she got over Southwark Bridge “a policeman would appear and would escort me to the door. The area was thought to be dangerous after dark.” More exactly, it was thought unsuitable for a middle-class girl to be crossing at night on her own. Married ladies, somehow, were considered more robust – and ‘shop girls’ were apparently quite safe. In reality, the brutal ‘outcast’ underclass of the previous century had now virtually disappeared. Between the two wars, London was a safer city than it had ever been before.

  When the baby was born a Nanny was added to the household. But in fact the Stevensons’ time there was nearly at an end. The collective opinion of their smart friends – “Darlings, you can’t bring a child up there” – must have had some weight, but Anna herself told me that their decision that Bankside was unsuitable was much affected by an event which she situated, in memory, near the end of their stay there, but which in fact took place some eighteen months earlier. Next door in number 50 lived a wharf labourer, with his wife and two little boys. One summer the younger one fell over the edge of the quay when the tide was in and was drowned.

  “I felt so for the family. I went to see the mother. The child was laid out there in the front room, washed, with his best suit on, all pale and still. I think we gave them some money to help out. I know that a long time later we had a nice letter from a brother of the family, thanking us.”

  Anna Lee rather thought the family name had been Murphy. No one of that name is recorded in the Electoral Rolls in the late 1930s, but a trawl through the Death Registers for the various names that did offer themselves produced a result. An Edward and Annie Crumpton, who had moved into number 50 at about the same time that the Stevensons were married in Marylebone Registrar’s Office, lost a six-year-old, John. The Southwark coroner reported ‘asphyxiation caused by accidentally falling into the river Thames’ on 9th June 1936. Before me as I write, I have a copy of the death certificate indicating this short, lost life, this tragedy that is itself now obliterated and lost. Accidents of this kind must have been happening on Bankside since the very first houses were built there – ‘Every season … [boys] terminate their youthful career in a muddy and watery grave’ (Living London, 1901–2).

  In spite of this tragedy, Mr and Mrs Crumpton stayed on in the house overlooking the water. Perhaps other work was hard to find. It was the Stevensons who left, for a rented house in Dorset that suited the Nanny better. 49 Bankside was sold by auction: presumably the West End agents had no idea what price to put on such an ‘unusual property’. A handsome brochure was produced, with much use of olde-worlde typeface and made-up stories about sea-captains, Wren and others – ‘It is believed that Oliver Goldsmith lived there for a time as a doctor, giving his services for nothing to his poorer neighbours.’ There were also photographs of various rooms in the house, furnished in disconcertingly sparse, 1930s style, with Anna Lee reclining in daring trousers on a divan, or tending her garden. There were notations such as ‘the radio-gramophone in this room is excluded from the sale but can be purchased at valuation if desired’. The front cover showed the house viewed from the water through a picturesque forest of ships’ masts.

  It fetched £4000, so even with the expense of restoring it, Robert Stevenson had done extremely well out of his bargain. He was also lucky that he sold it then and not at the outbreak of war, when the universal conviction was that the whole of London was due to be flattened by German bombs. This caused the perceived value of property to descend to a level from which it took many years to recover long after the war was won. But in any case, by September 1939 the Stevenson family were in the United States. They had not run away from the war: they were too heedlessly focused on their own careers and too uninterested in politics to know it was coming. When Robert was offered a commission by film mogul David Selznick, he accepted it, and his wife and little daughter (and Nanny) accompanied him to Hollywood for ‘a few weeks holiday’. While they were there war was declared. Much to Anna’s surprised annoyance, the British Vice-Consul in Los Angeles refused to deliver the special permit needed for her, baby or Nanny to return to Britain.

  As things turned out, she was never to return, except on brief visits. She acted in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, and her subsequent career – and later marriages – evolved willy-nilly in the United States, where she ended her days as the grande dame, wheelchair-bound, of a television series. “I was a star in England,” she told me wistfully, as she lay at home in Beverly Hills with old cuttings spread between us. “I never have been in America. Except a soap star.” I was the last person ever to interview her. Less than a year later, at the age of ninety-one, she was gone.

  It was a Civil Servant who paid the £4000 for the house, now picturesquely referred to as ‘Cardinal’s Wharf’. Anna Lee could not recall his name, but a chance encounter brought me some information on him. He was William Montagu Pollock (1903–93), younger son of a military baronet, who eventually acquired a knighthood of his own after an ambassadorial career in Scandinavia, Peru, Syria and Switzerland. The fact that he listed his recreation in Who’s Who as ‘washing up’ suggests a self-deprecating sense of fun at variance with this august public profile. So indeed does his choice of Bankside as a home. I was told: “at Cardinal’s Wharf he once chased a young woman round the dining table. His wife was called Prudence, and when they had a daughter, to patch up some particular misdemeanour, she was christened Fidelity.” His son, born in 1935, was a very small boy when the family lived on Bankside, where he dimly remembers his father giving the door a coat of red paint – further evidence of unconventional leanings. This son used to be taken for walks along the quay by his Nanny (another one), nicely dressed as befitted a child of the Nanny-employing classes, and had to be hastily shushed when he remarked loudly that the wharfside labourers were ‘dirty’.

  At the outbreak of war the family went off to Stockholm in neutral Sweden, to which country William Montagu-Pollock had been appointed Her Majesty’s representative. But fears early in the following year that Germany might breach that neutrality sent Prudence Montagu-Pollock and her two small children home to England, on an extraordinarily circuitous route through distant parts of Europe that had then not, quite, been invaded. After that, as their son put it, the marriage was over anyway.

  When the war, too, was over, mother and children returned to London from the home of country relatives, and a visit was paid to Cardinal’s Wharf to see what state it was in. Bankside had been severely blitzed. The bombers had been aiming at both warehouses and railway lines, and in any case the river itself had been an obvious marker and target. On the opposite shore, St Paul’s still stood, but acres of roofless, blackened buildings lay between it and the river. On the Southwark side Emerson Street, just down the river from Cardinal’s Wharf, had been virtually wiped out, as had Pond Yard and most of the Skin Market. Numbers 50, 51 and 52 Bankside stood, but they had been gutted by small firebombs early in the war and were effectively roofless. Number 49, miraculously, was more or less intact, though the back rooms had been badly damaged.5 To the ten-year-old schoolboy, fresh from the country, with his fading memories of a cheerful family house with a red front door and boats everywhere, the whole place appeared unspeakably desolate, ruinous, fit only (once again) to be swept away. There seems to have been no question of mother and children returning there. They had settled in respectable Eccleston Square, and the visit across the river was probably made only because the house was o
n the point of being sold.

  I had known that the house had been acquired just after the war by members of the part-Swedish Munthe family, and had been puzzled as to how this had come about. No doubt William Montagu-Pollock’s presence in Stockholm for the duration of the war provides the answer, for Axel Munthe (1857–1949) was then lodging in the palace as a retired physician to the royal family. He was a Swedish doctor and writer who had lived in a number of European countries. His book The Story of San Michele, a memoir centering on the house he had built himself on Capri from the ruins of the Emperor Tiberius’s villa, was hugely successful in the 1930s. An extraordinarily self-congratulatory work, stuffed with Gothic fantasies and half-truths, it still has a compelling readability. Munthe married an upper-class English woman thirty years younger than himself, Hilda Pennington-Mellor, though the fact is nowhere mentioned in his memoir. They had a son, Ludvig Malcolm Munthe, a swashbuckling figure who claimed the Scarlet Pimpernel as an ancestor on his mother’s side, and who, as a Major in the British army, played a genuinely valiant Resistance role in occupied Norway during the war. It was for him that Cardinal’s Wharf was bought in October 1945, but I do not know how much was paid: not much, probably, at that date. Like his father, Munthe had a good eye for remarkable places and their buried history, and, also like his father, he seems to have found fantasy irresistible.