The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  There he met ‘a German, Mr Keller’, and immediately started working for him. Bastendorff’s skill sharpened; over the weeks, he began to acquire a little of the language, and then more. Though there were many other German speakers in Whitechapel, the area was in sloping decline; bitterly overcrowded housing, pervasive street violence, a labyrinth of close-built courts that reeked of dung and animal blood. For a young man who had come from wide-open country, it must have been bitterly unpleasant.

  But as Bastendorff’s craftsmanship improved, so his ambitions rose. He took on another cabinet-making job, near Clerkenwell. This business was not so successful; he considered at one point returning to Paris. (This was commonly the case with numbers of French immigrants at this time, who for some reason, possibly to do with language, often found it harder than others to maintain their grip on the city.)

  Instead, he found another position, this time closer to the centre of town, with ‘Mr Vortier, of St Martin’s Lane’; and his speciality was bamboo work. Bastendorff stayed with him for a year, ever more profitably; then decided to take his own workshop in Denmark Street, and go into business for himself. (Though the timings are unclear, his sister and brother-in-law must have arrived around this time and established themselves elsewhere; similarly, his other brothers, Anton and Joseph, came to London too; Peter followed later.)

  Commercial success now came quickly for Severin: he started simply, making one table, a blend of timber and bamboo. He sold it to a large retailer on the nearby Tottenham Court Road. He recalled that by the time he had delivered this table, and returned to his workshop, there was already a messenger boy there to place an order from the retailers for more of his work.

  Bastendorff had found a place, and a skill that was serendipitously in demand. For some decades out of fashion, ‘chinoiserie’ – furniture inspired by Chinese designs – was desirable once more. It was now blended with influences from Japan, and the art of working with bamboo as a material resulted in furniture – chairs, desks, firescreens, occasional tables – that could be relatively cheap, as well as light and durable. In the early 1870s, only a handful of manufacturers were specialising in it. Although not a part of the nascent Arts and Crafts movement, which focused on the aesthetics of handmade designs, this sort of furniture making – highly elaborate patterns, careful lacquers and varnishing – was in the same spirit. And as Bastendorff grew his new business, he entered into partnerships with English furniture makers. His assimilation was fast. It was natural for him to think soon of taking a wife.

  By the 1860s and early 1870s, there was in a wider sense quite a degree of cultural fusion between the British and German people. The most obvious link – emotional, rather than constitutional – was the Royal Family, with its antecedents and branches reaching deep into Germany. Not only was German the first language of Queen Victoria, but many of the aristocrats who patronised the flourishing arts and sciences in London and throughout the land were very closely bonded with German landed power. Far from being either a suspicious or hostile environment, London was a very open city at this point. Continental Europe was more than neighbouring nations; it was a closely integrated part of the capital’s life.

  Bastendorff had to continually move his work premises; for his growing success meant he had to hire more hands and rent yet more space. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the streets that ran north from Oxford Street towards Somers Town were filled with workshops specialising in everything from easy chairs to pianos. By the time Bastendorff’s brothers had arrived in London in the early 1870s, there were an estimated 6,000 people working in the furniture trade in the small area of London around Fitzroy Square alone. Filmer and Sons, for instance, produced ‘couches and chairs’ that were ‘celebrated … for their grace and comfort’. Oetzmann in the meantime took immense pride in the finish of its mahogany furnishings. C. Nosotti offered ‘a choice selection of dining room, bedroom and boudoir furniture’.4 For soft furnishings such as ‘Brussels Carpets’, Druce and Co. were advertising heavily.

  And the busy thoroughfare of Tottenham Court Road was opening up yet more possibilities: furniture shops that had once been small and cramped were expanding, and blossoming in colour and style. John Maples had looked at his eponymous outlet and saw the wisdom in constructing a much larger store that could be divided into departments. In the 1860s, Maples was offering a shop which could offer everything from Jacobean-themed sideboards, blackened and elaborately carved, to more voguish Chinese lacquered cabinets.

  Soon this approach was attracting a more upmarket sort of customer: there were ladies in Belgravia who would summon the brougham to take them to Tottenham Court Road. Heal and Son – which still stands on the Tottenham Court Road today – was reconstructed ‘in the Italian style’ with galleries and ‘a considerable amount of colour introduced in the pilasters and panels’.5

  And the workshops that clustered around these smart emporia had for some decades seen a dazzling mix of European nationalities: French, Swedish and Dutch craftsmen had all, in time, come to own their own concerns. The working conditions were, for the time, very reasonable. This was not the case all over London. Cheaper, more basic furniture, manufactured on the fringes of the City and the Hackney Road, was a sweated enterprise; for less-skilled workers, the pay was very poor and the hours were debilitating. Here just off the Tottenham Court Road, however, the craftsmen were treated with respect.

  The journalist and social observer Henry Mayhew visited The Woodcarver’s Society just off Charlotte Mews in 1861 and found ‘a fairly paid class of mechanics’ surrounded with proud examples of their work, ‘discussing the affairs of their trade’.6

  Here was intelligence, and diligence, and also the prospect of social mobility. Severin Bastendorff – and brothers Joseph, Anton, and a little later, the young Peter – acquired skills and business acumen very quickly. The entire family went into the business of bamboo.

  Working with bamboo was quite a different discipline to the more conventional forms of carpentry; it required an understanding of the unique nature of the reeds and patience when it came to moulding with flame the different elements of each furniture item, the varnishing required for lacquered cabinets and the production of a tortoise-shell finish on items such as chairs and sofas.

  But, in the early 1870s, the time was perfect for hard-working young men from the continent; not least because, through contacts and assiduous research, they would have found very quickly a German-speaking market for their goods.

  By this stage, the German-speakers in London congregated most around three areas: Bloomsbury (which seemed largely to attract the younger incomers who would live in the boarding houses); Camberwell, an increasingly prosperous suburb four miles south of the Thames; and Sydenham, some three or four miles further south yet, and sitting on the high wooded hill that was dominated with the vast glittering structure of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace.

  The composer Richard Wagner had spent a few months in the 1850s being ‘entertained by some of the wealthy Camberwell Germans’ as well becoming infuriated with ‘inattentive’ English audiences and having his Tannhauser overture performed before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.7 But, by the 1870s, it was the native Germans in Sydenham who were the most well-to-do; these were families of merchants living in large, pretty villas, with pleasing views ranging from the City to the green fields of Kent; these were the sorts of customers that the Bastendorffs would seek out.

  Many of the small furniture businesses clustered around Fitzroy Square and Charlotte Street were run as partnerships; skilled tradesmen joining forces and sharing their enterprises. Then, as the Bastendorffs grew in confidence, there was a move to start building a family-based business.

  And as they did so, they also started to form romantic attachments that would come to give them even more permanent roots in this bright, exciting city. The eldest, Joseph, found himself a sweetheart who was a parlourmaid. And, in time, handsome young Severin, aged 25, began stepping out wi
th a striking young lady whom he had met locally. It must have seemed for a time, to him and Mary Pearce, that the possibilities of this extraordinary time and city were endless.

  Yet it might also be asked whether even at this early point Severin was finding it difficult to maintain his mental stability.

  12

  The New Age of Light

  It took a French artist, recently arrived in London in 1870, having fled the Franco-Prussian War, to see the exquisitely romantic spirit: Claude Monet’s 1871 painting The Thames Below Westminster bathed the new Victoria Embankment and the rebuilt Houses of Commons in the rosy smoke of sunset. Where others might have seen pomp wreathed in the vapours of industry, Monet’s vision softened the heart of this imperial realm. He gave it a glowing twilight evanescence, the river and the buildings and the jetty sitting on it suggestive of silence. But lovers had seen the possibilities too; the river had only been recently embanked, a vast engineering project undertaken by Joseph Bazalgette, and what he had conjured for the first time in London was a riverside esplanade.

  The trees had been planted but were as yet young and slender; the road for horses and carriages was wide but not always busy. Thanks to Bazalgette’s other terrific innovations in terms of London’s sewerage, the river itself, although still filthy with a variety of waste, was no longer noxious; the strong tides bore the effluvia fast down into the darkness of the east.

  Severin Bastendorff would surely have come here with his sweetheart, Mary Pearce, in the early days of their courtship; how could a recent arrival in London not be desperate to see both the heart of government but also the sophisticated marvel of a curving riverside path, lit prettily with gas flames, and gazing across south at the misty darkness of the Lambeth shore? How could he and Mary not spend a hazy summer’s evening talking and walking, taking in the splendour of the new Somerset House, or the quiet gardens leading to the Temple Inns of Court? Couples walked from Westminster to Blackfriars arm in arm; stopping to look up as mighty locomotives on the bridge above heaved from their platforms at Charing Cross across the water towards the countryside of the south. To a young man from Luxembourg, all of this must have dazzled and beguiled with possibilities.

  This was a time in which German-speakers were met with a growing measure of friendly curiosity (except in the East End, where young Irish men fought furiously with young Germans); one syndicated newspaper article detailed what kind of evening one might have in a German restaurant (of which more, such as Kuhn’s, were being established in the area just north of Oxford Street). The article described a cosy room, lit with gas jets and wreathed in rich cigar smoke, where one would sit at long wooden tables with random companions to partake of soup and meat and then drink Bavarian beers and lagers while engaging in lively political debate.

  The sense was given that the atmosphere of these establishments was a shade more thoughtful than the typical English pub.

  A native Luxembourgian like Bastendorff might also have been heartened to see a large number of rather fashionable little French restaurants around Leicester Square and Soho, advertising their tables d’hote, and serving such items as veal cutlets in white sauce with onion puree. There was also the sumptuous continental sophistication of the recently opened Café Royal, just off Piccadilly, noted not only for its Gallic cuisine but also its magnificent cellar. But if this was rather beyond the means of a young furniture maker, then there was still good wine to be found in small French bars a few yards up the road off the Shaftesbury Avenue.

  For Mary Pearce, who as far as can be gathered was a native Londoner, the prospect of romance with a German-speaking man (fast becoming fluent in English but still heavily accented) might have carried a sense of removing herself from the more straightforward class expectations. She lived with her mother amid the close-built terraces of Kentish Town, a mile or so north of King’s Cross. It is not recorded how she and Bastendorff met; but it is known that he was a restless soul, given to long evening walks. And there is every possibility that she was in service. Throughout the middle years of Victoria’s reign, the number of young women employed as domestic servants increased enormously. Severin’s older brother, Joseph, had met his wife-to-be when she was in service.

  However they first encountered one another, Severin and Mary must have made a handsome couple; she, dark and grave, and he, red-haired and whiskered and healthy.

  This was a city on the edge of electricity; while the thick industrial fogs of night were being softened with the pale flicker of gas light, there were men of science demonstrating their remarkable new developments in electrical illumination, in the streets and in the music halls. And some of these important innovators were German. (Indeed, in May 1879, the Royal Albert Hall, already bathed in the cream-tinged glow of early electric light, devoted a widely attended evening to the possibilities of this science, including incandescent lamps designed by the firm of Dr Siemens. He had already demonstrated how electric light might be used at sea; now he was telling his audience that this new luminous age would soon be changing homes and streets.)

  Meanwhile, the city had other more immediate wonders for young courting couples to enjoy. The vogue for Germanic entertainment extended mostly to orchestral music, but there were other attractions too: ‘Professor Herrmann, the world-famed conjuror, unique in his style, and the celebrated Praeger Family, performing every evening at eight’ announced the advertising for the Egyptian Hall theatre in Piccadilly. Elsewhere, ‘Herr Carl Fittig, Professor of the Zither, who had the honour of performing before their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales’ was pleased to announce his return to the London stage.

  And there were charitable events to be attended too. ‘The Chevalier de Kontski, pianist to the Emperor of Germany, and Herr Wilhelm Ganz, Grand Organist of the Grand Lodge of England, will play a grand duo on two pianos to raise money for the City of London lifeboat fund,’ announced The Times. And to the east of the City, where there had stood for some years a dedicated ‘German Hospital’ for German speakers in the suburb of Dalston, there was another fund-raising event which was to be attended, among others, by Count Bernstoff, Count Buest and Gustavus Kottengell.

  The Bastendorffs were sharp and fast adapters to nuances of class. And the romance between Severin and Mary deepened to the point in 1872 when he asked for her hand in marriage, and she accepted. The wedding was in St Pancras parish church.

  The furniture trade was expanding fast for the brothers. The Bastendorffs were honing their Chinese-styled bamboo work. As well as cane chairs with latticed geometrical motifs suggestive of Chinese architecture, they also produced occasional tables, fireplace screens, and ornamental stands for flower vases. The growing popularity of such pieces reflected a young and upcoming middle class, moving to the new suburbs in Kentish Town, Holloway and Plaistow, and favouring lighter furnishings than the previous generation.

  The Bastendorff brothers soon broke away from partnerships with others just off the Tottenham Court Road and made their enterprises more family-oriented. It would not be too long before they were hiring more staff.

  When Severin and Mary had the first of their children, whatever lodgings they had the lease on were not going to be sufficient for very long. The ideal was to combine more comfortable surroundings for the babies while also possibly finding room for a much larger furniture workshop.

  In the streets all around, putative landlords were taking leases on the four and five storey houses that clustered around the University of London and the British Museum. The economics were straightforward: if one could keep the house filled with tenants, one would have no difficulty paying for both the lease and the maintenance. And so it was that Severin alighted on 4, Euston Square.

  And while the Bastendorffs were not rich, they had certainly hit a plateau of financial ease; enough for them to acquire their own horse and trap (though the horse might also have been used for deliveries for the furniture business throughout the week). And what this city also offered – as well
as a kaleidoscope of different entertainments – was the weekend prospect of escaping into the airy heights of Hampstead Heath. These would have been marvellous adventures for the Bastendorff toddlers; the horse drawing them up past Euston and Camden New Town, and then the foothills of the Heath at Gospel Oak. In the summer, the heath was wild with hares; and as well as the middle-class picnickers, there were also numbers of boys and girls who had trailed up from humbler homes in Clerkenwell and Islington, and who were enjoying foraging for horseradish, sorrel and wild garlic.

  It was in the mid-1870s that Severin Bastendorff expanded his interests in sporting pursuits; he was keen on fishing, for instance, and acquired a circle of friends with whom he would ride out to the Welsh Harp reservoir to the north-west of London. Added to this, the fast and regular railway services from London out into the countryside of Kent facilitated his other burgeoning enthusiasm. The silent marsh country close to where Charles Dickens had set the opening chapters of Great Expectations was a lure to a number of men with shotguns aiming to pick off as many birds as they could.