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CHAPTER ONE The Day of Eyes

THE MEWS came from the Isle of Wight. It was a common name all over the island and still is, but by 1832 when Fred Mew, Charlotte’s father, was born, his own branch of the family had settled near Newport. Some of them were carpenters and labourers, some were known to have bettered themselves. This was certainly true of Fred’s grandfather, Benjamin Mew, the brewer – who was a member of the corporation and a prime mover of the Carisbrooke Water Company, which brought Newport its first public water supply in the 1820s. One of Benjamin’s sons, Richard, farmed at Newfairlee, a mile or so to the north-east of Newport, while another one, Henry, kept the Bugle Inn in the High Street. Henry imported wine and spirits, with premises in both Newport and Cowes; the farm at Newfairlee supplied milk and vegetables for the guests at the Bugle and grazing for their carriage horses in summer. These profitable arrangements brought the two families very close. Fred was the seventh and youngest of Henry’s children, and for all of them ‘Theirn’ and ‘Ourn’ – the farm and the inn – were both home. Fred grew up largely at Theirn, over at Newfairlee.

Henry Mew, however, was determined not to put his sons into the licensed trade, but to send them to London to make their fortunes. George and James went first, and were set up in a small business. Fred was to be an architect, or rather something between an architect and a speculative builder. Evidently there was money in that. In the Island itself, Seaview Villas were going up all round the coast in response to the new holiday trade, and new Gothic churches were ready for them, including St Paul’s, Barton, where the Mew family worshipped on Sundays. Royal Osborne, five miles north of Newport, was begun in 1845 (when Fred was thirteen), and went forward in the charge of the great builder Thomas Cubitt (Queen Victoria’s ‘our Mr Cubitt’) over the next three years. It might have been thought, then, that a bright boy could be apprenticed and have good prospects without leaving the Island. But one of Fred’s uncles was already a partner in a London architect’s firm, Manning and Mew, at 2 Great James Street, Bedford Row. The firm seems not to have been particularly successful, but it had the great virtue of being ‘in the family’. Fred was despatched, and arrived at the age of fourteen straight from the sea breezes and cow pastures and the old-fashioned Bugle Inn to London’s East End. His elder brothers had a house off the Old Kent Road, and he was to be lodged there.

To begin with they sent him for a little further education to Mr Walton’s Albany House Academy, also in the Old Kent Road. Walton’s place was not quite as grand as it sounded, being a commercial school which gave a grounding in business correspondence, practical arithmetic and some Latin. After a year Fred’s father took him and paid the premium for his articles with Manning and Mew, where he was to learn architectural drawing, ‘improving’, and surveying, and to make himself useful on the sites.

The only building by which (if at all) Manning and Mew is remembered is the New School of Design at Sheffield (commissioned in 1856). The drawing for it, the only one which the firm ever exhibited at the Royal Academy, is by Fred. But in the following year he found himself a more hopeful position, transferring as architectural assistant to H. E. Kendall, Junior, of Spring Gardens, Trafalgar Square. Henry Edward Kendall called himself Junior, or H.E.K., out of respect for and to distinguish himself from his grand old father. This father, the son of a Yorkshire banker, had been a pupil of Thomas Leverton and a friend of Pugin. In the Gothic manner he had designed churches, prisons, workhouses and castles, helped to develop the fashionable Kemp Town district of Brighton, and later designed Mr Kemp’s own mansion in Belgrave Square. He was responsible, ‘wholly or in part’, to quote his obituary in The Builder, ‘for the houses of the Earls of Bristol, Egremont and Hardwicke’. Everything was done with spirit. Kendall was tall, distinguished and generous, loved dogs and guns, and continued to shoot even after he had blasted off his left hand in an accident. At a time when Thomas Hardy, it seems, had to sit through a sermon in Stinsford church against ‘the presumption shown by one of Hardy’s class in seeking to rise, through architecture, to the ranks of professional men’, and these professional men themselves weren’t always clearly distinguished from jobbing builders, Kendall was, without question, ‘gentlemanly’. One example was his conduct in the affair of Kensal Green Cemetery; in an open competition for the chapel he was awarded first prize for his Gothic design, and second for his ‘Italianate’. There seemed not much room for manoeuvre here, but the chairman, Sir John Paul, ignored the decision and ruled that his own design, which had won no prize of any kind, must be accepted and that Kendall should carry it out, which, with what was thought ‘very proper spirit’, he refused to do. By the 1850s he already had thirteen grandchildren and several great-grandchildren, and in his grey-haired dignity was known as ‘the Nestor of architects’.

The Bugle Inn, Newport High Street, where Charlotte Mew’s father was born in 1832.

Henry Mew’s trade card.

H. E. Kendall, articled to his father, loved him. He had more imagination than the old man, but was less confident, and partly suppressed it. They worked well together, and were both active in the ‘formation of an institute to uphold the character and improve the attainment of Architects’ which met, at first, at the Thatched House Tavern and Evans’ Cave of Harmony. These were the very early days of the R.I.B.A.

H.E.K. specialized in private houses, from a villa to a mansion, Board Schools, and lunatic asylums. In 1857, when he took Fred Mew, the country boy, into his office, he was also district surveyor for Hampstead, and a very busy man. The pages of his publication Kendall’s Modern Architecture, with its handsome illustrations, showed the clients exactly what to expect. Gothic was always in stock, but as tastes changed you could have Greek, Italian Renaissance, Early English (or Tudor), Jacobean, Queen Anne, or a combination of two or more. Several of the office’s pupils had distinguished themselves – for example, J. T. Wood, who discovered the remains of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus – but what was needed, with the 1860s in sight, was a hard-working young man who for a salary of fifteen shillings a week would make the working drawings and collect the details and ‘appropriate ornament’ which were the hackwork of the conscientious Victorian architect. Professional examinations were not compulsory until 1863, and Fred Mew never took any. He settled down to the assistant’s work in Spring Gardens. Although he was not without temperament – in fact he was given to occasional black depressions – he dedicated himself whole-heartedly to Kendall’s service. He left his lodging in his brother’s house, and took a room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This gave him only three miles to walk to work in the morning, a great improvement. Then, in 1859, Kendall nominated him as associate of the R.I.B.A.; old Kendall, in very shaky handwriting, supported the nomination. In 1860 Fred was made a junior partner.

Fred, in the old phrase, ‘filled a place’. H.E.K. had a son of his own, Edward Herne, who had been articled to him in the accepted family manner but, for reasons which were not talked about, had never finished his training. A nephew, Thomas Marden, had also been articled, but never practised. After these two failures, Fred became what he could never have expected to be, a confidant. When Kendall drew up his will he made Fred not a beneficiary, but a joint executor. In 1860 he offered him a junior partnership. Fred, on the strength of it, took the lease of a house, No. 30 Doughty Street, which was close to (though much less expensive than) Brunswick Square, where the Kendall family lived. The house, though modest, was too large for a single man, and it can hardly have surprised anyone when, early in 1862, he asked Kendall for the hand of his daughter.

Anna Maria Marden Kendall may perhaps have been in love with her father’s tall, countrified assistant, or she may have felt that, at twenty-six, she oughtn’t to let this chance slip. What is certain is that she was a tiny, pretty, silly young woman who grew, in time, to be a very silly old one. But she had the great strength of silliness, smallness and prettiness in combination, in that it never occurred to her that she would not be protected and looked after, and she always was.

The wedding took place at St George’s, Bloomsbury on December 19th 1863, and the witnesses were Henry Kendall, his sister Mrs Lewis Cubitt, and Sophia Webb, wife of the proprietor of the Fountain Inn, West Cowes. But Fred was not allowed to put down his own father’s profession as ‘innkeeper’. It was given as ‘Esquire’.

The intention is clear enough. As Anna Maria’s husband, Fred was of course bound to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and to do this he had, in the first place, to set about making himself into a gentleman. The architect’s profession, even though since the 1830s it had been organizing itself as something distinct from the building trade, was not, as has been said, able to do this quite on its own. Fred, it was recognized, was not likely to be anything up to his father-in-law. H.E.K. was on easy terms with his titled clients and with Bishop Wilberforce, to whom he had dedicated his Designs for Schools and Schoolhouses, Parochial and National. Mrs Lewis Cubitt, Anna Maria’s aunt, was married to the youngest brother in the famous firm, and though the Cubitts had been the sons of a Norfolk carpenter, look at what, through hard work and royal patronage, they had become! But Fred could at least see to it that he did not fall too far short. This pressure on him, as might be expected, came from the women. To Henry Kendall he was simply a young friend and assistant whom he liked, and could trust completely.

Mecklenburgh Square and Doughty Street, w.c.1. No. 30, where Charlotte Mew was born, is on the extreme right.

Fred took his bride to 30 Doughty Street, which he also used as a drawing-office. The house was narrow and steep between the basement kitchen and the attic nursery, but well placed at the end of the street, overlooking the airy plane trees of Mecklenburgh Square. Brunswick Square, with its far superior society and a mother always ready to listen to Anna Maria’s complaints, was only just round the corner, and Mrs Kendall took steps from the beginning to make sure that her daughter would hold the balance of power. From her own household she selected Elizabeth Goodman, a tall upstanding north-country-woman, a ‘treasure’, with all the value and inconvenience of treasures, an old-fashioned servant who asked for nothing beyond service and due reward, but whose prejudices could never be shifted, not by an inch. ‘She herself’, according to Charlotte, ‘came of very humble stock’, and had no book-learning, but somewhere she had learned perfect manners, ‘and, in speaking, an unusual purity of accent’ – ‘purer’, very likely, than Fred’s. Proud of her skill, proud even of her servant’s caps and aprons, which she made herself, she knew absolutely her moral and social role at 30 Doughty Street. She was to make life tolerable for her young mistress, who had married beneath her. Doughty Street was a comedown, but there are ways of managing everything. This did not, of course, mean any insubordination towards the master, quite the contrary; only there was a constant ‘making do’ and contrivancing of the boot-patching, collar-turning and left-over cold meat variety, which had never been necessary in Brunswick Square, and of which Fred cannot have been left unaware. When her wages were paid it was Elizabeth Goodman’s habit to buy a small present for everyone in the house ‘except the too exalted head’, that is to say, Fred, in his drawing-office on the second floor. No one in the house could in fact be too exalted for Elizabeth, who was in charge of everything, but in treating Fred as beyond the range of her little presents we may be sure that she kept him in his place. Through a ceaseless round of cooking, nursing and laundrywork she remained a stern ally of Anna Maria, and, by implication, a silent reproach to the man she had chosen to marry.