FAMOUS LAMBETHIANS

WILLIAM BLAKE

IN Hercules Road, North Lambeth, there is a block of flats known as Hercules Buildings. On the front of one of these is a circular tablet calling attention to the fact that a famous house once stood there. This was for several years the home of William Blake, mystic, poet, and artist.

Here he produced some of his finest work; here he spent long hours in the garden under a vine which he obstinately refused to prune; hither came many pupils to learn of this great master of drawing.

The story of William Blake's life is a very interesting one, and although much of his work is extremely difficult to understand, you will discover many things about him which will make you realise what a great man this Lambeth poet was.

He was born in 1757 at Golden Square, London, and was the son of an Irish father from whom in all probability he inherited his vivid imagination. As a boy he was an omniverous reader, and delighted in long country walks.

On one occasion when he had wandered through the fields of Dulwich on to Peckham Rye, he returned to tell of a wondrous vision of angels he had seen.

At another time he described to his mother a vision of Ezekiel, and not even the whipping she gave him to cure him of falsehood, would make him change his mind.

At ten years old he was sent to a drawing school, and at fourteen was apprenticed to an engraver. His master sent him to draw monuments in Westminster Abbey and many are the amusing stories told of his contests with the Westminster School boys, who considered him fair game for their tricks.

When his apprenticeship ended he began work for himself as an engraver, and soon afterwards married. His wife became a most sympathetic and patient companion, accompanying him on the long walks of forty or even fifty miles per day, and getting up in the night to sit with him when his restless genius impelled him to work.

With her help and sympathy he published a little illustrated book called Poetic Sketches, and six years later, in 1789, Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Several of these will be well known to you.

The Lamb which begins:

"Little Lamb - who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee," etc.

Piping down the Valleys wild, The little Black Boy, The Cradle Song, The Chimney Sweep, Infant Joy, and many others, all very charming in their freshness and simplicity.

But gentle and delightful as Blake appears in such poems, he could be very fierce and passionate. All forms of oppression roused his indignation; he was intensely sympathetic with the French Revolution until the doings of the Revolutionists shocked and disgusted him; in all his great poems, Milton, Jerusalem, Vale, he teaches men the glory of freedom, mental and spiritual.

While his imagination led him to strange and often morbid expressions, he indulged at times in the most delightful fancies.

"Did you ever see a fairy funeral?" said he to a lady who happened to sit next to him at a party. "Never, sir," was the answer. "I have," said Blake, “but not before last night. I was writing alone in my garden; there was great stillness among the branches and flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf; this they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral."

His engravings, copies of which you may see for yourselves at the Brixton Library, were all intended to teach great truths.

"I found them blind," he says of the men of his own day. "I taught them how to see."

On the Library wall at Brixton there hangs a marble tablet, a copy of one of Blake's best known engravings. It is called "Death's door" and shows a rocky tomb with an open door, into which an old man on crutches is entering. Above the tomb, the form of a youth is rising, while around him are shed the beams of a new day.

This is Blake's representation of the immortality of the soul. Underneath are the words:-

“When once I did descry
The immortal soul that cannot die,
 Through evening shades I sped away
To close the labours of my day.
The door of death I open found,
And the worm weaving in the ground,
Behold I show you a mystery."

"I cannot think of death as more than going out of one room into another ", said he when his last hours had come, and in that “sure and certain hope" he passed away.

JOHN RUSKIN

A FEW years ago, builders destroyed the last link between Lambeth and another famous writer, John Ruskin.

The house in which he lived for many years, No. 28 Herne Hill, has been pulled down, and modern villas built on the site, but the district still retains the memory of the great man by a monumental tablet in St. Paul's Church, while the neighbouring borough of Camberwell boasts a Ruskin Park, and a Ruskin Art Gallery.

Let us try to picture the little boy four years old, who came with his father and mother to live in what was then a delightful country house overlooking the Thames valley and Norwood Hills.

He was an only child of very strict parents; his toys were few, so he played with the pattern on the carpet and the flowers in the garden.

He tells us himself how he used to watch his father shave, and then to listen to the story of the picture which hung over the dressing table; how he used to go with his parents to church in Walworth Road, and how he delighted in watching the creases and folds in the velvet cushion under the Bible; how he hated Sunday, with its cold mutton and Yorkshire pudding for dinner, but how he revelled in the stories he heard read aloud in the evenings. When he was able to read his mother insisted on his reading every day a passage from the Bible. Day by day, and year by year, this reading was continued, and to this discipline Ruskin in later life attributed his love for fine literature.

He was an exceptionally clever child, for we read of him writing poetry and making drawings of real value when only seven years old. His mother taught him till he was ten, then he had a tutor.

At holiday times he was taken long coaching trips in England and abroad, sitting on the box seat of the carriage; small wonder that he grew up knowing the castles and abbeys of England as old friends, loving the beauty of mountain and moor, passionately interested in the story of rocks and stones, and keenly sensitive to beauty wherever it might be found.

He made sketches and wrote poems; he spent three years at the University, but not until 1840 did he find his real vocation, that of an interpreter of Art, and particularly of the Art of Turner, his great friend.

You may see Turner's paintings for yourselves in the National Gallery and in the Tate Gallery, and when you are older you may read Ruskin's Modern Painters, in which he describes and explains these pictures.

He wrote many other books besides this one, giving his opinions on Architecture, on Political Economy, on Reading and Books, and on Life. The language of his books is always delightful, the burden of his teaching is Truth - Truth to nature and to God. If Art is not true, it is bad, if man is not true to righteousness, distress and peril follow.

In 1842 he removed from Herne Hill to a larger house and grounds on Denmark Hill, just outside the boundary of Lambeth. He tells us that in Croxted Lane, then a green by-road, passing through hedges, his mother and he used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn; there in after years he used to walk in the summer shadows to think over any passage he wanted to make better than usual in Modern Painters.

Even after the death of his mother in 1871, when the Denmark Hill house was given up, he was still connected with Herne Hill, for he leased the old home to his cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn, and there his former nursery was always kept as a bedroom for him on his visits to London.

The latter part of his life was spent in his beautiful home Brantwood overlooking Lake Coniston, and there in the little village churchyard he was buried.

HENRY FAWCETT

You will remember that in the description of Vauxhall Park, we referred to the statue of Henry Fawcett and the medallions around representing Sympathy, Courage, Truth and Justice. Let us try to understand why these tablets were put there.

Henry Fawcett was the victim of a terrible tragedy. As a young student at Cambridge, and later at Lincoln's Inn, his eyes showed signs of weakness. In 1858 he was out shooting with his father, when through hasty firing, a few pellets from his father's gun entered his eyes, blinding him instantaneously. He was operated upon, but in vain; the blindness was total and permanent.

This trouble, which would have crushed a weaker man, was borne by him with amazing courage.

He set himself to live his life as fully as possible. He kept up his favourite recreations of walking, skating, horse-riding and fishing. He enjoyed the beautiful still, though through the eyes of others; he was always gay and genial, a happy husband and father.

His ambition in early life had been to enter Parliament, and undaunted by his trouble, he became a candidate for election.

Twice he was defeated, for his Constituents thought his blindness a fatal disqualification, but eventually he was returned by Brighton in 1865.

As an M.P. he devoted himself to all kinds of social reform. His sympathy for poor people and his love of nature, caused him to work particularly hard in securing open spaces for people's enjoyment.

While Mr. Gladstone was Prime Minister, Henry Fawcett was made Postmaster General, and to him we owe many of our present conveniences. He established a Parcels Post in 1882, he introduced a system of Postal Orders, and of cheap Telegrams, while he encouraged people to save by having stamp slip deposits.

During the greater part of his Parliamentary career he lived at 51 The Lawn, a place now occupied by Vauxhall Park.

There is a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey, but possibly he is better remembered by a Scholarship for Cambridge, tenable by a blind man or woman, and also by a playground made in his honour at the Royal Normal College for Blind at Norwood.

SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN

LAMBETH can claim connection with yet another famous man, this time a musician, Sir Arthur Sullivan.

He was born in 1842 at 8 Bolwell Terrace, now Bolwell Street, Lambeth Walk. His father played in the Orchestra of the Surrey Theatre, but a few years later became Bandmaster at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and the connection of the Sullivan family with Lambeth soon ceased, Arthur became a Chorister at the Chapel Royal, St. James's, and very early began to like music.

His student years at the Royal Academy and at Leipzig developed his genius and he very soon became a well-known composer.

You will be familiar with the famous Comic Operas associated with his name, Trial by Jury, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado, and many others.

He wrote a well-known oratorio, The Golden Legend, and also some very beautiful incidental music to Shakespearian plays. Over fifty hymn tunes bear his name, perhaps the best known being St. Gertrude, a setting for Onward Christian Soldiers.

He spent the last years of his life not far from Lambeth, but over on the Westminster side of the river, and when he died in 1900, he was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's.

These are some of Lambeth's great men.

They have passed, but the life of the borough still goes on, and there are great men serving Lambeth to-day-great, because of their untiring zeal for the public good.

What of the future of Lambeth? Well, that is in your hands.

If in these pages you have read anything that makes you proud of your neighbourhood, interested in its history, and glad of its associations, then when you are grown men and women, responsible voters and rate-payers, determine that the future of the

borough shall be greater and happier than its past, and say in the words of our own Lambeth Poet:

"I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."