321. Exploding Rum-filled Coffins, Anglo-Indian Sisterhood, & Julia Margaret Cameron

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire. I'm afraid it's just me today without Anita because she is resting after her terrible week in A &E for which she's now recovered. But she had a miserable time and I'm glad to say she'll be back with us next week for our Indian Mutiny, our 1857 Great Uprising series, which starts next week. In her absence, I thought I could get away with smuggling in one more relative into the pond because she's not here to stop me and I have a free hand. So today will be the final episode of our Photographers Who Documented Empire, the Eyes on Empire miniseries that we've been doing.

1:10And I felt we couldn't allow that to pass without taking the opportunity to talk about my great aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron. Now, to traverse her life, we are joined by the wonderful art historian and my friend Emily Burns, who has just edited the fantastic book, Women of Influence, The Paddle Sisters, which accompanies the brilliant new exhibition at the Watts Gallery near Guildford, which has just opened and which we recommend that you definitely go and visit. It's a wonderful gallery set in this beautiful and unexpectedly rural valley just down from the Hogsback with the wonderful Watts Chapel and as well as the gallery.

1:49So it's an extraordinary place to go and visit. If you don't know it, now is the time to discover it. If you do know it, come and see the new exhibition, which will dazzle you. And it's all, well, it was kicked off, certainly, by Emily, who was the initial conceiver of the exhibition, has edited the wonderful catalogue. Welcome, Emily. And the exhibition is doing well. It's all sort of chugging along now. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Yeah, it's doing very well. It's open until the 4th of May. So plenty of time to come and see. I am coming back, especially in the new year to do a swoop and see it.

2:20but introduce us Emily for those who I grew up with Judy Mark Cameron in in the house and we had her photographs and it was something we were always very proud of but for those who've never heard of this woman give us just a kind of you know a sketch about why she's worth listening for the next 40 minutes to yeah she's a really interesting person because she's one of the seven sisters who are so interesting she's the one who's she's not necessarily a household name But among artists and photographers, she certainly is. And she should be more famous because she's a pioneer of photography, the very early beginnings of photography.

2:59She was gifted camera late in life and really took to it like a duck to water. The age of 48 she started, incredibly late. 48, yes. And, you know, gifted by her daughter and son-in-law. And, you know, it was a sliding box camera, one of the very early sorts. she had a friend Herschel who was a photochemist. So John Herschel, who's rather a distinguished old Victorian gent in his own right. Yeah, so she knew a bit about the science behind it and how to do it, but she essentially was self-taught. So it's an incredible feat that over such a short period of time and being entirely self-taught, she could rise up to be one of the most important 19th century artists full stop really in any medium there's a nice quote by by roger fry which makes that point uh roger fry writing at the beginning of the 20th century said mrs cameron's photographs already bid fair to outlive the works of the artists who work at her contemporaries which is very nice oh that's beautiful yeah yeah i mean she was there was a brief period when she wasn't so well known but really since um her virginia virginia wolf and fry and from then on really you know she's been really appreciated for for what what what it's worth because she she really did such beautiful creative um photographs which it's sort of prescient of the pictorialist tradition where sort of photography rather than being like a mechanical art was sort of brought up to the position of painting and sculpture and creating quite sort of romantic expressive artwork rather than just being a likeness.

4:38I think many people who maybe don't know her name and are thinking, who is this person? If you just Google Julia Margaret Cameron Photography, you'll recognize many of the images. Because again, like Karsh's images in the early 20th century or mid-20th century, Julia Margaret's Camerons are the defining photographs of many of the great figures of the 19th century. So for example, Tennyson, when you come to think of Tennyson, we tend to think of her photograph now. the dirty monk photograph as it was called at the time. Yeah, the dirty monk, which he quite liked, but he also refused to sit again.

5:12So it's quite an intense process sitting for Cameron, as we'll probably discuss later. She was a character, that's for sure. She was a character. My favourite story about her and Tennyson was apparently she was very keen that Tennyson get inoculated. And she arrived at his tower on the Isle of Wight and banged on the door and said, Alfred, Alfred, you're a coward. Come down. and he did indeed meekly come down and agreed to be inoculated for whatever smallpox I don't know what it was yeah yeah yeah that was the kind of woman she was yeah yeah so let's go back Emily um to the stuff that I'm really interested in which is her childhood and her sister's childhood uh in um East India Company Calcutta and and these girls were partly Bengali partly French They stood out even at the time.

6:01And really, that was the source of their considerable beauty, which is the first thing everyone noticed when they arrived in London. So Julia Margaret Cameron is born in Calcutta. She is the second eldest of the sisters, and she is born in June 1815. Yeah, yeah. I think they kind of played up to their Indian roots, their kind of Anglo-Indian upbringing. and they, I think because they had the French link as well, their grandmother Therese, you know, brought them up and educated them in Versailles. So they had, you know, they had, they're born in Calcutta, had time in France, but had English parents, you know, one French, one English parent.

6:44And, you know, they moved in the circles of the East India Company. They were very sort of cultured, if not educated in book learning academically, academically they were very kind of confident and you know well connected and the book learning was very much from their mother's french side they were educated in versailles because their father was this notorious scallywag who who i am longing to tell a story which um which some of you may be familiar with but it's a story which is only partially true but it's still worth telling all the same uh it's virginia wolf's story and when she was reintroducing um uh julie mark cameron her great aunt in the uh 1920s she she starts with the story and it it's the story of how um james paddle who was julia margaret cameron's father who was a notorious scallywag uh and a drinker uh and known as the biggest liar in india who claimed to have sailed across the atlantic in the hen coop uh and was also known as jem blazes the biggest liar in india uh anyway this character made a fortune importing ice from America to Calcutta and spent it all on a considerable wine and then sort of more or less drank himself to death.

7:55And in the end, appropriately enough, he asked to be shipped back to London in a barrel of rum, which was then the favoured way. And Lord Nelson and Byron and several other characters who died away from their preferred graves were indeed in this period put into barrels of rum it wasn't that unusual but the story goes that the the barrel of rum plus paddle were put into uh the widow's bedroom uh and then the the boat that was meant to take him back to england didn't arrive uh and this was the heat of the calcutta summer uh and it got hotter and hotter and the boat didn't come and didn't come and then one night the widow was sleeping when suddenly there was a terrific explosion and paddle burst out of his rum barrel whereupon according to virginia wolf uh the widow then died too they were both nailed down and put into the boat together which had then turned up finally but the sailors realized that there was uh rum in this so they bored a hole uh allegedly in in the barrels uh desperation and and then began drinking the rum uh and then the the pilot drank so much that he steered the ship onto a sandbank in the hoogley the the paraffin lamp which was being used to light this nefarious activity crashed to the ground the rum ignited and the whole thing exploded so battle never made it back to england according to this story at least uh but uh was was was cremated in the trouble is he there is a very perfectly good grave for him in uh in south london so certain parts of the story clearly aren't true yeah it seems virginia wolf ascribed to the ethos of don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

9:38I've always believed that myself. Anyway, so the girls make it back to England and, or certainly to Europe, and some of them are educated in Versailles with granny. And they become known both in London and in Calcutta for their beauty. So despite Patel being this ruffian, their grandmother, who had called them all to Versailles successively and had them shipped out for a proper French education, made sure that they grew up with the very best that French education could offer. And they became renowned for their enthusiasms, their beauty, their eccentricity, and their charm. And Virginia Woolf wrote this wonderful pian to them.

10:22She said, No one could restrain the paddles but themselves. Half French, half English. They were all excitable, unconventional, extreme in one form or another, all of a distinguished presence tall impressive and gifted with a curious mixture of shrewdness and romance no domestic detail was too small for their attention no flight too fantastic for their daring not a bad start for a for an artistic career exactly yeah i mean it seems that they were you know they were sort of strong enough to hold their own amongst groups of big intellectuals and highly influential people. And Cameron published translation work and poetry.

11:03And Mary Watts once said that Sarah Pattle, one of the sisters, was sort of complaining to her that she had no education, she kept saying. And then Mary Watts said, but she was riveted all the while by her power of vivid description and her originality of expression. So whatever education they had, it seems to have served them quite well in the world. And what's always intrigued me is that despite this being the height of Victorian racism, this is the period when Kipling is a young man, when attitudes are definitely not pro-Indian or even interested in India the way that they had been in the 18th century.

11:41all of the sisters celebrated their indianness and they were they were known for wearing indian clothes chattering to each other in hindustani they sat on indian rugs on the lawn serving indian food their lobster curries were famous and they wore sort of kashmiri jamavar shawls that you see in their portraits um while all the rest of india sort of england was in busks and crinolines and whalebone corsets and all this sort of stuff. Should we be surprised at that in this period, that they made so much of their Indianness? I think it was, you know, they weren't the only Anglo-Indians coming to London.

12:21But I think maybe the mixture of their upbringing, maybe it was a combination of the personality of the father, their mother, grandmother, that upbringing they had, and their confidence, you know, they weren't ashamed of their background. And so they were used to wearing very comfortable flowing robes and Kashmiri shawls and, you know, and that's what they were used to. And bangles and all the jewellery. Indian rackies around their wrists. Yeah. And so they confidently wore them about town. I mean, it suggested that this might be what influenced the pre-Raphaelite form of dress, that kind of bohemian, much looser style.

12:57And you can actually see in portraits of them by G.F. Watts. So at the Watts Gallery, in the Watts Gallery exhibition, you can see, you know, one of the most amazing portraits is this double portrait called The Sisters showing Sophia, your great-great-grandmother, and Sarah standing there in these beautiful flowing robes with their shawls. And you can see there, Raki, the kinship bracelets on their wrist. And there's a second portrait also just of Sophia on her own in this beautiful white dress, again with a Raki on her wrist. And you can see what they used to wear. It's quite nice to have that record of them.

13:30Let's quickly go through the different sisters, because we've talked about them as a sisterhood. Take us through who they are, because they're all quite interesting in their own way. Yeah. So, Julia, well, there originally were 10 children, but three were lost in infancy. So that left seven sisters. Julia was the second eldest of the seven sisters. Her older sister was Adeline, who was born in 1812 and named after their mother, who very sadly died at sea, aged 24. She married Lieutenant General Colin McKenzie, who appears in my book, Return of a King, and who we dealt with in the pod on the 1842 retreat from Kabul.

14:06He's one of the captives and one of the few to survive. Yes, well, a great link there. So he went on to be quite successful. But poor old Adeline died age 24, having got married at age 20, had three children in quick succession, and then died at sea and was buried at sea. So she leaves the scene quite early in our story. but then the next one along to Julia was Sarah Patel born in 1816 and she is the mother of the sort of second wave pre-Raphaelite Val Princep she married Henry Toby Princep which maybe we can talk about because he's a very interesting figure. Princep boys are very important and I think people don't know about them much in England they're very famous in India.

14:48Henry Toby Princep who just mentioned who was sarah's husband was a persian um speaking orientalist um he fights macaulay which is very topical in india today where there's a big debate on this uh saying that uh education should be in indian languages and that sanskrit should be venerated macaulay said a single shelf of a good english library is worth all the native literature of india and arabia and and princep basically lost that uh battle and then his brother is an even more famous figure in India today, James Princep, who decoded the Ashoka pillars, cracked the code to Karashti in the Brahmi scripts, which basically opened up the whole of ancient Indian history.

15:27We now know, thanks to him, all about Ashoka and the Buddha and all these early Indian inscriptions can be read. And he went mad in the process of decoding it, but decoded it first and was then taken back in a sort of hospital ship and died, I think, on arrival in London. The third sister, so Mia, tell us about her. Mia was she was born in 1818 and she became the grandmother of the author Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell of the Bloomsbury set. So that's kind of her claim to fame in a way. She was born at sea. So indicates how much the family spent traveling. They were Victorian jet set. They were always on liners going back and forth.

16:06And it took a long time, I should add. It used to take 90 days before the Suez Canal. And then by the end, you know, it could take about a month, you know, in a few weeks. But still, you know, at the beginning of their lives, certainly a very sizable chunk of their time was spent in quite dangerous transit. So Mia married Dr. John Jackson and her daughter, Julia Jackson, later Duckworth got married, later Stephen married Leslie Stephen. So that was one of the main beautiful models of Julia Margaret Cameron. The most famous really of her images are this extraordinary haunting, heavy loaded face of Julia Jackson.

16:43And Julia Jackson was Julia Margaret Cameron's goddaughter. So they were particularly close. And yeah, they took some beautiful photographs. And you can tell by this story so far that the family was very close, you know, all the children and grandchildren, they all sort of corresponded with each other. And, you know, I guess that happens when you are a sort of international network. Sometimes you're not with your children or not with your husband or not with your sisters. And so, I mean, especially Sarah Princep took on the role of supporting the younger siblings and their families and kind of sort of adopted the role as mother figure because both their parents died, you know.

17:16And setting up this salon, Little Holland House, which was both the base for the family and all the cousins as they successively arrived off liners or ships or whatever from India. but also which is where the Watts gallery comes in she invited famously the painter Watts to come to lunch and he stayed 35 years yeah she came for three days stayed for 30 years and in fact I think it was about 25 but you know whatever it's still quite a good line yeah yeah I mean just shows how generous she was great grandmother lived when she came from India she moved in with her elder sister Sarah where she succeeded to be sort of hit upon by various pre-Raphaelites such as Byrne Jones and Rossetti who all painted her endlessly as well as Watts who painted her.

18:04These people were lurking around Little Holland House and you could meet a poet, you could meet a painter, you could meet Joachim, the musician and it was really quite an impressive place. The Halle Orchestra is named. That's it, that's it. He would play in the garden in the evening soirees. So all this went on and somewhere in the middle of this, later in the story, Julie Margaret turns up and makes everybody sort of dress up as King Arthur and takes their photograph leaning against a tree, being the Knights of the Rhine Table or one of these sort of Walter Scott stories. Yeah, I mean, they called it sort of lion hunting in that, you know, they were trying to collect these great people and try and photograph them.

18:49Sarah wanted them to come to her soirees, Julia Margaret Cameron wanted to photograph them, Watts wanted to paint them, and so they did most of them. I mean, I think Julia Margaret wanted to photograph Rossetti and she never quite managed it. But, you know, she got most other people, she did quite well. Well, she turned up. Apparently she turned up at the door with Henry Taylor. She turned up at the door of Carlisle. She was desperate to photograph him. And his wife was horrified and had to sort of prevent her from walking into his room before his trousers were on. His wife was famously tough.

19:20She met her match in Mrs. Carlisle. But she did get him. She did photograph him. And he's looking as if he's just been sort of caught with his trousers half up. And he described the photograph as an inferno because he looked so pissed off. that picture. Anyway, we've jumped ahead. Let's go back just before we go to the break to just give Julie Margaret's life from when she comes back from Versailles, having been educated. Age 21, she gets sent off to the Cape of Good Hope. Tell us the story. Yes. So she got ill. And so she was resting at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. And while she was there, she met two important people.

20:00One was Sir John Herschel, who we briefly already mentioned, the astronomer and photochemist. They stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. She photographed him, she fluffed up his hair for the portrait. Brilliant. She kind of ruffled it just to make it… Yeah. It looks like Boris Johnson or something in the picture. It's a bad comparison because one just groans at Boris Johnson. Yeah, so they corresponded all their lives. So really, I find it quite interesting that she was thinking and talking about photography well before she got her camera and started the art of photography herself. And so you can maybe say Sir John Herschel planted the seed for that, which is quite nice.

20:40And then the other person she met was Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist, a reformer, 20 years her senior, and they married. They went back to Calcutta and married there in 1838. She adored Charles and he's also quite a character. There are some wonderful stories about her dressing him up. There's three layers of coats and a cone hat. He was pacing outside in the garden at Little Holland House. He looks like Merlin, but he was cast as Merlin, absolutely perfect casting in one of her photographs. He had to sit next to this oak tree, which they dragged it onto the set and decorated. And he kept getting fits of giggles and ruined all the photographs through sort of vibrating the tree.

21:26But, you know, he's a lovely relationship, both of them, I think. And he invests very early on in coffee plantations in Sri Lanka, which is going to be important for the end of the story, because they always have these loss making plantations in Sri Lanka that are draining all their money and to which they eventually retire because they can't afford to live in England. Yeah. Yeah. I think Cameron, he, Mr. Cameron actually sort of, he really liked Sri Lanka, Salon, and he wanted to go back there, which is why they kind of returned at the end of their lives. But he wrote the sort of the legal code there.

21:58He was actually in the 1830s. He'd already been there and worked there. And so there was always a sort of link to it in the background. And, you know, their sons went out and worked on the plantations. You know, He always joked that Julia, with her great spending on people and gift giving, was slicing up salon. It's in their estates there. Another bit of salon gone, you know, another shawl. So listen, we must take a break now. But after this, we want to come back and focus on Little Holland House, which we've mentioned already, but we want to dive deep into that world and Julia Margaret Cameron's amazing photography of the inhabitants of this Victorian salon.

22:39Wow.

22:45I think of it as a summer afternoon world. To my thinking, Little Holland House is an old white country house standing in a large garden. Long windows open to the lawn. Through them come a string of ladies in crinolines and little straw hats. They are attended by gentlemen in peg-top trousers and whiskers. Tea tables and great bowls of strawberries and cream are scattered about the lawn. They are presided over by the lovely sisters who do not wear crinolines, but are robed in splendid Venetian draperies. They sit enthroned and talk with foreign emphatic gestures to the eminent men, rulers of India, statesmen, poets and painters.

23:30My mother comes out to the window wearing that striped silk dress buttoned at the throat that appears in her photographs by Julie Margaret. and there she stands silent with her plate of strawberries or perhaps is told to take a party across the lawn to Signore's studio. The sound of music also comes from those long low rooms where the great Watts pictures hang and Joachim playing the violin and also the sound of a voice reading poetry, Uncle Toby reading his translations from the Persian poets. So that is Virginia Woolf describing Little Holland House at its peak. Emily, tell us about Little Holland House because it's absolutely central to this story.

24:11Yeah, so Little Holland House was the dour house of Holland House, which is now sadly under Melbury Road. So all that survives of this whole world is sort of Leighton House, isn't it? You can go and get an image of what this used to feel like, I think. Yeah, so Little Holland House was demolished sadly as well. But it was this sort of rambling, sort of almost like a farmhouse type building, big lawn, big gardens, big trees. And it's where Sarah Princep and Toby Princep settled in London. And they took in, you know, two of her younger sisters and their families and other families. You know, Julia would visit.

24:53She lived in East Sheen. And that's where they welcomed great artists, great poets. So George Frederick Watts, we've mentioned him already, he became a sort of artist in residence of sorts. And so that's why there's lots of wonderful sketches. And all the sisters worshipped him and used to bring him tea and incense, says George Moria, and worshipped them until his very manliness hath been undone. Yes, hath departed, is such a wonderful phrase. Yeah, so Watts was sort of held court there. um and um but then you know they were you know Rossetti went, Burne-Jones went, and lots of politicians and scientists you know Darwin you know they had all these connections um and it was on a sort of Sunday afternoon so a very kind of bohemian collection on an otherwise quite serious day um and they um which in Victorian London was a big deal so the Sabbath was celebrated very much as sort of um something which not should not be broken and the sisters did break it.

25:56They've had all their parties on that day. Yeah. And, you know, they served curries. They wore their fabulous outfits. You know, Julia would come in and try and persuade some unsuspecting person to sit for her portrait. There's a lovely story. One of my favourite stories that she sees in the street outside Holland House, a handsome young priest probably heading towards the Brompton Oratory. And without a moment's hesitation, goes up to him and says, you must be my Galahad. And the priest, understandably taken aback, murmurs excuses, but she doesn't take no for an answer ever. And assuming that his refusal of this honour to be in her photograph could only be for religious motives, she reassures him with the promise, I'll write and ask your Pope.

26:40And the priest in question afterwards, of course, becomes Cardinal Vaughan. Of course, of course, but of course. Another one of her close friends, Henry Taylor and his wife Alice, she attacks them with her wild beaming benevolence is the phrase and she said to Taylor's new wife Alice that before the year is out you will love me like a sister and she did she broke them down and they adored her but there's lots of accounts of her sort of you know chasing after people to sit for her portraits but also sort of showering people with gifts. And one friend commented that she would rain down precious things upon us, not drop by drop, but in whole Golconda mines at once.

27:24I love it. There's a kind of oddly classless atmosphere also in this place. They'd grown up outside the English class system, which was such a dominant feature of Victorian society. And they unusually seem to have broken through all that. So Watts came from a very humble background. Burne-Jones came from sort of, you know, the back end of Birmingham. And none of these artists were from the top drawer of society. And they took them in. And the photographs would often mix people like Tennyson, who was rather grand, with the cleaning lady from Little Holland Tower, so the stray Italian waiter who became Iago in one of her most famous photographs.

28:05And she put them all together, you know, quite irrespective, obeying none of the English laws of the class system. They'd all be jumbled together and made to sort of be, you know, the knights of the round table or Sir Galahad and his ladies in some sort of Arthurian sort of scramble. Yeah, it was classless and intergenerational, which I think is the kind of wonderful environment to be in. You can learn a lot. Virginia Woolf said, we never knew what aunt julia was going to do next nor did anyone else so let's talk about how she begins her photography because she she moves at one point to freshwater in the isle of white uh which is now a museum which also can be visited um to her and and and all she did um and has contained some of her cameras and and many of her most famous pictures and she knocks these two houses together uh she's on the she's not far she's she's sort of walking distance from tennyson who's also um taken refuge there uh and and she's always disturbing tennyson when he's trying to compose his poems and and telling him to be inoculated or or delivers a grand piano or something of the sort and just when just when he's at the moment of inspiration has come she's the eternal woman from Porlock breaking into his reveries.