A History Boys Magic Lantern Show
His family home, Ivy House, on the edge of Wandsworth Common
My name is Philip Boys, and I am developing a website called History of Wandsworth Common (historyofwandsworthcommon.org), where each month I publish short pieces about local history, which I call Chronicles. But there is rather more going on behind the scenes — and tonight's story is one example.
This tale does not begin quite at the beginning, but at a key moment. When I was young and living in Wandsworth, nobody I knew referred to any part of the Common as "the Scope." I had never even heard the word used that way. Then someone told me about the Craig Telescope — and I was astonished, as, I suspect, everyone is when they first learn of it.
There is a wonderful website devoted entirely to this extraordinary instrument (www.craigtelescope.co.uk), which includes dramatic Photoshop reconstructions giving a vivid impression of the structure. The observatory stood to the south, with Lyford Road to the north-east, where it becomes Heathfield Road.
The whole site is dedicated to what was, at one time, apparently the largest telescope in existence — and for a long while nobody knew precisely where it had stood. A Time Team-style group came together around 2002 to deploy all manner of technology in an effort to locate it. The long and the short of it, as far as I can tell, is that they found very little. There should have been rubble, metal, foundations — and there was next to nothing.
I even thought I might know why.
I am a great admirer of John Buckmaster, who wrote an autobiography titled A Village Politician. In it he describes how Wandsworth Common was being nibbled away in all directions during the Victorian era — by railways, by enclosures, by private interests. And then I came upon this sentence:
"Six acres were enclosed for a telescope, which was never put up." — John Buckmaster, A Village Politician
The telescope, it seems, was never built at all. And yet the story was about to become stranger still.
Returning to the Craig Telescope website, I read that after the 2002–03 research concluded, people began searching their own family albums. Then, on 6th January 2004 — the Project Director's birthday — an email arrived with remarkable news: a photograph of the telescope did exist.
The original print is tiny: roughly two and a half inches by three and a half. It is extraordinarily detailed — individual bricks are visible, even in reproduction. The cigar-shaped telescope barrel rises from a great tower, and despite its miniature dimensions the image is arresting. The website notes that it was taken by Geoffrey Bevington in the mid-1850s. [PB: perhaps too early, even if he was still a teenager - he was born 1838.] It adds that GB lived at Ivy House, not far from this part of Wandsworth Common, and was an accomplished amateur photographer.
If he had photographed the telescope, I reasoned, surely he must have photographed much else on and around the Common. That seemed to me extraordinarily exciting. So I went looking.
The trail began with fragments. The University of Glasgow Special Collections holds three marine-themed photographs by him but offers no further biographical detail beyond his name and the note "floruit 1864, member of the Amateur Photographic Association — no further information found."
The Encyclopaedia of 19th-Century Photography devotes precisely one sentence to him: that he managed to produce convincing photographic illustrations of workers engaged in their occupations in the 1860s.
And then I searched the Victoria and Albert Museum's online catalogue — and page after page came up. Fifty-four pages, in fact, all reading simply "Photographs, etc., by Geoffrey Bevington, c.1860s" — and not a single image [only three images, none of them Wandsworth-related]. The V&A has the photographs but has never digitised them.
I did eventually track down a handful of images online. Geoffrey Bevington made a series of beautifully composed photographs of leather workers, probably around 1862 and very likely produced for the International Exhibition of that year, for which there is evidence that the company voted him funds for equipment. The workers are exquisitely posed — the photographs are truly lovely, reminiscent in their format of Millais' figure paintings, and there is reason to believe Bevington knew the work and was influenced by it.
He also travelled frequently to Northern Ireland, where the Bevingtons had married into a Coleraine family, [the Knoxes], and made photographs there too. His most widely reproduced single image is, curiously, a botanical study: Winter Fronds of the Prickly Fern. It has even appeared, I discovered to my amusement, on a shower curtain.
Learning that the V&A had recently received and conserved a major Bevington album — a great volume the size of a Victorian family Bible, which had just emerged from extensive conservation — I made an appointment to see it.
It contains around 760 photographs, and its origins are poignant. Geoffrey Bevington died in his early thirties, and the album was compiled as a memorial to him — possibly in several copies, for different branches of the family. The opening spread is especially moving: Geoffrey himself at the left, photographed in his garden, probably in Wandsworth; his brother at top left; himself again at top right; his mother below; and his father, James Bevington.
The James and the elder Bevingtons are, incidentally, important figures in the history of saving Wandsworth Common itself — but that is a story for another Chronicle.
The album is a wonderful mixture: travel photographs, still lifes, garden scenes, portraits of women in magnificent dresses — and, tucked among them, the original Craig Telescope photograph.
Some of the images are in pairs: Bevington was experimenting with stereoscopy, and a great deal of this work cries out to be viewed through a proper stereoscopic device.
Among the most tantalising images in the album are the many photographs of Ivy House itself. Early cameras suited buildings perfectly — the subjects did not move, and the resulting images are crisp and clear. In the backgrounds one can make out Lake Terrace and other Wandsworth locations.
The photographs show the family at leisure: Geoffrey in the garden, his mother nearby, the family playing croquet on the lawn.
I now know — though I did not at the time — exactly where Ivy House stood. On the tithe map, the relevant fields are numbered 281 and 280. The top of East Hill is at the upper left; Trinity Road runs diagonally up from the bottom; and those two fields were owned by the Bevingtons. (When Wandsworth Common was saved for the people of the borough, the family donated both fields freely to the conservators — so they became part of the Common, though not in a way that is immediately obvious today.)
Overlaying the pink-shaded area of Ivy House and its gardens onto a modern map, one can see Trinity Road running diagonally, St Ann's Road ([aka Marcilly Road] now a ghost road, grassed over), and the so-called Huguenot Cemetery nearby.
The 1868 Ordnance Survey map shows the garden layout in remarkable detail, and I would dearly like to match those plans to the album photographs, to establish precisely where Geoffrey was standing when each one was taken.
By 1893 the house still stood intact, though other roads were encroaching. By 1898 the Charles Booth map records new terraced housing along West Side replacing the earlier buildings. By 1913 each individual house on the new streets is plotted. Then a bomb in the Second World War destroyed what remained. The site lay derelict for years.
The Trinity Road junction was later realigned, and the site is now occupied by a block of flats called Alexander Court — which does, pleasingly, retain a modest garden to its rear [which is wehere Ivy House stood - does anybody ever dig up artefacts?], a faint echo of the great grounds that once spread behind Ivy House.
Geoffrey Bevington died in 1872 — next year will be the 150th anniversary of his death. He was thirty-two or thirty-three years old. Britain has never much rated him, but some US galleries and museum collections hold his work in high regard.
>He deserves better recognition here, and especially in Wandsworth, where he lived, where he photographed, and where his family played so important a role in preserving the Common that his neighbours walk across to this day.
Somewhere in those fifty-four pages at the V&A, and in the great album now conserved and catalogued, are what must be among the finest surviving photographs of Wandsworth Common and its fringes in the 1850s and 1860s. That is a remarkable thing to contemplate.
— Philip Boys