Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (33 page)

Mayer's involvement with the local people started simply enough, and had its roots in his collection. Arms, armour and things military had always fascinated him. At the age of twelve, he had a brief taste of army life, marching from his home in Newcastle-under-Lyme to Macclesfield as a drummer boy with the 34th Regiment of Foot in the weeks before Waterloo. As an adult, flintlocks, swords, daggers, axes, crossbows, suits of armour, powder flasks and spurs were prominent in his museum and he developed a particular interest in the history of local defence. In 1860, he was appointed Commanding Officer of the Liverpool volunteer borough guard. Four years later, he established a volunteer company of the 1st Cheshire Rifles: he became captain
of the 4th Bebington Company, which he supported financially and presented with two challenge cups for shooting. Within six months, over a hundred men had enrolled to be part of Mayer's troop and he took satisfaction from serving as their commander. Mayer enjoyed the expeditions: the would-be soldiers camped together at Hooton, further along the Wirral, telling stories in the smoke of camp fires, testing themselves against the cold and trapping animals for food.

The 4th Bebington Company was one of many. The Victorian volunteer movement was a phenomenon which began in the 1860s, when fears of war with France were at their height. In 1858, reprisals were expected after a failed assassination attempt on Napoleon III was traced back to exiled French conspirators based in England. In March 1860, France annexed Nice and Savoy. Such territorial ambitions on the part of the French raised the spectre of invasion and were regarded as a threat to national security. A programme of coastal fortification led to the construction of defences such as Fort Nelson, near Portsmouth, and many towns began to establish local volunteer Rifle Corps.

The idea was an eighteenth-century one: volunteers were called upon between 1797 and 1805, before the Battle of Trafalgar brought to an end, for that period at least, the French naval threat. To a new generation, it proved a popular and sociable way to be seen to do one's duty. According to the report of a Royal Commission in 1862, the Volunteer Force consisted of 162,681 men including engineers, light horse and mounted rifles and, by the 1870s, one in twelve men throughout England had joined up.
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Across the country, drill halls, training grounds and rifle ranges were quickly established. The attraction, as at Bebington, was not just military protection: musical, sporting and recreational activities were commonly organized for members, local teams travelled to take on rival corps, and men from all walks of life came together for target shooting, cricket
and football. Each corps had its own character, depending on the area in which it was based and the type of men it attracted. One of the more well known was the 38th Middlesex (Artists') Rifle Volunteers, founded in 1860 by an art student called Edward Sterling. Consisting largely of painters, sculptors, engravers, musicians, architects and actors, the corps' first commanders were the painters Henry Wyndham Phillips and Frederic Leighton, and the regiment became celebrated in time as it attracted members such as William Morris, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The battalion was not finally disbanded until 1945: during the First World War, over 15,000 men fought under its banner, including the poets Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, the artist Paul Nash and the sculptor Frank Dobson.

As Mayer got to know his men, discovering how they lived and what it was they valued, he gradually immersed himself in their welfare. It was a small step from the needs of the volunteers of the 1st Cheshire Rifles to the needs of their families. Convinced that physical activity and fresh air were to everyone's benefit, Mayer founded bowling, cricket, quoits and football clubs, as well as starting a horticultural society and setting aside land for allotments. But he also heard from the men in his company how difficult and uncertain working life could be, and how everyday chores were unnecessarily exhausting and demoralizing. So he raised funds for a village hospital and campaigned for the introduction of gas and water. The obvious next move, in the tradition of the great Victorian patrons, was, of course, to open a school, but there was already a schoolmaster in the village doing an adequate, if modest, job, and, in any case, Mayer believed strongly in the value of informal, self-directed education, the kind of learning that had allowed him to take his place alongside scholars. He chose instead to invest in a public library. ‘He who reads lives in a larger world, and has a knowledge and grasp of
possibilities far wider than he who is without the art, and even prospers when the latter would succumb,' he informed the village, and to make this larger world of literacy available to as many local people as possible, he rented a house, stocked it with 20,000 volumes on travel, poetry, history, natural sciences and art, as well as a good number of novels, appointed a librarian and a team of volunteers, established evening opening hours for study after work and set out the arrangements for borrowing books.
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The library was an instant success, and an extra room had to be provided almost immediately. Three years later, in 1869, Mayer had the opportunity to buy a farmhouse and barn alongside Pennant House and by January 1870 he had created a public garden, with walks of chestnut trees, a grand new reading room brightly lit with gas burners, and a public hall for art exhibitions and lectures. He was clearly joining the philanthropic trend of his age, aligning himself with wealthy industrialists and merchants across the country who were founding public facilities and open spaces. From the ambitious model villages at Saltaire, outside Bradford, and Bournville, near Birmingham, to smaller gifts like the Derby Arboretum, England's first public park, created for the people of the Derby in 1840 by textile manufacturer Joseph Strutt, philanthropic Victorians were reshaping the urban landscape. Mayer's projects were respectable and predictable outlets for his energies, positioning him at the heart of Victorian society. But his generosity was not simply a product of conformism. Mayer was a genuinely kind man; he was not interested in gestures. He envisaged sturdy and practical facilities for the young and the old, for learning and for entertainment, not an empty monument to his wealth.

All of this, he achieved. ‘All classes meet at the library, farmer's boys in corduroy and heiresses in sable, clergy of the church and little girls of their Sunday School, servants and masters,' noted
The Standard
. Many villagers walked four or five miles or more
with their families to use the library and ‘each night a crowd assembles around the door as if it were a theatre, waiting with patience' until the readers could be admitted to browse the shelves.
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Mayer was spoken of fondly and with respect. Far from shutting himself off with his things, he reached out energetically to the community, to the benefit of all in Bebington.

There was satisfaction in seeing the village thrive around him, and not a little pleasure in being greeted so warmly by local people. As the pains of age grew sharper and his breath came shorter, Mayer delighted in sitting by the counter at the library, helping the staff issue readers' tickets or watching from the terrace of Pennant House as local boys gathered up the chestnuts in the autumn. With his museum apparently in the safe hands of the Liverpool town council, Mayer made arrangements that, on his death, the objects in Pennant House should be sold to finance the public projects in Bebington. He left clear instructions detailing the sale, and he established a trust to manage the resulting funds and look after the necessary day-to-day administration. With one collection safely stowed for posterity, he could afford to use the other for more practical purposes: the sale of the Pennant House objects would, he knew, reach out into the future, imprinting his name on the village he had adopted as home. Everything was settled. He would leave the best of both worlds, the Liverpool Museum and the Bebington facilities, which, he believed, would last. His memorial would be secure. There would be no need of further portraits.

M
URRAY
M
ARKS

T
he carriage pulled up quietly outside number 16 Cheyne Walk. Everything about this eighteenth-century Chelsea street was hushed and genteel. A light mist drifted up from the Thames and the bells from the medieval Old Church were subdued. Murray Marks paid the driver and stood for a moment on the wide stone pavement looking across the river. It was 1863, and Cheyne Walk was one of London's most desirable addresses. In 1810, Elizabeth Gaskell had been born at number 93 and in the early decades of the century, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had lived for nearly twenty years at number 98, a divided seventeenth-century townhouse. Admiral William Henry Smith, founder of the Royal Geographic Society and Vice-President of the Royal Society had lived at number 3 in the 1840s and 1850s, while next door to him, at number 4, was the Scottish painter William Dyce. Further along the street, J. M. W. Turner had lived quietly since the mid-1840s, before dying in 1851 at number 119. At 101, James McNeill Whistler had recently arrived. It was a street of celebrity, a place of invention, creativity and achievement, and Murray Marks had come to visit another of its famous inhabitants, the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He relit his cigar, settled
his hat on his head after the ride and made his way through the high gate to the tall, flat-faced white house.

Marks became aware of a strange squawking, something like the shriek of a banshee. He stopped and looked around. But the citizens of Cheyne Walk, apparently unflustered, remained in their houses, and for a moment all was quiet again. Then the squawking continued; as Marks pulled the doorbell, it was louder and shriller than ever. It was coming from within the house, he could tell that, but he could not place the sound. He had not heard anything like it before; it was harsh and otherworldly; it did not belong. But when the door was opened to him, Marks saw nothing terrifying or supernatural. Nor did he notice, at first, the wide entrance hall with its stuccoed ceiling and sweeping stairway, because the source of the sound was showing off and Marks was confronted with the dazzling blue of a disgruntled peacock, in full display, flashing green and gold in the morning light from the street, and confronting a kangaroo.

Marks was not as surprised as he might have been. He had heard about the menagerie. In this most elegant of streets, Rossetti kept a zoo: among its inhabitants, described by his brother William, were: ‘a Pomeranian puppy named Punch, a grand Irish deerhound named Wolf, a barn-owl named Jessie, another owl named Bobby. . . rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, two successive wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, an ordinary marmot, armadillos, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer, a white mouse with her brood, a racoon, squirrels, a mole, peacocks, wood-owls, Virginian owls, Chinese horned owls, a jackdaw, laughing jackasses (Australian kingfishers), undulated grass-parakeets, a talking grey parrot, a raven, chameleons, green lizards, and Japanese salamanders'. It was a haphazard arrangement, and the collection of exotic creatures was not easy to control. The tent constructed in the garden to house the animals was by no means secure; William Rossetti wrote in his memoirs of how ‘one or other bird
would get drowned' or ‘the dormice would fight and kill one another' or, worse still, the racoon ‘followed his ordinary practice of burrowing, [and] turned up from under the hearthstone of a neighbour's kitchen, to the serious dismay of the cook, who opined that, if he was not the devil, there was no accounting for what he could possibly be'.
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Undaunted, Marks tried to take his unusual surroundings in his stride. The obvious eccentricity was unlike his own steady, respectable home, as though he had stepped over the threshold from the ordinary to the avant-garde. But there were also more familiar things to draw his eye; despite the shuffles and smells of strange animals, Marks admired the high ceilings, tall windows and elegant proportions of Rossetti's panelled rooms, strikingly painted in deep colours. Above all, he could not fail to notice Rossetti's idiosyncratic collecting. The house was full of bric-abrac picked up at junkshops, an uncoordinated assemblage of brass and pewter, oriental rugs, velvets and chintzes; a jumble of musical instruments valued not for how they played, but for how they looked; Sheraton furniture and Spanish cabinets set alongside worthless junk; and banks upon banks of mirrors, reflecting the city light into the rooms.

Marks and Rossetti soon became friends. Rossetti had a collector's instincts. He liked to surround himself with the curious and the rare, and to talk excitably and at length about his finest objects. He could forget himself so absolutely in his curiosity that he was capable of ignoring the dictates of etiquette: upending a porcelain dish at a dinner party to check the maker's marks on the bottom, he promptly upset a salmon all over the tablecloth. But his fascination with collecting and display needed a reliable and respectable foil, and this is what drew him to Murray Marks. Marks was modest and quiet, reticent with strangers, and distinctly unflamboyant. He had a calming influence on the long-haired, ostentatious Rossetti. He was reliable and sympathetic,
happy to help create the rooms the artist wanted with the minimum of fuss. Theirs was a marriage of opposites: Rossetti was excitable and unconventional; Marks was studious and proper. They were brought together by the desire to discover and acquire lovely objects, to dress Rossetti's home with the finest furniture and ornaments, to create a Pre-Raphaelite interior that would provide the perfect backdrop for the preening peacock.