The House by the Thames (30 page)

He and his wife lived in the house, at any rate intermittently, for several years, figuring in the Electoral Rolls as ‘DeMunthe'. The bundle of house Deeds contains copies of laborious letters from a wharf company who, he pointed out, were infringing the wharf rights he had purchased along with the house: ‘… I have had a talk to the Barge Company and they tell me that they are not aware of any breach of the order they have given to their workmen that you shall not have their barges on your wharf. They suggest that the most that can have happened is that they have tied up on their wharf and that the end of their barges have over-lapped, and they point out that this is a thing which always takes place and cannot be altered as it depends on the tide …'

It is not recorded, however, if Munthe ever had a boat of his own to moor. Number 49 and its neighbours have no such wharf rights today, but no one seems to know quite when or how these were extinguished. It is possible that, when plans were laid around 1970 for the Jubilee walkway to be added to the quay on the river side, the Greater London Council failed to consult individuals, and that no one at that point with a vested interest in Number 49 thought to raise the matter. (A similar combination of inattention and public-authority high-handedness has also resulted in the loss, over the last twenty years, of a number of ancient rights-of-way between the river front and Park Street.)

The bomb-damaged back of the house had to be repaired, and no doubt also the roof. It seems that Munthe did what was essential but was more interested in décor. On the re-plastered ceiling of the ground-floor back room, the dining room, a large round picture appeared: Neptune, or possibly Father Thames, with attendant Tritons, and old London Bridge in the background. Above the front door onto Bankside, in place of the Stevensons' theatrical masks, went the supposed coat of arms of the Pennington-Mellors. By and by, at the side of this door, a double plaque appeared:

The writing is curly, in pseudo-ancient style. The whole thing is made out of plaster, probably by Munthe himself. There had in fact been an eighteenth-century porcelain plaque, referring to Wren, attached to the house further up Bankside which was pulled down in 1906. After that, the homeless plaque was apparently put on the boundary wall of the Power Station which had swallowed the site of the house, not far from number 49. Anna Lee recalled seeing it there. When the post-war rebuilding of the Power Station began, Munthe evidently saw no harm in appropriating this small piece of history for himself.

What other embellishments of his own he might have contributed to Cardinal's Wharf, had he lived there more permanently and for longer, one rather dreads to think. Fortunately his attention was absorbed by several other family properties, including a house at Southside, Wimbledon. Here, his fondness for otiose structural improvements-in-the-style-of was given full rein, as was his passion for collecting ancient artefacts without much regard for their provenance or authenticity. That house remains open to the public to this day, a monument to dubious antiquarianism.

But though one must be thankful that 49 Bankside escaped this fate, I have come to feel grateful to Munthe. For in putting up his bogus plaque he may actually, whether he knew it or not, have saved the house once again. In the Brave New World spirit of post-war planning, that now-reviled era that produced the wastelands of the modern Elephant and Castle and desolate housing estates in Bermondsey, Georgian houses were something to be pulverised without a second thought. In the words of one planner extolling the future Festival of Britain site in Lambeth, where the last old houses in Belvedere Road were just being destroyed, ‘huddles of mean streets' were to give way to ‘the shining architecture of the future'. The Abercrombie Plan for London, which was drawn up before the war was even over, did not spare the riverfront from its good intentions. On its designs, no trace of quays or wharves is to be found on the whole stretch between Southwark Cathedral and Waterloo Bridge, though this was many years before the great shift of the port away from London began to be seriously envisaged.

One would like to think that Abercrombie and his team were exceptionally prescient (many of the Plan's ideas for integrated road–rail systems and new railway lines to the docks were sound) but I suspect that, for Bankside, vision had simply overcome realities. On the outline design, trees line the Southwark shore, in a way that would have delighted John Evelyn but no one else much in the intervening three centuries. Behind this frill of greenery is an almost unbroken wall of medium-high concrete blocks set at right-angles to each other – ‘Offices and flats'. Had this been built, not a trace of Bankside's ancient identity would have remained.

However, the force of existential circumstances is sometimes greater than that of futuristic vision. The old Power Station needed to be replaced by a more modern one with a greater capacity. You might have supposed, given Abercrombie, the new post-war concern for ‘zoning' and for the removal of noxious industries from central London, that plans would be made to site the new plant anywhere rather than opposite St Paul's. Certainly, the LCC thought so. But evidently such was the continuing invisibility of the Southwark side of the river, to everyone but the dwellers and visitors at Cardinal's Wharf, that the old site was still felt to be the obvious one. It was as if the City were a house and Bankside was its unregarded back door, necessary but beneath attention – or as if the watery space that separated London from its Surrey side was perceived to be much wider than it was in reality.

There were considerable protests, not so much at the siting of the Power Station as at the size of it. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who had designed the coal-fired Power Station at Battersea a few years earlier, and who happened also to be Chairman of the Royal Academy, was asked to design this new one. There were fears that its cathedral-like proportions would dwarf the Wren dome opposite and emit clouds of polluting smoke. But by 1947
The Builder's
correspondent was writing sanguinely: ‘The station is lower than the original building Allowed under the London Building Act. As you can see, it will be more a question of the other buildings overshadowing the station than of the station overshadowing them.' The
Illustrated London News
of the time was equally soothing – ‘The new power station would have only one chimney, designed as a “campanile” … Oil-fuel would be used, delivered by underground pipe-lines from barges discharging at a small jetty off-shore. Thus there would be no derricks or coal dumps, nor smoke from the “campanile”, which would emit only exhaust fumes which had been cleaned, washed and purified prior to reaching the upper air.' The shining future, evidently, was on the point of arriving.

The debate continued with some fervour, in and out of Parliament, before the project was finally approved by Lewis Silkin, the Minister of Town and Country Planning under the post-war Labour government. Opponents christened it ‘Silkin's Folly'. Construction did not start till 1948, and in the several years since the initial proposal for it, the first flush of extremist, money-no-object enthusiasm for a totally replanned London had abated. The Royal Academy now designated the Surrey shore not for anodyne ‘offices and flats' but for ‘well-designed wharves and warehouses'. No longer was the new Power Station as depicted in artists' impressions flanked exclusively by regimented modern blocks. The magazine
The Sphere
published a mocked-up view which actually highlighted and labelled ‘Wren's house' near by, though placing it carelessly on the west side of the new Power Station rather than the east! The
Illustrated London News
paragraph quoted above ends, ‘A picture of the Bankside house where Wren lived during the building of St Paul's appears on p.548.'
⁶

Evidently something, perhaps indeed Malcolm Munthe's timely and inventive labelling of 49 Bankside, served to make councils, planners and other public bodies shy away from touching it, even while they were reducing to rubble other equally old and beautiful houses both up and down the river.

In due course numbers 50, 51 and 52 were reconstructed after their fire-bomb trauma, to form, along with 49, a small preserved enclave. But theirs was more of a complete rebuilding than a repair, with some windows altered and the three houses converted into two. They are so changed that the shade of little John Crumpton seems unlikely to linger there. Today, they are in the property of Southwark cathedral and the Provost lives in one of them.

At some point in the later 1940s Malcolm Munthe let his house. In what, by then, was becoming a tradition of distinguished maverick occupants, the principal tenant was Peregrine Worsthorne, then a young leader-writer on
The Times
.
⁷
Half a century later, in his memoir
Tricks of Memory
(1995), Worsthorne described going to Cardinal's Wharf for the first time with his French wife, Claudie:

‘The day chosen was a summer Sunday when the river was looking so beautiful that one scarcely noticed that the house stood alone and isolated amongst acres of post-Blitz desolation … After giving us tea in lovely china, Malcolm Munthe showed us around the house, which was full of period furniture. The dining room, too, was ravishing with a ceiling hand-painted, or so we were led to believe, by Rubens …'

Once they had moved in, things were rather different. There was also the Power Station, at that date still the old one:

‘… Not only did it emit an ominous low hum, but, much worse, a steady stream of black smoke which coated everything with sticky grime. Rats from the barges, tied up at the wharf, were also a problem. The basement, which we had not been shown, was infested with them.'

Although the basement had been in use as habitable space before the war, Munthe must have abandoned it. A photo taken in 1949 shows the nineteenth-century pavement grid cemented over again and its railing removed.

‘… at night [the rats] would invade our bedroom where they had the effrontery to climb up the drapes surrounding the four-poster bed in which Catherine of Aragon was supposed to have rested.'

As for the ‘Rubens' ceiling, it was flaking worryingly.
The Times
then employed a museum's correspondent who happened to be a Rubens expert, so Worsthorne asked him if he would mind visiting to give some advice on preservation? It was while the great man was contemplating the ceiling (with some reservations, I should imagine) that Rosie Darc, the char-woman, bounced in. She revealed briskly that Munthe had painted it himself – “Don't you worry. It only took him half a sec to put it there, and he can do it again in no time.”

The rats eventually got too much for Worsthorne, who developed a jaundice so serious that he was carried off to St Thomas's Hospital. There, the doctors were puzzled, until the exact nature of the conditions in which the young couple lived was revealed to them. Worsthorne had, apparently, contracted a rat-borne strain of the disease that was ‘rare to the point of non-existence, a bad memory from the days of Victorian slums.' The Worsthornes, by then expecting a baby, moved out.

However, the late Michael Oakeshott, then already Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics, who was for a while the Worsthornes' sub-tenant in the attic, seems to have felt nonchalant about the rodents. Their boldness – chewing through a rolled-up carpet to get into the kitchen – amused him. His very young girl-friend, artist June Hooper, who shared the attic, even remembers them with affection – ‘I woke up one morning,' she told me, ‘to a sort of rustling. And there was this perfectly enchanting black rat sitting on the edge of the waste paper basket.' She was quite unfazed too by the dark quay at night. ‘I always felt perfectly safe there.'

In the years immediately following the war, Bankside was a shadow of its former self, with so many of its buildings ruined. But by 1951 Grace Golden could write:

‘Bankside today is coming to life. The gloomy fronts of buildings which for years have looked like unburied corpses are receiving fresh coats of paint … Cranes, which I thought permanently flattened against a wall, are swinging back and forth …'

It seemed then that all the industry and trade that had been traditional there for over two hundred years would pick up and continue as before. For a few years, it did. But this revival in the 1950s was to be a last Indian summer.

BY THE EARLY
1950s the more exotic occupants had departed from 49 Bankside. It was still owned by Munthe, but it once more became a family home and was to remain so for over fifteen years.

Not that the Black family was particularly conventional. Mrs Black had been to Art School, and it was in company with friends from these student days that she found number 49, then untenanted, and persuaded her newly married husband to rent it. Dr Black was then a young registrar at the London Hospital in the East End; he later trained as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley, in Camberwell. Over the next few years three sons were born, including Daniel, the middle one, my informant. The youngest boy had a home birth, probably in the same top-front bedroom where Sells children of several generations had been born into the silvery river light.

For much of the boys' childhood an extra person also lived in the house ‘like a sort of permanent uncle'. Geoffrey Davidson, one of the friends of student days, was a dancer with the Ballet Rambert and subsequently a dance-teacher. He inhabited the ground-floor back room giving onto the garden that had been Munthe's elegant dining room. The crumbling ceiling painting of a watery deity was still in place. The children were not allowed to go into the room immediately above it in case the vibration of their feet should dislodge further shards of paint, but in any case that room was a repository for Munthe belongings and was kept locked. The little boys liked to think that it was out of bounds because it was haunted.