arts & crafts issue || 7 hammersmith terrace, london: the last arts and crafts interior

The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present

7 Hammersmith Terrace, London: The Last Arts and Crafts InteriorAuthor(s): Aileen ReidSource: The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 - the Present, No. 28, ARTS &CRAFTS ISSUE (2004), pp. 184-203Published by: The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the PresentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41809356 .

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7 Hammersmith Terrace, London

The Last Arts and Crafts Interior

Aileen Reid

I with visited

the house two 7 Hammersmith

friends and seriously

and was Terrace

disturbed enchanted

yesterday

at with the

with two friends and was enchanted with the house and seriously disturbed at the

thought that so unique a London interior of the Morris period together with its ... pictures, chairs, cabinets, hangings and Morris papers, should be dispersed There is now no other Morris interior in London to equal it, nor was there ever a Morris interior to retain so many relics of the Morris movement. Of course, its

appeal is as a private house, not a museum, and the way the walls are hung with a mixture of

photographs, water colours and illuminated

manuscripts and the way the twinkling light from the Thames at the bottom of the garden shines on the blues and greens of Morris papers and fabrics and old brown hand made

furniture, leads one in to a kingdom that can never be created again. This house and its contents must be preserved.'

For anyone who has read Peter Roses article in this journal about the saving of Standen 30 years ago, or taken an interest in the

acquisition by the National Trust in 2003 of William Morris's Red House, these evocative and passionate words about an Arts and Crafts interior will prick their curiosity. Why have we never seen or heard of this house? How could such an important interior be under threat?

The obscurity of this interior is just one

startling aspect of these words. To begin with, they were written 40 years ago, and their author was none other ťhan John Betjeman.1 More than that, 7 Hammersmith Terrace is still under

threat, despite the best efforts of Betjeman, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and many others in the past,

and of the house's current owners, the Emery Walker Trust, in the present. The purpose of this essay is to outline the life and work of

Emery Walker whose home it was, to introduce the interiors, and to describe the obstacles facing the Emery Walker Trust in trying to keep the house and contents together.

EMERY WALKER AND 7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE

Although today his name is not well known outside academic circles interested in the history of printing, Emery Walker was a figüre ât the centre of the Arts and Crafts Movement.2 He was a founder or committee member of all its key bodies, including the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Art Workers' Guild, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. But he was also a close personal friend of the leaders of the movement: by the end of William Morris's

life, he 'did not think the day complete without a

sight of Emery Walker', ̂ while Philip Webb described him as 'The universal Samaritan ... to be laid on like water, only we don't pay rates for him.'4 These personal and professional links are still very much in evidence in 7 Hammersmith

Terrace, the house where Walker spent the last 30 years of his life.

Emery Walker was born in Paddington in 1851 but moved when he was a small boy with his parents to Hammersmith. Walker's education had to be cut short at 13 as his father's

eyesight was failing. He began work as an

apprentice linen draper, but found his métier

FIG. 1 The dining room photographed in 2000. The plans chest and wall bookcase were Philip Webb's own, designed by him for Morris & Co. in the 1870s. Although the room is largely as it was in Emery Walker's lifetime, it had, like the rest of the house, assumed a rather more crowded appearance, replete with dried flowers, during Elizabeth de Haas's stewardship (compare with Fig 9). Hogarth's vine can just been seen through the door in the conservatory. Country Life Picture Library

7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE, LONDON 185



FIG. 2 A carte de visite photograph of the young Emery Walker, probably taken at the time of his marriage in 1877. Emery Walter Trust

as a printer when, in 1873, he went to work for Alfred Dawson at the Typographic Etching Company. Working for Dawson allowed Walker to familiarize himself with many of the new techniques then being developed for the

reproduction of illustrations in books. His

experience managing Dawson's firm enabled him to set up in business with a partner as Walker & Boutall, Automatic and Process

Engravers, in 1885. (Fig. 2) By this time Emery Walker had married

Mary Grace Jones (1849-1920), the daughter of a civil servant, and they had a little girl, Dorothy (1878-1963). The family had moved to 3 Hammersmith Terrace in 1879, the year after William Morris had moved to Kelmscott House in Upper Mall, just a few hundred yards downstream. Morris considered that 'the situation is certainly the prettiest in London'.5 The appeal is not hard to see today if one walks the mile or so along the river from Hammersmith Bridge to Chiswick church-

yard, via the picturesque variety of Georgian and later houses in Lower and Upper Mall, Hammersmith Terrace and Chiswick Mall.

Although the area was well out in the country when Hammersmith Terrace was built in the mid- 18th century, by the 1870s industrialization had seen the Terrace hemmed in by the

chimneys of oil mills and waterworks, with an

accompanying decline in its social standing. (Fig. 3) In the 18th century one occupant of 7 Hammersmith Terrace had been the painter Philippe de Loutherbourg; later it was home to a wealthy surgeon. This decline in status, however, made what now seems a highly

desirable address affordable to a young couple like the Walkers. As with Chelsea in the 1860s, Hammersmith's raffish riverside charms attracted a community of artists and craftsmen from this time well into the 20th century. Residents of the Terrace included at various times the bookbinder and Walker's future

partner in the Doves Press, T.J. Cobden-

Sanderson; William Morris's daughter, the embroiderer and weaver May Morris; the

painter A.H. Fisher; the calligrapher Edward

Johnston; and the art critic F.G. Stephens. The 24 years during which Walker and

his family lived in 3 Hammersmith Terrace were spent building up his business: some years later Bernard Shaw was describing Walker as 'the guide, philosopher & friend of many publishers in the matter of illustrated books'.6 The 1880s were key for Walker. It was in this decade that he formed close friendships with William Morris, Philip Webb and Bernard Shaw and found an outlet for his political and artistic interests. Like Morris, Walker had

joined the Social Democratic Federation (the forerunner of the Labour Party) in J 883, and

together they founded its Hammersmith Branch in 1884.

The SDF was also apparently the forum in which he established a friendship with Bernard

Shaw, which lasted to Walker's death. The curious flavour of progressive politics - socialist, Utopian, positivist, anarchist - in Britain at the

time, with its blend of radical ideas with middle- class domestic etiquette and routine, is neatly encapsulated in an entry in Shaw's diaries, where he recorded that on 28 July 1891, 'Stepniak [was

i86 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO4



FIG. 3 A view of Hammersmith Terrace from across the river, taken in 2000. No. 7 is the second from the right of the taller houses. Country Life Picture Library

speaking] on Nihilism at Mrs Tomson's At- Home'7 That year Walker and Shaw took a

holiday in Italy with the Art Workers' Guild, the first of many trips Walker took with the Guild in the following 20 years, to Italy, France,

Spain and Greece. His many acquisitions on these trips are still much in evidence in 7 Hammersmith Terrace. (Fig. 1, 9 and 18)

From an early age Walker was fascinated

by the artistic and historical, as well as technical,

aspects of printing. From the age of 12 he was

collecting books, and by 1882 was bemoaning in print the decline in standards of typography.8 In 1888 he was a founder with, among others, Morris of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society and it was a lecture the following year that Walker gave to the A&CES on 'Letterpress Printing and Illustration', illustrated with

enlarged photographic lantern slides of historic

typefaces, that, according to May Morris, gave her father the idea to set up the Kelmscott Press.

Since the 1860s Morris had been trying to

produce a fine 'big story book' version of his

Earthly Paradise , wiťh two or three hundred woodcut illustrations by Burne-Jones, but had found neither a typeface he liked nor a

satisfactory way of reproducing Burne- Jones's illustrations.9 Walker, although never a partner in the Kelmscott Press, advised Morris

throughout its six-year existence on the design of the types, and on sourcing the right handmade paper and chemical-free ink, and introduced him to the punch-cutter Edward Prince. Fifty-two works in 66 volumes were

produced by the Press, which shared premises

with Walker & Boutall at Sussex House, a few doors away from Morris's home at Kelmscott House on Upper Mall. By the mid-1 890s Morris was already ailing in health. As Bernard Shaw put it, with typical candour, 'Morris, like Charles II, was an unconscionable time dying . . . and ... he very nearly killed Emery Walker, who devoted himself to attending on him'.10

With the closure of the Kelmscott Press in 1898 after Morris's death, Walker had not lost his interest in the production of fine printed books. In 1900 he formed a partnership with his friend the bookbinder T.J. Cobdén-Sanderson, then living at 7 Hammersmith Terrace. This was the Doves Press: its productions, set in the Doves type derived (like Morris's Golden type, but to very different effect) by Walker from a

15th-century Venetian original, their pages ornamented only by distinctive initial letters in red or gold hand-drawn (or based on hand- drawn originals) by the calligraphers Graily Hewitt and Edward Johnston, form a striking contrast with the medievalizing Kelmscott Press books.11 Between 1900 and 1917 the Press

produced 40 books bound in 45 volumes, of which Milton's Paradise Lost and, above all, the five-volume Doves Bible (Fig. 4), are the most

sumptuous. Although the Doves Press is the fountainhead of the private press movement in

Britain, Europe and the United States, it is often remembered more for the disposal into the Thames in 1916 by the visionary but quixotic Cobden-Sanderson of the Doves type to

'prevent it from falling into Walker's hands'. Given Walker's unimpeachable professional and personal probity12 and his 'humility and




FIG. 4 The opening page of the Doves Bible, with initial letter drawn by Edward Johnston and engraved by C.E. Keates. British Library

down-earth practical approach'13 this act must be seen as more a measure of Cobden- Sanderson s instability than anything else.14 In the view of May Morris (not perhaps, as a friend of the Walkers, an objective witness), 'Emery Walker did the work mostly while Sanderson existed beautifully and read proofs.'15

By the time the Doves type was consigned to its watery grave Walker had severed his connection with Cobden-Sanderson, having withdrawn from the Doves Press in 1908. He had also moved house in 1903, though only four doors away to 7 Hammersmith Terrace, which had been Cobden-Sanderson's home for the

previous six years. The move is perhaps a measure of Walker's increasing financial

security, although, as was still very common

among the middle classes in the early part of the 20th century, he rented rather than bought the house.16 The move brought an extra floor of

space, with room for a cook, a necessary addition to the household as Walker's wife, Mary Grace, had been, at least from the early 1890s, when she was only in her early 40s, a semi-invalid,17 and

spent an increasing amount of time away from Hammersmith Terrace at a series of cottages in

Sussex, Surrey and Berkshire. From the 1890s Walker was increasingly

in demand as an advisor on all aspects of

printing from the technical and mechanical

aspects taught at the School of Photo-engraving and Lithography in Bolt Court in Holborn, to the more recherché subject of fine printing -

he was involved with St John Hornby's Ashendene Press, Count Harry Kessler's Cranach Press in Germany and the Yeats sisters' Dun Emer Press in Ireland. In later life he was closely associated with Bruce Rogers and Loyd Haberly, key figures in exporting the

private press movement to the United States. From 1899, when they spent a month with

Ernest Gimson and Ernest and Sidney Barnsley at Pinbury Park, Gloucestershire, the Walkers

i88 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO4



developed a strong attachment to the Cotswolds. This is reflected still in 7 Hammersmith Terrace in many items of furniture, metalware and

plaster moulding produced by these pioneers of the Cotswolds Arts & Crafts Movement. Ernest

Barnsley in particular was a close friend of

Emery Walker, and often went to stay, along with his family, at Mary Grace Walker s cottage in Surrey.18 After his wife's death Emery Walker in 1922 took a long lease on Dane way House in Sapperton, a 14th- to 17th-century manor house (not unlike Kelmscott Manor), that had been used by the Barnsley brothers and Ernest Gimson as a showroom. His old friend

Sydney Cockerell was much amused by Walkers transformation by 1903 into 'a country gentleman ... he leads the local choir and rides to hounds twice a week . . .'.19 (Fig. 5) Walker had so far abandoned his youthful radicalism by 1930 as to accept a knighthood, an offer initiated

by Bernard Shaw. Sir Emery Walker died on 22

July 1933 at home in 7 Hammersmith Terrace.

Shortly before he died, Rudyard Kipling described him as 'a wonderful man and I should think as much of the* pure artist as is made'.20

DOROTHY WALKER AND 7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE, 1933-63

Dorothy Walker, (Fig. 6) as Sir Emery's only offspring, inherited 7 Hammersmith Terrace and a legacy of more than £30,000. Dolly, as she was always known to family and close friends, has on occasion been written about in a slightly patronising manner,21 but she greatly valued

and benefited from her friendship, from

childhood, with Morris and Philip Webb, and shared many of their and her father's cultural interests and passion for travel and collecting, which are still evident in Hammersmith Terrace today. She spoke fluent French, as she

spent a year in France before she went to the Slade in 1898, a contemporary of Augustus John and Stanley Spencer ('a very clever boy'). Dorothy also studied calligraphy with Edward

Johnston, and many examples of her work survive in the house. She travelled on a number of the Art Workers' Guild töurs with her

father, and between 1909 and 1913 took long trips to the United States, Morocco and Russia.

The trip to Mogador (now Essaouira) in Morocco in 1912 was especially significant for

Dorothy. She had travelled there with her invalid

mother, probably in search of a climate that would benefit Mary Grace's health. Dorothy was greatly taken with North Africa, its people and culture. She studied Arabic and brought home many pieces of native ceramics and textiles which still adorn 7 Hammersmith Terrace. (Fig. 1 and 18)

For the rest of her father's life, following her doomed romance with the American communist journalist and novelist Arthur

Bullard, Dorothy devoted herself to looking after her father, and especially enjoyed the years from 1922 to his death when they had Dane way as their second home. Although she had to give up the lease after his death, she always maintained a close connection with the Cotswolds and with many of their craftsman friends there, including the designers and decorators of ceramics, Alfred and Louise

FIG. 5 A chalk portrait of Emery Walker by Charles Geoffroy Dechaume, 1920. Emery Walter Trust




FIG. 6 (left) Dorothy Walter, studio portrait photograph by Dorothy Hickling, C.1910. Emery Walter Trust

FIG. 7 (right) Wedgwood plate , decorated by Alfred Powell with the garden view of 7 Hammersmith Terrace. Emery Walter Trust

Powell and Grace Barnsley, and the architect and designer Norman Jewson.

In 1948, conscious that age was creeping up on her and that Hammersmith Terrace was a

large house to maintain on her own, Dorothy advertised in The Lady magazine for a

companion - a role that sounds unbelievably quaint today. The advertisement was answered

by a young Dutchwoman, Elizabeth de Haas

(1918-1999), who had experienced the hardships of wartime occupation in the Netherlands and had been caught up in the ill-fated Battle of Arnhem. She arrived at Victoria station in October 1948, never having met Dorothy, but the arrangement was a great success. In 1959

Dorothy felt able, with Elizabeth accompanying her, to visit Mogador again.

By this time Dorothy Walker had given considerable thought to the future of Hammersmith Terrace. It is evident from the careful way she documented objects in the

house, often attaching labels establishing their

provenance ('this was the poet Rossetti's teapot'), and from photographs of the interior over 70

years or so, that she consciously sought to maintain the appearance of the house as it had been in her father s day. The problem of keeping house and contents together has, therefore, been an issue for nearly 50 years. The issue then, as it has always been, was money. Although Dorothy had inherited a substantial sum from her father, the increasing costs of running and maintaining a five-storey Georgian house depleted her funds to the extent that she had to sell her mothers

property in Ireland and some of her father s

precious manuscripts (although many important

items were also donated to the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow). When Miss Walker died in September 1963,

lacking any close family, she left 7 Hammersmith Terrace, and the problem of what to do about it, to Elizabeth de Haas.

ELIZABETH DE HAAS AND 7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE, 1963-99

Over the 15 years they spent together Elizabeth de Haas became very close to Dorothy Walker

(whom she referred to by the Dutch diminutive

'Famke'), and came greatly to appreciate the house and its unique associations. She continued to travel widely, and to collect

indigenous craft productions wherever she

went, as Emery and Dorothy Walker had before her. She maintained their contacts with the surviving Arts and Crafts artists and forged new friendships with the furniture-maker Edward Barnsley (son of Sidney) and the

printmaker Robin Tanner.

Money was, however, dwindling. Treasures that were sold over the years included the Doves Bible on vellum,22 Dürer

prints and the autograph manuscript of Morris's The Roots of the Mountains .23 There were a few changes to the furnishing and decoration. The 1930s glass plafonnier shades in the dining room and drawing room were

replaced with 19th-century brass or glass continental chandeliers (arguably more in

keeping with the decoration). But these are

I9O THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO4



minimal alterations compared with what has

happened at other so-called Arts and Crafts

interiors, and Miss de Haas, like Miss Walker before her, made a conscious effort to keep the house as it had been in Sir Emery's time.

Keen to find a suitable body to take over the running of the house and its contents and to secure their future, Miss de Haas had

negotiations from the 1960s onwards with bodies that included the SPAB, the National

Trust, Hammersmith and Fulham Council and the Landmark Trust. These came to nothing, partly because Miss de Haas, perhaps naturally, wished to stay on in the house once she had handed it over to its new owner. Finally in

1991, she sold the rest of Sir Emery's private press books, including his complete set of Kelmscott Press titles, to Cheltenham Art

Gallery and Museum which, under the

directorship of George Breeze, was building up an Arts and Crafts collection rivalled in Britain

only by the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was this money that enabled Miss de Haas to set up and endow the Emery Walker Trust a few months before she died in June 1999.

A TOUR ROUND 7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE

Compared with the picturesque variety of

Upper Mall and Chiswick Mall either side, Hammersmith Terrace presents a rather austere

façade to the street. At first glance it appears to be a unified terrace of 17 houses, but it was in fact built over a period of around 50 years

between about 1750 and 1800 - hence the fact that the end house, built as a shop, is No. 1 A.24 As Pevsner pointed out, it is surprising that a terrace of houses was built at this location, so far away from central London, surrounded as it was in the mid- 18th century by market gardens and open fields.25

Once through the door of No. 7, any impression of austerity is instantly banished as one penetrates an interior dominated by the rich blue-green interplay of Morris & Co.

wallpapers, hangings and carpets.

The hall and kitchen As one enters the hall on the ground floor, the room on the right is now the kitchen, converted

by that great friend of the Arts and Crafts and

expert on Philip Webb, the architect John Brandon-Jones, in the 1960s. In what had been in Sir Emery's time the Telephone Room (in

FIG. 8 A trio of cream Wedgwood jugs decorated with entwined 'EW's, backstamped with the monogram of Alfred and Louise Powell, and dated 'DANEWAY HOUSE 1922'. Emery Walker Trust

7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE, LONDON I9I



FIG. 9 The dining room photographed in 1939, six years after Emery Walkers death. Most of the plates and pots on top of the bookcase and in the conservatory, gathered by Walker on trips with the Art Workers Guild, remain in the house today (see Fig. 1). Emery Walter Trust

1930 the telephone instrument was the most valuable object in the room),26 he created a kitchen in a charming sub- Arts and Crafts style in shades of red and green. On the shelves is a selection of Sir Emery's collection of ceramics - 18th- and 19th-century Chinese plates similar to those that Morris had at Kelmscott Manor, as well as Wedgwood plates and jugs from the

period 1900 to 1930 by Cots wolds artists such as Alfred and Louise Powell (Fig. 8) and Grace

Barnsley, many, such as the Daneway jugs or a plate depicting the back elevation of 7 Hammersmith Terrace (Fig. 7), made

specially for the Walkers. Passing back out

through the hall, we should admire the lino on the floor, believed to be the only Morris & Co. lino still in situ in any house.27

The dining room The hall leads 'into the dining room, the main room on the ground floor and, with the drawing

room on the first floor, one of the best-preserved rooms in the house. (Fig. 1, 9, 10, 18, 21) Like the

drawing room, this room is dominated by some

very fine Philip Webb furniture. Webb's close

friendship with and regard for Walker led him to name Walker not just as his sole executor but as the sole beneficiary (apart from the small amount of money he had to leave) of his will, so that at Webb's death in 1915, many pieces of furniture and personal mementoes and books made their way from Webb's cottage, Caxtons, on Wilfred Scawen Blunts estate in Sussex, to 7 Hammersmith Terrace, where they remain.

Among them are a plans chest in dark-green stain, designed by Webb for Morris & Co. in the 1870s28 and a similar wall bookcase. Also Webb's are the 18th- or early 19th-century wine cooler and card table. Both chest and wine cooler can be seen in a painting of the interior of Caxtons

by Burne- Jones's studio assistant T.M. Rooke, over the fireplace in this room (Fig. 10).

I92 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO4



FIG. 10 The dining room which over- looks the garden, photographed in 2000, shortly after Elizabeth de Haas's death. Above the mantelpiece are photographs of Morris taken by Emery Walker and Frederick Hollyer, and a painting by the novelist Samuel Butler, a neighbour of Walker's at his office in Clifford's Inn. Emery Walter Trust

The dining room is also the location for Walkers many mementoes of William Morris. These include a 17th-century chair from Morris's library at Kelmscott House, given by Janey Morris after her husband s death, as well as a cutting of his hair and several pairs of his

spectacles. Along one wall hang the woven blue and green Morris & Co. 'Bird' hangings that Morris designed for Kelmscott House, and which probably came to 7 Hammersmith Terrace via May Morris, who lived next door at No. 8 from 1890 to 1923. There is a series of

photographic portraits of Morris by Walker over the fireplace, as well as Frederick

Hollyer's famous platinotype portrait. In one of the desks a hand-corrected typescript of Widowers' Houses , the first play by Walker's friend George Bernard Shaw, was recently discovered.

Among the personal mementoes in the

desks, carefully wrapped in a brown envelope,

is a small box, like a ring case, in peacock- coloured leather tooled in gold with an initial letter 'E'. It is a collar-stud box - a notably personal item - and the maker was Walker's close friend the bookbinder Katharine Adams.29 The sense of previous owners only recently having departed is reinforced by the

ephemera in the desks: Sir Emery's wallet, still

containing his annual membership cards for the National Trust and other organisations for

1933, the year he died, sits in a drawer.

The conservatory This building off the dining room was added to the house some time in the late 19th century, some years before the Walkers moved in. The vine is reputedly a cutting taken by Cobden- Sanderson from Hogarth's house nearby in Chiswick. This room has been used to display ceramics of all kinds, and its appearance as it would have been in Walker's lifetime has been

7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE, LONDON I93



FIG. 1 1 The garden and back elevation photographed in 2003. Emery Walter Trust

recreated using an inventory of 1930 and a

photograph of 1939: most of the pots were still in the conservatory in any case. The ceramics -

artisanal wares from Morocco, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland - reflect the travelling of both Walker and his daughter Dorothy, sometimes on trips with the Art Workers'

Guild, between 1890 and 1920. There are also several examples of 17th- to 19th-century blue and grey German saltglaze pots, some of which were owned by Philip Webb: Webb and Morris were enthusiastic collectors of this ware, which

they knew as Grès de Flandres.

The garden The delightful garden which runs right down to the river, is laid out exactly as it was in Walker's lifetime,30 and a few of the plants, such as the jasmine on the stairs leading down to the garden, are very old.

First flight of stairs On the stairs is a series of ten photographs of

Daneway, Walker's Cotswolds second home in the 1920s. The series was probably taken for

Dorothy Walker as a memento when she had to give up the lease on the house after her father's death in 1933.

Drawing room, first floor As in the dining room, the associations here with Webb and Morris are numerous (Fig. 12, 13. 14, 19, and 20). The bookcases and plans chest on the left-hand wall were made for

Webb, and the display cabinets either side of the fireplace are also Webb's - designed by him and made by Morris & Co. Inside these are some of the finest pieces of glass and ceramics in the house, including numerous Webb-

designed glasses made by James Powell & Sons of Whitefriars. They also contain mementoes




such as a 'tally stick found by Mr Webb' and a black basalt-ware teapot and blue and white salt cellar that belonged to Rossetti.

Among the textiles are a flatweave Morris & Co. 'Tulip and Lily' carpet (possibly, like the 'Bird' hangings in the dining room, from Kelmscott House) and an early Hammersmith

rug. On the daybed by the window is a woollen throw embroidered by Walker's friend May Morris. There is also a tapestry cushion cover made by May to fit her father's library chair in the dining room and 'inscribed' with a woven dedication: 'MM to EW'. On the wall by the door is a fine pencil portrait of May by Edward

Burne-Jones.

FIG. 12 (far right) Burne- Jones's portrait of May Morris. Country Life Picture Library

FIG. 13 (below) The drawing room photographed in 1939. The machine-made Morris carpet survives today as a kind of underlay to later layers of carpet in the drawing room. The plans chest, cabinet and bookcases were Philip Webb's. Emery Walter Trust



FIG. 14 The drawing room as it is today. On the floor is a Morris & Co flatweave carpet in 'Tulip & Lily', a design Morris had on the floor of his bedroom at Kelmscott House. Webb's cabinet now houses Wedgwood ceramics designed and painted by Alfred and Louise Powell and Grace Barnsley, since the private press books were acquired by Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum in 1991. Country Life Picture Library

The walnut, tulip and holly desk (Fig. 20) is by Walkers close friend Ernest Barnsley, the architect of Rodmarton Manor, and the large plate depicting Daneway (lent to the 2005 International Arts & Crafts exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum) was painted for him by Alfred Powell, as were many of the ceramics in the display cabinets.

First-floor landing and stairs The long-case clock belonged to Walker's

father, and the portrait etching of Walker was

by William Strang. The Strang family were

gfeat friends, and there are many letters and

photographs in the house, as well as inscribed charcoal portraits of two of Strang's sons.

Main bedroom, second floor This bedroom was apparently always used by Dorothy Walker, as her invalid mother spent most of her time in the country, and her father seems to have preferred the top floor. Like all the rooms in the house, apart from the stairs and hall which are hung with a modern Morris 'Willow' paper, this room is decorated with its

original Morris & Co. wallpaper. Here it is Morris's first design 'Daisy'; the same paper, in a different colourway, is in Sir Emery's room, above this one. In Emery and Dorothy's lifetimes the furnishings in this room included a superb Sidney Barnsley bed (Fig. 15), but this was given by Dorothy to John Brandon-Jones in lieu of architectural fees in the 1950s. The bed here now is a four-poster from Heals,

probably of the 1920s, formerly at Daneway. The rooms described so far are those that

will be open to the public. There are a number of other rooms which it will not be possible to

show, some of which have been altered since Walker's time, others of which are just too crowded to admit visitors. But these, too, contain many interesting Arts and Crafts and other survivals, including Morris wallpapers on the walls (as well as many unused rolls), Morris & Co. curtains and loose covers. There is a large variety of interesting textiles from the exotic

(collected by Emery and Dorothy Walker on travels in Greece, Russia, etc) to the ordinary domestic, such as 19th-century Irish linen tablecloths (probably from the family of Mary




FIG. 15 The main bedroom, Dorothy Walker's, photographed in 1939. The Sidney Barnsley bed was given away in the 1950s, but the Morris wallpaper and carpet and the Webb bookcase remain. Emery Walker preferred the smaller bedroom on the top floor, which has the finest views of the river. Emery Walter Trust

Grace Walker), and Walker's huckaback

towels, many still with his embroidered name

tags and laundry marks. Furniture includes a huge whitewashed

linen press with iron strap hinges, a strikingly simple piece designed by and made for Philip Webb, possibly as early as the 1850s, and similar in type to the built-in settle at Red House; Philip Webb's Windsor chair; and numerous Morris & Co. Sussex chairs. Pictures include a

very fine etched version of Burne- Jones's Holy Grail tapestry designs, possibly by Feliks

Jasinski, the foremost interpreter in print of Burne- Jones's work (the Primavera in the

dining room (Fig. 1) is also by Jasinski - Morris had the same print in his library at Kelmscott

Manor); a painting of a girl in Dutch costume

by the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey, another friend of Walker's with Cotswolds

connections; and a signed print by Walter Crane of The Triumph of Labour.

Because this was a private house until only five years ago, the survivals of personal possessions are very numerous. Objects reflecting Walker's many interests include his

freemason's leather apron in fetching white and

turquoise; seals and seal matrices (he was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries); 18th-

century Hammersmith tradesmen's tokens (he had a great depth of knowledge about local

history); his badge from the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he was a judge of the typography section; and shells gathered from the foreshore nearby, which feature in his coat of arms.

Walker's unparalleled knowledge of and interest in printing is reflected throughout the house in manuscripts, prints and books. These include the only page proof outside the Morgan Library in New York of Morris's abortive

attempt in the 1860s and 1870s to publish his

'great book' version of the Earthly Paradise (the page here is the only one with notes in Morris's

handwriting); proofs of Morris's Kelmscott Press initial letters and Burne-Jones illustrations; wooden Kelmscott printing blocks

part-prepared with the designs developed by Walker on to the block photographically; and

exquisite tiny illuminated books made for the Walkers by their friend Ethel Sandell.




FIG. 16 The drawing room at Kelmscott House. The same eclectic mix of middle eastern rugs and ceramics and Morris & Co. furniture and textiles is evident at 7 Hammersmith Terrace. The 'Bird' hangings are probably those now in the dining room at Hammersmith Terrace. Emery Walter Trust

THE EMERY WALKER TRUST AND THE FUTURE OF 7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE

The Emery Walker Trust was set up in 1999, its purpose being 'the advancement of the education of the public in arts and crafts design and architecture ... by promoting . . . the study and appreciation of artists, craftsmen, designers and "architects of the 19th and early 20th centuries and their works and the Arts and Crafts Movement, and acquiring and thereafter

conserving, maintaining and displaying 7 Hammersmith Terrace and its contents'. While the first of these aims - education - is

achievable in a great number of ways, the second - the preservation of the house and contents and making them available to the

public - is far more problematic. When the Trust was bequeathed the

house by Elizabeth de Haas in 1999, it undertook essential works to the structure and

services, and had the textiles treated to arrest the work of moth and carpet beetle. In keeping with its remit to record and research the house, in 2002 the Trust commissioned the present author to catalogue the contents: this, with the

exception of- some of the paper archive, is

complete. The research will form the basis of an illustrated catalogue to be published in both

printed and electronic form as a definitive record of the house, its interiors and contents.

In 2004 the Trust recognised that it would have to make a decision about the house and its

future, and set the end of 2005 as a date by which this would be done. The asset base of the Trust is insufficient to support long-term staffing, a

public opening programme and major repairs should these be necessary. In keeping with this decision the Trust embarked on a two-stage programme of consultation and public opening in 2004 and 2005. In the summer of 2004 a consultation brief was prepared, outlining six

options. These ranged from 1) maintaining the status quo (which would see the Trust eventually become bankrupt), through 2) fundraising to

support an ongoing opening programme, 3) transfer of the house to a partner institution, to

4), 5) and 6), the sale or lease of the house, with or without covenants relating to the decoration, and

coupled with dispersal or sale of the contents.

FIG. 17 The drawing room of The Grange, Fulham, the home of Edward Burne- Jones. Burne-Jones enjoyed the same mixture of Morris & Co. and eastern objects as William Morris and Emery Walker. Emery Walter Trust

198 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO4



Many organisations which could possibly take over the house or act as a partner, from the National Trust and English Heritage, to the Landmark Trust, together with societies which

might offer advice, including the Decorative Arts

Society, Victorian Society and William Morris

Society, were asked to read the consultation brief and invited to view the interiors, to consider the future of the house and the Trust and to offer a written response. This consultation process is

ongoing at the time of writing. The Trust is clear that its preferred option

is transfer to a larger partner institution. This is

really the only viable way of keeping house and contents together. Large-scale fundraising is not a possibility for the Trust in its current form: as Martin Williams, chairman of the

Trustees, has said, 'Endowment fundraising is

notoriously difficult to achieve, especially for a

small, unknown and relatively unstaffed

institution ... This sort of major fundraising drive, putting at risk the remaining cash assets of the Trust, has therefore been ruled out as

option.' One of the difficulties of fundraising is that the house does present challenges of access. It is a four-bedroom terraced house with a

relatively narrow staircase. A structural

engineer has reported that only 10 people should be in a room at any one time. The interiors are very crowded with objects that could easily be broken or stolen. Many grants, such as from the Heritage Lottery Fund, come with requirements for access which could not be fulfilled at Hammersmith Terrace without

damaging the interiors or compromising their

integrity. The Trust could still fundraise for

specific purposes such as the publication of the

catalogue. But the result is that if a partner institution does not take over Hammersmith

Terrace, dispersal of the contents is inevitable.

FIG. 18 The dining room photographed in 2002. To the left is a Gimson ladderback chair, formerly in the conservatory, and to the right William Morris's 17th-century visitors' chair, given to Walker by Janey Morris after Morris's death. Emery Walter Trust




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FIG. 19 One of the pair of Philip Webb's display cabinets, designed by him for Morris and Co., that flank the drawing- room fireplace. On display are many items of glassware, including the Red House glasses

designed by Webb for Morris when he married in 1859, and made by James Powell & Sons of Whitefriars. Country Life Picture Library

The second part of the Emery Walker Trusts programme is the opening of the house to the public, coinciding with the Victoria and Albert Museums International Arts and Crafts exhibition in 2005. Study days will help locate 7 Hammersmith Terrace in its historical context. This opening to the public will, should the contents have to be dispersed, have fulfilled the Trusts brief to 'display Hammersmith Terrace and its contents', at least to a few hundred people.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE

The difficulties of keeping the house and its contents together in perpetuity, and available for the public to visit and scholars to study are

legion. The significance of 7 Hammersmith

Terrace, however, cannot be overstated. It is

beginning to be widely recognized that it is the

only surviving Arts and Crafts interior in an urban setting in Britain. But it is much more than that: arguably it i$ the only authentic Arts and Crafts interior in Britain. All the other Arts and Crafts interiors are to a greater or lesser extent recreations or, in the case of Standen,

displays of Arts and Crafts objects set in an

important Arts & Crafts house. Although Standen had survived in the one family since it was built, it was subjected to a process of

'purification', w''th family furniture excised, and the 'right kind' of Morris & Co. bought to beef up the 'Arts and Craftsness' of the interior. The purpose of this was, in keepihg with the curatorial norms of the time, not to preserve

what was authentic but, as Peter Rose says, to create the 'foremost assembly of Arts and Crafts furniture then on public display in an

appropriate house setting'. The importance of Hammersmith Terrace

was demonstrated in the autumn of 2004, when invited groups of experts visited the house, many for the first time. While the great majority appreciated immediately its significance and

unparallelled authenticity, one group of collectors felt that inclusion of such furnishings as 18th- and 19th-century English furniture, middle eastern rugs and Chinese blue and white ceramics somehow made it less 'authentic' an Arts and Crafts interior. And this despite the

overwhelming evidence of photographs that it was just this eclectic mix that William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Philip Webb had in their own homes at Kelmscott House, the

Grange and Caxtons. The decision to live with

FIG. 20 The drawing room, photographed in 1939. The secretaire under the convex mirror was designed by Ernest Barnsley, for 30 years one of Walker's closest friends; it remains in situ in the drawing room. Emery Walter Trust




FIG. 21 The dining room, photographed in 2002. A pair of brass sconces by Norman Jewson and Ernest Gimson are displayed against the Morris hangings. Emery Walter Trust

this eclectic mix, rather than with a

Gesammti^unstwer' interior produced by one

designer or one manufacturer, can hardly be seen as a lapse of taste, or a diminution of Arts and Crafts authenticity in these circumstances. If

anyone could have had a pure Morris & Co. home if they had chosen, it was surely William Morris. And he chose not to. (Fig. 16)

This same stricture about authenticity applies for rather different reasons to Kelmscott Manor. The interior today, created over 40 years by a dedicated series of experts and advisors, is not inauthentic, in that the furnishings are those owned by Morris or of a type that Morris would have owned. But it is a pared-down museum

presentation of an interior. This is an inevitable

consequence of historical events. Kelmscott Manor could never be as it had been in Morris's

time, once the 1939 sale had taken place after

May Morris's death, and the contents were

dispersed to the four winds. And this will be the case if the contents of

7 Hammersmith Terrace have to be dispersed. Many imaginative solutions have been posited should the Trust be forced to disperse. Rooms can be recreated in museums or in other

locations; furniture and objects can be relocated to other suitable houses - inevitably Red House has been mentioned in this connection. But a museum reconstruction is surely a sorry substitute for the real thing, and one can't help

thinking that the tricking out of Red House with furniture from Hammersmith Terrace would do a disservice to both locations, creating a historically inauthentic hybrid of a house.

To return to the words of John Betjeman with which this essay began, 7 Hammersmith Terrace is 'a kingdom that can never be created

again'. There is now a real danger that 'this

unique London interior of the Morris period', a house that belonged to a key, if lesser-known, figure in the movement, and in the history of

printing, will be lost. And this despite conditions for its survival being now far more

propitious than they were when Betjeman wrote those words. In the intervening 40 years there has been a revolution in perception that has seen the Arts and Crafts Movement enter the mainstream of popular favour and taste.

Many of the difficulties that faced Elizabeth de Haas in securing the future of the house no

longer apply, such as her need to stay on living there. And although one should not underestimate the difficulties in securing grants, there is now, compared to the 1960s, a leviathan of public funding available for

'heritage', as the case of Tyntesfield demonstrated. Hammersmith Terrace's future could be secured with less than one tenth the

money that was raised for the National Trust to acquire Tyntesfield. Whether that will

happen we will know within the year.

202 THE DECORATIVE ARTS SOCIETY JOURNAL 2OO4



AUTHOR Aileen Reid has written a number of books and articles on late 19th- and early 20th-century architecture and

design, with a particular focus on the work of E. W. Godwin, on whom she was awarded her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 2002-2003, as curator to the Emery Walker Trust, she catalogued the contents of No 7 Hammersmith Terrace, and continues to work at the house as curator on an occasional basis. She is also assistant literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

The Trust may be contacted via its website

www.emerywalker.org.uk or on 020 8741 4104.

This essay is based on the published works cited, and on books, letters and other archive material at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, which is at the time of writing (November 2004) being catalogued. This material is cited as 'EWT'.

NOTES

1. John Betjeman to Hugh [Lord Euston, now Duke of Grafton], 13 April 1964, copy sent to Elizabeth de Haas (EWT).

2. The best summary of Walker's life is Greensted, Mary (2003) Emery Walker: Printer, Artist and 'Universal Samaritan', in Greensted, Mary, and Wilson, Sophia, eds, Originality and Initiative : The Arts and Crafts Archives at Cheltenham , 9-21. Cheltenham and Aldershot, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum and Lund Humphries. For his work with the Doves Press and a comprehensive bibliography on Walker, 244-5, see Tidcombe, Marianne (2002) The Doves Press. London and New Castle DE, British Library and Oak Knoll Press.

3. Sydney Cockerell, 'Sir Emery Walker A Master of Typography', The Times , 24 July 1933, quoted in Greensted (2003), 11.

4. Quoted in Greensted (2003), 9. 5. Greensted (2003), 10. 6. Bernard Shaw to Grant Richards, 21 May 1897, in

Laurence, Dan H., ed. (1985) Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, Volume 1: 1874-1897 2nd edition London, Max Reinhardt, 766.

7. Bernard Shaw diary entry for 28 July 1891, in Weintraub, Stanley, ed. (1986) Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885-1897 Vol. 2 Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press, 742.

8. Greensted 2003: 12. 9. A full account of this project can be found in Dunlap,

Joseph R. (1970) The Boo' That Never Was New York, Oriole Editions. The standard work on the Kelmscott Press is Peterson, William R. (1991), The Kelmscott Press : William Morris's Typographical Adventures. Oxford and Berkeley CA, Oxford University Press.

10. Bernard Shaw to Robert Ross, 13 September 1916, in Laurence, Dan H., ed. (1985) Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, Volume 3: 1911-1925 New York, Viking Penguin, 414.

11. The standard work on the Doves Press is Tidcombe (2002) (n. 2); for an alternative interpretation of the relationship between Walker and Cobden-Sanderson in their conduct of the Doves Press see Nash, John (1994) Mr Cobden- Sanderson s Two-Handed Engine. London, Nine Elms Press.

12. Bernard Shaw to Laurentia McLauchlan, 24 July 1933, in Laurence, Dan H., ed. (1988) Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, Volume 4: 1926-1950, 350

13. Greensted (2003), 16. 14. For an accurate, thoughtful and balanced summary of

Cobden-Sanderson 's life see Alan Crawford's entry (2004) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

15. May Morris to Sydney Cockerell, 3 March 1925, quoted in Marsh, Jan (1986) Jane and May Morris London, Pandora, 253. See also Greensted (2003), 18.

16. He acquired the freehold of the house and cottage opposite, which had been the stables, in 1924, perhaps as a legacy for Dorothy, who never married (EWT).

17. She was already absent on census night 1891, while Bernard Shaw records in his diaries that on two occasions that year when he visited she was in bed, attended by a nurse: Weintraub (n. 7) Shaw Diaries , 739, 855.

18. There are many personal photographs of the Barnsleys in the Emery Walker Collection of photographs in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

19. Sydney Cockerell to Katharine Adams, 24 February 1903; quoted by Greensted (2003), 18.

20. Greensted (2003), 20. 21. She is described as Emery Walker's 'ungainly daughter

Dorothy' in Douglas-Home, Jessica (1996) Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse. London, Harvill, 224.

22. To the Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, in 1977.

23. Modern First Editions, Presentation Copies, Autograph Letters and Literary Manuscripts , Sotheby's New Bond Street, 11-12 March 1968, lot 805.

24. The most comprehensive historical description of Hammersmith Terrace is still (1915) Survey of London, Volume VI: The Parish of Hammersmith. London, B.T. Batsford for London County Council.

25. Cherry, Bridget and Pevsner, Nicholas (1999) London 3: North West. London, Penguin, 217.

26. The source of much information about the house in Sir Emery's lifetime is an inventory prepared in 1930 by William Whitely's for insurance purposes (EWT).

27. Some survived into the 1970s in an upstairs room at Standen: I am grateful to Kate Catleugh for this information.

28. The drawing for the plans chest is among the Philip Webb papers bequeathed by Webb to Emery Walker in 1915 and given by Dorothy Walker to John Brandon-Jones in the 1950s. I am grateful to Martin Charles for showing me a photograph of this drawing.

29. I am grateful to Marianne Tidcombe for confirming my identification of this object.

30. A plan dated 1898 (EWT) for the erection of a pergola at the river end of the garden shows the layout of paths as it is today.

7 HAMMERSMITH TERRACE, LONDON 2O3



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