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September, 2010:

Dorset’s Roman Mosaics

Mosaics can be traced as far back as the third millennium BC and were widely applied in Greek and Roman homes of the classical period. They are a pictorial form of enduring decorative ceramic for floors or walls, and demanded considerable skill in their assembling. Until the classical period only coarse pebbles were used, but in the 3rd century BC square, trapezoidal, or triangular glazed tiles or tesserae, varying from a few millimetres to 1 square centimetre in size were introduced.

When Britain became a province of its empire Roman techniques and designs were inevitably imported into the country through growing trade and commercial links with the continent. Mosaic floors were then laid in villas of the civil zone including in Dorset, and several examples of the art have come to light during the excavations of the residences of which they were once a part.

The mosaics found in the Dorset villas were not necessarily contemporary with the original building. A floor could have been laid after many generations of occupation, perhaps at a time of greater status attainment or affluence. Since the floors are usually the only part of the buildings to survive, the mosaics are often all that is known about a villa. But in any event the villas in Dorset seem to date mainly from later in the Roman occupation period, i.e. from the late 3rd century onwards. From the 1st century onwards there appeared a recognised Durnovarian school of mosaicists.

The Durnovarian school was based in Dorchester and at Illchester, now in Somerset but then well within the canton of the Durotriges (the native people of Wessex.) their style is characterised by fine-figured work of common themes and unusual reliefs which point towards a quite restricted cliché or school of expert artisans. The motifs employed are not so much geometric as concentric and were routinely framed by elaborate inter-twinning or guilloche.

While most of the floor would have been laid under the direction of a single mosaicist, there is at least one example of a villa floor in Dorset, which shows traces of completion by another worker of inferior skill to that of his master. There is also evidence to show that parts of some floors were repaired sometime after they were laid. Although more than half a dozen villas are known in Dorset, four in particular have yielded remains of mosaic pavements of sufficient extent to be worthy of conservation and description. These came from Frampton, Hinton St. Mary, Dewlish and Hemsworth.

The villa at Frampton was one of the earliest to be discovered and excavated, in 1796. It was found to have considerably large areas of well-preserved mosaic flooring laid around 350 AD, which were subsequently cleaned and drawn. Here dolphins are a prominent element in the designs, a motif also popular in Christian art. Hinton St. Mary is perhaps the most famous of the villa sites following its fortuitous discovery by the village blacksmith in 1963. As at Frampton virtually all that is known about the villa in through the mosaic, later bought by the British Museum.

But what is most interesting about the floors at both here and Frampton is that they include the earliest yet known icons of Christianity to be found in Britain as well as – and in tandem with – traditional pagan motifs. At both villas the mosaics featured the popular scene of the god Bellerophon slaying the monster Chimaera, as well as other hunting scenes and the popular inclusion of the wine god Bacchus. Yet at Frampton there is also the singular appearance of the Chi-Ro monogram – so called after the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek (a reverse “P” superimposed on an “X”.)

This monogram appears again in the Hinton flooring, but here it was taken a stage further by the inclusion beneath the symbol of a portrait, which is difficult to interpret as anything other than a likeness of Christ himself. This element of the design appeared to be accorded special status, for it was positioned within an apse or semi-circular embayment seemingly provided for the purpose.

The villa at Dewlish was discovered in the grounds of Dewlish house and found to have almost complete mosaic floors in several rooms. In the entrance passage was a Greek key pattern, while a floral motif bordered by a guilloche with vines adorned the dining room. A room (numbered 11) showed a leopard killing a gazelle. Users of the bath suite changing room would have stood on a design with Cupid, a ram, leopard, dolphin, and a sea creature procession or Theasos. These probably surrounded a centrepiece showing perhaps Neptune, though this detail was missing when excavated, presumed destroyed in antiquity. The leopard and Gazelle fragments were mounted for display in Dewlish House; some of the other pieces went to Dorchester Museum, but the remainder was re-buried.

Excavation of the villa at Hemsworth exposed a fine, complete rhomboidal mosaic laid for the plunge bath in the bath-house. This piece was lifted and presented to Dorchester Museum by the executors of Lord Allington in 1905. In the museum’s conservation section is a roundel of Neptune or Oceanus lifted from the centre of a pavement at Hemsworth in 1908 and presented by the Allington estate executors. This shows the head of a sea-god with crab legs and claws growing from the forehead.

Apart from villa floor sections the County Museum also displays a number of other mosaic fragments discovered during excavations of townhouses around Dorchester, or during the laying of foundations for new buildings. For example a townhouse found in the grounds of the former county hospital yielded a rich 13’x21’ geometric mosaic of rope and diamond patterns in black, white, red, grey, blue and yellow tesserae. This was re-laid in the entrance to a residential home on the site.

In the Victorian Gallery can be seen a fragment from Durngate Street lifted and re-laid in 1905. This shows typical Durnovarian work with crested serpents and leaves similar to a design in the Hinton mosaic in the British Museum. This Durngate piece however is one of the few to show a fruit and leaf motif signature. Also in the gallery is a mosaic unearthed at a site in Olga Rd in 1899. Alfred Pope presented the fragment, which shows a vessel with ornate handles similar to a motif on a Cirencester mosaic, to the museum.

Fordington High Street has yielded a polychromatic mosaic also similar to one at Cirencester, and possibly dating from the 2nd century AD. Found in 1927 it was set up in the temporary exhibition gallery and shows a repair carried out in antiquity to the 3-strand guilloche surrounding one of the circles containing a stylised flower. Six red tesserae of a figure once occupying the central octagon are also present.

A fragment of orange-brown guilloche with flowers can be seen in the Roman Section of the museum. The then Devon and Cornwall Bank (now Natwest) discovered the piece when laying foundations for the new bank. By the main staircase is a fragment of mosaic from near South Street found in 1894 – the first piece to be acquired for the museum by Alfred Pope. Halfway up the staircase a geometric mosaic from the prison burial ground is displayed. It was found in 1858 when a grave for an executed man was being dug and was re-laid in the Prison chapel until that was re-built in 1885, whence it was moved to the museum.

The museum’s entrance lobby is laid with a mosaic made up in 1908 with tesserae from a mosaic surround found behind 45, South Street in 1905. The floor of the Dorchester Townhouse conserved in Colliton Park remained under cover after its excavation between 1937 and 1939 until 1997, when the mosaics were re-exposed and conserved.

Storm – 1824

“Dreadful Effects of the Late Tempest”….The “Western Flying Post, Sherborne and Yeovil Mercury and General Advertiser for Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall” made much of its reports of the great storm of November 1824 and the associated tidal wave which swept far inland.

“We have rarely had a more melancholy duty to perform than the recital of the tremendous effects of the gale of Monday night last” began the account in the weekly newspaper of November 29th. “A tempest teeming with more frightful terrors is scarcely within the memory of man.” The storm beginning at 4 a.m. on November 22 appears to have come from the SSW direction and to have been accompanied at times by rain, lightning and thunder.

The pier at the entrance of Weymouth harbour was demolished by the sea, and the quays inundated. The esplanade was destroyed, and a stone bench carried over 200 yards. Lower apartments were filled with water and boats seen floating in all directions. Two smacks were lost and seamen were drowned. A 500-tonne vessel went down with all hands, and a Dutch galliot broke from her moorings and went ashore. Other vessels rode out the storm but were dismasted.

At Portland, in the village of Chisel 80 houses were swept away by the sea and 30 people died, while the ferry passage-house was almost demolished and the ferryman drowned. Along the coast to the west, a ship was wrecked in West Bay and 17 men from her were picked up and buried at Portland. To date 25 bodies had been picked up on the Isle of Portland. The fishermen had lost all their boats and nets.

Among the wrecks was that of a West Indiaman laden with rum and cotton, which foundered opposite Fleet, the whole of the crew perishing. The water swept over the barrier of Chesil Beach and inland to the village of Fleet, where it demolished the church only leaving the chancel or east end. Later the church was to be replaced by another nearby. Many houses were destroyed.

Although well inland, Dorchester did not escape. “The devastating effects of the storm were felt in every quarter of the town,” says the newspaper report. Here a heavy chimney stack fell on the home of the Rev. H.J. Richman, rector of Holy Trinity church, crushing him to death.

At Poole a roaring wind broke windows; trees were torn up by the roots and blown down, together with around 50 chimneys. The tide flooded the quays and craft were at the mercy of the wind and waves, and the town was surrounded on all sides. Some captains sank their own vessels to avoid them being damaged. Some £7,000 of damage was estimated to have been sustained before the tide retreated.

The Cobb at Lyme Regis was damaged, and a large number of houses were carried away at Bridport and sheep drowned. Damage there estimated at £20,000. And the effects of the storm were felt in Southampton and Portsmouth and even inland as far as Salisbury.

Nellie Titterington – Maid of Max Gate Pt.2

Whatever happened at Max Gate now that her master was dead, Nellie knew she would not be working there for much longer; she would have been thinking about how to keep her pregnancy a private matter.

Nellie’s employment at Max Gate was full time and she lived in. Her hours of work being 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. with one half day off during the week and she had either Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon off  leaving little time for romance. Besides her employer the only other male in the household was the gardener Mr. Bert Stephens: he didn’t live in. There was a procession of distinguished men who regularly visited Hardy and later in her life Nellie commented about some of them quite warmly but most likely the father of her child was a lad from Dorchester. Whoever he was Nellie kept his identity to herself.

The widowed Florence Hardy shut up Max Gate and moved to London where in the closing days of August 1928 she took a flat or suite of rooms at the Adelphi Terrace. She wrote to Nellie telling her she needed the companionship of someone she could trust– Nellie later said this was quite a change of heart for, at Max Gate, Florence trusted no one. Mrs Hardy would have been surprised and taken aback not to have received a reply to her offer of a position.

For Nellie this was a dream job, an opportunity to be reacquainted with her mistress’s celebrity friends from the literary and artistic worlds, albeit from below stairs. So what kept the maid from skipping to the post box with a letter of acceptance?

While Florence was moving into her London accommodation her maid was in Dorset County Hospital, Dorchester where, on the 28th of August 1928, she gave birth to a baby girl.

A member of the extended family has told me “…her family wouldn’t let her keep the child and it was given to….” The birth was registered on September 20th and a certificate issued by the Registrar Mr F.J.Kendall.  In the margin of the certificate is a one word declaration signed by the Superintendent Registrar, Mr Henry Osmond Lock: the word is “Adopted.”  The arrangements for the adoption were well advanced before the arrival of the child who filled a gap in the lives of the adopting couple and ensured the child would be out of sight if not out of mind.

Nellie’s dramatically altered circumstances meant that later when she opened her front door and saw the mistress of Max Gate on the step she could accept Florence Hardy’s repeated offer to join her in London. The move from the steady pace of life in the County town to all the excitement and hurly-burly of life in the capital was just the tonic Nellie needed and she would be free of all the knowing glances and gossiping neighbours speculating in whispers about who was the father of her child.

In case you are wondering, Nellie named her daughter Florence Maxina Eunice, which tells us something of how she felt about her time with the Hardy’s, but later in life she said her days at Max Gate were not the happiest of her life. The inclusion of Eunice in the child’s name confirms Nellie knew who was going to bring up her child. We are left to wonder if Nellie followed her daughter’s life from a distance and if she knew the girl married and had four children.

The extent of Hardy’s fortune came as a complete shock to the two women but the gaiety of London life brought about a dramatic change in Florence. She became an altogether happier, less inhibited person, able to spend her miserly husband’s legacy. During this time Florence forged a friendship with Sir James Barrie, for whom Nellie would cook simple dinners at their flat. When a later quarrel ended the friendship with the author of Peter Pan, Florence and Nellie returned to Max Gate and soon after Nellie left Max Gate for good.

In the spring of 1941 Nellie’s mother passed away. Later in her life Nellie recalls that Hardy would often ask her to post letters for him at the General Post Office in South Street, Dorchester. Florence Hardy used to apologise for this cycle journey into the town, but Nellie didn’t mind because it gave her a chance to look in on her Mother for a few minutes.

In one edition of the Dorset Yearbook there is an article, which is the story in effect a biographic testimonial as related to a woman called Hilary Townsend, by Nellie towards the end of her life when in service caring for the author’s invalid mother. Despite becoming more infirm through arthritis she rarely left the old woman’s side, and still carried out all the domestic duties. One day she told her charge’s daughter: “If I stopped coming to you ma’am I shall die – I know I shall.”

Indeed, her words proved to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. One Saturday in 1977 Nellie Titterington missed her regular visit, saying that she was unwell. By Monday she was dead. The following day, the 24th of May, her younger sister Margaret Grace Hocking went to the Registrar’s office to record that Ellen Elizabeth Titterington a domestic servant of 1 Marie Road, Dorchester, had died.

So departed a highly intelligent, ever cheerful, unforgettable domestic servant who would be delighted to know that people are still talking and writing about her.

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[We have looked at the Hardy biographies (Seymour-Smith, Millgate & Tomalin,) the Monographs, Dr Marguerite Roberts work ‘Florence Hardy & the Max Gate Circle’ and Hilary Townsend’s article in the Dorset Year Book series as well as civil registration and census records and found nothing to suggest Florence Hardy knew about Nellie’s child.]

[We have placed a photograph of Miss Titterington in the photo section.]

Nellie Titterington – Maid of Max Gate Pt.1

She was a domestic in a class apart: a kindly, no-nonsense servant living towards the tail end of the age of domestic service. But Nellie Titterington was not just another woman in service in a household of the gentry or privileged upper class. She was privy to the private life and foibles of Dorset’s – and one of the worlds – most noted literary figures. For Nellie was the last, the longest serving, most understanding and probably the best parlour maid Thomas Hardy employed in his household.

Nellie Tetterington’s story begins with her birth on the 30th of March 1899 at 5 Brownden Terrace, Fordington, Dorchester. She was named Ellen Elizabeth but known as Nellie. Her parents were John Joseph and Mary Ada (nee Masters) Titterington: her father, a house painter was born in Malta in 1871; he was the son of an Irish soldier who was stationed there. Her mother was born in 1874 at Tolpuddle.  Nellie had an older brother, William, and three younger siblings Doris, Henry and Margaret.

Nellie is likely to have been a bright, high-spirited and pretty child, active and interested in everything and everyone around her. Certainly as an adult she had an interesting life, which she talked about almost incessantly. Nellie was said to have been “alert and neat, with a clean, well cared for complexion and white hair set off with hats.”

What is known is that in the last year of the First World War, when she had just turned eighteen, young Miss Titterington had made up her mind to enlist in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Having filled out her application documents she left them on the mantelpiece, intending to discuss her move beforehand with her mother. Next day however, an interfering aunt had it in mind to post off the forms without any prior consultation or authorisation from her niece. Only a week later Nellie was amazed to find call-up papers in her letterbox; soon after she was to find herself serving as an orderly to a WAAF officer.

Following the Armistice, Nellie remained in the officer’s service as housekeeper after the officer had moved to a new home in Kent. But Dorset-born people living away from their native patch are especially prone to homesickness, and the officer’s servant was no exception. Put simply, in Nellie’s case the pangs of loneliness she felt emanated from the feeling that she was too far and remote from her beloved mother.

Then in 1921 Nellie’s prospects rose dramatically. Through an acquaintance, Alice Riglar, who appears to have been in service at Maxgate, Thomas Hardy’s country home near Dorchester, she learnt that the position of parlour maid at the house had fallen vacant. Alice then initially recommended Nellie for the position to Hardy, and then informed her of her recommendation in a letter. Before Nellie could begin the job however, Alice wrote again, saying she had second thoughts and asked Nellie not to come after all. It seemed that Alice, concerned about the gloomy, oppressive atmosphere at Max Gate (due mainly to the several trees Hardy had planted so close to the house when moving in) warned Nellie that it would not be “the best of places” as it had “an air of silence.” However, by then Nellie had made up her own mind and was in no way dissuaded by her friend’s misgivings. She therefore left the service of her WAAF officer and returned to Dorset.

Miss Titterington was soon to find Hardy an introspective man who, she said, regarded women not as women but as “shadowy figures fitting into a space like a jigsaw.” Nellie studied him intensely and in time came to understand and respect the writer’s intensely introverted nature. But she also discovered that Hardy was mean with money, had no hobbies and never discussed politics with anyone, though he had a deep, almost mystical reverence for nature.

His parsimony became apparent when Nellie learnt that Hardy would only give each of his staff a Christmas bonus of 2s/6d in an envelope – and even then the cook was instructed to leave hers unopened until later in the day. Hardy’s wife Florence later secretly topped up these bonuses to 10/-. Nellie also spoke of one particular winter evening when Florence had accompanied Lawrence to an event at Glastonbury, leaving Hardy alone with his servants. On this occasion Nellie had stoked up a particularly good fire in the dining room but on checking on its progress a little later she found Hardy removing the coals lump by lump with the tongs and arranging them neatly on the hearth!

Nellie also responded positively to the great man’s love of nature. At one time Max Gate had five owls roosting in the trees over winter and the parlour maid would fetch Hardy to see them. Once, when a hare from adjoining Came Wood strayed into the garden Hardy, Nellie and the gardener together caught it in a net; but then the writer lifted his corner of the net to let the animal escape. On the day of her master’s funeral Nellie noticed that some of the mourners were wearing red fox hunting jackets. Had he been able to see them, Hardy, a fervent abolitionist regarding foxhunting, would have been incensed.

There was one animal at Max Gate however that Nellie probably lost no love over but had to suffer not gladly all the same: Hardy’s rough-haired terrier Wessex. The dog was of a disposition that was both peculiar and nasty, being fiercely protective of his master and as jealously suspicious of most other people as he was evidently devoted to Hardy himself.

Nellie’s approach to dealing with her mistress took much the same form as that towards her master. Florence Hardy was a socially insecure woman with a difficult temperament and other clearly discernable faults. Almost madly suspicious, she would trust no one else with the house keys, and would often accuse one or other of the servants of breaking something or even stealing it. Over time Nellie became accustomed to her awkwardness, and came to pity this second-time-around wife, who married Hardy after the death of his first wife Emma. One particular skill Nellie possessed was flower arranging. Yet when, as often happened, a visitor asked Mrs Hardy in Nellie’s presence who was responsible for the floral display the parlour maid would silently dare the mistress of the house to take the credit for the work. Florence, though much younger than her husband, was nevertheless accustomed to reading whole tracts of books aloud to him in the evenings. It was this devotional side of her nature that made Nellie feel sympathetic towards Florence.

Thomas Hardy died on Wednesday, January 11th, 1928. The following morning Nellie cycled over to ‘Talbothays’ at West Stafford to deliver the news of Hardy’s passing to his sister Kate. Away from Max Gate she had time to think about a growing personal problem.

Nellie was pregnant.

To be continued…..

The Amazing Lady Charlotte of Canford

Between Bournemouth and Poole lies the heathland parish of Canford, today an area of intense development pressure. However, for most of the earlier 19th century it was an estate of thirteen thousand acres about to be transformed through the intervention of a businessman and his remarkable wife.

The wife in question was born Charlotte Bertie in 1812, the only daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsay and his wife Charlotte Layard. When young Charlotte was only six her father died and her mother entered into a second marriage to a hard-drinking, violent clergyman called Peter Pegus, whom the wife and step-daughter were later to turn against. Charlotte junior’s response to the intrusion of this disagreeable step-father into her life was to withdraw into herself with the consolation of reading.

Whether or not this habit and her abnormal family life were contributory factors, Charlotte’s abilities expanded such that she developed a phenomenal intellect and capacity for learning, even by today’s standards. She learnt Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, French and Italian; could play the piano and harp, do copper etchings, and find time to go riding, hunting and shooting. Yet her two younger brothers were mentally retarded.

Charlotte also enjoyed frequent trips to London. It was during one of these trips when she was 21 in 1833 that she was introduced to Benjamin Disraeli, who in turn presented her to a venture capitalist of his acquaintance called Josiah John Guest.

Guest was then 48 but of a very different background and age to Charlotte. He was then the owner-manager of an ironworks his grandfather had established at Dowlais near Merthyr Tydfil, and a year before he married Charlotte he had been elected the town’s MP. Over the first twelve years of their marriage they had ten children: five boys and five girls.

In 1838 Charlotte was presented at the court of the newly-crowned Queen Victoria and by the end of that year Sir John, as he was by then, had been made a baronet. Lady Charlotte also sought a position at court, but in 1844 her husband’s health began to fail after undergoing a gall-bladder operation. It was this change in their circumstances that convinced Charlotte that they should seek to make their home in Dorset.

Subsequently in 1845, the Guests purchased the Canford estate for £335,000, Charlotte immediately taking upon herself the mammoth work of re-organisation. The great architect Sir Charles Barry, who a decade before had designed the new Palace of Westminster, was commissioned to re-style Canford Manor as a Gothic mansion – an undertaking that took several years to complete.

Following the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway the Dowlais Ironworks turned to making railway lines. Charlotte became much involved in the day-to-day running of the company, even adding Welsh to her linguistic tally so that she could converse with the labour force at the works. Her mastery of their mother tongue however, further enabled her – over the course of eight years – to undertake the first translation of the Welsh folklore epic The Mabinogion into English.

Sir John died in Charlotte’s arms in 1851, barely a year after the Guests were able to move into their mansion at Canford. Thereafter Charlotte took total control of the Dowlais Works, but soon after her husband’s death, she was confronted by industrial unrest caused by calls for higher wages in the face of recession and competition from abroad. A settlement was eventually reached without the need for a lock-out.

However, Canford was about to become the beneficiary of an unusual and valuable legacy of Empire. Lady Charlotte’s cousin on her mother’s side was Austen Henry Layard, an energetic, argumentative archaeologist, diplomat and Liberal MP whose father – Charlotte’s uncle – was a civil servant in Sri Lanka. While excavating at a site in Assyria in the 1840’s Layard uncovered a large cache of treasure, most of which went to the British Museum, though a residue of this find went to Canford. Through the familial connection Layard was a frequent visitor to his cousin at the mansion and eventually married one of Charlotte’s daughters, Mary Enid. Her mother again commissioned Barry to add an extension to Canford specifically to house the Assyrian Collection.

About this time Charlotte employed a 27-year-old Fellow of Trinity College called Charles Schreiber as a tutor for her first child and oldest son, Ivor, who was soon to go to university. But when he was struck down by a near-fatal illness Charlotte nursed him back to health, an act which, though the tutor was 13 years her junior, established a solid bond of love between them. In 1855 Charles and Charlotte married. Ivor eventually fulfilled all his mother’s expectations of him, but many of her other children were to cause Charlotte much consternation in the first four years of her second marriage. Ivor took over the management of the ironworks after leaving Cambridge with a first-class degree. In 1885 Charles was elected MP for Cheltenham.

Lady Charlotte’s retirement from managing Dowlais left a void in her life which she filled by collecting a plethora of household articles that included china, tea-caddies, thimbles and snuff-boxes.She travelled abroad widely in her search for new additions to her collection. Disraeli again met Charlotte at a reception in 1870 and through his recommendation Ivor received a peerage the following year.

Throughout the hard winter of 1881 Charlotte was confined to Canford at a time when Charles’ health was in decline from lung problems. That year his wife had undertaken the last of her collecting trips and began the mammoth task of cataloguing her collection. On his doctor’s advice, Charles went out with Charlotte to South Africa in 1884, but died in Lisbon on the 6th of January from the effects of a rough voyage. For Charlotte this tragedy was compounded by the devastating news, borne in a letter from Ivor shortly before, that a fire had broken out at Canford and gutted a large part of the mansion.

Lady Charlotte returned to face the ordeal of the fire damage and Charles’ funeral. She was then 72 and decided that she must split her collection – thereafter known as the Schreiber Collection – 50/50 between the British and Victoria & Albert Museums, though the cataloguing would take up the rest of her life. Apart from two stays with the Layards in Venice she had completed her travels by 1890.

From this time on Lady Charlotte’s declining years were spent with her youngest daughter Blanche, Countess of Beesborough. Lady Charlotte Guest Schreiber died in 1895 and was buried in Canford Churchyard beneath a great white three-tier “mastaba” type granite tombstone topped with a full-length raised crucifix.

Truly a fitting memorial to one of Dorset’s most remarkable Victorians.

 

[We have placed in the gallery two photos by Chris Downer of Canford Magna parish church.]