Visiting the Victorians
Behind the hustle and bustle of Kensington High Street is a large Victorian townhouse where time has stood remarkably still. If you should happen to visit here, 18 Stafford Terrace, on a particular day at a particular time, you’ll find yourself met at the door by a Mrs Reffell, family cook and housekeeper.
Dressed in her corseted taupe-coloured, high-necked and respectable dress, a bustle at the back and her hair elegantly pinned, she’ll greet you with a warm welcome. “I’m the cook, the housekeeper and the family treasure. Keep your fingers off my objets d’art!” she’ll announce as you enter the hall.
Originally owned by Mr Edward Linley Sambourne, a leading cartoonist with satirical magazine Punch, the house now offers a fascinating insight into the worlds of art and journalism in late Victorian times and beyond. Linley, as he was known, lived here with his wife Marion and their children, Maude and Roy, from 1875 to 1914. Thanks largely to the children, and their granddaughter Anne Messell, later Countess of Rosse, its interiors and extensive family archive have all been lovingly preserved and maintained. In 1980, it was officially opened to the public as a museum.
Throughout most of the year, from March until December, guided tours of the house are held every weekend and during the week by appointment, led by actors in period costume. Special tours for schoolchildren are popular, too, and coming up (14/15 December) are two dramatic evening performances with mulled wine and mince pies (book now).
Once inside the house, it’s like stepping into a time warp. Almost everything before you is original, having been carefully restored, from the days of Linley and his family. The layers of decoration on the walls, the quantities of furniture, objects, books and papers contained throughout the rooms, all reveal an incredible amount about the owners, their tastes and loves. For one thing, the Sambournes were obviously keen on their wallpapers, particularly the recent designs of William Morris. Bills describe three payments totalling over £70 made to Morris & Co between March 1875 and December 1877, ‘for wallpapers throughout the house’. To put this into perspective, Mrs Reffell the housekeeper, currently reincarnated as our very charming guide, tells us she receives £20 a year in salary from the family. Not cheap then. Over the following 30 years, changes would be made to the house by the family, and the Morris papers, too, would be overlaid with more luxurious and expensive embossed and gilded papers, more in vogue during the 1880s, many imported from Japan. Art was obviously important, too, and paintings line the walls, overwhelming the senses.
But aside from being an artist himself, Linley was a photographer. Many of his pictures can be seen hanging on the walls, amongst his original drawings (he often took photographs to help with the construction of his cartoons and family members would be called upon to pose in amusing scenes). Linley also took somewhat more ‘adult’ photographs: naked women posing on pieces of furniture throughout the house – taken while wife Marion was safely away in the country or on shopping trips, of course. Some of these pictures hang on the walls in the bathroom, the rest are kept in boxes on the shelves in his studio at the top of the house.
A member of the Camera Club in 1893, he further experimented with photography, taking verité images in the streets of Kensington using a ‘secret’ camera, mostly of schoolgirls and young women.
Marion Sambourne, Linley’s wife, kept a diary religiously and these important historical references have all been kept, now catalogued with the help of Lottery funding. Linley also kept a journal and in one entry tells of an elaborate gentlemen’s dinner with a luxurious menu comprising: ‘Hors d’oeuvres, caviar, clear soup, sole vin blanc, crème de volaille (cold), tongue and mushrooms, roast lamb, peas and potatoes, French beans, roast chicken, salad, fruit jelly, Finnon haddock’, all washed down with nine bottles of wine. He often complained afterwards of feeling ‘seedy’ and ‘bilious’.
The house was obviously special to the family. After the death of her parents, their daughter Maud, now herself married, urged her brother Roy to continue to live in the house and to make only minimal alterations. She would regularly check on its state, and years later, after Roy’s death in 1946, her daughter Anne would also catch her enthusiasm, regularly visiting it (now empty but well-maintained). She would use it to entertain occasionally and at one of these gatherings, held in 1958, Anne, her husband and several other enthusiastic champions of the period, including poet John Betjeman and the architect Hugh Casson, all agreed to establish a Society to preserve Victorian and Edwardian architecture, then widely under threat, and to encourage research into the art and history of the time. The Victorian Society would later lease the house, opening it as a museum in 1980, playing an important part in its preservation.
Anne, now Countess of Rosse, was determined to keep the house as an historic ‘home’ rather than as a museum of curiosities, and in 1980 negotiated the sale of the property to the Greater London Council on this basis. When the GLC disbanded in1989, it was passed on to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with further preservation and alterations made to the building over the years.
For anyone fascinated with history, this house is a gem, a living example of life in Victorian times – a magical experience and one that the Sambourne family would surely be thrilled to discover lives on.
The catalogue of all the personal papers relating to the family can be consulted via the Linley Sambourne House website at: www.rbkc.gov.uk/linleysambournehouse.
To view the archive, contact the Local Studies section of Kensington Central Library on 020 7361 3028.
To book a place on a tour of the house (open March to Dec), call 020 7602 3316 ext. 300 (Mon-Fri), or 020 7938 1295 (weekends).