Georgiana Eagle & The Curse Of Vicky’s Ticker
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours
Roger Clarke tells the tale of Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen and Mesmerist, and Curse of Vicky’s Ticker
Once I held it in my hand, I was aware of the weight of it. I was standing in a small downstairs room at Bonhams in South Kensington holding a Victorian gold pocket watch. Yet the weight I felt was not that of the precious metal or the intricate mechanics of its system, but of the significance of those whose hands through which the watch had passed: Queen Victoria, two celebrated psychics, a newspaper editor who went down in the Titanic and the thief who stole it fifty years ago.
Here is the entry in Bonham’s catalogue:
LOT 19: AN 18K GOLD KEY WIND OPEN FACE POCKET WATCH, Circa 1840 (£500–700)
Two engraved inscriptions: ‘Presented by Her Majesty to Miss Georgiana Eagle for her Meritorious & Extraordinary Clairvoyance produced at Osborn House, Isle of Wight, July 15th 1846′ and ‘Presented by W.T Stead to Mrs Etta Wriedt through whose mediumship Queen Victoria’s direct voice was heard in London in July 1911.’
I first came across the name of Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Mesmerist, while researching my book A Natural History of Ghosts – and as a Shoreditch resident myself – I was naturally intrigued by her. Dalston was a Victorian nexus of young female psychics, including the infamous Florence Cook in the eighteen seventies, and there was a very famous Dalston spiritualist group at the time many of whose members worked on the railways – two recently-built spurs (now the overground) had opened up the area and were instrumental in making Dalston popular for séances. It was a new territory, opening new doors into the other world. However it seems an even younger East London psychic proceeded Miss Cook by several decades amongst the furniture-making factories and leather-working rooms of Shoreditch.
Georgiana Eagle was born on November 28th 1834 and baptised at St Leonard’s Church. Her grandfather owned a pub in the parish and the family were of Huguenot descent. She lived with her father Barnardo Eagle in Holywell Place. He was a professional stage magician and the family led a nomadic existence as travelling players. In 1839, he was describing himself as ‘The Royal Wizard of the South’ and in the Birmingham Journal of November 23rd of that year claimed he had performed for ‘His late Majesty and Queen Adelaide, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, The Duchess of Kent and numbers of the nobility.’
After the death of her mother, eight-year-old Georgiana stayed with her father while the rest of her siblings were packed off to live with their grandparents in 36 Coleman St. She was a willing participant in her father’s stage act of ‘Hundred feats of mighty magic’. He was a sceptic who revealed deception and his show, The Mysterious Lady, which was devoted to exposing the clairvoyance claims of mesmerists – proved immensely popular. Little Georgiana was the star and she performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House when Prince Albert was still alive, receiving the gift of the gold watch from the monarch. Victoria’s journals show she gave similar watches to other children of Georgiana’s age and I believe Georgiana had it engraved after that event at Osborne House in 1846. This is the ill-fated watch that was subsequently stolen from the College of Psychic Studies in September 1962.
One morning last year, I received a call from a relative in the antiques business who was monitoring sales of objects connected to the Isle of Wight where we both grew up. He had learnt about the sale of a watch. I went in one day in January for a viewing and sat in a small windowless, fortified room as a young man brought it in. There was absolutely no doubt about it. This was Vicky’s Ticker – the watch given to Georgiana by Queen Victoria which has not been seen or heard of since 1962. It had been discovered among the effects of a jeweller from Manchester at his decease by his relatives, who had no idea of its tainted provenance.
There is a contemporary mention of Victoria’s gift of the watch to Georgiana in the Northampton Mercury in 1849. ‘On Monday last, a theatre suddenly upreared its tawdry head in the market square, decorated with pictures representing Miss Georgiana Eagle in trunk hose and flesh tights, in the act of receiving a splendid gold watch from Her Majesty Queen Victoria.’
A remarkable thing happened. In 1850, Barnardo Eagle advertised private clairvoyance sessions ‘to the nobility and gentry’ in Brighton. At a meeting in Edinburgh in November 1852, around sixty people were invited to experience Georgiana’s powers of mediumship and mesmerism. Whether this conversion was heartfelt or genuine, we will probably never know. It could have been simply that Barnardo was commercially savvy and he saw the wind was blowing in favour of psychics. Yet his journey from sceptic to believer is the reason that the watch is so precious to the College of Psychic Studies.
Those who were shocked by Barnardo’s apparent betrayal of his rational beliefs blamed him for dragging his eighteen year-old daughter along with him. It did not go well for either of them. By 1853, he had abandoned the profession and reverted to the family occupation, buying the licence to the Brown Bear Tavern near the British Museum. His infant daughter Rosabel died and was buried in a public grave, indicating the family’s reduced state at this time. Yet by 1855 they were back on the road, offering clairvoyance once again.
There was a late resurgence in their fame. The hiatus appears to have restored their public reputation now belief in psychic phenomena had became widespread. Then tragedy struck when Barnardo died onstage during his act. A few weeks later – while her father was barely cold in the ground – Georgiana married a Drury Lane scene-painter. She was now performing as Madame Card, Wizard Queen and Mesmerist and living happily with her husband in Cheltenham, until he was committed to a lunatic asylum in Sussex where he died seven months later.
She married a music professor from Islington and they toured together. He accompanying her act with musical numbers and they were reviewed quite favourably by the Evening Standard. Georgiana was by now an accomplished hypnotist and ‘performed with a dexterity that is scarcely surpassed by any other male conjurer’ Unfortunately, the music professor – a volatile character who got in trouble with the law over his temper – also died young and Georgiana was widowed for a second time by the age of forty-seven. She married a draper twenty-five years her junior, and eventually died in Muswell Hill of ‘senile decay’ in March 1911.
Within months of Georgiana’s death, the watch fell into the hands of the newspaper editor W.T. Stead who gave it to Etta Wriedt, a medium who used it to channel the spirit and voice of Queen Victoria in London in July 1911. When Stead drowned on the Titanic, Wriedt presented the watch to the London College of Psychic Studies.
The colourful history of this little timepiece might tempt the credulous to believe it has a curse attached to it – though why that should be, I have no explanation. I attended the ceremony marking the return of the watch at the College of Psychic Studies and afterwards talked with a throng of interested parties. ‘We think you were guided,’ suggested a couple of mediums but naturally I could not say. Yet it is very strange that I should write on the subject for Spitalfields Life and then find it.
I do not feel my business with Georgiana Eagle has quite finished yet.
Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Mersmerist of Shoreditch
Inscription of July 1846
Inscription of July 1911
St Leonard’s Church where Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Clairvoyant Mesmerist, was baptised
Dalston became a nexus for female psychics in the eighteen seventies due to improved transport links
Barnardo Eagle, the Royal Wizard of the South (Courtesy of Senate House Library)
Advertisement for a performance by Barnardo and Georgiana Eagle in Plymouth
Georgiana Eagle commonly performed under the stage name of Madame Gilliland Card (Poster courtesy of British Museum)
Etta Wriedt used Vicky’s Ticker to channel the spirit and voice of Queen Victoria in London in 1911
Journal of Spiritualism, Psychical, Occult & Mystical Research (Courtesy London College of Psychic Studies)
Roger Clarke wishes to thank Vivienne Roberts, College Curator & Archivist at the London College of Psychic Studies for her research
The Nights Of Old London
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours
The temperature is plunging and I can feel the velvet darkness falling upon London. As dusk gathers in the ancient churches and the dusty old museums in the late afternoon, the distinction between past and present becomes almost permeable at this time of year. Then, once the daylight fades and the streetlights flicker into life, I feel the desire to go walking out in search of the dark nights of old London.
Examining hundreds of glass plates – many more than a century old – once used by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for magic lantern shows at the Bishopsgate Institute, I am in thrall to these images of night long ago in London. They set my imagination racing with nocturnal visions of the gloom and the glamour of our city in darkness, where mist hangs in the air eternally, casting an aura round each lamp, where the full moon is always breaking through the clouds and where the recent downpour glistens upon every pavement – where old London has become an apparition that coalesced out of the fog.
Somewhere out there, they are loading the mail onto trains, and the presses are rolling in Fleet St, and the lorries are setting out with the early editions, and the barrows are rolling into Spitalfields and Covent Garden, and the Billingsgate porters are running helter-skelter down St Mary at Hill with crates of fish on their heads, and the horns are blaring along the river as Tower Bridge opens in the moonlight to admit another cargo vessel into the crowded pool of London. Meanwhile, across the empty city, Londoners slumber and dream while footsteps of lonely policemen on the beat echo in the dark deserted streets.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Read my other nocturnal stories
Burdekin’s London Nights
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours
East End Riverside
As you will have realised by now, I am a night bird. In the mornings, I stumble around in a bleary-eyed stupor of incomprehension and in the afternoons I wince at the sun. But as darkness falls my brain begins to focus and, by the time others are heading to their beds, then I am growing alert and settling down to write.
Once I used to go on night rambles – to the railway stations to watch them loading the mail, to the markets to gawp at the hullabaloo and to Fleet St to see the newspaper trucks rolling out with the early editions. These days, such nocturnal excursions are rare unless for the sake of writing a story, yet I still feel the magnetic pull of the dark city streets beckoning, and so it was with a deep pleasure of recognition that I first gazed upon this magnificent series of inky photogravures of “London Night” by Harold Burdekin from 1934 in the Bishopsgate Library.
For many years, it was a subject of wonder for me – as I lay awake in the small hours – to puzzle over the notion of whether the colours which the eye perceives in the night might be rendered in paint. This mystery was resolved when I saw Rembrandt’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” in the National Gallery of Ireland, perhaps finest nightscape in Western art.
Almost from the beginning of the medium, night became a subject for photography with John Adams Whipple taking a daguerrotype of the moon through a telescope in 1839, but it was not until the invention of the dry plate negative process in the eighteen eighties that night photography really became possible. Alfred Stieglitz was the first to attempt this in New York in the eighteen nineties, producing atmospheric nocturnal scenes of the city streets under snow.
In Europe, night photography as an idiom in its own right begins with George Brassaï who depicted the sleazy after-hours life of the Paris streets, publishing “Paris de Nuit” in 1932. These pictures influenced British photographers Harold Burdekin and Bill Brandt, creating “London Night” in 1934 and “A Night in London” in 1938, respectively. Harold Burdekin’s work is almost unknown today, though his total eclipse by Bill Brandt may in part be explained by the fact that Burdekin was killed by a flying bomb in Reigate in 1944 and never survived to contribute to the post-war movement in photography.
More painterly and romantic than Brandt, Burdekin’s nightscapes propose an irresistibly soulful vision of the mythic city enfolded within an eternal indigo night. How I long to wander into the frame and lose myself in these ravishing blue nocturnes.
Black Raven Alley, Upper Thames St
Street Corner
Temple Gardens
London Docks
From Villiers St
General Post Office, King Edward St
Leicester Sq
Middle Temple Hall
Regent St
St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate
George St, Strand
St Botolph’s and the City
St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You might like to read these other nocturnal stories
Night at the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery
Night at The Spitalfields Market, 1991
Spitalfields In Autumn
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours
The rain is falling on Spitalfields, upon the church and the market, and on the streets, yards and gardens. Dripping off the roofs and splashing onto the pavements, filling the gutters and coursing down the pipes, it overflows the culverts and drains to restore the flow of the Black Ditch, the notorious lost river of Spitalfields that once flowed from here to Limehouse Dock. This was the watercourse that transmitted the cholera in 1832. An open sewer piped off in the nineteenth century, the Black Ditch has been co-opted into the drainage system today, but it is still running unknown beneath our feet in Spitalfields – the underground river with the bad reputation.
The shades of autumn encourage such dark thoughts, especially when the clouds hang over the City and the Indian Summer has unravelled to leave us with incessant rain bringing the leaves down. In Spitalfields, curry touts shiver in the chill and smokers stand in doorways, peering at the downpour. The balance of the season has shifted and sunny days have become exceptions, to be appreciated as the last vestiges of the long summer.
On such a day recently, I could not resist collecting these conkers that were lying neglected on the grass in the sunshine. And when I got home I photographed them in that same autumn sunlight to capture their perfect lustre for you. Let me confess, ever since I came to live in the city, it has always amazed me to see conkers scattered and ignored. I cannot understand why city children do not pick them up, when even as an adult I cannot resist the temptation to fill a bag. In Devon, we raced from the school gates and down the lane to be the first to collect the fresh specimens. Their glistening beauty declared their value even if, like gold, their use was limited. I did not bore holes in them with a meat skewer and string them, to fight with them as others do, because it meant spoiling their glossy perfection. Instead I filled a leather suitcase under my bed with conkers and felt secure in my wealth, until one day I opened the case to discover they had all dried out, shrivelled up and gone mouldy.
Let me admit I regret the tender loss of summer, just as I revel in the fruit of the season and the excuse to retreat to bed with a hot water bottle that autumn provides. I lie under the quilt I sewed and I feel protected like a child, though I know I am not a child. I cannot resist dark thoughts, I have a sense of dread at the winter to come and the nights closing in. Yet in the city, there is the drama of the coloured lights gleaming in wet streets. As the nights draw in, people put on the light earlier at home, creating my favourite spectacle of city life, that of the lit room viewed from the street. Every chamber becomes a lantern or a theatre to the lonely stranger on the gloomy street, glimpsing the commonplace ritual of domestic life. Even a mundane scene touches my heart when I hesitate to gaze upon it in passing, like an anonymous ghost in the shadow.
Here in Spitalfields, I have no opportunity to walk through beech woods to admire the copper leaves, instead I must do it in memory. I shall not search birch woods for chanterelles this year either, but I will seek them out to admire in the market, even if I do not buy any. Instead I shall get a box of cooking apples and look forward to eating baked apples by the fire. I am looking forward to lighting the fire. And I always look forward to writing to you every day.
Joan Lauder, Cat Lady Of Spitalfields
In my imagination, Joan Lauder (1924-2011) was a mysterious feline spirit in human form who prowled the alleys and back streets, a self-appointed guardian of the stray cats and a lonely sentinel embodying the melancholy soul of the place.
Here are Rodney Archer’s memories with Phil Maxwell’s black and white photos from the eighties and Clive Murphy’s colour pictures from the nineties.
One day, when I went round to enjoy a cup of tea and shot of rum with Rodney in his cosy basement kitchen in Fournier St, he told me about Joan, the Cat Lady, who made it her business to befriend all the felines in Spitalfields during the nineteen eighties.
Rodney: Joan went all around the neighbourhood feeding the cats regularly and she had names for them. You’d see her crouching, looking through the corrugated iron surrounding Truman’s Brewery, waiting for the cats to come and then they suddenly all appeared. I think once I saw her there and I asked her what she was doing, and she said ‘I’m waiting for the cats to appear.’
‘My darlings,’ she really did call them, ‘My darlings,’ and it was wonderful in a way that she had this love of cats and spent her life encouraging them and feeding them and keeping them alive. I could never quite work it out, but she had a bag, like one of those trolleys you carry, full of cat food. Now, either she’d taken the tops off the tins or something, since I noticed – because she had a kind of witchlike aspect – that although she put her hands right into the tin to feed them and then just threw it down, I never saw any cat food on her hands. It was like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Over the years, I would chat to her but she was someone that you had to have some time for, because once she began she went on and on. The Cat Lady was strange – she spent all her money on the cats – she was like a character out of Dickens. She was almost a street person, except she had a place to live. And she did get benefits and she wasn’t an alcoholic or anything, she was very doughty, she had a bit of a moustache.
She was the kind of woman that, a hundred years ago, people would have been fearful of in a way. There was something awesome about her, because she had her own aura and she was there to feed the cats, and the cats were much more important to her than people. I’d talk about my cat to her and I think once she stopped by my door, and I opened it, and my cat sat looking at her.
The Gentle Author: I’ve heard she had this mantra, “Cats are better than rats.” Were there a lot of rats at that time?
Rodney: I think there were. When the market was still going and you had all the fruit and vegetables, the rats would come out to feed. I never saw that myself, but you might see a rat running along the curb. A lot of people said they were looking forward to the market closing because the area would be cleaner and neater, but I regretted that the market left and there weren’t cabbages everywhere.
The Gentle Author: Can you remember when you first saw the Cat Lady?
Rodney: I think I first saw her on the corner of Fournier St and Brick Lane. She had a huge physical endurance, but I think she must have been exhausted by her journey every day, because she would often stop for quite a long time, and she’d just be there looking around. I suppose she might have been looking for the cats. That’s why you could catch up with her and ask her how she was doing.
One day I just spoke to her, maybe I’d seen her around, and I said, ‘Are you feeding the cats?’ And she told me, and I said had a cat and so we talked about cats and the wisdom of cats and that kind of thing. And afterwards, I’d see her quite often. She didn’t talk much to me about her life – but she was the Great Mother of all the cats in Spitalfields.
Phil Maxwell photographed Joan, the Cat Lady, in the eighties
The cat lady on Brick Lane in the late nineteen eighties.
Phil: The woman in this photograph was always dressed in a head scarf and large coat. Usually she would pull a shopping bag on wheels behind her. She was the Cat Lady of Spitalfields. She knew where every cat and kitten lived in the wild and made it her task to feed them every day. Her bag was full of cat food which she would serve on newspaper at designated spots around Spitalfields.
Phil: The Cat Lady pauses for a second beside the Seven Stars pub on Brick Lane. She has just left some food in the ‘private road’ for some cats.
Phil: The Cat Lady floats past Christchurch School on Brick Lane – with her eyes closed, she contemplates the next cat awaiting a delivery.
Phil: The Cat Lady waits outside her favourite cafe in Cheshire St. Now a trendy boutique, in the nineteen-eighties you could buy a cup of tea and a sandwich for less than a pound at this establishment.
Phil: The Cat Lady ‘kept herself to herself’ and avoided the company of others
Phil: It must be about twenty years since I last saw the Cat Lady of Spitalfields. She devoted her life to feeding the stray cats of the area. I have no idea where she lived and I never saw her talking to another person. She seemed to live in her own separate cat world. Even though I was sitting opposite her when I took this photograph, I felt that she had created a barrier and would be reluctant to engage in conversation. It was impossible to make eye contact. I’m pleased I photographed her on the streets and in her Cheshire St cafe. She would not recognise Cheshire St and Brick Lane today.
Clive Murphy’s portrait of Joan Lauder
At Angel Alley, Whitechapel, 5th March 1992
Feeding the cat from The White Hart in Angel Alley, 5th March 1992
In Gunthorpe St, 5th March 1992
Buying cat food at Taj Stores, Brick Lane, 3rd August 1992
In Wentworth St, 3rd August 1992
Calling a cat, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992
The cat arrives, Bacon St, 3rd August 1992
Alley off Hanbury St, 2nd August 1992
Hanbury St, 26th November 1995
At Aldgate East, 3rd August 1992
At Lloyds, Leadenhall St, 3rd August 1992
Walking from Angel Alley into Whitechapel High St, 3rd August 1992
Beware Of The Pussy, 132 Brick Lane, 26th November 1995
Clive visits Joan in her Nursing Home, 1995
Clive: The women I have loved you could count upon the digits of one hand – my mother, her mother, our loyal companion Maureen McDonnell, the poet Patricia Doubell and the demented, incontinent Joan Lauder, the Cat Lady of Spitalfields who, in 1991, when I first spoke to her was already my heroine, a day-and-night-in-all-weathers Trojan, doggedly devoting herself to cats because human beings had for too long failed her.
She looked at me with suspicion when I suggested we tape record a book. Only my bribe that half of any proceeds of publication would fall to her or her favoured charities and enable the purchase of extra tins of cat food persuaded her at least to humour me. I could swear I saw those azure eyes, set in that pretty face, dilate.
I had entrapped her with the best of intentions as she, I was to learn, often entrapped, also with the best of intentions, the denizens of the feral world to have them spayed or neutered in the interests of control. But to the end, her end, I don’t think she ever trusted or respected me. I once found her surreptitiously laying down Whiskas in my hallway for my own newly-adopted cat which I named Joan in her honour. And she once spat the expletive ‘t***’ at me in a tone of total dismissal. To be called a foolish and obnoxious person was hardly comforting, given that I believe my own adage ‘in dementia veritas’ holds all too often true.
Black & white photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell
Colour photographs copyright © Estate of Clive Murphy
So Long, G. Kelly Of Bethnal Green
Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours
G.Kelly in happier days
This week, I was so saddened to confront the long-closed-up premises of G. Kelly at 444 Bethnal Green Rd – which shut in 2018 never to reopen – that I realised I needed to publish a belated elegy for this beloved institution which served pie and mash to loyal East End customers for over a century.
Sue Venning of G.Kelly pie and mash (still open and flourishing at 526 Roman Rd) kindly outlined the genealogy. “Samuel Robert Kelly opened up originally in Bethnal Green in 1915 – he had three sons, Samuel who took over in Bethnal Green, Joe who opened in Bonner St and George who came here to the Roman Rd. My father Bill (George Kelly’s brother-in-law) ran this with my mother Bea, until he died in 1969, and then I took over from her in 1990.”
Years have passed now since contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I hit the lunchtime rush at G. Kelly, Bethnal Green Rd, (connected only genealogically to G. Kelly, Roman Rd) where Matt Kelly, proprietor, baker and third generation pie man, had his work cut out in the kitchen to meet the demand for pie and mash and liquor at £2.65. Diners ate off elegant cast iron tables beneath framed portraits of local boxing heroes of yesteryear and everyone was at home in one of the neighbourhood’s cosiest destinations.
At the head of the lunch queue was Mrs Julia Richards. “I’m going to be ninety-eight,” she bragged with a winsome grin, the picture of exuberance and vitality as she carried off her plate of pie and mash hungrily to her favourite corner table, pursued by her sprightly seventy-year-old daughter Patricia – both superlative living exemplars for the sustaining qualities of traditional East End meat pies. “I’ve been coming here over fifty years,” revealed Patricia proudly. “I’ve been coming here since before it opened!” teased Julia, her eyes shining with excitement as she cut into her steaming meat pie.”They used to have live eels outside in a bucket,” she continued, enraptured by memory, “And you could pick which one you wanted to eat.” We left them absorbed in their pies, the very epitome of human contentment, beneath a hand-lettered advertising placard, proclaiming “Kelly for Jelly.”
S. & R. Kelly & Sons (connected only genealogically to G. Kelly) remains open at 284 Bethnal Green Rd.
At G.Kelly, Bethnal Green
The prizefighters of yesteryear fondly remembered at G.Kelly in Bethnal Green
Julia Richards, nearly ninety-eight – “They used to have live eels outside and you could pick your own.”
Regulars, Julia Richards and her sprightly daughter Patricia Wootton aged seventy, at the favoured corner table at G.Kelly
G. Kelly in Bethnal Green, 1915-2018
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
Joan Beales, Illustrator
I am proud to publish these excerpts from THE SILVER LOCKET by a graduate of my writing course. The author says ‘A lifetime of reading and book collecting leads me to share stories of literary life: books old and new which inspire and comfort me and the people I meet.’
I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.
If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.
Illustrator Joan Beales holds a very special place in my heart. Her first picture book Pip and the Six Cooks, published in 1964, was one of my very first books, which I read over and over again.
Turning the pages, all my childhood delight comes rushing back – the generous size, the exquisite line drawings, the vibrant colours which evoke the sunny atmosphere of the mediterranean, the joy to be had in all the characters depicted in the book’s endpapers, including the head chef with his wind-up gramophone, Poppoff who was born in a circus, and not forgetting the terrible kitchen cats. I think it is my desert island book because it would bring me comfort and joy, and I would never tire of looking at all the details.
When I had a lot of time on my hands during the pandemic, I did some research into Joan Beales’ life and work. Keen to find out more about her I contacted Professor Martin Salisbury, founder of the MA in children’s book illustration at the Cambridge School of Art. I knew he was an admirer of Joan Beales’ work and he told me:
‘Joan Beales is something of a mystery. Her charming poster designs and illustrations for children’s books are greatly admired by practitioners and students alike for their inventive graphic fusion of flat shape, pattern and line drawing.‘
Despite all my enquiries I have discovered very little. I believe she was born in 1926, lived in Manchester and studied at the Royal College of Art just after the War. She was a graphic artist and illustrator, designing posters for London Transport and the Science Museum between 1954 and 1956. Two other books besides Pip stand out for her illustrations: The Seasons by Derek Jervis, published in 1962, and Travel by Land which she wrote and illustrated, published in 1966.
Although she went on to illustrate many early readers in the seventies including Leila Berg’s Nippers, it is her early work which enchants me. In the London Transport Museum online archive online, I found a letter from Joan Beales in which she mentions a mural she was working on for a London hotel. Further investigation reveals that she designed a mural for the Tavistock Hotel in 1957.
Imagine my surprise when, on posting my piece, I was contacted by Lynda Saul who wrote:
‘We bought some panels from an auction a few years ago and all we knew were that they came from a hotel….and I think they could be the ones Joan mentions in her letter! We have looked at her style and think they could be by her! Would love to try and work out which hotel it was! They’re huge!’
More recently I received this from Doug Wilmott-Swanney
‘I was a close friend of Joan Beales and I love she is getting the recognition she deserves. I may be the only person alive that knew her and her family.’
I am now fully embarked on detective work to try to piece some of this jigsaw together. Lynda has kindly given me permission to post her snapshots of the murals, which she subsequently sold, being too big to display. She told me:
‘They caught our eye as we love mid-century illustration and just had to have them! We didn’t at the time know who they were by, but they encapsulated the style we love perfectly (and we love a mystery!). Plus we had moved from London to Brighton (although since left!) and we liked that one depicted the same journey.‘
Maybe, just maybe, whoever bought Joan’s murals from a dealer in Brighton might read this and get in touch? It would be such a joy to know they are loved and even pay them a visit maybe. What a dream that would be!
Double page spread from Pip and the Six Cooks, 1964
Double page spread from Pip and the Six Cooks, 1964
Double page spread from Pip and the Six Cooks, 1964
Double page spread from Pip and the Six Cooks, 1964
Double page spread from Pip and the Six Cooks, 1964
Endpapers from Pip and the Six Cooks, 1964
Letter from Joan Beales in which she mentions her murals for the Tavistock Hotel. (Courtesy of London Transport Museum)
One of the panels designed by Joan Beales for the Tavistock Hotel in 1957 which is now believed to be in Brighton
Detail from one of the panels depicting the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run
