Benjamin Charles Partleton (1824-1884)

Part II

This is part II of the story of Benjamin Partleton. Click here to see Part I.

To summarise, Benjamin was born and grew up in Lambeth. He took a wife, but apparently didn't marry, and recorded a 15-year-old 'son', William - probably adopted - in the 1861 census, for whom there is no birth record and who is never seen again. William may be out of the country in the army, as his children do appear later on, as we shall see.

At some point in his 40s, Benjamin and his partner Louisa decided to move away from Lambeth, circled green in the map below, to South Norwood, circled in purple:

And it is here we find Benjamin and Louisa, circled below, in the 1871 census:

Their new address is Denmark Road, South Norwood, in the Borough of Croydon: Suburbia. They have a 'daughter', Maryen, aged 7. Maryen is another puzzle. For the second census running, Benjamin and Louisa are claiming a child for whom there is no birth certificate - and who is never seen again.

I believe the only thing that makes sense of this is that, after the death of their little two-year old daughter in 1851, the couple were taking in orphans.

In keeping with the inconsistency of all his records, Benjamin declares his birthplace as 'St George Middlesex' which conflicts with every other census. Louisa is apparently from Bromley. Maryen had been born in Wandsworth, a few miles upriver from Lambeth, circled in turquoise in the map below, but has no birth certificate as a Partleton...

The lovely map of Surrey which we see above was originally surveyed by Joseph Lindley and William Crosley in 1789 and 1790, and republished in the version above by William Faden in its 1814 or 1818 edition.

Having established the location of Benjamin's new home, we're going to step into his shoes in the south London suburbs of the 1870s. 

South Norwood is about 7 miles, as the crow flies, from Lambeth, as we see on the map. It's a very familiar place to me, as I grew up in Upper Norwood.

But for most of our gentle readers, South Norwood is probably a mystery, so let's have a little closer look at it:

The area evolved after 1839 around the railway station, Norwood Junction, circled green in the map above. For its first 7 years, the station went by the charming name of Jolly Sailor, after a pub at the point of the purple arrow. As we can see in the 1870s map above, Benjamin's house on Denmark Road, circled in red, was only a few minutes walk from the station, and was surrounded by fields.

Here's South Norwood High Street, seen from the green arrow:

I love this picture; the two girls on their bicycles (difficult to use in this hilly part of London); the lady on the right apparently hurrying; the tram driver looking at something on his left; the little girl holding hands at the pub doorway, the two ladies at the extreme left chatting on the street. The photo is of 1910, but this High Street hasn't changed at all since Benjamin lived there, except for the clock tower which was brand new in 1907. The station is down the road to the right... Step into his shoes...

Here's the exact same view in the late 1950s, and yes, it turns out that the whole world wasn't black and white before I was born:

And below is how it looks in the early 2000s; pretty much unchanged - and unlikely to change as it's a conservation zone.

We'll turn right and have a quick look a rainy Norwood Junction, a sight which would be familiar to our Benjamin, and not much changed today. No doubt Benjamin would have used the train from here to Lambeth occasionally:

Let's navigate closer to Benjamin. He and Louisa lived in Denmark Road, a side road off Portland Road, which we see circled in red in the map below:

The map above was surveyed the late 1870s, and it is apparent that there were practically no houses on Denmark Road at that date. The Partletons lived at No 4 Katey Cottages, which, by the census, are near the end of Denmark Road, but frustratingly, I can't identify which end. But there were 6 Katey Cottages in all, and there's a block of 6 houses together at the south end, which I have circled in yellow, which may be them.

There's also a block of 6 cottages at the north end of the road, circled turquoise in the map. They still stand today - below we see them from the viewpoint of the blue arrow:

These might be Katey Cottages; I think they probably are, but in any case, they provide a good example of a typical south London house. Benjamin and his wife lived together on Denmark Road for at least 23 years.

But the vast majority of Denmark Road in 1871 had no houses on it, and Benjamin has some interesting neighbours who live on the undeveloped bit, neighbours whose dwellings don't appear on any map:

Those 'Licenced Hawkers' in caravans were not an unusual sight. Norwood used to be famous for its gypsy population:

One of the main streets in Norwood is still known as Gypsy Hill.

The story of the Norwood 'Queen of the Gypsies', Margaret Finch, whom we see in the engraving above, is told in this publication of 1798:

Margaret Finch died long before our Benjamin was born, but the superb image below was taken by photographer John Thomson in Battersea, Lambeth, in 1877 and thus is exactly contemporaneous with Benjamin's time of residence in Norwood, and may give us some insight into his neighbours on Denmark Road.

Upper Norwood, West Norwood, South Norwood, Norwood Junction, everything is Norwood. What does all this mean?

Well, all of these names derive from how a vast area of present-day South London had been previously known: The Great North Wood.

"North of what?", I hear you say, and that's a fair question, 'cause this ancient oak woodland, long gone, was quite definitively south of London. The extent of it in 1818 is clearly drawn and named in Faden's map, and I have outlined it in blue:

The wood had been bigger in previous eras, and - even as it was being mapped in 1800 - was shrinking, shrinking, under massive attack from agriculture, and later from housebuilding.

Perhaps the map answers the question of the 'north-ness' of the Great North Wood - as it can be seen to be standing north of Croydon. But Croydon, pre-1800, had been just a modest market-town. Hardly noteworthy that something, or anything, might be north of it. However, Croydon had been the location of one of the residences of the Archbishops of Canterbury, and three-quarters of the Great North Wood was part of the Archbishop's Manor, so it seems entirely possible that the name may have been in reference to this.

Anyhoo, for those of you who who know the area, I have overlaid the modern map, which I find fascinating to analyse. Hover your mouse on-and-off the map to compare the old and the new:

William Faden drew his map, which was first surveyed in 1790, with care and skill. It's not perfect, but - ignore the new roads and diversions - you'll see the old main roads align pretty accurately with the modern mapping.

Anyhoo, what we can regretfully affirm from the modern map is that the Great North Wood is no more. Indeed, in 1871, when Benjamin Partleton was recorded in the census residing at Norwood, the Great North Wood was already, sadly, almost completely, chopped down. Fait Accompli. So we can relax our modern consciences for the crime. Not our fault. Phew.

There are a handful of small exceptions. A remnant of the wood, next to the red letter 'A' in the modern map, at the south of the old forest, is Grangewood Park where the author used to play with his mates as a kid in the 1960s. It's a beautiful stand of 27 acres of old, tall oak trees. Grey squirrels nimbly spiral their way up the tree trunks for refuge as the visitor ambles through the park.

The ancient trees in this pocket of land survived the axe through the Victorian era because they formed the grounds of a grand estate with a mansion at its centre. The estate was subsequently purchased by Croydon Corporation in 1900 for public use. Thanks to Google Street View, from the comfort of my armchair in Aberdeenshire, I can furnish this page with the view of Grangewood Park we see above.

The council found it difficult to find a use for the mansion. It fell into neglect and was demolished in 1960.

Let's get back to Benjamin in the 1870s, and explore some of his neighbourhood, so let's remind ourselves of the location of his house, on Denmark Road, circled in red in the map below - named after the nearby Prince of Denmark pub on Portland Road:

Benjamin, who was a house painter, had chosen to live outside of the built-up area. His house was surrounded by fields.

When he walked into town, perhaps on a painting job, he made his way up Portland Road, and from the viewpoint of the yellow arrow, he would have seen the following stretch of street:

The photographic postcard above is Edwardian in date - perhaps 25 years after Benjamin lived in the area - but we can see from the map that these buildings were there in the 1870s, including the Duke of Clarence pub with the arched windows on the right, so step into his shoes, walk past it, take a deep breath, and experience that stale beery waft of pub-air drifting across the pavement.

The scene is quite unchanged now [2013], as we can see below:

From the above image, it looks like the Duke of Clarence was still in business in April 2012 when the Google Street View camera drove past, but in fact it was already closed down, and is now no longer a pub.

Further south along Portland Road, at a point parallel with Denmark Road, from the red arrow, we get the following interesting view:

You can forget the parade of shops on the right. Those are 20th-century edifices...

If you look at Benjamin's 1870s map, you'll see that the east side of Portland Road at this point was just cow-fields, and since I love playing around with Photoshop, and to remind us all that the world was not monochrome in Victorian times, I have overlaid a bit of countryside below:

Look straight up the road to the hill on the horizon in the images above, and you'll see two towers which were there as Benjamin strolled up Portland Road in 1871. These structures had dominated the whole of this part of the South London landscape from 1855 onwards, impossible to ignore. Benjamin saw them every day.

In the present-day [2012] view below from the same point of view, at the junction of Oakley Road and Portland Road, it's not obvious - because there are modern buildings in the way - but take my word for it, the towers are gone:

Let's have a closer look at one of those towers.

In the map below, it is circled in red...

And here's a photograph of it, taken from the viewpoint of the blue arrow in the map above:

Ok, I think the clues are fairly obvious now. If you were born before 1930, you might have seen it, but most of us only know it from photographs and by reputation: the Crystal Palace.

The 20th-century photograph below gives us an excellent perspective of just how much the Crystal Palace dominated the landscape for pretty much the whole of south London for three or four generations:

When the Crystal Palace was relocated in 1854 from its temporary site at Hyde Park in the centre of London, its owners hunted around for a new, permanent, prominent home - a massive investment decision. They made a spectacular choice, but an expensive one: Sydenham Hill in Norwood, the very top of a high hill in a posh suburb in south London.

If you need convincing of the prominence of this location, check out the painting below executed by artist William Greaves in 1874:

The subject of William's painting was Old Battersea Bridge on the Thames, and very beautiful it was too, not mention dangerous to shipping - the cause of frequent collisions as boats struggled with the currents and the narrow passages between the piers.

The artist's objective was, I am sure, to make a record of the old bridge before its demolition, which occurred in 1885, but look at the right of the painting, and you'll see that Greaves quite incidentally captured the Crystal Palace - seven miles away - on the horizon. 

The painting was executed from the viewpoint of the yellow arrow in the map below:

By hovering your mouse on-and-off the map, you may compare the old and the new. The location of the actual Crystal Palace building is indicated in turquoise. We can see that it was built on what had once been the Great North Wood, and that the surrounding 180-acre Crystal Palace Park straddles the old woodland to the west, and Penge Common to the east.

But if we check out the 1845 map of Surrey by mapmakers J&C Walker which we see below, we can see that, in 1854, it had not been necessary to clear trees for the Crystal Palace: with few exceptions, the Great North Wood had already been felled between 1818 and 1845:

And so, back to Benjamin. Unless he was a very incurious man, capable of completely ignoring the glass giant looming over the whole neighbourhood for decades, then he must surely have visited the Crystal Palace. He wouldn't have been the only one...

The beautiful, shimmering vision we see below, which is in the possession of the Art Institute of Chicago, was painted by French artist Camille Pissarro during his stay in Norwood from December 1870 to July 1871.

Pissarro was taking refuge in Britain from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. As a refugee, Camille took the precautionary measure of deliberately dodging the UK census – he’s nowhere to be seen, nor are his wife or children, though from his surviving correspondence we know that they were living in Upper Norwood when the census was taken in April 1871. This is the same 1871 census where our Benjamin Partleton was recorded a mile or two down the road at South Norwood; the same time, give or take a week or two, when Pissarro created the masterpiece we may admire below:

The exquisite shimmering effect in Pissarro’s painting might at first be taken for heat, but we can tell from the pedestrians’ apparel - and from the bare trees - that this is spring, not summer. In fact what Pissarro has recorded forever is the glimmer and shine of the glass of the Palace in the spring sunlight, far better than any photograph could, and if we want to understand what it was like to be Benjamin Partleton in 1871, we need merely to step through our computer monitors into Pissarro’s beautiful painting.

Camille set up his easel on the pavement next to the big houses at the point of the purple arrow in the map below:

While we are in the vicinity of the Crystal Palace, we should take a little time to explore its neighbourhood.

The building which occupies the location outlined in blue in the map above - 77 Westow Hill - has a blue plaque on its frontage in the present-day...

... but the plaque is quite rightly careful to claim only that Pissarro 'stayed on this site' - because the building upon which the plaque is affixed also has a very helpful inscription set in its east wall which tells us that it was built in 1884; therefore in 1871 Pissarro had lived in the previous building which stood at that location. That building was the Westow Hill Dairy, circled in yellow in the 1871 census below:

In 1871 - when Pissarro was living in Norwood, the only occupants were James Canham - dairyman, and his family. Did Mr Canham join in the subterfuge, break the law, and conceal occupant refugee lodger Camille Pissarro and his family from the census?

Let's have another look at the map of Westow Hill:

The Edwardian postcard of the South Tower we see below was photographed from Westow Hill at the viewpoint of the green arrow in the map above.

The Westow Hill Dairy had been behind the large building at the left, and we can see that, as he stepped out each day, Camille had a right eyeful of the South Tower:

The towers, which added a touch of elegance to the Palace, in fact served a strictly functional purpose, storing vast quantities of water at a height, to power the huge fountains in the park.

Below is the same view in 2012:

For those of our gentle readers who don't know its history, the Crystal Palace burned down in 1936, as we see it sadly ablaze in the newspaper story below:

88 fire engines assembled from all over London. The fire was visible across six counties.

The south tower was damaged, but both towers survived the blaze, as we see them like bookends to the ruins in photo below:

The towers were still standing three years later when WW2 broke out.

The south tower - the one nearest us in the photo above, close to the houses on the road - was carefully dismantled during the winter of 1940/41. On 16 April 1941, the north tower, as it wasn't close to any nearby houses, was brought down more precipitously:

Left: Lewiston Morning Tribune [Idaho, USA], 24 March 1941

The official explanations for the demolition were that the materials were to be used for the war effort, which was probably true, and that the Nazis might use the towers to aid navigation for their bombers, which may also be true:

Left: Lethbridge Herald [Alberta, Canada], Wednesday 16 April 1941

Redundant tall structures were also demolished during WW2 due to the dangers represented by their potential collapse if bombed, which explains why the neighbours were agitating for its removal. Despite its obvious distance from any residences, they didn't want it dropping on their heads in an air raid. 

On 25 March 1956, a new, totally different tower was completed on the site of the old north transept, just a few yards from where the north tower had stood: 

This was the BBC's new television transmitter for London, the Crystal Palace Transmitter.

It's easily the most important TV tower in the country, serving nearly a quarter of the population of England. If you live in London, this is where your terrestrial BBC TV pictures have been coming from for over 50 years. 

Left: Crystal Palace Transmitter Coverage, in Yellow

I've always wanted to know exactly where the TV mast stands in relation to the old Crystal Palace, so I have laid it on top of the Victorian map, as we can see its footprint below, outlined in green, and the old north tower in blue:

In 1962, The Crystal Palace Transmitter was joined by its ITV equivalent, the Croydon Transmitter at Beulah Hill, so, 21 years after the Crystal Palace towers were pulled down, there were once again two towers on the hill at Norwood. 

I grew up right in the shadow of the Croydon Transmitter - just 400 yards away as the crow flies. Wherever you stood in Upper Norwood, it was always there, looming, in what seemed to me at the time to be a peculiarly reassuring, friendly sort of way; it seemed to symbolise my home. It still does, though I haven't lived there since I was 7 years old:

Left: Croydon Transmitter

You can see both towers glowing on the horizon in this photograph of the Croydon skyline which I took in 1979:

Benjamin Partleton clearly wouldn't recognise Croydon like this, 100 years after his death.

On 16 October 2013, the Croydon Advertiser reported that the local council had entered into a £0.5 billion 'exclusivity agreement' with a Chinese developer to transform the park, including a brand new replica of the original Crystal Palace, and below we see their artist's trancelike impression, apparently populated by zombies, from the rear of the building, compared to the original. These web pages are like time capsules of their time of writing [October 2013], and, as you are probably reading this in some strange future time, you'll know whether this speculation ever comes to anything.

Perhaps someone should quietly remind the Chinese billionaire behind the project that the original Crystal Palace lost money every year for 82 years before it burned down.

xxx

That diversion seems to have taken us a long way from Benjamin Partleton, but don't forget, he knew the original Crystal Palace. Let's get back to him...

One day in December 1870 there was a snowfall at Norwood, and Benjamin would have to put on his sturdy boots when he set off for work that day.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Norwood, Camille Pissarro - who had only been in England a few weeks - put on a warm scarf and coat, set up his easel on Fox Hill, and created for posterity a breathtaking glimpse of a crisp winter's day in rural Norwood, which we see below:

That painting is so good, I'm getting frost on my breath just looking at it.

Pissarro's fabulous evocation of a cold day in 1870 on Fox Hill at Norwood was from the viewpoint of the yellow arrow in the map below:

Here's the same kink in the road; Fox Hill in 2012:

A few months later, Pissarro painted this view of the Crystal Palace from the south:

This nice little painting, arguably not quite a masterpiece in the same class as the previous two Pissarro artworks we have just seen, was catalogued by Camille Pissarro's son Lucien in the 1930s; he titled it 'Upper Norwood, Crystal Palace' .

That title is correct, but a bit vague. The painting is in private hands, and you are the lucky owner, googling its history, and have come across this website - as you inevitably will - I can reveal something hidden for 140 years, known only to Claude Pissarro: the exact location from whence the painting was executed. From the parallax of the Palace and its towers, allowing for some degree of impressionism, the artist's point of view was again on Fox Hill.

I hide nothing from the gentle reader. I am a geek, and I had a lot of fun projecting the north tower in blue, and the south tower in red, in relation to the central transept arch of the palace, in yellow, back to the artist's point of origin, as below:

So Pissarro stood at the point of the red arrow in the map below:

When Pissarro fled France, why did he choose to go to Upper Norwood? The answer lies with his half-sister Emma Isaacson née Petit who already resided in the area. Emma was married to Phineas Isaacson, a successful English merchant who traded with the the island of St Thomas in the West Indies - where the Pissarro family came from, and where Camille had been born.

During the census in April 1871 in which Camille Pissarro is missing, his mother - also in exile - can be found living at Park House School, north of Crystal Palace, with four of Emma's kids.

By June1871, Camille and his family stayed in Chatham Terrace, one of the six houses circled in green on Palace Road, which was Phineas and Emma's residence at that moment.

If you check out the map above, the proximity of Palace Road explains Pissarro's selection of Fox Hill for two of his paintings; it's only 100 yards from his half-sister's house. Below we see an Edwardian photo of Palace Road, seen from the orange arrow in the map above. Chatham Terrace is behind the trees half-way up the hill on the left:

To bring us back down to earth from our admiration of his art, Pissarro found that his wondrous, lustrous, uplifting early-impressionist masterpieces, which were painted on location in the open air, not in a studio, were not at all to the English Victorian taste. The British just didn’t get it; they preferred more literal depictions; let’s say Constable; and Pissarro was snubbed by the British art establishment including the Royal Academy. He wrote during his stay at Palace Road, to his friend Theodore Duret, that he planned to return home: 'ici il n'y a point d'art, tout est affaire de commerce' ; ‘Here there is no art, everything is just a matter of business' ... 'ma peinture ne mord pas' ; 'my painting doesn’t catch on' ... 'not at all' ...

Here's one of those nice houses on Palace Road - probably not where Emma Isaacson lived, but No. 43, just few doors away on the same side of the road half-way up the hill, set for demolition in August 1979, along with the whole of the street. Nothing stays for ever in London.

I’m tempted to spend time at the Crystal Palace Park, with its extraordinary giant Victorian dinosaur replicas emerging unexpectedly at every turn from foliage and water, its children’s zoo, paths and landscaped lakes. I've always loved that park, and Benjamin may have liked it too, but it's time to move on with his story. 

Click here to continue with Part III.

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