FOUNDER'S DAY SPEECH 2010
(please see the photos at the bottom of this article)
One Summer afternoon in the late 1920's, two sixteen year old girls arrived at Canons. They were pupils at North London Collegiate School, then based in Camden Town, and they had heard a rumour that a large country house near Stanmore was being purchased for their school.
They decided to investigate for themselves and, in their summer holidays, walked all the way up the Edgware Road, which turned out to be rather longer than they had expected, leading them into the countryside past fields and ditches. They eventually arrived at the stone pillars [PICTURE 2] at the gateway to Canons Park and plodded up the drive to the house itself. There they found a kindly-looking man in country tweeds who showed them into a mansion house where they were astonished by a "gracious hall and staircase, ... lovely rooms looking out onto the terraces, the gallery and the bedrooms with their neat little name plates on the doors, the children's room with its frieze of animals, and the cellars with toads."
The man in country tweeds was Robbins; gardener and estates manager for the last private owner of Canons, he was persuaded to stay on to maintain the grounds and vegetable garden for the School and his horse "Queenie" became a great favourite with the pupils. [PICTURE 3]
Cannons, once spelt with a double "n", takes its name from the Augustinian canons, or monks, of the mediaeval priory of St Bartholomew in Smithfield, that owned the manor of Stanmore from 1086. After the dissolution of the monasteries, the estate passed into private ownership for 400 years. Among the owners were Sir Thomas Lake, Chancellor of the Exchequer under James I who built a grand mansion which he his great grand-daughter, Mary, inherited on her marriage to James Brydges in 1696. Brydges became an MP, rising to the rank of Paymaster General, made a great fortune which he spent creating a grandiose palace [PICTURE 4] at Canons. He became the first Duke of Chandos in 1717, the same year Handel became Composer in Residence at Canons, writing The Chandos Anthems.
Chandos lost much of his fortune in South Sea Bubble speculation and Canons was pulled down in 1747 after the second Duke had to sell the great house to pay the family debts; the statues, staircases and balustrades were auctioned and the original colonnade reputedly now stands in front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The estate was bought by William Hallett, a wealthy cabinet maker who built a small elegant house [PICTURE 5] on the central vault of the old building, using what was left of the old palace, including stone, capitals and pilasters.
After Hallett's death and that of his heirs, Canons had another colourful period. It was bought by "Captain" Dennis O'Kelly, a roguish Irish racehorse breeder and professional gambler, who started his working life by carrying sedan chairs through London's grimy streets. O'Kelly made a fortune from the lucky purchase of a racehorse, Eclipse, undefeated in his lifetime, and who was very profitably put to stud: amazingly, 95% of all today's thoroughbreds can be traced back to him! He was so well known in his day that the Artist famous for his horse pictures, George Stubbs, was commissioned to paint Eclipse; [PICTURE 6] a copy of this picture hangs in the Drummond Room today. Eclipse died of colic at Canons at the age of 24 in 1789. His skeleton is housed at The Royal Veterinary College, but, rather gruesomely, his flesh and his hide were buried here at Canons, where a party with cakes and ale was held to pay tribute to the horse!
Sir Thomas Plumer, a politician and judge who became Master of the Rolls, bought the estate in 1805, and it was later acquired by Dr David Begg. And at the end of the nineteenth century, it was sold on for the last time to a private owner.
An architectural historian, Dr Lucy Jessop, visited School recently and enthused about the Edwardian House and gardens; it made me realise that, though we often talk about the 18th century period here at Canons, the story of the last time the House was a family home is relatively unknown.
An 18 year old Irish cycling enthusiast, working for 12s 6d a week on the lowest rung of the Civil Service spotted the potential of a different kind of tyre: a rubber tube covered with linen tape. The tube could be inflated by using the pump normally used for blowing up footballs. The cyclist described the device as a "pneumatic tyre" and persuaded race officials to allow him to compete; he won the race and the first prize and became a legend in his own lifetime. His name was Arthur Du Cros.
By the time he was 25, [PICTURE 7] he was Managing Director of a £3 million company. By 1917 he owned 60,000 acres of rubber plantations in Ceylon and Malaya.
Du Cros built up his fortune quickly, but spent it easily, too. He was generous to causes: during the First World War, he financed three motor ambulance convoys, contributed his own money to develop what became the Royal Air Force, and made large donations to The Royal Free Hospital. He built up a political career, elected as an MP for Coventry, where his main factory was sited, in 1906, and became known as the best-dressed man in the House of Commons.
His love of beautiful things extended to his homes. As he was planning to enter parliament, he needed a house near London, where he could entertain in the style of wealthy Edwardians of the period.
The Country house party had been made fashionable by Edward, Prince of Wales and his circle: at weekends, guests would arrive at about five o'clock and were ushered into the saloon for tea, [PICTURE 8] ladies dressed in exquisite tea gowns were served scones and cream, sandwiches and cake by footmen. Everyone dressed for dinner, a meal of at least nine courses, followed by bridge, billiards or charades, before the next day's shooting began after a lavish breakfast.
In the 1880's and 90's, those in business tended not to be invited to such gatherings, but, by the turn of the century, these barriers were broken down, and a rich industrialist such as Arthur Du Cros would have wanted to emulate the country house lifestyle.
And so, he bought Canons and commissioned the architect and garden designer Charles Mallows to work on the house and gardens.
Mallows was influenced by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and William Morris. The idea of an Arts and Crafts house was that it should look as if it has evolved from the landscape, with enclosed "rooms" as part of the garden, hedged with box and yew, walls and paving and architectural features built of the same materials as the house.
[PICTURE 9] Mallows used white stone for all the additions to the house, much of original carved stone that had come from the 18th palace. He created a new entrance and court on the West side (the entrance we use for the Old House today) and built a stone screen to link the house and garden and to give privacy to the south garden (where we have Budge Square). He designed two mainly paved gardens on the North and South sides of the house, with pools, water courses, basins, fountains and urns [PICTURE 10] and at the far end of the south garden, beyond where our tennis courts are today, Mallows resited the original 18th century tempietto.
Architectural historian Lucy Dynevor, who gave a lecture in 1997 about Mallows and his work at Canons said he was probably prevented from doing any significant planting near the Old House because of the remains of a vast platform and foundations of the Duke's palace (12 feet above the surrounding area on the south side and six on the east). York stone was used for the terracing and space was left between the flags for plants to grow and soften the harsh outlines. Mallows also used brick in square or herringbone patterns, and millstones. And under the great cedar tree, if you clear away the pine needles, you can see a large semi-circular platform, set with nearly 5 thousand tiles in concentric circles. [PICTURE 11] Mallows added sunken gardens, a favourite motif of the Arts and Crafts architect, and the north pool garden was a famous example. The herbaceous border was designed to run the length of the house, and at each end a stone castellated arbour, to house a seat shaded by climbing plants. The border itself is planted with drifts of colour, as suggested by Gertrude Jeykll, the celebrated Arts and Crafts garden designer who was an admirer of Mallows' work.
Inside the house, six reception rooms were created, sixteen principal bed and dressing rooms, seven bathrooms, ten servants' bedrooms, a Schoolroom, a billiard room and an electric passenger lift to all floors.
[PICTURE 12] We can work out from contemporary documents and pictures the way the house was lived in by the Du Cros family. This is the Buss Room as it was then, for example. Our entrance hall was the Elizabethan Room, with Jacobean carved oak-panelled walls, two open fireplaces and a central vaulted ceiling with murals on two sides. A winding oak stairway led to the Minstrel Gallery, which is still there above Glassy Porch, and a solid bronze studded and decorated door led from the hall to the Boudoir, with its two domed aiches, a barrel-vaulted ceiling with floral designs in relief, and casement doors leading to the South garden. So my study was once a boudoir...I like that idea!
On the floors above, what are now the sixth form common rooms were a Billiard Room and Nursery. There were hard tennis courts and a Summer house approached by a rustic bridge over a stream which fed what is now our lily pond by the Performing Arts Centre. A Schoolroom opened onto the North garden (where the library is today), and a tennis lawn led down to the seven acre lake where there was boating and coarse fishing.
The completed house and gardens featured in a 1916 edition of Country Life, and though the gardens look beautiful, the rooms somehow look bare and do not have a lived-in appearance. It's hard to find much evidence of Du Cros family life at Canons.
Alfred Porter, who has lived in Edgware all his life and in recent years has produced several local history books, visited the School recently (his grandson, Steve now takes care of our grounds). Alfred, who is with us today, told me of his memories of working as an errand boy when Canons was owned by the Du Cros family. He would cycle up the drive from Edgware and sometimes stop to play tennis with Robbins' son. But he doesn't remember ever seeing the family who were often "away some where else".
Perhaps one explanation for the relatively short time the family lived at the expensively remodelled Canons lies in the evidence of Arthur Du Cros's personal unhappiness: he divorced his first wife Maude in the early 1920's having left her and their four children in July 1919. The details of the divorce case were published in the Times, including a letter from him to his wife; "our lives have now been for ten years most unhappy...we simply have incompatible dispositions, and have ...suffered unutterably, to such an extent as to make life impossible..."
According to his wife he had left as the result of a "mad infatuation". And he had become caught up in a scandal that involved The Prince of Wales that cost him a lot of money and contributed to his loss of Canons. A few years before he left his wife, Du Cros had paid £75,000 to his friend Frances, Countess of Warwick [PICTURE 13], known as "Daisy" for what became known as the "Dear Daisy" letters, to save the Royal Family from scandal.
Du Cros' involvement with Daisy, a famous society beauty who was apparently the subject of the music hall song "Daisy Bell", is the subject of a book in the School's archives "My Darling Daisy", which in turn was made into a stage play and a television programme in the 1970's. Daisy had been for nine years the mistress of Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, and had in her possession a series of love letters the Prince had written her. In 1914, Edward VII dead and his son George V on the throne, the Countess was in debt and she decided, in effect, to blackmail the Royal family for money to prevent her from publishing the letters.
She did this by involving Arthur du Cros, a friend who had already lent her money. His response was to do all he could to avoid the publication of the letters. An injunction was eventually granted and Daisy handed over the letters to the King's officials. And, for whatever reason, Du Cros generously decided to shoulder the Countess' debts himself, and was awarded a baronetcy in 1916, for services to industry and the nation!
It is a strange connection that the author of the letters was the same Prince of Wales who attended North London Collegiate School prizegivings, and his wife, Princess Alexandra who had made a generous gift of an endowment to Miss Buss in 1871 which helped fund her two schools for girls in Camden.
So it was that Canons was put on the market in the early 1920's, and was eventually bought by North London Collegiate School. A great deal of building work was needed before the whole school could move out to the house, so an ingenious scheme was devised: each layer of the School should have one day a week here.
One of Miss Drummond's prefects, Connie Hurran who is attending Founder's Day today, aged 99, recalls being taken on a visit to Canons one afternoon over 80 years ago: [PICTURE 14] "We walked up Canons Drive past the pond with the ducks, and walked round the grounds which looked like a wilderness that had been neglected. We thought it was wonderful, such a peaceful place with beautiful trees after the noise of the traffic in Sandall Road. Then we went back to tea and cakes at The Express Dairy!"
Sir Albert Richardson, Professor of Architecture at London University at the time and later President of the Royal Academy, was appointed to design the extension to the Old House necessary to house the School, combining the dignity and graciousness of an 18th century mansion with a twentieth century school.
Richardson was one of the outstanding architects of his day, responsible for the construction (or restoration) of many London buildings, from Moorgate Hall on Finsbury Pavement, to the restoration of St James's Church, Piccadilly and parts of Regent Street.
He was also an interesting character. [PICTURE 15] His obituary in The Times described him as "the complete Georgian", with an enthusiasm for everything that belonged to the period. When at his beautiful Georgian home, Ampthill in Bedfordshire, he wore eighteenth-century dress: knee-breeches, a periwig, shoes with silver buckles; he had a three-cornered hat, and used a sedan chair for transport. He was a colourful eccentric, at a dinner party taking from his waistcoat pocket a miniature silver box of colours, and, dipping his brush in his wine glass, would record for his dinner companion, a vivid picture of the room and diners.
This was the architect that the governors finally chose to remodel Canons.
It was a glorious Saturday afternoon in the June of 1937 when Miss Drummond met Professor Richardson to introduce him to Canons for the first time. It had been carefully planned that they would approach the Old House along the flower border, mindful of the fact that Richardson was an artist as well as an architect. Governors and staff were waiting to greet the architect on the terrace, and he immediately whipped out his drawing block. "What a lovely cedar, Miss Drummond! Your new school building shall be focussed on that beautiful tree."
Richardson's first plans [PICTURE 16] and drawings were produced for the Governors' meeting that July, but proved too costly and had to be made simpler. Eventually the plans were passed in December 1937 [PICTURE 17] and preliminary work began in the summer holidays of 1938, making a temporary kitchen in the basement of the Old House and the dungeons into cloakrooms.
However, that autumn, war seemed very much on the horizon, and tenders for the building were being considered as Mr Chamberlain was on his way to Munich. By December 1938, the North Wing and garden were demolished, and in February 1939, Miss Drummond came to Canons to lay the first brick [PICTURE 18] with a special trowel which is now in our archives, followed by Dolly Langton, [PICTURE 19] the youngest member of the School who laid the second brick.
Not all architectural critics approved of Richardson's design, which involved the destruction of the beautiful North garden. [PICTURE 20] One wrote: "It is sad that Richardson did not have enough respect for Mallows building to leave the north side of the entrance court intact. My hope is that one day it may be restored."
And the difficulties in moving to Canons weren't over: when war broke out that September, a promised grant from Middlesex County Council was withheld, and the Governors were faced with the choice of seeking permission from the Treasury to borrow money or discontinuing the building. They chose to borrow, and appealed to parents and old girls for interest free loans for the duration of the war; work went on, and then came the collapse of France in June 1940. None of the new furniture planned for the new building could be acquired, so the staff painted all the cupboards from Sandall Road to make them look as good as possible for the new building. The cost of the alterations was £72,000.
The great day arrived and on the 18th June 1940, the whole school assembled for the first time in the new school hall at Canons. Laboratories and Dining Room weren't ready and for the first week the girls had to picnic on the hockey pitch, but the move to Canons was complete. [PICTURE 21]
Her work done, Miss Drummond retired as Headmistress that December. There is a spot at the North End of the East Terrace, under the grandest of the cedar trees where a garden bench stands. It bears an inscription, HIC AMOENA DELECTENT: "Here let them enjoy the beauties." The bench and its message were Miss Drummond's parting gift to the School.
In spite of Canons having lost so much of its grandeur - the north garden has entirely disappeared under the Richardson building, all ornament removed except for the tempietto in the South garden which dates from the time of the Dukes; fountains and pools have gone; the view of the lake is obscured by the trees and ugly fencing - but for all that Canons still has magic, and enough to conjure up a picture of a grandly beautiful garden, with all its fountains and running water...
And...[PICTURE 22] we can be grateful for Mallows' enthusiasm for the Arts and Crafts principle that gardens are comfortable and beautiful outdoor living areas, with their pergolas, rose gardens, cloister courts, lily pools, terraces and orchards, all visible at Canons today.
This January I received a note from Dr Lucy Jessop, the architectural historian who had paid us a visit at the end of last year. "It was truly splendid to see such an interesting building in lively occupation, still celebrating its historic past, (complete with the best leadwork I've seen - who could think that pipes could be so interesting?) alongside creating fine minds and happy lives for the future."
[PICTURE 23] There is something of the air of disappointed hopes about the private owners of Canons, with their personal misfortunes and bankruptcies. We don't have many records of the collegial life of the 15th Century Priory that gave Canons its original name, but perhaps the house was always destined for a large community, and the 70 years Canons has been the permanent home for North London Collegiate School have certainly been happy ones in our joint history...
Bernice McCabe
Headmistress
March 2010