Marianne has always scoured charity shops for book bargains, and recently she discovered a copy of ‘Victorian Sidelights’ by A.M.W. Stirling (1954). She looked at the index and was surprised to find anecdotes about people or places with West Hampstead and St John’s Wood connections.
The cover gave no biographical information about the author. An Internet search revealed it was writer and art collector Anna Marie Diana Wilhelmina Stirling (1865-1965). The subject of the book was Jeanie Hering, who became a successful novelist and playwright. Stirling uses Jeanie’s letters and papers to describe her life from childhood to old age.
Born Marion Jean Catherine Hamilton in 1846, she was the illegitimate daughter of the 11th Duke of Hamilton and wife of eminent Victorian sculptor John Adams-Acton. Her early years were happy ones, spent on the Isle of Arran, the home of the Dukes of Hamilton.
Old West End House, William Beckford and the Dukes of Hamilton
Hamilton provides the first local link. The 10th Duke of Hamilton (father of the 11th Duke) and William Beckford, son of the Lord Mayor of the same name, were linked by a marriage. William was heir to an enormous West Indian sugar fortune and believed to be the wealthiest man in the country. His mother Maria and two daughters Margaret and Susan, lived at Old West End House, roughly on the site of today’s Nos 202-220 Iverson Road in West Hampstead.
Susan rejected her father’s first choice of a Spanish husband for her, but agreed to the second and in 1810 she married Lord Douglas, who became the 10th Duke of Hamilton. Maybe she made the wrong decision: Jeanie wrote that the Duke felt Susan was not sufficiently ‘grand enough’ to dine with him, and insisted she took all her meals in a separate room.
Stirling describes Jeanie’s parents as ‘a Scottish nobleman and a very lovely girl, Elizabeth Hamilton’. Accurate so far as it goes, but no mention is made of her illegitimacy. And while the book makes no further mention of her birth father, the 11th Duke watched out for his daughter’s interests and believed she would have a better life, enjoy more advantages, if she left Arran.
Adoption and a move to London
The successful painter George Hering was a friend of the Duke’s and a regular visitor to the island with his artist wife Catherine. Their only child Bertha died when she was six years old and probably this tragic event suggested to the Duke that the Herings might be willing to adopt his daughter. Their position in society meant she would enjoy many advantages denied to her on Arran. The Herings agreed to his plan and Marion left Arran for London.
There Marion became Jeanie Hering, her nom de plume when she started writing. Her first home was on Maida Vale where in the late 1840s, ‘wide green fields stretched away to the open country’. The family soon moved uphill to 45 Grove End Road St John’s Wood, a large house with a spacious garden, since demolished. Being a pretty young girl, Jeanie was in great demand to ‘sit’ for her portrait, which she disliked doing. James Sant, portrait painter to Queen Victoria, picture of her was named ‘Little Sunshine’. It showed a girl with rosy cheeks and red gold curls, an image that became very popular and much reproduced. ‘I believe he realised quite a fortune from it’, reminisced Jeanie.
Age six, she was sent to a day school in Finchley Road and when she was 16, at the suggestion of the Duke, Jeanie went to finishing school in Germany for a couple of years.
On 12 July 1863 the Duke collapsed at the fashionable Maison Dorée restaurant in Paris and was taken to his hotel in the Place Vendôme. He had been dining with Napoleon III, and unfounded rumours circulated that the Duke had been injured during a drunken altercation between the two men. He died three days later. Queen Victoria wrote to her eldest daughter, ‘How shocking too is the Duke of Hamilton’s death! He had I fear been drinking too much in a café at Paris!’
Jeanie said it was thought he had been gambling with Prince Napolean who had pushed or accidentally knocked the Duke downstairs; ‘murder was hinted at with bated breath’.
The arts and St John’s Wood
George Hering’s home was just one of many in St John’s Wood occupied by artists and novelists, ‘a recognised headquarters for the artistic world’, said Jeanie. It was still a rural neighbourhood, where ‘across the fields to the pretty village of Kilburn was a favourite walk for near-by residents on Sundays’. Artists in residence included members of the St John’s Wood Clique, writers George Eliot, Miss Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood.
Gambart and the gas explosion
Another well known resident was Ernest Gambart, said to be the most important of all Victorian art dealers and publishers. The Herings were regular visitors to his home at 62 Avenue Road, a few houses north of the junction with Elsworthy Road. In May 1866, on the eve of a particularly lavish fancy dress ball, a massive gas explosion ripped through the building. Two people died from their injuries and others were badly hurt. Gambart was celebrating the opening of a new picture gallery that he had added to the house. The gas escape had filled the basement and when the cook Elizabeth Etall struck a match to light the kitchen fire, there was an explosion that blew out the back of the house. She died later in hospital.
Jeanie wrote:
‘Away went the newly-laid parquet blown high into the air, great slits appeared in the rocking walls, pictures crashed to the floor or spun through the chasms in the brickwork and all the costly cabinets of china and glass were smashed to fragments. Every building in Avenue Road had all the windows smashed. Those who had been asleep in the upper storey were suddenly aroused from slumber and flung violently out of bed. Some fainted, some became hysterical, Gambert seized Mrs Gambert and carried her down a staircase which heaved and cracked beneath his tread. ... The whole neighbourhood was strewn with debris. ... A great six-foot painting by David Roberts was shot over several gardens and lodged in an apple tree where some of the branches stuck right through the canvas’.
Ultimately no one was convicted of causing the gas escape. In 1874, the neighbourhood experienced a second and far more serious explosion, as a barge was passing under Macclesfield Bridge on the Regent's Canal. Escaping benzoline vapour was ignited by a galley fire. Rubble rained down on the neighbourhood, windows were broken as far away as Camden Town. Amazingly, the three-man crew of the barge were the only fatalities while the rebuilt bridge is still often referred to by its nickname, ‘Blow Up Bridge’.
For more details on the Blow Up Bridge incident, see our book ‘Bloody British History: Camden’, The History Press (2013).
John Adams-Acton (1830-1910)
Sculptor John Adams-Acton became a regular visitor to the Hering home and fell in love with Jeanie. They were married at St Mark’s Church in Hamilton Place in April 1875, less than a year after their first meeting. He nearly didn’t make it, as he was laid up with severe muscle strain after lifting a very heavy marble bust. John was born in Acton Hill, studied at the RA Schools, winning many awards and a studentship to Rome. After they married the couple travelled to India where he set up a busy studio. He added Acton to his surname, after his birthplace and presumably to distance himself from other artists with the surname Adams. The list of the busts and statues he made is a long one and are listed here.
Some of the eminent Victorians he captured in stone included Queen Victoria, W.E. Gladstone, Charles Dickens, and Benjamin Disraeli.
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The Tussaud family
The Adams-Actons returned to England, and by 1881 they lived at Marcutta House, 103 Marylebone Road while John searched for a plot of freehold land, with space for a large studio. Marylebone Road was wide with long gardens in front of most of the houses, but Jeanie hated it. She particularly disliked the smell from the steam trains that came up through gratings under the main road. She pined for St John’s Wood but for the time being, John rented a studio from Joseph Tussaud in mews behind the houses on the main road.
The Tussauds had long links with West and South Hampstead. Jeanie recounts several stories about the family.
The creator of the famous Tussaud Waxworks exhibition was Marie Groholtz who became a talented modeller in wax. During the Reign of Terror in late eighteenth century France, she was forced to model the death masks of its victims, including Queen Marie Antoinette and Robespierre. Marie married Francois Tussaud in 1795 and the couple had three children, a daughter who died aged just six months, and two sons, Joseph and Francois.
In 1802 Marie took Joseph and her best wax figures and left France for England. She never saw her husband again and was only reunited with Francois in 1822. Marie toured England with her waxworks. It’s hard for us to appreciate how popular they were, but this was before photography had been invented, and people were curious to know what a famous or notorious person looked like. Marie allowed them to ‘see’ the faces of the great, the good and truly evil. Joseph and Francois became good wax modellers like their mother and in the 1830s the travelling show found a home in Baker Street near Portman Square, later moving to its present home on Euston Road. Marie had always turned her hand to anything that needed doing from wax modelling to taking cash at the box office, and she expected her family to do the same.
Jeanie talks about Marie’s son but the Joseph she is describing is in fact Marie’s grandson Joseph Randall Tussaud, chief modeller at the Exhibition. He married Helen (Ellen) Evans and they had a large family, at least three sons and ten daughters. Jeanie said: ‘Ellen was never happy without a baby in her arms’. After visiting her sister’s new baby, ‘she cried because she had not a baby herself’.
A large family needed a large house, and in 1888, Joseph was living in a newly built villa, Chesterfield House on Iverson Road, coincidentally on a site opposite where Old West End House had recently stood. Ellen suffered severe bronchitis for 11 days, before she died there on December 9th, ‘to the complete break-up of her husband’. They had been a devoted couple and as Jeanie says; ‘he missed her every moment of his life – oh, how pathetically he longed for her gentle presence’. She was buried in the catacombs of the RC Cemetery in Kensal Green. The family moved to 62 Broadhurst Gardens where Joseph died of liver disease on 31 August 1892 and was buried close to his wife.
During the 1890s, Francis Curtius, grandson of Mme Tussaud lived at No 20 Hilgrove Road and Alice, great-granddaughter of Madame who was married to Max Pemberton, was at No.1 Aberdare Gardens. In 1900, four daughters of Joseph Randall were living at 117 Alexandra Rd (since demolished). Jane was married to William Remy and the couple were sharing their home with her unmarried sisters Maud, Beatrice and Dora. The three sisters moved to 138 Abbey Road, where Beatrice died in 1953.
Sunnyside, Langford Place
Much to Jeanie’s relief, John finally managed to buy a St John’s Wood freehold and the couple moved into 14 Langford Place. 400 people were invited to the housewarming. In 1882 he commissioned a large studio made of concrete with a sculpture gallery above, eighty by thirty feet, under a high glass dome (now the site of No.16).
The 500 mile walk from St John’s Wood to Arran
The big adventure of Jeanie’s life was her brave or bizarre decision in 1888 (depending on your viewpoint) to walk from St John’s Wood to the Isle of Arran where she had a home. She had been working hard for a charity bazaar with friends, now that was over she felt life was a bit dull. Her husband told her of a friend who had walked from London to Dorset. She decided it would exciting to go all the way to Arran.
Her wooden children’s pram was ‘in the shape of a double handsome cab with a very large hood’, had three wheels and could hold several children. Very reluctantly John said he would accompany his wife, six children and two maids. Jeanie made meticulous plans and having loaded up the pram with luggage and their one-year-old baby, they set off one sunny July morning. ‘Over five hundred miles did that little party travel, up hill and down dale, along hot, dusty roads or roads ankle deep in mud, through pouring rain or blazing sunshine’. It was a wet summer, so more mud than dust. One maid was largely responsible for pushing the pram and it’s variously reported to have taken between five or seven weeks to complete the marathon journey. Jeanie published a book about the walk called 'Adventures of a Perambulator' in 1894.
Adams-Acton’s last commissioned public work
This was the statue of Cardinal Manning (d.1892) which was placed on his tomb in Westminster Cathedral. A related accident ended John’s career, as he was knocked down by a vehicle after leaving the Cathedral to check the sculpture. He sustained severe internal injuries and while convalescing, fractured his right arm when he fell over a ladder in his studio.
The couple moved from Langford Place to 17 Abbey Road in the early 1900s, and John died in 1910 on holiday on Arran, never having fully recovered from his accident. There is a Westminster City Plaque to his memory at the Langford Place home, but his birth year is incorrectly shown as 1831.
Jeanie had moved from Abbey Road to 21 Hamiliton Terrace by 1921, and she died at her home 99 Clifton Hill, on 10 October 1928. She and John are buried in Brodick Parish Churchyard on Arran.
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