Conservative History Journal

October 16, 1834 was the day Parliament burned down to be rebuilt eventually into the grand edifice we know today with Westminster Hall the only remaining mediaeval part. Caroline Shenton, a Parliamentary Archivist and author of  The Day Parliament Burned Down, describes the events of that traumatic day.

J. M. W. Turner played the role of a disaster photographer by setting up his easel on the other side of the Thames and getting down as many sketches as he could.

Tory Historian has now been sent the full obituary of Professor John Frederic Main published by the Institute of Civil Engineering , the hero of the previous posting. He was fully as remarkable as his wife, Elizabeth and her first husband, Frederick Burnaby.

 JOHN FREDERIC MAIN.

Obituary published by the Institute of Civil Engineers, Volume 110, Issue 1892, 01 January 1892 , pages 394 –396, 

JOHN FREDERIC MAIN, son of the late Mr. David Main, Civil Engineer, was born at Greencastle, in the island of Jamaica, on the 7th of July, 1854. Taken as a child to England, he received his early education at the Southern Division Grammar School, at Southsea. 

In October, 1872, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won a mathematical scholarship, and in the Tripos of 1876 was ranked Tenth Wrangler. He was President of the Cambridge Union Society in the Easter term of that year. In January, 1872, he had matriculated seventh in honours at the University of London, where he subsequently passed the first and second examinations for the degree of Bachelor of Science, and in June, 1877, obtained that of Doctor of Science, the special subjects taken being Light, Heat and Acoustics treated mathematically, he being then barely twenty-three years of age. 

In the following October he was appointed Lecturer in Mathematics and Applied Mechanics at University College, Bristol. With characteristic energy, he sought additional qualifications for this post by obtaining practical experience during three summer vacations, which he spent respectively in carrying on experimental work at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, in practical work at Professor Stuart’s workshops, in the same place, and in the drawing office in New York, of Mr Thomas Main, who subsequently became Manager of the works of Messrs. John Roach and Sons, at Chester, Pennsylvania. 

Dr Main’s connection with University College, Bristol, lasted for four years, and proved one of importance in the history of that Institution. In the first year, his gifts as a lecturer and teacher were so signally demonstrated, that the Council of the College entrusted to him the arduous task of founding and organizing the School of Engineering, which he had induced them to try to establish, and appointed him Professor of Mathematics, Applied Mechanics and Engineering-an office he held for the following three years. Chiefly owing to his exertions, the newly-founded school gathered strength, and soon grew into one of the most promising departments of the College. The system adopted was that suggested some years before by the late Professor Rankine, and subsequently formulated by Dr. Main’s predecessor at Bristol, Mr. W. R. Bonsfield, viz., a combined practical and theoretical training, to consist of the pursuit of theoretical studies at the College during the winter months, and of practical work in engineering shops during the summer months. The course of Mechanical Engineering was arranged to extend over three years, and various manufacturing engineers in the neighbourhood consented to receive students of the College into their workshops and offices as articled pupils. 

To carry out this plan  successfully required no ordinary energy and work; those who owe their training to him could have had little knowledge of the difficulties of the task Dr. Main had undertaken; yet, with all the labour this imposed, he could find time to give several “ Gilchrist ” lectures in Bristol and the surrounding neighbourhood, and for the study of astronomy. But hard work began, after a time, to tell on a constitution which had never been robust, and in 1881 he decided to apply for the post of Assistant Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Normal School of Science (now the Royal College of Science), South Kensington, the duties of which were lighter than those of his Bristol professorship. 

Unhappily, Dr. Main’s tenure of this post proved but brief. Before he had been a year at South Kensington his health gave way, and although he struggled manfully against a severe pulmonary attack, it made such inroads on his strength as to force him to leave England in the spring of 1883, and to make his home for a time at Davos, in Switzerland. He benefited so much by his stay in the High Alps that there was for a time great hope of his complete recovery, and his post at South Kensington was kept open for more than a year. 

It was a delusive prospect, however; his health, though greatly improved, was never, during his residence in Switzerland, so far re-established as to allow him to revisit England for longer than a few weeks; and even in Switzerland he was at least once brought very near death by acute illness. It was his fate to remain in that country until late in 1887. In the last months of his residence, he contemplated, and actually made some progress towards, setting up at St Moritz a telescope of considerable power, which Sir Howard Grubb was making for him. He also made some observations and experiments in the Engadine on the viscosity of ice, an account of which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. 

In October, 1887, his health having to a certain extent improved, Dr Main determined to go to Colorado, in the hope of regaining a still larger measure of strength. After a short stay in England, he settled in Denver at the beginning of the following year. There his expectations seemed more than realized, something of his former vigour, and a considerable amount of his old energy, were restored. 

Again his life became busy; he gave lectures, edited and wrote for a local newspaper, and frequently travelled great distances. 

In partnership with an Englishman, Mr. Thomas J Pulling, he entered into business in connection with investments and mortgages of town property in Denver. So successful were they, that towards the end of 1890 they decided to start a limited company under the style of the Denver Banking and Investment Corporation, of which he and Mr. Pulling became managers. More than half of the capital was secured in England, and when, in the spring of 1891, Dr. Main visited this country, he was apparently in excellent health. 

In the following December, however, symptoms of paralysis began to manifest themselves, and though for a time these appeared to have yielded to treatment, and even to have been entirely subdued, they were revived in a more malignant form by an attack of scarlet fever. After a brief rally, he died on the 10th of May, 1892, at Denver, at the early age of thirty-seven. 

Of the personal character of Dr. Mann, it is impossible to speak too highly, without using words which would sound like exaggeration. Possessed of intellectual powers of a high order -- a fact which was strikingly supported by his personal appearance -- he at the same time had only a frail constitution, and hence never attained that position in the world which his friends anticipated for him, and which in their opinion he was so well fitted to occupy. 

Dr. Main was elected an Associate of the Institution on the 6th of December, 1881.

The obituary does not mention his marriage but we can presume that he and Elizabet Burnaby met when he was at St Moritz and married there or, possibly, during that short trip back to England. Why he then decided to go to Colorado is slightly mysterious though it is true that the climate there would have been of great benefit to him. Nor do we find out much about the other people on the tombstone who appear to be relatives. Could they have been family members who had settled there earlier?

A while ago Tory Historian blogged on the awesomeness of some Victorians, specifically, Captain Frederick Burnaby and his wife, then widow, Elizabeth Burnaby (subsequently Elizabeth Main and Elizabeth Le Blond, with an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography under the last name).

For various reasons TH looked up Mrs Le Blond again and found out some interesting things about her second husband, John Frederic Main (1854 - 1892). He was according to the DNB professor of engineering at the University College, Bristol, which eventually became the University of Bristol and at the Royal College of Science, which eventually merged into Imperial College London.

According to this excerpt from the obituary published by ICE (Institution of Civil Engineering) Professor Main had been born in Jamaica where his father was a civil engineer but was brought to England as a young child and went to a grammar school in Southsea, going to study Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge where he seems to have done well.

A further obituary tells us:

Dr. Main’s connection with University College, Bristol, lasted for four years, and proved one of importance in the history of that Institution. In the first year, his gifts as a lecturer and teacher were so signally demonstrated, that the Council of the College entrusted to him the arduous task of founding and organizing the School of Engineering, which he had induced them to try to establish, and appointed him Professor of Mathematics, Applied Mechanics and Engineering-an office he held for the following three years

Tory Historian's attention was called to a fascinating source for the study of conservative history. The Duke University Press has set up a site on which you can read Thomas Carlyle's letters on line. The collection is excellently catalogued and the site is easy to navigate. One almost wishes that one was a student of Carlyle. However, this has also reminded TH of the need to visit Carlyle's house in Chelsea. A report from there will follow.

Tory Historian had long intended to read Max Pemberton's Jewel Mysteries I Have Known, as it contained the splendid Ripening Rubies, a tale first disinterred by Sir Hugh Greene in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. As this blog describes, the collection, the TV plays made from the stories and the particular tale of dastardly deeds in upper class London are a joy. TH did not manage to purchase the volume referred to but borrowed it from London Library. It does, indeed, give tactile pleasure to anyone who reads it. The illustrations are delightful.

It is always a pleasure to see a gorgeous building that could have been demolished but for the wise intervention of the great Sir John Betjeman renovated and re-opened. The former Midlands Hotel, now St Pancras Renaissance Hotel is a joy to behold. Tory Historian has spent a great deal of time watching its gradual emergence from what was more little more than rubble within a fine frame and will be visiting it very soon. In the meantime, here is Mark Easton's glowing account.

The ghost of Sir John Betjeman will be grinning from ear to ear tonight as it hovers among the guests at the grand opening of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in North London.

Not only does the event mark the climax of a project to rescue and resurrect a building the poet personally sought to protect from the bulldozer barbarians of the sixties, it also glorifies an extraordinary monument to the skills of the ordinary English working man.

Tory Historian has maintained for some time that there is a good deal of similarity between present-day Americans and Victorian British though their ideas of international influence are somewhat different in that Americans dislike the idea of an empire.

British secularism is a 20th-century innovation, produced by the psychological shocks of war and social change. The Victorians would be bemused by the secularism of muscular liberalism and scandalised by the vague ‘births, deaths and marriages’ Anglicanism of much of the present government. Yet they were capable of a surprising degree of multiculturalism. Albeit with much debate, Unitarianism and Islam were legalised in 1812 and Catholics were given the vote in 1829. Muscular liberalism is a project rooted in false historical consciousness that seeks to drive religion out of the public sphere. In contrast, Victorian society revelled in difference and debate. Its unifying principle was not the absence of belief but its permeation. Given the part that faith has played in shaping the British constitution and state – from the right of Parliament to dismiss a heretical monarch, to the abolition of slavery – it is ahistorical to try to proscribe or eliminate its role today.

Tory Historian is aware that "awesome" has become one of the most fashionable slang words meaning, roughly speaking, "pretty good". This is rather a pity as the word should be used only when describing people like Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842 - 1885), modestly described by Wikipedia as a "traveller and soldier". And so he was, as well as a superb writer of two classics of travel literature: A Ride to Khiva and On Horseback Through Asia Minor.

Thanks to one of Colonel Burnaby's admirers who is also a reader of this blog, Tory Historian has found out about Mrs Burnaby (1860 - 1934) who became later Mrs John Frederick Main and Mrs Aubrey Le Blond. She seems to have been as awesome (in the true sense of the word) as her first husband, becoming a leading mountain climber and the first President of the Ladies Alpine Club. She wrote about her mountain climbing under her different married names and made a number of films of snow sports in the Alps. She is generally considered to be the first woman film-maker.

Le Blond evidently did not think her filmmaking of any great significance as she fails to mention it in her autobiography, perhaps because her life encompassed so many other activities: as well as writing and photographing, she lectured, travelled widely, worked in the Service de Santé Militaire in the First World War, and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1933.

In pursuit of more detective stories Tory Historian came across Lee Jackson's Victorian mysteries, in particular A Metropolitan Murder that starts on the Metropolitan line soon after it opened in 1863, apparently only 3 years after the construction started. No particular opinion of it as yet. The style, which is mostly in the present tense is slightly irritating but the description of mid-Victorian London is fascinating. How good the plot is remains to be seen.

Tory Historian has spent some time recently reading M. V. Hughes's books about her life in Victorian London and the later one about life between the wars in Cuffley, a village just outside London that was, in that period, steadily moving towards becoming a suburb.

This was Open House week-end in London, a very worthwhile enterprise that appears to be losing some momentum, getting bogged down in badly written prose and trendy jargon like sustainability (meaningless in the context) as well as self-congratulation.

The programme this year was thinner than ever before with many much loved buildings missing and whole boroughs opting out.

Nevertheless, Tory Historian found two fascinating buildings, neither seen before and both, as it happens, related to Victorian self-improvement.

One was the German Gymnasium, opposite the glorious new St Pancras International station, which was staffed by Open House volunteers who had not bothered to find out anything about the building. In fact, the Q&A leaflet that was lying on the table had several questions that were not provided with answers, merely with blather.

However, the history of the Gymnasium, probably the first of its kind in Britain is fascinating, as is the building with its vaulted roof of laminated timber trusses that was copied for the original King’s Cross station. Though there have been additions, such as a platform built as a first floor in 1908, essentially the building is there as it was first built in 1864-5.

The money was raised by the German community in London (something that the Open House team seems to find “impressive”, which would indicate that their knowledge of Victorian mores is not very good).

In the first place the facility was for the German Gymnastics Society, which had very advanced ideas on the need for physical exercise for both men and women; there are illustrations of those various exercises on the wall. Needless to say there was also a well stocked library (what happened to it, one wonders) and literary evenings were held.

Soon after its opening membership was extended to all nationalities and, apparently, the records are still available – they provide interesting information about all those various nationalities to be found in London at the time.

And there was more to come:

Due to the work of one of its early presidents, Ernst Ravenstein, the building also claims a pivotal role in the birth of the modern Olympics, and in 1866 the German Gymnasium hosted the indoor events of the first National Olympic Games.

Although it is the twenties and thirties that are considered to be the golden age of detective story writing, Tory Historian, on the whole, prefers their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. One reason is the more leisurely and better written style (with some exceptions on both sides).

Then there is the fact that many of the Victorian stories, of whatever length, are about other crimes, not just murder, which is unthinkable either with the golden age writers or the considerably more prolix and slapdash modern ones.

Murder is, after all, a relatively unusual crime while theft, robbery, fraud and other suchlike activities are far more common. Reading about them and the detectives who solve them give an impression of real life disintegrating and being reconstituted. Of course, there are writers like the great Emma Lathen who follow the Victorian pattern and start with some kind of financial shenanigans, which degenerate into an often reluctant murder.

It is also fair to say that the villains of Victorian detective stories are considerably more satisfying than those of subsequent periods. Admittedly, they are not real dyed-in-the-wool villains and there are various occasions when unfortunate or noble-but-walked-into-a-nasty-situation criminals are released by detectives on condition that they go off to the colonies and redeem themselves. Sherlock Holmes was particularly apt to exercise such stern compassion.

These thoughts have been floating in Tory Historian’s head as a result of reading a volume, acquired for £2 in a charity shop, gradually the only remaining second-hand bookshops in London, entitled “Three Victorian Detective Novels” one of the numerous excellent reprints by Dover Publications.

The three novellas are “The Unknown Weapon” by Andrew Forrester, “My Lady’s Money” by Wilkie Collins and “The Big Bow Mystery” by Israel Zangwill. The first of these is one of the earliest modern English detective stories, part of a collection of tales about the exploits of a woman police officer, known only as Mrs G--- (though Katherine Gregory Klein seems to think that she is Mrs Gladden). The whole collection, published in 1846 was called “The Female Detective” (a very hard to find volume).

Wilkie Collins’s relatively late novella, published in 1879, is a disappointment, largely because Collins was a near-genius in his best works. “My Lady’s Money” is beautifully written with highly entertaining characters – an excellent villain and a rather annoying detective who shuffles around doing no detecting but being a character as well as very good female personalities. But the plot is ridiculous. Every reader knows what is going to happen a page or two before it does and once the theft takes place it ought to be clear to the meanest intellect who the criminal is. There is only person with the necessary opportunity, motive and personality, yet that person’s guilt is dismissed as being out of the question.

Undoubtedly the best is the last tale, a classic of its genre, that being the locked room mystery. Israel Zangwill was a writer, journalist and Zionist activist, most of whose novels and plays concerned various social issues, often but exclusively to do with Jewish immigrants to London’s East End and New York’s Lower East Side. “The Big Bow Mystery” is a delightful exception, a tale of crime and detection written to order in the space of a fortnight and published in the same space of time in the daily newspaper Star in 1891.

Locked room mysteries are rather tiresome, in Tory Historian’s opinion, because of the need either to cheat or to produce an extraordinary number of coincidences for the solution. One by Edmund Crispin presupposes the firing of a bullet through several open windows in order to hit the required target with the loud and engrossing music making it impossible for the people in the first room to realize what is going on. Too ridiculous for words.

The "Big Bow Mystery" is just about credible, largely because, as Julian Symons points out in his seminal history of the genre “Bloody Murder” it is really a parody; it is not, on the other hand, parodic enough to make it dull – the story is still there. There is something else there: a thrilling and highly amusing account of the East End at the end of the nineteenth century, seething with meetings, organizations, debates, disputes and manifold ambitions. It is, in a way, a microcosm of the whole Victorian era and, perhaps, that is why those years produced some of the greatest detective stories.