The London Journal

Volume 30 No.2 2005

ABSTRACTS

The destruction of historical buildings in Britain during World War II not only engendered shock and dismay; it also evoked wonder and rumination. Only months after the German Blitzkrieg, picture books were published that graphically documented those losses. Functioning variously as architectural criticism, London histories, and documents of mourning, two of them - J. M. Richards' and John Summerson's The Bombed Buildings of Britain; a Record of Architectural Casualties: 1940-41 (1942), and James Pope-Hennessy's History Under Fire (1941) - are examined in detail here. The reception of these books is discussed in the wider context of Britain's perennial fascination for ruins. This study also treats photographs of blitz damage, including those by Cecil Beaton (1904-80), and charts their stylistic and rhetorical strategies. Besides addressing the effects of the attacks on the urban fabric, this essay addresses, more generally, how Britain's national catastrophes have been registered visually and how architectural losses are negotiated.

The Thames has served as a vital means of trade and transport since the foundation of the first settlement on its banks, but with the arrival of the steamboat in 1815 it began increasingly to be used for recreational purposes. This paper charts the rise of the steamboat service for recreational traffic and explains the reasons for the rapid development of this means of travel. It describes the differences in the pattern of development of steam travel between the Thames and other waterways, due to the particular reliance of the Thames boats on recreational traffic. It charts the differing uses to which the new steam-powered vessels could be put - the rise of the 'day trip', as technology advanced and journey times were cut; the increased use of steamboats for excusions to new places or special events; also the changes in the clientele, as more trips were scheduled for Sundays, allowing the working classes to participate in pleasure trips. The paper concludes with assessments of the risks involved with this form of transport as increased use and speed led to overcrowding and collisions, and the impact of the service on Thames traffic as a whole.

The photography E.O. Hoppé established his first professional studio in London in 1907, gaining rapid recognition as a skilled and sympathetic chronicler of fashionable society. Indeed, he is best known for that earlier phase of his career when he rose to become the most famous celebrity and stage photographer of the Edwardian era. However, the capital was to be more than mere backdrop to this career. Between 1926 and 1937, the period during which he shifted from portraiture to topographical photography, Hoppé illustrated a number of books on London and his work from this period registers the variety, complexity and sometimes contradictory nature of the discourses to be engaged by a photographer intent on depicting the metropolis. These discourses are characterised, variously, by a positive response to the visual experience of the modernising metropolis and, alternatively, by an anti-modernity and nostalgia for a 'disappearing' London. Hoppé's photography therefore articulates something of the crisis experienced by a capital (and a whole society) in rapid and far-reaching processes of demographic and cultural change. Beginning with Picturesque Great Britain (1926), I go on to examine three of Hoppé's metropolitan texts: London (1932), The Image of London (1935), and A Camera on Unknown London (1936). Each registers significant alterations to the perception of the modernising metropolis and to its representation in photographs, and my subject concerns these interations between metropolitan modernity and photography in the early decades of the twentieth century.

DIANNE PAYNE, Rhetoric, Reality and the Marine Society (pp. 66-84)

This paper examines the largely unexplored 'Marine Society Registers of Boys sent as Servants on the King's Ships', particularly those for the decade 1770 to 1780. These Registers provide a rare insight into the lives and experiences of boys sent to sea and are used to assess the social backgrounds and geographical origins of the recruits. The paper demonstrates that recruits came from a wide cross-section of London's poor communities, and that a clear majority of the boys were not the street children of the Society's rhetoric. It also demonstrates that only the smallest minority of the boys had the criminal connections so often ascribed to them. These results are contextualised by examining the advertising rhetoric used by the Society. This rhetoric, found in the substantial printed literature produced to encourage donations, describes the recruits as actual and potential criminals. The contradiction between rhetoric and reality suggests that the Marine Society functioned in a way that is not reflected in its propaganda. By extension, it also suggests that current historiography, based largely on published sources that privilege the Society's advertising rhetoric, but with little knowledge of the boys themselves, has presented a distorted picture of the Society, its social role, and its recruits.

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