On the north bank of the river, south of the A4, aka The Great West Road, lies Furnivall Gardens. You may think of it as being between The Rutland Arms and The Dove.
Attached to the wall of a house on the east end is a street light from Berlin presented by Willy Brandt, when he was Mayor of West Berlin, to mark Hammersmith’s twinning with the Berlin district of Neukölln. The site is apt as the pocket park, created in 1948, owes its existence to bomb damage in the war and pays tribute to Frederick James Furnivall (1825-1910).
Furnivall was a good egg and a Renaissance Man. The Friends of Furnivall Gardens have a logo, a Facebook page, a website and describe some of Furnivall’s activities and his connection to this part of Hammersmith.
“In April 1896, the 71-year-old Dr. Furnivall founded the Hammersmith Sculling Club for girls, later becoming Furnivall Sculling Club. Having learnt to row in his teens, rowing became a lifelong obsession for Dr. Furnivall. He was admitted to Trinity Hall Cambridge in 1842, where he rowed in the first eight. He also sculled regularly and at the age of 20, he and his friend John Beesley built the first narrow, outrigged single scull to be seen on the Cam. In 1891 when the Amateur Rowing Association refused to accept working men as ‘amateurs’, Furnivall founded the National Amateur Rowing Association which anyone could join. Given his passionate opposition to discrimination, he wanted to break into the traditionally male-dominated world of river sport, by building a club for women. Membership of the Hammersmith Sculling Club was extended to men in 1901. It was also in this year that the name was changed to Furnivall Sculling Club for Girls and Men. The captaincy continued to be restricted to female members for the first half of the century, however, in honour of Dr. Furnivall’s original purpose for founding the club.
Dr. Furnivall continued to row regularly every Sunday, to Richmond and back, a habit he maintained throughout his life until he died in 1910 aged 85. Dr. Furnivall was a true Victorian. Not only did he found the club when he was a young 71 but he was also the ultimate enthuiast; passionate about social justice and personal health. He never smoked or drank and, unusually for the time, became a vegetarian. In 1849 he opened a school for poor men and boys and in 1851 he sold his book collection so as to give £100 to support striking woodcutters. The following year he helped establish the Working Men’s Association.” (The Friends of Furnivall Gardens)
The F of FG then briefly fill out their parochial biography of the good doctor but Wikipedia does a better job.
“Furnivall was one of the three founders and, from 1861 to 1870, the second editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Despite his scholarship and enthusiasm, his stint as editor of the OED nearly ended the project. For a dictionary maker he had an unfortunate lack of patience, discipline and accuracy. After having lost the sub-editors for A, I, J, N, O, P, and W through his irascibility or caprice, he finally resigned. He continued, however, to provide thousands of quotations for the dictionary until his death.
Furnivall indefatigably promoted the study of early English literature. He founded a series of literary and philological societies: the Early English Text Society (1864), the Chaucer Society (1868), the Ballad Society (1868), the New Shakspere Society(1873), the Browning Society (1881, with Emily Hickey), the Wyclif Society (1882), and the Shelley Society (1885). Some of these, notably the Early English Text Society, were very successful; all were characterised by extreme controversy. The most acrimonious of all was the New Shakspere Society, scene of a bitter dispute between Furnivall and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
. . . His work, and that of the amateurs he recruited, was often slapdash, but it was substantial, and it laid the foundation for all subsequent editions. He was one of a small group of Victorian scholars who have been credited with establishing the academic study of English literature.“ (Wikipedia)
I can imagine his irascibility when he found the dictionary sub-editor for A had forgotten “aardvark”. Blackadder felt the same when he had to rewrite Johnson’s dictionary, used to light a fire by Baldrick. As a philologist you will know that the word only came into use in 1785, thirty years after the dictionary was published.
What a joyous and eccentric start to a Monday morning bathed, highly unusually, with sunshine.
Great reading Christopher, thank you. He was a man of rare energy and principle.
Mmm a good egg, no doubt, though the Wikipedia entry rather deflates his balloon. Also when I see the phrase “passionate about social justice” I tend to reach for my Luger.