The link between investment manager McInroy & Wood and one of the greatest letter writers of the 19th century may not be immediately obvious. There is also a tenuous link to the greatest diarist of the 20th century. This sounds like a question on the venerable (started in 1947) radio programme Round Britain Quiz.
The diarist is, of course, James Lees-Milne and during the war he lived in Cheyne Walk. A few minutes walk away on Cheyne Row is Thomas Carlyle’s house. It has been open to the public since 1895 and since 1936 has been owned by the National Trust. Although I lived in Chelsea for a while in the 1970s I had never been, something I rectified on a wet Wednesday morning. Admission is by pulling a brass bell knob, the same one that Thomas Carlyle used. Inside, the house is a shrine to TC. Downstairs the kitchen had a pump to draw water from a well beneath the house. The pump is still there but in 1852 it was connected to the mains. There is an open range for cooking and an iron bedstead for the maid to sleep on. Even by 19th century standards life at the Carlyles’ was more primitive than it need have been. The rent was a modest £35 a year and in 1852 the landlord splashed out on gas lighting but only over the front door and in the kitchen. The rest of the house was lit with oil lamps and candles. Washing was with a jug and basin, or in a copper hip bath with hot water carried up from the kitchen by the maid. The privy was in the garden.
The principal rooms are the parlour, back dining room, drawing room, Mrs Carlyle’s bedroom and the attic. The third floor, where TC had his bedroom has been modernised and provides accommodation for a resident caretaker; such an attractive job that the present incumbent has been in post for sixteen years.
In a glass case TC’s dressing gown is displayed and it has an interesting history. One Sir Lewis Pelly was an ardent admirer of TC’s writing. He was a soldier, spy and diplomat, playing the Great Game assiduously. In 1860 he was in Herat in Afghanistan and bought a camel hair robe which he sent back to TC. Not only is it on display in the house, Sir Edgar Boehm’s bronze in Chelsea Gardens shows him wearing it. It was too wet to take a picture, so here’s one I took last year.
A digression, but when I was in Afghanistan in 2008 I bought a camel hair waistcoat in a market in Kabul. It accompanied me on a railway journey from London to Shanghai some years later.
Thank you for your patience. The letter writer was not TC, he stuck to books which are unreadable today – even the National Trust guide agrees. One of his best known efforts is his three volume French Revolution. In an episode of Blackadder, Baldrick uses the manuscript of Johnson’s Dictionary to light a fire. The script writers no doubt drew inspiration from a calamity in 1835. TC had lent John Stuart Mill the manuscript of the first volume of French Revolution and, you’ve guessed, his servant threw it on the fire. TC had to write the whole thing again.
Meanwhile, Thomas’s wife Jane was busy writing letters that were famous in her lifetime and still attract interest today. Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship and Marriage by Kathy Chamberlain came out in March this year. Now we only need her connection to McInroy & Wood. In 1801 Jane Baillie Welsh was born in Haddington where M & W has its head office. Job done.