What went up Judy’s Passage? Lupton’s Tower of course. My first House (JDRMcC) was at one end so I went up Judy’s Passage a lot. These days I go through Milkmaid’s Passage. It links The Green Park with St James’s Place and is a good route to my club.
Walking through St James’s Place I look nostalgically at the old HQ of Collins where I worked as a waiter one evening in the 1970s. Lady Collins and her son had asked some important folk back for dinner after the annual religious book prize that they sponsored. Incidentally I note that HarperCollins continue to mint money from their Religious List but have dropped the prize. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Papal Nuncio were among the guests. The staff consisted of Lady Collins’s granddaughter, the now Lady P and me. We are all friends from Durham. One of us, no names, spilled cream down the Papal Nuncio’s back, of which he was unaware but was visible to everybody else. I was so overcome that I stepped in a salad bowl which for some reason had been put on the floor. The Archbishop later confided that he never expected the party to be such fun.
But I digress. This blue plaque is on the other side of the road in St James’s Place. Huskisson went into politics when he was only twenty-three in 1793 but his political patron, William Pitt the Younger, had himself been Chancellor of The Exchequer at the same age and Prime Minister a year later. However fascinating Huskisson’s political career, he achieved mortality and fame in a quite different sphere.
In September 1830 he attended the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. He was a passenger in the locomotive Northumbrian with the Duke of Wellington and other notables. The driver was George Stephenson himself. Halfway there was a stop to take on water and, although the passengers were advised to stay in the carriages, many of them, including Huskisson, got out to stretch their legs. The rest, as they say, is history. Huskisson was run over by the Rocket coming in the other direction on the adjacent line. There is a fine statue of him in Chichester Cathedral with this inscription.
He is also commemorated in Pimlico Gardens with this statue by John Gibson.
Gibson was a pupil of Canova who taught him how to depict Huskisson’s drapery.
Rather ironically Huskisson’s death resulted in an explosion of interest in rail travel due to the newspaper reports of the incident. There is another memorial close to were the accident occurred, now standing rather forlorn adjacent to the tracks.
Nota bene: there is a letter ‘t’ omitted from your transcript of the Chichester memorial, no doubt your former Etonian English Master would have encouraged a proof read prior to publication.
I am too lazy to transcribe – it’s a cut and paste job. However, I notice there is an aitch missing from your comment but perhaps you drop them, ‘oof ‘earted?
Very well spotted CJB……the pitfuls of preductive test!
Gibson, the sculptor of the statue of Huskisson in Pimlico, was a fixture for many years in Rome. His studio, along with those of many other artists, was on the visitor circuit. He claimed, at the time controversially but probably correctly, that the Greeks used to colour their statues, and therefore tinted some of his own – although not, presumably, that of Huskisson.