On his election as President of the [Royal] Society of Arts in 1843 Prince Albert led the Society’s renaissance by impressing on the institution that the main object of its existence was the application of science and art to industrial purposes:  ‘to wed mechanical skill to high art.’  As a result of this suggestion the Society held exhibitions of British manufactures and decorative arts at its headquarters in John Adam Street which laid the foundation for the Great Exhibition of 1851, which Albert decreed should be an ‘international’ exhibition.    The success of that enterprise led to the development of museums and educational institutions that form the modern day ‘Albertropolis’.

In memory of their illustrious President the [Royal] Society of Arts instituted its most prestigious award, The Albert Medal, which it continues to award for ‘Distinguished Merit in promoting Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’.  The Society also contributed £1000 from its limited funds towards the Albert Memorial, and ran a campaign to enable ordinary men and women to make their own contribution to honour Prince Albert.

After short messages of appreciation of Prince Albert are delivered a wreath will be laid jointly by Dr Nicholas Cambridge FRSA (Chairman of William Shipley Group for RSA History) and Jonathan Rollason FRSA (Trustee of the RSA).  The party will then adjourn to the Café Consort (via door 12) in the Albert Hall.

‘A number of regular attenders said it was one of the best talks they’ve heard.

The RSA’s work touched so many aspects of British life, that the talk felt as much a local history talk as a national one, given the impact of its work on the mundane details of familiar history as well as the grand events and figures.’

Dr Henderson’s medals

In September 2011, Peter Seabroke, great grandson of Dr Roderick Henderson, one of Rickmansworth’s most celebrated former residents, presented Three Rivers Museum with Dr Henderson’s medals, awarded to commemorate his long service with the town’s fire brigade and his national reputation within the fire service. For many years the medals had been ‘lost’ in the sense that their location was unknown.  They appeared in Australia and then in New Zealand in the possession of a medal collector and were purchased by the Seabroke family, who generously donated them to Three Rivers Museum.

Dr Roderick Henderson (1841-1929) is probably a familiar name to many residents of Rickmansworth, as the house he occupied and enlarged is the home of Three Rivers Museum.  As well as working as a busy medical practitioner, Dr Henderson was also a keen voluntary fireman, establishing the local fire brigade in 1869. The medals awarded to him for  his work in the fire service disappeared until they recently came to light in a collection in New Zealand and have now been purchased and donated by his family descendants to the Museum.

Dr Henderson’s interest in the fire brigade may have developed through the work of the pioneering fireman James Braidwood (1800-1861).  Braidwood established a level of professionalism in the fire service by ensuring that his men were physically fit and properly  trained.  When the London Fire Brigade Establishment (the forerunner of the London Fire Brigade) was formed in 1833, Braidwood was appointed Chief Fire Officer, a post he held for 28 years.  Braidwood introduced a uniform for the firemen as part of the measures he instituted.  While a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, Henderson acted as a runner for the  fire service, then under Braidwood’s direction.

Arriving in Rickmansworth in the mid-1860s with his wife Marie Louise, Henderson was concerned to find that not only was the local fire brigade inefficient, but that it was manned by untrained volunteers and dependent on the parish.  Herbert Fellows, manager and trustee of Salter’s Brewery, shared his concerns and together they established the ‘Rickmansworth Volunteer Fire Brigade’.   Henderson and Fellows followed Braidwood’s lead by ensuring that the men received proper training and, by organising regular drills, that they worked as a team.  To further improve the brigade’s efficiency, Henderson purchased a steam-driven fire engine to replace the old, slow parish machine.   He also allowed his home and surgery, Basing House, on Rickmansworth’s High Street to be used as a dropping off point for messages for the firemen.  In 1891, Henderson took the initiative of providing the town with its first fire station, located at the west end of the High Street.   Today, the building is a fish  and chip shop, but a foundation stone, laid by ‘R.W. Henderson, Esq., Captain of the Rickmansworth Fire Brigade’ along with the names of the firemen (most of them familiar    names as town shopkeepers) can be seen just above head height on the wall of the old building.

In recognition of his continuing support for the town’s volunteer fire brigade, Dr Henderson was presented with the National Fire Brigades Long Service Medal in December 1895.  On this occasion he also received three bars on the medal, for a total of 30 years’ service.  Subsequently, five additional bars, each for five years’ service, were added to the medal ribbon.  This medal and its bars show that Dr Henderson had been involved with the fire brigade for a grand total of 55 years.  A well-respected member of the national voluntary fire brigade service, Henderson  sat on sub-committees of the British Fire Prevention Committee concerned with fire prevention legislation, as well as undertaking the testing of fire  extinguishers.  He also gave evidence to a select committee set up to ‘inquire and report on the existing arrangements for the provision of fire protection’.  Henderson informed the  select committee that the brigades should be put under the management of the County  Council and be open to government inspection.  In further recognition of his work for the fire service, the National  Fire Brigade Association awarded him a medal for ‘services rendered’.   Two more medals in the set suggest that he was also involved with the international fire brigade movement as the medals were awarded by Belgium and France.

The last medal in the group was awarded to Dr Henderson for ‘faithful service in the special constabulary’.  The medal includes a bar recording ‘The Great War, 1914-1918’. In spite of his age (Henderson would have been 73 at the outbreak of the First World War),  he was placed at the head of a force of special constables charged with safeguarding water  supplies from German infiltrators.  After the war ended in 1918, Henderson continued to take an active interest in the organisation of the special constabulary during the General Strike of 1926. By the time of his death in 1929 he had become head of the uniformed branch of the constabulary.

It would seem likely that it was through his involvement with the National Fire Brigade movement that Dr Henderson’s daughter, Marie, met her future husband George Tertius Seabroke.  His father, George Mitchell Seabroke, who had set up a volunteer fire brigade Rugby, Warwickshire, went on to become one of the founders of the National Union of Fire Brigades and no doubt the two older men would have met at national fire brigade meetings.

When Dr Henderson died in 1929, his coffin was placed on the new Rickmansworth fire engine, ‘Muriel’, named after his second wife.  This modern machine, brought into the brigade two years earlier, formed part of the funeral cortege with members of the town’s fire brigade as pall-bearers.   On his coffin sat his brigade helmet, belt and hatchet, together with his medals.  Representatives of local and national fire brigade organisations followed the engine along the High Street.  His obituary in the Watford Observer described Dr Henderson as, ‘a man without an enemy, whose sterling character endeared him to every inhabitant in the town …  He was a typical English gentleman.’

Susan Bennett

September 2011

Judge Leigh Russell, local author of crime fiction, is presenting me with my award

I would like to place on record my thanks and appreciation to you for being a guest judge on the graduate programme which is an Innovation, Communication and Enterprise project conducted by the University of West London.

Your solid grasp of what was required was impressive and the graduates were appreciative of your insightful recommendations.

We will certainly be calling on you again.

with my best regards, Jacqueline Purcell FRSA

Specialist university lecturer in communication strategy

5th April 2011

‘I awleis  admired your talent’: The artistic life of Georgiana Jane Henderson (nee Keate) 1771-1850, by Susan Bennett

This beautifully written and illustrated study of a genteel and artistic young woman in Georgian England makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the period. Drawing upon the hitherto unknown diaries of Georgiana Henderson and various secondary sources, Susan Bennett has recreated the story of a talented daughter of upper class parents who married an amateur artist against her parents’ wishes but whose life as a daughter, wife and mother of five children mirrored many conventions of the times.

What makes this book especially valuable is its wealth of detail on the artistic education and daily social life of such young ladies. Watercolour painting was deemed more suitable as an accomplishment for ladies as it minimised the soiling of “their fair hands” which painting with oils could cause. Composition in watercolour became a distinguishing characteristic of  gentility amongst female artists and exhibitions of art by the Royal Academy reinforced the socially permissive traditions of the time: that painting of flowers, landscapes and portraits were subjects for females while historical themes featured more in the work of male artists. The Society of Arts played an important role in encouraging a love of the ‘Polite Arts’ by awarding prizes for excellence in drawing by boys and girls. The inclusion of Pugin and Rowlandson’s engraving of a prize distribution (fig.16) emphasises the large number of girls as well as boys waiting to accept their awards. Georgiana’s attendance at such annual occasions with her parents and future husband, John Henderson, brought her into contact with both esteemed art works of the period and its patrons. The Society of Arts’s building designed by the architect Robert Adam as part of the Adelphi scheme, reinforced the grandeur of these social gatherings.

Bennett’s study illustrates and explains many aspects of the social life of the elite classes in the later eighteenth century. Continental wars mitigated against the traditional destinations of the ‘Grand Tour’ making picturesque scenes of England popular artistic choices. Fashionable spa resorts featured in many paintings and Georgiana’s picture of Hall’s Library in Margate (fig. 31) shows the importance of such institutions not only as social spaces but also as a shop for books, toys and games. The many plates included in this book on Georgiana Henderson reveal some fascinating details as explained in the text, for example  the portraits of Chevalier and Madam D’Eon (fig. 63), the secret agent for the French King who hid under woman’s clothing to aid his mission to Russia. This volume will be of interest to both the general reader and to students of art, social and women’s history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dr Jana Sims

See http://royalsociety.org/350-years-exhibition/ for information.