Baron de Berenger—Horse Whisperer?

Thomas Alken, A Gentleman Riding With a Groom, and Coversing

Loretta report:

Last year, during my visit to the Kensington Central Library, Dave Walker introduced me to the Baron de Berenger’s gun. Thanks to Dave's introducing me to this colorful character, I’ve spent some time with de Berenger’s Helps and Hints: How to Protect Life and Property. It surprised me in a number of ways.

At the time of my stories, animals tended to be treated brutally. I won’t go into the ugly details, but, generally speaking (of course there were many exceptions) if human life was cheap, non-human life was close to worthless, the RSPCA notwithstanding. And while life was kinder to humans of the privileged classes, they were not necessarily kinder to their animals, especially their horses. And so I was struck with de Berenger’s views on the subject:

“[A] rider should, to appearance at least, be a part of his horse; in the efforts of both these component parts there should seem as if there was but one and the same impulse,— a generous and reciprocal attention to please,—to serve, and to spare; and when that is accomplished, most horses will display as much delight in being rode, as the rider will be delighted in riding such a horse; but to accomplish this to perfection, an intimacy, nay, an affection, must be established between yourself and the generous animal; but which ... cannot be attained by the intercourse which, by far too generally, prevails between fashionable characters and their horses; these poor, willing, and faithful animals, rarely experiencing any other notice, save that of being urged on by whip and spur, to exertions but too frequently woefully distressing to a willing frame ... What has secured to the dog the reputation of being more affectionate, more intelligent, and more faithful, than the horse? Because, even the exquisite will deign to hold a familiar and encouraging intercourse, nay, conversation, with him: not so with the poor horse; except when being cleaned or fed, it stands unnoticed for many hours in dull solitude, at least as far as man is concerned. With him the cheering influence and the enjoyments of the sun are embittered by a portion of severe, because generally inconsiderate, labour; even then, and although enduring willingly, hardly ever to experience the pattings of a condescending hand as a cheap encouragement!  ... nevertheless, and aware as the horse must be that it is led forth to endure straining labour, we see him cheerfully leave the stable, ever as willing slavishly to serve his master, as to please him, in any way, which he is taught to know as agreeable to him. Only familiarize with and pet him, as much as you do the dog, and his best endeavours at least to rival canine affection, intelligence, and fidelity, will soon be placed beyond all doubt.

The entire entry, from which I’ve also included a clipping (at right), is well worth reading. I’d be especially interested in the reactions of our horse-loving/riding/driving Nerdy History persons.

Image: Henry Thomas Alken, A Gentleman Riding With a Groom, and Conversing (undated), courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Traveling Advice & Expenses 1828

Alken, Bath Coach 1820

Loretta reports:

Traveling in the early 1800s was complicated to a degree we can scarcely fathom. The Traveller's Oracle, by William Kitchiner, M.D., deals with what seems to be every last, daunting detail of the process, like what sort of servant(s) to take, what medicines to pack, how to sleep safely at an inn, and so on.

I could have picked any of dozens of excerpts, but decided matters of the horse would offer a good clue to the kinds of things one had to consider. This is from the third (1828) edition:

Travel expenses 

Travel expenses

Travel Expenses

When you wish to travel forty or fifty miles in a day expeditiously, if you have Horses of of your own—it is the most advisable plan to send them on the day before about twenty or twenty-five miles, desiring they may go not more than five miles in an hour.
If you start from home with post Horses, your own will be fresh to carry you on briskly to the termination of your Journey.

Image: Henry Alken, Bath Coach (1820) courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Horse-Drawn Carriages in Motion

Cabriolet

Loretta reports:

The heroine of Dukes Prefer Blondes drives her own vehicle—a cabriolet, as pictured at left— and there's quite a bit of traveling in the story, in various kinds of vehicles, including the hackney cabs and coaches I recently described. 
This short video offers s a chance to watch horses and carriages in action. Note that many of the vehicles are earlier than the time of my story, and some are quite modern, made specially for extreme carriage racing.

Image: John Ferneley,William Massey-Stanley Driving His Cabriolet in Hyde Park 1833, courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection


Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

The Bee Whisperer

Cruikshank, Bee Swarm

Loretta reports:

One of the delights of Hone’s Every-Day Book  is an entry like this one.

I was especially struck by the concluding paragraph. It’s all too easy to cite instances of animal cruelty during previous centuries. Horses, for instance, were worked to death. All the same, hundreds of years before PETA, it isn’t unusual to read expressions of concern like this—or see compassion for animals in prints.

Hogarth’s Cruelty is but one example.  Henry Alken’s print series, The High-Mettled Racer, sympathetically follows the career of a race horse to his sad end, as does Charles Dibdin’s poem of the same name.

Bee Management

Bee Management

 Image: George Cruikshank, Pic Nic party disturbed by a Swarm of Bees, 1826, courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Tattersall's For Horses

Tattersall's 1834-35

Loretta reports:

If you’ve read novels set in the 19th century, you've probably come upon mention of Tattersall's, where Lord This or That would buy a horse. Here’s a bit of its history, as seen from the mid-Victorian era.

Tattersall's history

Tattersall's history

Tattersall's from Tom & Bob

Images:
Text from John Timbs, Curiosities of London: exhibiting the most rare and remarkable objects of interest in the metropolis; with nearly sixty years personal recollections (1868)

Above left—James Pollard (1792 - 1867), Epsom Races: Settling Day at Tattersalls 1834-35, courtesy Yale Center for British Art.

Below (the image I believe the text refers to)—Henry Alken, Tattersals. Tom and Bob, looking out for a good –one, among the deep-ones, courtesy Project Gutenberg.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Happy New Year or, Welcoming 2015 with a riddle

CR Wright, Happy New Year

Loretta reports:

Happy New Year!

2015 will bring a new book from Isabella Bradford, some celebratory events from Loretta Chase, and the historical nerdiness you’ve learned to love or at least tolerate in our blog.

To start the New Year off in the nerdy spirit, I invite you to a not-too-difficult (I hope) sleuthing expedition.

Today it’s a Happy New Year card by an artist who’ll be familiar to some of you.  Since my nerdiness does not extend to paleoart (and a great many other topics), Charles R. Knight was a discovery for me.  Not that I would have connected this sprightly watercolor with his more famous work.  Circuses was what first came to mind.  Then I finally deciphered the words.  I’ll let you decipher them, and see if you can determine what and where the “new building” of 1922 was.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to view at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Update: The 1772 "Grippine" Mystery Solved

Isabella reporting,

One of our most popular blogs last month was The Hazards of Traveling by Chaise, which included a letter by Hester Pitt, Countess of Chatham, recounting the trials and setbacks that she, her daughters, and the rest of their party encountered on their journey to Hayes Place in Kent from their home at Burton Pynsent.

While most of the letter described rutted roads, broken traces, and other travelers' mishaps, there was one passage that puzzled me, and many of you readers as well.

"...William [went] forward to fetch a fresh chaise from Amesbury to meet Bradshaw, who was to march on foot till they came to him with his grippine."

What could "his grippine" be? Reader suggestions included overshoes, a saddle, and a small suitcase, as well as another horse, but the correct answer was tantalizingly unknown.

But we Nerdy History Girls hate to leave a history-question unanswered, and fortunately for us, historian Jacqui Reiter (who provided us with the original quotation) is just as persistent. Since the version of the letter we were discussing had been transcribed and printed in a 20th c. biography (William Pitt, Earl of Chatham by Brian Tunstall), Jacqui decided to seek out the original letter to see what could be learned from the complete text, and made a journey of her own to the UK National Archives in Kew, where the Chatham papers are housed. The letter is several pages long, written in Lady Chatham's brisk hand, and the page with the "grippine" passage is above.

But as often the case with transcriptions, the one in the Tunstall book was not quite correct, nor was it complete. The actual words - underlined for emphasis by Lady Chatham -  in the letter are "with his favorite Gippine." The capital G makes it seem as if Gippine is a proper name, and a further passage in the letter leaves little doubt that Gippine is a horse, referring to Gippine as Bradshaw's "faithful attendant":

"The Fresh Chaise found Bradshaw got forward with his faithful attendant about a mile and a half, so he was quit for only a Comfortable perspiration."

Jacqui also found another letter that humorously refers to Bradshaw as "Gippine's travelling Friend." As she notes, "The way Lady Chatham refers to Gippine as nearly human is quite typical of the Pitts' attitude towards their horses. In fact I am still somewhat confused about which names in the correspondence refer to horses, and which to servants...not sure whether this reflects better on their attitude towards their animals, or worse on their attitude towards their staff!"

Incidentally, Bradshaw was a trusted upper servant in the Pitt household. As Jacqui notes, he was sufficiently literate and valued to witness Lord Chatham's will. And yet in the letters, he does indeed seem to take second place to the noble Gippine.

One final note: once we had the horse's name identified as Gippine, I wondered what, if anything, the name might mean. The "ine" ending seemed more French than English to me, and given the 18th c. penchant for phonetical spelling with foreign words, I tried searching for Jippine - and had success. While the name doesn't appear to have a translatable meaning (and if any of you know it, please share!), I did discover that today it's still a name used for French horses, as seen in this performance record for a pony called Jippine du Rietz.

Another history mystery solved!

Many thanks once again to Jacqui Reiter for tracking down this information for us.

Above: Excerpt from Letter from Lady Chatham to Lord Chatham, UK National Archives, Chatham MSS, PRO 30/8/9f 100, dated 9 April [probably 1772]. 
Below: A Saddled Bay Hunter, by George Stubbs, 1786. Private collection.

Friday Video: 5,000 Years of Dogs in Art

Isabella/Susan reporting:

I can't resist clever morphing videos - they're like a crash course in Art History in three minutes. I've already shared 500 Years of Women of Women's Portraits and A Century of Men on Film. Now, for the dog days of summer, here's 5,000 Years of Dogs in Art. Woof!

Lord Rothschild's Zebras

Isabella/Susan reporting:

One of the absolute best things about the internet is all the historical *stuff* that I discover while I'm hunting for something else. Sometimes these discoveries can inspire a scene or a character in a book, or they simply end up as another entry in our weekly Breakfast Links. The ones I HAVE to share at once land here as blog posts. Which is why today we have photographs of the 2nd Baron Rothschild and his zebras.

Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) is one of the most fascinating gentlemen of the late 19th-early 20th c. As the heir both to a title and to a legendary financial empire, young Rothschild was expected to join his family's business, and for twenty years, he did. But his heart lay far from the world of international finance. From boyhood, he was fascinated by zoology. He was also an almost fanatical collector, building an unrivaled private museum with literally millions of zoological specimens gathered from every part of the world. Unlike many private collectors, he believed in sharing his passion, not only opening his museum to the public, but hiring scholars and experts to help organize and document the collections for publication.

A shy man, he was still willing to create a sensation to demonstrate a point. Victorians regarded zebras as irredeemably wild animals, resistant to being tamed and made useful to man, an unforgivable sin to the Victorian mind. Walter believed otherwise, and to prove it drove his carriage drawn by a team of well-trained zebras, above, to Buckingham Palace. (In this photograph, there's an ordinary horse hiding behind the first zebra; I have no idea whether he was a calming influence, or simply a ringer.) Nor was this a one-trick pony - er, zebra. Lord Rothschild's zebras became a famous sight to Londoners, and visitors to his home were also treated to sight of him driving a single-zebra cart, below.

Lord Rothschild's remarkable collection continues to delight the public today, with the majority of the specimens divided between the American Museum of Natural History and the British Museum. His private zoo became the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring. Click here for more about Lord Rothschild, including a wonderful video narrated by Beth Rothschild.