IN October 1805, the East India Company bought a small estate outside Hertford, once owned by a surgeon, William Walker, who had worked in its service. The intention was that Hailey Bury, as it was then, would be the site of a college for young men destined to serve in the administration of the Company’s territories. Established in 1600 as a trading monopoly, ‘John Company’, as it was popularly known, had laid the foundation for 18th-century British Imperial expansion in India and then into China. Managed from London, it maintained all the trappings of a sovereign power, even a standing army.
The quality of recruits to the Company’s service was not high and the issue of training them had been of concern for some time. In 1787, the writer of one report acoustically observed that he ‘did not think Britain could have furnished such a set of wretched objects’. East India College was established in 1805 and, for the first years of its existence, occupied temporary premises in Hertford Castle, close to its intended future home. The Company turned to its surveyor, Henry Holland, to repair the castle and plan the new college.
To Holland’s considerable annoyance, his plans for the new institution were almost immediately set aside in favour of those devised by the 27-year-old William Wilkins of Cambridge, the son of a builder and university educated. As a young man, his interest in architecture had been expressed in accomplished drawings and surveys of medieval buildings. One thread of his subsequent career—as a domestic architect—drew on this knowledge of Gothic, but it was not the style of his public buildings.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
