Walter Bayes, Gateway, Royal Naval College, Greenwich, c1940. V&A Museum, London.
King William Road was selected as the western boundary of the Hospital1 in 1824 – the result, according to Drake’s edition of Hasted (Part I, 1886), of a sudden and belated decision to restore Wren’s original ground plan.2 Previously, the boundary wall and gateway stood farther east, and to carry out the extension certain houses had to be acquired and demolished. The move was not completed till 1849. Iron railings, designed by Philip Hardwick (architect of Euston Station archway), replaced the old brick wall, but the gateway was kept, being transferred (piers, globes, and all) to the new frontage.
The celestial and terrestrial globes are of stone, 6 feet in diameter. The celestial globe shows astronomical lines, meridians, and circles; the terrestrial, the parallels of latitude and longitude together with the outlines of sea and land. They were made by Edward Man in 1752,3 and ‘inscribed by Richard Oliver, Mathematical Master of the School’; and they had been in position almost from the first, for the gateway, which bears a shield with a very defaced Royal Cipher (George II?), was built in 1750. Twenty-five years after the move, people still recalled the difficulties attending the reorientation of those globes. Important astronomers from the neighbouring Observatory lent learned assistance.
Amid the array of architects who, from first to last, have had a hand in Greenwich – Jones, Webb, Wren, Vanbrugh, Campbell, Stuart,4 and the rest – the probable author of the gateway turns out to be Thomas Ripley,5 a poor Yorkshire boy who walked to London, became a protégé of Sir Robert Walpole, and succeeded Vanbrugh, in 1726, as Comptroller of the board of works. Fate has not been kind to him, for his Admiralty has been hidden, and his work on the Hospital chapel destroyed by the fire of 1779, whereas Pope’s lines remain.
What brought Sir Visto’s ill-got wealth to waste?
Some demon whispered, ‘Visto! have a taste.’
Heaven visits with a taste the wealthy fool,
And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule.6
While not called upon to believe that the poet held the architect in the highest esteem, the reader should remember that it was an age of cliques. Pope, who was a friend of Burlington, who was a friend of Kent,7 who had himself been not without hopes of the Comptrollership, felt bound to strike a blow for his side, and drew his sole but sufficient weapon, the couplet. In his own way he is saying, rather wistfully, that it would have been nice if Kent could have got the job.
Recording Britain, Vol 1, London and Middlesex, p 4-5.
Image: Walter Bayes
Text: Arnold Nottage Palmer
1 Greenwich Hospital was a permanent home for retired Royal Navy sailors, open between 1692 and 1869. Thereafter, it became the Royal Navy College (1873-1998), and is now referred to as the Old Royal Navy College.
2 The reference here is to the 1886 edition of Edward Hasted’s history of Kent, edited by Henry H. Drake. The original, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, was first published in four folio volumes between 1778 and 1799, but this was updated by Drake, under the catchy title, Hasted’s History of Kent, Corrected, Enlarged, and Continued to the Present Time, from the Manuscript Collection of the Late Rev. Thomas Streatfeild and the Late Rev. Lambert Blackwell Larking, the Public Records, and Other Sources.
3 The reference here to Edward Man seems to have also been drawn from Drake’s version of Hasted, “The globes over the piers of the western gates were made by Edw. Man in 1752, inscribed by Ric. Oliver, mathematical master of the school in 1750...”. No other references to Man seem to exist. Oliver is cited as the designer by Royal Museums Greenwich, but again Man is absent.
4 Respectively, Inigo Jones (1573-1652); John Webb (1611-1672); Sir Christopher Wren (16332-1723); Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726); Colen Campbell (1676-1729); James ‘Athenian’ Stuart (1713-1788).
5 Thomas Ripley (1682-1758), English architect, much influenced by the Palladian style.
6 From Alexander Pope’s ‘Moral Essays. Epistle IV. - To Richard Boyle, Earl Of Burlington’ (1731) which criticises wealthy individuals’ ostentatious, tasteless displays in architecture and landscaping. Using Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington as his model, Pope argues that true taste requires reason, utility, and respect for nature, rather than extravagant projects built without purpose or sense.
7 William Kent (1685-1748), English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer.