Breakthrough - Naturalised British Subjects

Glad to have found this today on the 1861 Census  - an indication that my client's ancestors did originate in Germany and that they became naturalised British citizens!

 

Contributing to Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine

 

Who Do You Think You Are ? Magazine. September 2024.

If Walls Could Talk - Your Ancestors' Wallpaper - (Actual article text)

 

If Walls Could Talk: What We Can Learn From Our Ancestors’ Wallpaper

This article first appeared in Discover Your Ancestors Online Periodical, March 2024

 

Image 1: Block Printed Paper Block printed on hand-made paper, this wallpaper was made by Jaquemart et Bernard, a French wallpaper manufacturer operating between 1791 and 1840. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Whilst few of us probably actually still live in the houses of our own ancestors, many of us certainly live in older properties with rich histories. If you’ve ever attempted a make-over of such a house, you might well have been surprised by the number of  layers of wallpaper beneath the one with which you are familiar. Indeed,  some renovators have reported more than ten different coverings that need to be peeled away, and in pubs and other public buildings, up to 30 layers have sometimes been espied!

British householders have always been keen on sprucing up their homes, but the 1930s and the era after the Second World War saw unprecedented and nationwide bursts of redecorating which may have left really distinctive changes in colour and design on your walls. Evidence for the wallpaper favoured by your ancestors may come from remnants of the paper itself, or from paintings and photographs of the interiors of their homes in the past.

So were your ancestors’ walls graced with splendid foliage designs or peppered with a geometric repeating pattern? Did they depict a scene or panorama, or display a design that can easily be attributed to one of the popular wallpaper designers of the past such as William Morris or the children’s illustrator Walter Crane? What was the function of the room in which you found the paper? Was it papered by a tradesman or an amateur, do you think? Were the walls simply papered over completely or fashionably split into dado, ‘filling’ and frieze areas? Was the paper in sheets or rolls, hand-painted, machine printed or screen printed ?  Has the paper yellowed significantly (denoting its poor quality) or not? All of these aspects might give clues to the people who chose the papers and the fashions and technical capabilities of the times in which they lived.

People of different classes aspired to different aesthetic ideals and bought different kinds of wallpaper. For example, whilst the rich favoured high levels of ornamentation in the nineteenth century, the poor often made do with plainer paper and distemper (a cheap alternative to paint made with water, chalk, pigment and eggs). In the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, something of the reverse situation appertained, with the poor now favouring the now-more-affordable floral designs of the past whilst those higher up the social ladder were eschewing the over-stuffiness of their Victorian forebears and opting for simpler designs or even no wallpaper at all.

So, if you’re going to analyse your ancestors’ walls, you might need to employ some lateral thinking. Remember that working-class people tended to hang on to older designs until long after they had gone out of fashion, for example. And whilst you might assume that the poor in the past would go for darker papers that would need to be replaced less often, it’s worthwhile remembering that in an era of candlelight, cream-coloured papers might actually have been a more popular option since they automatically made a room brighter.   

Image 2: Print Trade Card. An engraving on a trade card for Richard   Masefield’s Paper Hanging and Papier Mache Manufactory on the Strand, London. Two elegant ladies inspect a piece of floral wallpaper. Many other papers are visible in compartments around the shop. C 1758. Via Wikimedia Commons. 

Wallpapers and Health

Strangely enough, wallpapers have cropped up in family history research for some rather sinister reasons. In the nineteenth-century, some of the new chemicals used in creating wallpapers were untried and not properly understood and they could prove dangerous to those who lived and worked around them. 

Many newspapers around the country, including the Altrincham, Bowdon and Hale Guardian of April 23^rd 1879, reported the Metropolitan case of six-month old Frank Smith of Peckham, London who had been, ‘left on a chair at the table, playing with a piece of green wallpaper. A few minutes later it [sic] was seen sucking the colour off the paper….The dangerous plaything was at once taken away from it but…on the same afternoon it was taken ill and on the next day it died.’  A post-mortem examination found a large quantity of lead in the child’s stomach and it was discovered that the basis of the wallpaper was covered in either oxide or carbonide of lead.

And you didn’t have to go as far as actually sucking wallpapers to be badly affected by them. Further cases, later in the century, suggested that wallpapers coloured with a chemical known as ‘Scheele’s Green’ (which was the basis of many different colours of wallpaper not just green), had caused the deaths and severe illness of many people who had simply sat in rooms decorated with them. It took some time for the detrimental effects of these papers to become recognised since the incidence of poisoning - due to white arsenic in the chemical - was affected by the humidity of rooms and the fact that different people reacted to it in different ways.

Whilst poisoning by arsenic was perhaps the most dramatic way in which wallpaper could affect the lives of our ancestors, there were numerous other ways in which it could annoy and disgust them and even make them ill. The practice of papering over old paper rather than scraping it off was widely perceived as dangerous to health since the layered paper was seen to trap dust and dirt and to harbour bedbugs. It was generally advised that sickrooms and nurseries should have painted rather than papered walls. During the Second World War, when money was tight and repapering probably a distant dream for most, newspaper articles recommended cleaning wallpapers by removing pictures and rubbing them with bran and chalk.

Image 3: Panoramic Wall Painting.  Found in the 1950s beneath four layers of wallpaper, a panoramic wall painting in the Romantic tradition, Grosvenor Square, Bath. Thought to have been painted in about 1815.  Illustrated London News, 23^rd July, 1955.

Help in dating your old wallpapers can be had from the dedicated books and websites listed at the end of this article. You can also view many old wallpapers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Many stately homes around the country have attempted to replicate old wallpapers and tour guides are  often able to explain their provenance if you care to ask. Likewise, museums that show the everyday life of the masses, such as York Castle Museum, include wallpapered interiors from different eras of British history.

 

History of Wallpaper Timeline

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

In the distant past, wallpaper was a luxury item. The walls of aristocratic homes might be covered in the French manner with hundreds of small sheets of engraved block-printed paper. Flock wallpapers, which imitated textiles (with shredded wool glued to parts of the design), were popular as wallcoverings as were Chinese silks and Chinese wallpapers.

Late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries

Wallpapers were made more affordable by the development of machines including Christophe-Philippe Oberkamps’ printing machine (1785) which used engraved copper rollers to print and colour design.  In 1799, Louis-Nicolas Robert designed a process for manufacturing endless rolls of wallpaper and this was improved by the Fourdrinier brothers with a machine that could cut sheets to any length in 1807. Not only was wallpaper now in rolls rather than sheets, but the new wallpapers  had finer detail and better shading and perspective.

 After a lull in wallpaper production during the Napoleonic Wars, the trade took off again in the second decade of the nineteenth century, with British products in high demand on the Continent.  However, tax had to paid on wallpapers between 1712 and 1836 which meant that decorating walls in this way remained the provenance of the well-to-do.

Mid-nineteenth century

By 1850, wallpapers had become an expectation in middle-class homes, and were indeed fairly common across the social spectrum. Loud floral and leaf designs became a key feature of the Victorian drawing room where they added to the general air of sumptuous clutter. Some simpler repeating designs championed by Owen Jones (The Grammar of Ornament, 1856) and inspired by Islamic Art also flourished in wealthy homes.

By the 1860s, wealthy people could go to department stores to view illustrated catalogues of wallpapers. These famously included designs (now well-recognised since they have oft been copied) by William Morris featuring naturalistic trailing plants and flowers in rich colours. Morris, as a proponent of the Art and Crafts Movement, objected to the industrialisation of wallpaper production, and favoured the older method of hand printing with wooden blocks.

Image 4: Processes of Wallpaper Production, 1882. This engraving shows five scenes depicting wallpaper production in the late nineteenth century. The Art Room - the artists at work; The Reception and Sale Department  - clients choosing their design; Twelve Colours at One Impression - a man on a ladder operating a large wheeled printing press; Embossing – A man embossing the wallpaper with the design; Reeling up  - a man rolling up pieces of wallpaper. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the 1870s, so-called ‘sanitary’ wallpapers were developed using oil-based rather than water-based inks. Sometimes imitating marble, woodpanelling or even tiles, these could easily be washed or wiped. Such papers were popular in working-class homes and for the harder wearing areas of middle-class homes such as hallways.

In the 1880s. it was fashionable to divide walls up into three separate areas: the dado area (at the bottom) the filling (in the middle) and the frieze (at the top). The filling areas tended be the plainest, since in this way, paintings and the like could be shown off to their best. Wealthier customers could afford designs created by well-known artists. Several new wallpaper firms emerged that were able to produce wallpapers with fancy names at a fraction of earlier costs.

Lincrusta and Anaglypta (1883) wallpapers didn’t absorb water in the same way as earlier papers and could, therefore, be cleaned more easily. The walls and ceilings of your ancestors’ local public house and nearby civic buildings were probably covered in these textured papers that imitated plaster, wood panelling or even leather and which could be painted over many times.

Image 5: Page from a Sample Book.  This wallpaper was made by Jeffrey and Company to a design by William Morris in 1887. The sample book contains 178 sheets and show this design in various different colours.  Individual sheets of this particular wallpaper were sold at twelve yards long and twenty one inches wide. Via Wikimedia Commons

Early 1900s 

The dawn of the new century brought a revolt against the over-fussiness of Victorian wallpapers. Art Nouveau brought in smaller, more stylised floral designs with curving lines. After world War One, Art Deco added sharper angles, more geometric shapes and an overall more abstract appearance to the walls of some British homes. By the 1920s and 1930s, wallpaper had somewhat started to lose its attraction for the upper classes, some of whom came to prefer plain painted walls.

Image 6: Office Wallpaper By 1930, offices, as well as homes, were experimenting with bold new wallpaper designs.   Via Wikimedia Commons. 

Post-War

With the new mood of optimism that swept the country after the end of the Second World War, many new homes were built to replace those damaged by bombs; many other homes were renovated. New wallpapers were brightly coloured and innovative with British manufacturers and designers actively promoted by the government in an effort to boost the post-War economy. A wave of consumerism stimulated far more variety of design. New screen printing techniques  with heavy ink coverage and more vibrant colours allowed for relatively short runs of more customised  wallpapers to be produced.

Late Twentieth Century

As tradesmen gradually came to be more and more in short supply, people started to decorate their own homes – including kitchens and bathrooms - in a surge of DIY fervour promoted by magazines and television programmes. Manufacturers started producing papers - some of them vinyl-coated for hygiene and durability - that were ready trimmed, and wallpaper paste that was water soluble and easier to mix. Open plan-living meant that different wallpapers were sometimes used, in the absence of extra walls, to demarcate one area of the home from another.

 

Useful Websites

 

 www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-brief-history-of-wallpaper  Information from the Victoria and Albert Museum on the history of wallpaper.

 

www.thevictorianemporium.com/publications/history/article/history_of_wallcoverings. The history of wallcoverings and wallpapers.

 

www.wallpaperhistorysociety.org The Wallpaper History Society website provides a network through which professionals, manufacturers and enthusiasts can talk about wallpaper.

 

Books                                                                            

 

Brunet, Genevieve, The Wallpaper Book, Thames and Hudson, 2012

Mckennar Susie and Sparke, Penny, Interior Design and Identity (Studies in Design and Material Culture), Manchester University Press, 2011.

Hawksley, Linda, Bitten by Witch-Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Victorian Home, Thames and Hudson, 2016.

Hendon, Zoe, Wallpaper, Shire, 2018.

Schoeser, Mary, The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co. in Context, ACC Art Books, 2022.

Sugden, Alan Victor, A History of English Wallpaper, 1509-1914 (Classic Reprint), Forgotten Books, 2018.

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