Anyone who comes on any of my tours will know that I love researching and am often adding new research projects to my never-ending list. My monthly tours of Waltham Forest Town Hall regularly change as when I discover something new I want to share it.
The following describes my long journey into trying to find the reason why there was a discrepancy between the name of a sculptor recorded in the New Town Hall Minutes and the many reliable articles which reference a different name.
The sculptures in question are the 16 bas reliefs which can be found on the portico columns at the front of Waltham Forest Town Hall. The New Town Hall minutes of 9th December 1938 state:
“The Architect also proposed that sixteen small panels should be inserted portraying the building trades as follows:- Architect, Excavator, Concretor, Bricklayer, Stone Carver, Steel Erector, Carpenter, Plasterer, Joiner, Heating Engineer, Slater, Painter, Smith and Gardener.” I have a photo of the relevant page of the minutes. There are only 14 trades on the list. There are 16 carved panels in total. I will have to re-visit this at a later date.
This research has also brought up the question as to whether the sculptor recognised in records is the sculptor of the plaster model or the sculptor of the stone carving. This anomaly was brought to my attention by author John Stewart who has written about Waltham Forest Town Hall and was one of the people I contacted when trying to get to the bottom of this conundrum.
When I started researching and leading tours of Waltham Forest Town Hall in July 2024 the local archives and Local Studies Library were temporarily closed before their move to their new home in Chingford Assembly Hall, handily only 5 minutes’ walk from my flat. My initial tours had to rely on information gleaned from elsewhere – my own resources and information that previous researchers had put together.
As soon as I was able I booked an appointment to trawl through the council’s minute books which is much more interesting than it sounds! It was in the New Town Hall Committee minutes of 9th December 1938 that I discovered a discrepancy with notes I had taken from other sources.
These minutes record that there had been 3 quotes for the 16 bas reliefs:
“The Architect submitted prices for the sixteen small panels, as follows:-
Mr Cavanagh [sic] £12 each, total £192
Mr Armitage £13 6s 8d each total £213
Mr Parker £18 each total £288
RESOLVED: That the offer of Mr. Armitage be accepted.”
The problem is that authoritative articles all say that John Francis Kavanagh is responsible for the reliefs. He is also noted as being the artist responsible for the statues in the niches at the back of the building and also comedy and tragedy on the Assembly Hall. I have searched subsequent council minutes but was unable to find any other reference to the reliefs.
Looking at other quotes throughout the minutes Walthamstow Borough Council as it then was usually picked the cheapest quote. So the question was, when and why did this choice of sculptor change?
I spent the next few weeks contacting various bodies to try to find a complete list of works for the relevant time period of each sculptor. Although RIBA couldn’t help with my question they did provide me with a long list of others I could contact. One of these was the Royal Society of Sculptors who pointed me to the excellent Glasgow Sculpture website which shows that Armitage was responsible for carving some of Gilbert Bayes’ work in Glasgow. This brings up the point mentioned earlier.
Via a bit of a detective work I then made contact with descendants of both Armitage and Kavanagh.
I could have saved myself a bit of time. The document Kavanagh’s relative sent to me can be found as one of the references to the article about Waltham Forest Town Hall on Wikipedia. The 1979 exhibition catalogue was for an exhibition of Kavanagh’s work in Auckland where Kavanagh was living at the time. The exhibition included plaster models of some of the bas reliefs and the introduction thanks Kavanagh and his wife for ‘supplying all the data for the preparation of this catalogue’. Catalogue entries 8 and 9 are “models for two of the sixteen panels which Kavanagh designed and carved for the new Walthamstow Town Hall.” This does seem to indicate that he was responsible for them.
Weirdly reference 41 on the Wikipedia entry is the New Town Hall minutes which state that the commission was given to Armitage! Kavanagh’s relative who wrote the Wikipedia entry told me he believed this was an error.
This wasn’t the end of my digging though. I still wanted to find a paper trail ie to find out how this change came about.
I had several email exchanges with Jeremy Armitage, grandson of Joseph who had the family archive and he did send me some information but eventually I made the trek across London to look through the papers for myself. Jeremy told me that Joseph had kept photos of all the sculptures he had worked on and the absence of any pictures of the bas reliefs is telling.
Included in these archives are drawings showing the star windows in the assembly hall next to the town hall – shown in the image immediately below – and a drawing of the wording on the plaque commemorating the laying of the foundation stone. This plaque can be found inside the town hall.
There are other references too to cornices and other plasterwork inside the town hall and lettering on the assembly hall.
A scrap of paper in the Armitage files shows the cost of a weekly train ticket from Liverpool Street to Hoe Street Station (as it then was) – 4s 10d. Then it says “Hoe St to job 4d day return”.
There is another scrap of paper with the heading:
“Walthamstow Town Hall. Stone Carving”
Each entry has a reference and some are numbered.
“No 12. Panels 18” square on faces of pillars” – this certainly sounds like the bas reliefs
“WALTHAMSTOW TOWN HALL” – the wording above the portico?
“No 5. 6’ 6” figures in niches at back of Council Ch…” (chamber?) –
There is no doubt from looking at these very organised files that Armitage did work on some aspects of the decoration of the town hall but why has he included information about the bas reliefs or the niche figures? The New Town Hall minutes of 9th December 1938 do record that he also quoted for allegorical figures on the outside wall of the chamber at the back of the building so maybe this scrap of paper is just a quote although the monetary figures on the scrap of paper don’t align with those in the minutes.
From the minutes:
Mr Cavanagh (sic) £88 each
Mr Armitage £91 each
Mr Parker £230 each.
There was no trace of the correspondence I wanted in these papers. In fact unrelated letters had been struck through with a pencil and the back used for draft paper. It couldn’t have been thought important at the time.
This is as far as I have got and I have had to admit defeat. A shortened version of my quest is mentioned on the tour.
Just to finish the third quote for the bas reliefs and the niche figures was given by a Mr Parker. His quotes were always far more expensive than the others. I came across him in the minutes for the New Town Hall Committee of 4 February 1938:
“The Town Clerk submitted letters from Mr W E Spradbery* and from Mr P Denis Goodall, asking the Council to consider the recognition of the work of Mr H Wilson Parker, an old boy of the Sir George Monoux Grammar School, by giving him a commission for the execution of any work of sculpture required at the New Civic Centre.
The Committee also had under consideration the report of the Architect on the matter.
RESOLVED:-
That an opportunity be afforded to Mr H Wilson Parker of submitting quotations for sculptural work at the appropriate time.”
* This opens up another research avenue!
Joanna Moncrieff’s tours of Waltham Forest Town Hall take place once a month with the next one being this Saturday 26 July.
All Joanna’s upcoming walks and tours and social media profiles can be found here: https://linktr.ee/joannawestminsterwalks
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