LOUISA POWELL (1822-1902), THE EARTHQUAKE AND THE BORGHETTO ORGAN

Louisa Powell married George MacDonald in 1851. Their daughter Caroline Grace MacDonald married my great great grandfather’s nephew Kingsbury Jameson thirty years later in 1881. George is the best known of these, a prolific nineteenth century fantasy author and theologian whom no less a theologian and fantasy author than C.S. Lewis regarded as the master of the genre. I’ve written about Kingsbury and Grace here before; Louisa wrote the stage adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress which brought Grace and Kingsbury together.

The English Church, Bordighera

Kingsbury Jameson was the chaplain of the English Church in Bordighera, a small town on the Italian Riviera which the MacDonalds had made their winter home. Their home, Casa Coraggio, became a hub of entertainment in the town, not only for the British residents but the whole population. Entertainments and lectures were regularly held there in a huge room on the first floor, which (it is reported) held five pianos.

Born before women were considered worthy of an education, Louisa had acquired the usual genteel Victorian woman’s skills – literacy (which led her to play-writing), needlework (which she applied to scenery and costume-making) and music. She could sing and play the piano and must have played a central part in musical evenings at Casa Corragio.

The Salon in Casa Corragio, with Louisa and one of her daughters sitting on the left

She also took on the role of choirmistress in her son-in-law’s church and played the organ there, considered the best such instrument in all of Liguria – a masterpiece of late eighteenth century Genoese woodcarving. The church became the last resting place of Grace in 1884 and Louisa must have felt close to her daughter through her musical duties. Louisa herself is buried there now.

At 5.30am on 23^rd February 1887 a massive earthquake struck the northern Mediterranean coast, with its epicentre at Nice, only twenty miles west of Bordighera. A tsunami struck Mentone, the French resort midway between Nice and Bordighera. Tremors continued for three or four hours and there was great loss of life, much of it from the collapse of buildings onto refugees sheltering inside them. 3000 people died in the event and Bordighera was, as Louisa’s son Greville later wrote, “entrapped in [the earthquake’s] fellest grip.”

Searching the rubble in Diano Marina, about 30 miles further east of the epicentre than Bordighera, after the Riviera earthquake of 1887 (from the Illustrated London News)

Casa Coraggio (literally “the house of courage”) suffered some damage. The MacDonalds in their position at the centre of local society did what they could to provide aid and cover to the displaced and injured. The following morning Louisa was in the church playing the organ when aftershocks began again to shake the town. In an act of almost stereotypical Englishness she did not stop what she was doing but moved seamlessly into a defiant rendition of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus!

Four years later Louisa got an organ of her own, which she inherited from her brother George Powell. The organ had been made for George by English manufacturer William George Trice at his factory in Genoa. Louisa had it installed in the salon at Casa Coraggio above the five pianos. Variety concerts there must have been extraordinary events.

The Salon in Casa Coraggio after 1891, with the organ installed

After the deaths of Louisa and three years later her husband George, the MacDonalds ended their connection with Bordighera. Their son Greville sold the Casa Coraggio organ to a local parish church in Bordighera, Borghetto S. Nicolograve. There it remains, almost unchanged save for some minor additions of 1934. It fell into disuse, but was restored to its former glory in 2001. I like to think of her music soaring above the many tragedies and losses of her life. Along with the organ in the English Church, the Borghetto organ now serves (to me at any rate) as a reminder of Louisa Powell MacDonald’s spirited playing, come hell or high water.

 The restored Borghetto organ (built in 1890), and Louisa Powell (1822-1902)

REV KINGSBURY JAMESON (1856-1943) AND THE SMELL OF THE GREASEPAINT (PART TWO)

(Read Part One here!) My great great grandfather’s nephew Kingsbury Jameson fell in love with theatre and his future wife Grace MacDonald at the same time, while he was chaplain of the Anglican Church in Bordighera, Liguria. The MacDonald family had moved there in 1880 for the good of their health.

The family of George MacDonald (centre with beard) and Louisa Powell (behind him) pictured in 1876 – four of their eleven children would die of tuberculosis within fifteen years

The illness which haunted them was tuberculosis, such a frequent presence that they nicknamed it “the family attendant.” By the time the family arrived in Bordighera Grace had already lost a brother and a sister to it, and she too had contracted it by the time Kingsbury married her.

Kingsbury took roles in the MacDonald family stage production of Pilgrim’s Progress when Grace’s brother Ronald was too ill to perform. When Grace’s illness forced her too to miss performances her parts, Mercy and Piety, were taken by Octavia Hill, a family friend better known today as a co-founder of the National Trust and social reformer. Many performances of Pilgrim’s Progress were given in support of her campaigning work, and when Kingsbury and Grace were blessed with a daughter in 1882, they named her Octavia.

Octavia Hill (1838-1912) namesake of Kingsbury Jameson’s daughter

Life was good; the Ligurian air was sweet; and the landscape so bright that Claude Monet, who came to paint in Bordighera in 1884, declared that to paint it “I would need a palette of diamonds and jewellery.” But that year, after only three years of marriage, Grace died of tuberculosis. She is buried in Bordighera and commemorated in a plaque within Kingsbury’s church there. Worse was to come when nine-year old Octavia fell to the contagious disease, dying in 1891. Grace’s oldest sister Lilia, who had nursed so many members of her family through the illness, also caught and died from tuberculosis that year.

In time Kingsbury Jameson left Bordighera and returned to England, where he took a job as chaplain to Highfield Girls’ Boarding School in Golder’s Green. There he met Mary Agnes (Dysart) Morewood, a widow, and the couple were married in 1896. After the loss of his wife and daughter within seven years of each other, Kingsbury was at last rebuilding his life, and perhaps it was while at Highfield that he reconnected with the theatre too. Certainly he cuts a cheerful figure in this photograph of 1898.

Kingsbury Jameson (1856-1943) photographed by Gwendolyn Marjorie Howard, one of his Highfield pupils, in 1898

At the age of 60 Kingsbury accepted a position as vicar-chaplain of St Edward’s Church in Cambridge, but only on condition that he preached as little as possible. Instead he invited friends and celebrities to cover for him in the pulpit – among them Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch the legendary literary critic, and Sir Oliver Lodge the physicist. It was said of him that “Jameson expects every man to do HIS duty.” But it was also said that if you hadn’t preached in St Edward’s as Jameson’s locum, you hadn’t really made it socially in Cambridge.

Life in the university town suited him very well indeed. Freed of most of his ministerial duties he threw himself back into amateur dramatics; and although he preferred not to act, he welcomed (according to Cambridge publisher S.C. Roberts in his 1966 memoir Adventures with Authors) “any job, however humble, in the mechanics of production – properties, noises off, the curtain, anything provided that it gave him a part in the production.”

At the age of 80 he was still spritely and an instantly recognisable character around Cambridge in a Norfolk jacket, a pair of knickerbockers and a cloud of pipe smoke. At 83 he was mounting a new production of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida – Shaw, who had been a regular guest in the home of his father in law George MacDonald in the days before Bordighera.

Bordighera, by Claude Monet (1884)

Today actors talk about the power of Doctor Theatre – the power of the stage to help actors overcome illness and injury in order that The Show may go on. It seems to have worked for Jameson too and he lived to the age of 87. However there was one aspect of old age that Doc Theatre could not deal with: in his 70s Kingsbury was so deaf that he couldn’t always hear his cues. S.C. Roberts, who was also an amateur actor and whom Jameson cast in his Candida, recalls on more than one occasion having to hiss from the stage in a very loud stage whisper, “HOUSE LIGHTS!”

REV KINGSBURY JAMESON (1856-1943) AND THE SMELL OF THE GREASEPAINT (PART ONE)

The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd. It’s what theatre workers onstage and backstage are supposed to be addicted to – more often, as the 1965 Bricusse-Newley musical had it, it is the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd. I know, because I was part of it – a touring stage manager for fifteen years man and boy, completely seduced by the glamour of barnstorming one night stands in everything from provincial theatres to wooden village halls.

I am not alone. Kingsbury Jameson, youngest son of my 3x great uncle William Kingsbury Jameson the indigo merchant, was hooked. And he remained, despite tragedy and comedy in his own life, a hands-on devotee of the theatre until his death.

Rev Kingsbury Jameson (1856-1943)

actor, stage manager

Kingsbury is a fascinating man and worthy of much more research than I have given him. As a young man he became chaplain of the English Church in Bordighera, a small town in Liguria on the Italian Riviera. It was in Bordighera that he met his wife, and through her that I believe he found his love of theatre.

His bride was Grace MacDonald, daughter of George MacDonald, the theologian and fantasy novelist who inspired C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The MacDonald family, plagued by illness, sold their London home The Retreat in Hammersmith to William Morris (who renamed it Kelmscott House) in 1877 and moved to Italy in search of better, healthier air. In 1880 they settled in Bordighera where they built Casa Coraggio, their winter home for more than twenty years.

Casa Coraggio, Bordighera, Liguria, survives to this day

The house became, according to one report, “the centre not only of the British community but also of the social and cultural life of the town, open to everybody. Concerts, recitals, parties, entertainments, and biblical lectures were given in a large salon on the first floor, which was provided with five pianos and a chamber organ.” In 1880 Kingsbury Jameson must have been an early guest.

He probably saw one of the early performances of an extraordinary piece of theatre, the MacDonald family’s amateur stage version of John Bunyan’s Pigrim’s Progress. It was an adaptation in 1877 by George’s wife Louisa Powell and the cast included all of George and Louisa’s eleven children. Kingsbury Jameson must have been taken with Grace’s performance, and he married her in Rome a year later in 1881.

Now, as a MacDonald son in law, he too got involved in the play. On several occasions he took acting parts to cover for the illness of MacDonald’s second son Ronald – Ronald’s principal role was as Feeble-mind! Pilgrim’s Progress was performed on tours of Britain as well as in the private homes of friends and acquaintances in England and Liguria in the course of twelve years up to 1889.

Props and costumes from Pilgrim’s Progress, displayed in the town museum in Huntly, George MacDonald’s northeastern Scottish birthplace 
(picture from www.george-macdonald.com)

Jameson may also have used his own family influence to get bookings for the play. It is known to have been performed at the home of Mrs Russell Gurney, whose late husband (he died in 1878) was a first cousin of Kingsbury’s mother Mary Anne (Gurney) Jameson. (I’ve written about Russell's pivotal role in the Treaty of Washington here before now.)

With the MacDonalds’ deep Christian convictions the amateur production was as much an missionary project as a theatrical one. Hardened drama critics such as Laura Ragg were unimpressed: “the team seemed to me wholly inadequate to a very difficult task." But audience members including Lewis Carroll, a family friend, were captivated. One, Joseph Johnson, wrote that “all who came … went away feeling that no performance could be more unpretentious and reverential.” Carroll particularly admired the family’s diction.

 L:George MacDonald (1824-1905), Strong-heart in Pilgrim’s Progress

R: Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), who admired the MacDonald troupe’s “perfect clarity of diction”

The family felt it was engaged in good and useful work. The move to Italy had been at least partially effective – George MacDonald’s health was much improved. Kingsbury had fallen in love with Grace and the theatrical arts. All in all it was a very happy time. And although some of that happiness would evaporate in only a few years, Jameson never lost his enthusiasm for the stage. More about Kingsbury and the theatre here in Part 2!