London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a very good morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are. It’s Thursday, December 5th, 2024.
Let us now praise a good man.
This day because it’s the 125th anniversary of his going to his long rest.
I’m talking about Sir Henry Tate, one of the great benefactors of the 19th century.
It’ll stand us all in good stead to know a little bit about him.
He was of course immensely wealthy. A self-made man who became a merchant prince. He was born in Chorley, in Lancashire. The son of a unitarian clergyman. He was the 11th of 12 children. Four of his siblings died before Henry Tate was born. Unitarian ministers in Lancashire or elsewhere weren’t minting it in 1819. To eke out his meagre income, the Rev. Tate opened a private school for poor children. His time in his father’s school was Henry Tate’s only formal education. When he was 13 he was apprenticed to one of his older brothers, who was a grocer in Liverpool. When he was 20, Henry Tate bought his employer’s business and set up on his own. Sixteen years later he had six shops. Four in Liverpool, one in Birkenhead and one in Ormskirk. So he was prosperous but not rolling. He expanded into the wholesale trade in 1857. Two years later he went into partnership with a Liverpool cane sugar refiner. A decade later he builds a new refinery in Liverpool. And then – he’s 55 years old – he comes to London. Builds a refinery in Silvertown. It was a bold move, a risky move. His financial wherewithal was so stretched he had to take his daughter out of boarding-school. Every penny – the capital he’d amassed in over half a century – went into that refinery.
And then came the breakthrough. It always puts me in mind of Ray Kroc selling his milkshake machine to the Macdonalds brothers who owned that hamburger fast food joint in San Bernadino, California. And then buying the brothers out and the American fast food industry had lift-off.
Well, Henry Tate did something similar. Sugar had previously been sold in loaves. A loaf of sugar was difficult to work with. It was cumbersome. Cutting it up wasn’t easy. And out of the east – Germany – comes a timely invention. A machine that turned conical sugar loaves into cute, handy, perfectly sized cubes.
And Henry Tate’s surgar refinery business took off like a rocket. He became immensely wealthy almost overnight.
He lived fairly modestly. Like every plutocrat he had more money than he could spend. So he gave it away. He gave money for new libraries, gave money to universities and medical institutions, including nurses’ pension funds, and of course, the big one, what we know today as Tate Britain and Tate Modern, the two great London art galleries.
In Henry Tate’s own words, “a great want was felt of some place where works of modern art could be seen at any time of the year.” He took it upon himself to do something about that want.
And here’s the matter that really sticks in the mind, really sets him apart. Bequests are one thing. A fortune isn’t the only thing you can’t take with you when you die. You also can’t take your art collection. So, yes, leave your Rembrandts and Picassos to the nation.
But Henry Tate – Sir Henry Tate as he became shortly before he died – went the extra mile. He didn’t wait until he died to part with his beloved art collection. He gave many of his beloved paintings to the nation while he was still very much alive.
And one more takeaway that perhaps more than any other gets the man into focus. Trying to work back to 1899, see him as his contemporaries saw him, I came across a letter written to a publication called The Daily Graphic. The correspondent signed himself as An Artist. He wrote that he had visited Sir Henry Tate just a few days before his death. The correspondent said, “what struck me forcibly as showing the extraordinary unselfishness of the man was the poor quality of the pictures on the walls of his own home. He had literally stripped his house of his choicest paintings, his constant friends and companions, in carrying out his munificent ideas.”
Anything else? Yes. You visit the Tate you might like to see Sir Henry Tate’s personal favourite. It’s a painting called The Vale of Rest. It’s by John Everette Millais. It’s a twilight scene. Features two nuns in a graveyard, one of them digging a grave. And as long as we’re at it, maybe also make a point of seeing his last gift to the Gallery. It’s another painting by Millais. It’s called The Order of Release. If you go on art critic Rick Jones’ Tate Britain Tour – it’s our Monday afternoon Gallery Tour – Rick will be pleased to give you a steer.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.