Here is another blog post in our series of ‘Behind the scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ – this time some further background information on the making of the film focused on the antique dealer Walter Waddingham in the digital trail at Temple Newsam. Here’s the finished film on the YoD website.
Deborah Crossley, who introduces the antique library desk in the film, retired from Temple Newsam recently, but she delivered an excellent introduction in her piece to camera, and in just one take too! (thanks Deborah!).
As with many of the other films we had many more images that we could have used in the Walter Waddingham film but could not find space to actually fit them in without impacting the dwell time for the viewers of the images. One example is a photograph of ‘Pomfret Castle’ in London, which was the original home of the library desk in the 18th century (see below). In the Year of the Dealer films we concentrated more on the history and contextual background of the antique dealers (so for this film, Walter Waddingham) rather than the history of the object (the antique), but the ‘gothic’ library desk does have a fascinating provenance, which no doubt would also have interested Walter Waddingham.
The desk may have been made for ‘Pomfret Castle’, which was designed by either Sanderson Miller or Richard Biggs for Henrietta Louisa Fermor (1698-1761), Countess of Pomfret (their country seat was Easton Neston in Northamptonshire), or it may have been part of the furnishings of William Gerard Hamilton (1729-1796), who rented ‘Pomfret Castle’ following the death of the Countess of Pomfret in 1761. Hamilton was known as ‘Single Speech Hamilton’ for allegedly only delivering a maiden speech in the House of Commons (13th November 1755) – the desk in the film retains a brass plaque inscribed ‘William Gerard Hamilton, known as ‘Single Speech Hamilton’ M.P. for 42 years, born January 29 1729, died July 16 1796′.
The desk was later presented, in about 1860, by William Gerard Hamilton’s nephew, Walter Kerr Hamilton (1808-1869), then Bishop of Salisbury, to the See of Salisbury. It then passed into the ownership of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1946, who offered the desk for sale at Christie’s in London in 1950, where it was bought by Walter Waddingham, as we outline in the film.
One other image that we might have used was a screen shot (see below) from the antique dealers project map website (see the map here). We highlighted the importance of Harrogate a a key location in the history of the antique trade in Britain in the Walter Waddingham film.
You can just see Harrogate towards the top edge of the map, near the middle, underneath the number 78 in the blue circle. Harrogate had 78 antique dealers between c.1900 and c.1969, ahead of Leeds (right in the centre of the map) which had 60 antique dealers and York (top right of the map) (which had 57 antique dealers) in the same period. Harrogate was also the location of another antique dealer featured in the Temple Newsam films – Charles Lumb & Sons, who we will focus on in a forthcoming ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ blog post.
In the meantime, there will be another ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ next week, so do keep your eye of the blog.
Mark
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