Category Archives: Museum

Treasurer’s House York, Mess and Muddle, M & S and evening prayer in the Minster

Located in Minster Yard just behind York Minster is Treasurer’s House, a dwelling with a multi-layered history. Situated over a Roman road, the original house was built for the first Treasurer of York Minster in 1091 and remained the Treasurer’s House until the Reformation.  

Over the centuries changes and additions were made to the building and in the 18th century it was divided into several residences, much of it falling into disrepair. Frank Green, a bachelor and wealthy industrialist, bought and restored each part of the house between 1897 and 1898, creating a town house as a showcase for his collection of antique furniture, paintings and objets d’art. And it’s been immaculately preserved.

Green donated the house and his collection to the National Trust in 1930 – it was the first historic house acquired by the Trust with its contents complete. One of his stipulations was that visits to the house should be by guided tour only.  His aim was for the house to be maintained exactly as he intended – he was a very exacting man with an obsession for tidiness – but he wanted people to enjoy and appreciate the house as he left it. Green threatened to return to haunt the house if his wishes were not respected creating the prospect of additional spectral sightings. Several ghosts are reputed to haunt the house – from Green himself to a lady in grey and shield-bearing Roman legionaries in green tunics in the cellar!

Frank Green’s restored Jacobean townhouse has thirteen period rooms, all representing a different style or era, which I found to be a bit of a mishmash. And while there are some very significant and noteworthy pieces, it’s quite an ad hoc collection and there are not many valuable paintings bar a painting by 16th century Dutch painter Joachim Beuckelaer in the grand hall. However, the house breathes the ethos of its owner, the character of the man as interesting as his collection.  

Frank Green was the son of Sir Edward Green, 1st Baronet and a Yorkshire industrialist. In those days there was a clear divide between being born into wealth and those who made their money from industry.  Frank’s wealth came from the family business – his grandfather invented the ‘economiser’ a device that improved the efficiency of hot water boilers. The Green family were keen on horses and hunting and there’s a picture in one of the rooms of Frank Green in Hunting Pink – he was Master of the York and Ainsty Hounds.  Clearly fashion-conscious – he favoured floppy bow ties and changed his clothes three times a day – and possibly vain to boot, there’s a picture of him wearing morning trousers with a pleat on the outside, following a trend – trumpeted as ‘sartorial innovation’ – set by King George V at Ascot Races in 1922.

He was keen on royal connections and hobnobbing. in June 1900 Edward VII and Queen Alexandra visited as Prince and Princess of Wales along with their daughter Victoria. It was in their honour that the King’s Room, Queen’s Room and Princess Victoria’s Room were so named.

The Queen’s Room

The drawing room is furnished as a formal salon in the Versailles style with chandelier candelabras, mirrors, gilt wood furniture and marquetry. The top of a marquetry kneehole desk dating from 1710 is made of brass inlaid in tortoiseshell and depicts scenes from a performance of the Comédie-Italienne.

The furniture in this room is stapled to the ground to prevent it being moved or re-arranged. He had no tolerance for “mess and muddle”, wanted everything in its place and instructions dotted around the house indicate he was quite the stickler – from requiring workers to wear slippers to having pieces of coal wrapped in newspaper to prevent unnecessary noise. A former kitchen maid related how Frank would inspect the kitchen, turning out any drawers he thought were untidy.

In his free time, he travelled around Europe in one of his Rolls-Royce cars seeking and purchasing items for his collection.  Three of his collectibles that I found of particular interest were a witch ball, a French Boulle clock (made around 1720) and a Queen Anne tapestry bed cover.  In the 17th and 18th centuries witch balls were made of glass and hung by windows to ward off evil spirits. The thinking was that witches would be scared off by seeing their own reflections. The belief that witches had the power to inflict death or illness simply by looking at a person or animal was widespread at the time.

The Boulle clock is an ornate Rococo piece with a calendar dial on the left and a lunar dial on the right. The calendar dial has 31 numbers around the circumference, the months of the year in French and the signs of the Zodiac, and the lunar calendar has the age of the moon in Arabic numbers and 24-hour tidal dial of the river Seine.

The Queen Anne period bedspread is displayed in the King’s Room, and the design includes a cornucopia representing fertility with pomegranate seeds on the male side (right) and a rose on the female side.  The Tapestry Room is lined with oak panelled walls and hung with Flemish tapestries from the 17th Century known as ‘stumpwork’, a form of raised embroidery. And a tapestry chair – associated with a ghost sighting – reminds us who is in charge – Please do not sit – by order of Frank Green.

One of the most over-the-top features of the house is the medieval banqueting hall.   The half-timbered gallery was created by removing the first floor above to open up the space. Complete with fireplace, minstrel’s gallery, stag’s horns and a massive polished oak refectory table from the 1600s, the great hall looks somewhat out of place in a town house!

Looking down at the Great Hall from the gallery
Minstrels Gallery

Another way he created a stately home-type of environment was by buying up family portraits – some of these line the grand William and Mary-style staircase – in house sales following the tax hikes and high death duties following the First World War when there was a massive shift in land, goods and property by cash-strapped aristocrats.

I went down to the Treasurer’s House café at lunchtime and chose a cuppa and a gluten-free scone, which arrived fresh from the microwave blown up in its plastic wrap like a puffer fish until I popped it with a fork! I had to pay extra for cream and jam, a good investment as the scone needed a bit of love…

I had planned to do a tour of the Minster but didn’t have enough time to do justice to the £20 entry ticket – and that’s because I wasted time ploughing through racks of crappy clothes – a symphony of largely synthetic fabrics – in Marks & Spencer in the afternoon.  I am told that quality M & S clothes are still available online or in bigger stores, but all was not lost as I bought some tights and a couple of cotton tops.

And, a silver lining, I stopped for a quick cup of tea in the M & S café, which had fantastic views back over towards the minster.  And I just made it – at a sprint – to the Minster in time for evening prayer (there’s no choral evensong on Mondays) at 5.30pm.

Evensong or prayer is held in the Quire in the eastern part of the cathedral which has seating for clergy and the choir and houses the high altar.  Going through the archway leading into the Quire with its gilded and painted ceiling bosses (recreations of the 15th-century originals following a fire in 1829) with views over to the great East Window, the largest expanse of medieval glass in the country, was a humbling moment. Note to self: next time I must do a tour of this magnificent place of worship dating back to the 13th century.

Walk like a Victorian: A trip down memory lane at York’s Castle Museum

How often in life do we get the opportunity to reminisce about something from our childhood and then to step back into that treasured memory and find it still exists in time and place?  

This was my experience at the Castle Museum in York. When planning my trip I remembered being enchanted, probably aged around ten or so, by Kirkgate, the museum’s recreation of a Victorian Street. I was thrilled to discover it’s still there; and not only still there but significantly enhanced after a major restoration in 2012.

The museum is housed in what was formerly the female prison, situated in the Norman Castle complex, and is located directly opposite Clifford’s Tower, the largest surviving part of York Castle, northern England’s greatest medieval fortress.

The Castle Museum was founded in 1938 by Dr Kirk, a practising medic who lived in nearby Pickering. Some of his patients were unable to pay his fees and so he would accept an ornament or object of interest in lieu of payment leading some people to hide their family heirlooms before one of his visits! By the 1930s he needed somewhere to display his extensive collection and the idea for the museum was born. The Castle Museum was the first in Britain to have room and street recreations rather than just display cabinets.

What I remembered most vividly was a carriage, coachman and (very) lifelike model horse.  Looking down on Kirkgate from an upper level of the museum, I spotted the very same hansom cab, horse and coachman that I had seen in the 1970s. Thrilled to find it still there, I was off to a good start! Not only that but I discovered that the carriage – like most of the other items in the street – the lampposts, horse troughs and shopfronts are nearly all originals.  

When Kirkgate was restored, the focus shifted to the later years of the Victorian era – 1870 to 1901, and  the attention to detail is meticulous – the cobblestones, soundtrack of clopping horses, the dim Dickensian lighting, the buildings and the presentation of the shopfronts – each shop and business is named after a real business that operated in late Victorian York. There’s Horsleys, Gunsmiths, George Britton Grocers and importers of fine tea and coffee (such as Liptons), J W Nelson, Saddler, G E Barton confectioner, named after a Victorian confectioner and baker, Saville’s pharmacy and Leak and Thorp Drapers shop. Sessions Printers with its beautiful display of leather-bounds books and historic prints is still in operation today!

A coffin-makers shop displays handmade wooden coffins, an advert for Keen’s Mustard propped against one wall and a reminder that life is short – tempus fugit – hanging beside the desk, alongside chisels, hammers, brass plaques and handles. Similarly, next to the clockmaker’s is a studio with all the tools of the trade laid out on a bench.  

I marvelled at the bolts of cloth at the drapers; the dress pattern, the fans and a poster advertising corsets – “Ensure a Graceful and Elegant Figure”. Reading Ruth Goodman’s How to be a Victorian, I learnt that corset-wearing was a mark of social respectability and corsets were deemed to protect a woman’s delicate internal organs, and to keep them warm. Corsets, properly worn, were thought to promote a whole range of health benefits including good posture. Being encased in a corset, ribs compressed, swathed in layers of petticoats and skirts and then caged in by a crinoline, forcing you to perch on the edge of your chair to do your needlework, must have been very restricting and uncomfortable! These were the days when women were considered the weaker sex – physically, intellectually and emotionally. Did you know that The Great Reform Act of 1832 excluded women from the electorate by defining voters as ‘male persons’? It wasn’t until 1928 that gender equality in voting was achieved.

There’s even a ‘second-hand’ shop in Kirkgate with a sign in the window requesting “left-off” clothing. The Victorians were recyclers and upcyclers – fabric costs were high and many families lived in poverty. Garments were “turned” with the outside becoming the inside to make them last longer or were remade and reworked to adapt to changing fashions.

The pharmacy was another source of fascination with its panelled wooden shelves lined with glass jars, canisters and curiously named perfumes such as Rough and Ready and Jockey Club Bouquet. Saville’s Golden liver and stomach mixture seems to have been a bit of a cure-all, treating “costiveness and disorders of the stomach and bowel, giddiness, pains in the head and cutaneous eruptions.”  Although germ theory was gaining traction from the 1860s onwards, in the early part of Victoria’s reign disease was believed to be carried out in evil miasmas in the air, requiring poisons, waste matter and the noxious substances of disease to be expelled from the body. Bloodletting, leaches, lancing and purging were all in vogue and, in the absence of affordable doctors, housewives would often have a stock of drugs at home – many marketed with far-fetched claims, the pharmacy industry lacking any regulation. Beecham’s pills, for example, were made from aloes, ginger and soap – nothing to harm you, but nothing to heal you either. Other preparations contained opiates such as laudanum and there was widespread use of laxatives – senna, Epsom salts, syrup of figs and castor oil.

An electric hairbrush is advertised as strengthening hair, preventing baldness and relieving headaches in five minutes. If you Google head-massagers, you’ll see the Victorians were ahead of their time!  When it comes to health and wellness, you could argue not much has changed in this respect:  we still hanker after miracle cures and are vulnerable to marketing claims.  And headaches and digestive problems are still very common – check out the shelves at any pharmacy!

Some of the facades, whether a business or a private residence, have fire plaques indicating the owner had taken out insurance, which entitled them to receive priority treatment. This was a time of marked social division, poverty, child labour, hunger, disease, overcrowded housing and overwork. A guide dressed in Victorian garb told us that the Rowntree Report, published in 1901, revealed that 27% of the population in York were living in insanitary conditions with one drop toilet to 52 people – a grim thought given the obsession with laxatives and bowel function!

The advent of the railways transformed York – in 1877 it boasted the largest station in the world – supporting tourism, communications and the confectionary industry. The railways also lead to the standardisation of time across Britain, replacing local time in different cities. The clock on the wall in Kirkgate would have been on Greenwich Mean Time, adopted in 1880.

Rowntree, a Quaker company with a social and ethical conscience was founded in York in the 1860s.  Making chocolates and later fruit pastilles, Rowntree’s were enlightened employers provided affordable housing and medical care for their workers. There’s a Temperance Cocoa Room in Kirkgate – the Rowntree family, like many Quakers, attributed many of society’s problems to alcohol and encouraged people to avoid the temptations of alcohol by drinking cocoa instead.  What would they make of Baileys Chocolate Liqueur? An aberration that would no doubt make them turn in their graves!

Talking of turning in graves, my next blog will be on Treasury House in York, a house built directly over one of the Roman roads that led northwards out of York. Several ghosts are reputed to haunt the house.