Palace of Whitehall, Part II by Katherine Pym

For more about Katherine Pym's books and to purchase visit her Books We Love author page

 
Previously, I told you the history of Whitehall Palace, its beginnings and its end. Today, I want to talk of the structure, and how London’s activities affected Whitehall Palace. 

Whitehall Palace

Part II, Other stuff about Whitehall:

Castles have a tendency to be drafty, and it was no different with the Palace of Whitehall. Due to the compilation of various buildings crammed together, the palace was more drafty than normal. During storms, winds whistled down chimneys and spread ash across the chambers. Fires sparked, then smoldered.   

London and its suburbs used sea coal and brown coal to heat their homes. It was inferior and smoked. London also seemed to have existed under a pall of inversion. Smoke and pollution hung stagnant over the city and its suburbs for weeks on end.

Coal was used to brew ale or beer. Dyers used coal to heat water. Soap boilers manufactured their product with ash. Glass houses, founders and most industries used coal for their fires and their products. As a result, smoke settled heavy on everything with a gritty dust. Not a good place for asthmatics, the air was hard to breathe.

John Evelyn (1620-1706) loved London. He observed everything within and without the great city. 

In 1661, he wrote Fumifugium: or, The Inconvenience of the AER, and SMOAKE of London Dissipate, a diatribe of the damages smoke can do to a person, city, and anything alive. In this pamphlet, he also proposed remedies for this damage. This, he gave to King Charles II in the year of his coronation (1661).

A visit to Whitehall provoked Evelyn to write this pamphlet. While he strolled through the palace, looking for a glimpse of His Royal Majesty, Evelyn said, “a presumptuous smoke issuing from one or two tunnels near Northumberland House, and not far from Scotland Yard, did so invade the Court that all the rooms, galleries, and places about it were filled and infested with it, and that to such a degree, as men could hardly discern one another for the cloud...”

Apparently, the smoke was so thick in the palace, people had to stretch their arms to make it from room to room. I can imagine with the uneven floors, bridges, and stairways that linked strange floor levels, this could be dangerous.

Evelyn continues, “...upon frequent observation, but it was this alone, and the trouble that it must needs procure to Your Sacred Majesty, as well as hazard to your health…” Yes, wandering a palace so filled with smoke, it would be difficult to breathe, to see without your eyes tearing.

In 1662 a strong storm hit London, and Whitehall was not spared. A few fires started but fortunately, they were doused without any real damage. After this, regulations were enforced to have at each hearth a leather bucket filled with water.

In 1691, Whitehall nearly burned down. By this time, it was a maze of complexity, and the largest palace in Europe. On April 10^th of this year, a fire broke out that damaged a great deal of the structure(s), but not the State Apartments. By this time, William III and Mary II lived most of the time in Kensington Palace.

Then, in 1698 what remained of Whitehall burned, along with many treasures garnered over the ages. Among other treasures, scholars believe Michelangelo’s Cupid, the Portrait of Henry VIII, and Bernini’s marble bust of King Charles I were all lost.

John Evelyn wrote: “Whitehall burnt! Nothing but walls and ruins left.”

Can you imagine the stories those old walls could have told, so rich, historical, and often tragic.

Sources:

Adrian Tinniswood. By Permission of Heaven, The true Story of the Great Fire of London. Riverhead Books, NY, 2003

John Evelyn. Fumifugium: Or, The Inconvenience of the AER, and SMOAKE of London Dissipated. Together With some Remedies humbly proposed by J.E. Esq; To His Sacred MAJESTIE, and To the Parliament now Assemble. Published by His Majesties Command. London 1661

http://www.hrp.org.uk/learninganddiscovery/Discoverthehistoricroyalpalaces/thebuildinghistories/BanquetingHouse/WhitehallPalace

Happy Halloween in February...

Yes, you read that right.

My dad called me February 13 to wish me and early Happy Halloween.
We both had a good laugh. Nearly twenty-five years ago, my dad underwent brain surgery to help control his epileptic seizures. While he hasn't had seizures since, he has had to relearn a lot of things he'd forgotten after doctors removed a quarter-sized piece of his brain. He's had a long journey.

I've always taken for granted the ability to read, to write, to think in the way I always have. I knew the things my dad had to re-learn. How to talk, how to write, how to name the every day objects we all "just know" because we've learned from the time we were little. In the blink of a ten hour surgery, my dad forgot a lot of those things. The names of his wife, his kids, his pets, even the names of holidays all these years later. His brain just didn't make the connection any more.

As writers, we all learn new things with every book we write. We forge new pathways in our brains and test our own memories as well as our sanity. I've learned some new things and had new experiences mostly out of my own interest which I've then transformed into new story ideas.

When I moved to a small town, I began to explore and use the scenery around me to create a mystery series about Katie Mullins who moved to a small town to hide out and ended up creating a whole new life. While I didn't get to work in a bookstore, I sure do haunt a lot of them!

As a karate student, I began to write a martial arts mystery series and my latest work in progress, is about a woman who ends up running a tea shop. All the things I write about in that book, I've partly learned in my brief stint working in a local Tim Hortons coffee shop. Now that I'm working at a haunted theatre... The sky is the limit. The things I learn go into books and the things I write become things I want to learn. It's all give and take.

As for my dad, even after the surgery and a lengthy recovery, he's now a singer/songwriter.
He used to be a lumberjack.

At a local coffee house with my dad and one of our CDs.

To be honest, we didn't always get along. We went for a long time gone without speaking to each other. Once we reconnected, I've been fortunate to work with him writing lyrics and have heard my words come to life on his numerous CDs.

As for Halloween in February, I figure next year I'll send him a package of pumpkin seeds for Valentine's Day next year.

Diane Bator

Check out my books here.

Women's Work Memories--Doing the Laundry

                        http://amzn.to/1YQziX0  A Master Passion   ISBN: 1771456744

A few things have changed for women, if not all that much on the rights side--we seem to be going backwards at the moment--however, in the material world, the traditional hard work of housekeeping has grown much easier. Laundry is one of those revolutionized tasks. Still, like cleaning the toilet, another traditionally designated woman’s work, I'd thought I'd share some memories about some of the things I've seen during my own 70+ years of life. 

I wonder how many of you can also look back on these same changes, or if you have some unique stories of your own. I’m going to move through time—my little slice of it--regarding laundry day.

The first laundry days I remember was at Grandpa’s house where we took our clothes for a familial Saturday wash, because they had a machine, a rockin’ and rollin’ wringer washer in the basement. Running the wet clothes through the wringer was men’s work in my family, although the women did the rest: pre-sort, load, hang, fold, dry, and iron. (Remember ironing? The day devoted to the task, taking the clothes out of the hamper and dampening them with a spritz or a sprinkle—the ones from a little top you bought at the Five and Dime to attach to the top of a coke bottle? The back ache/neck crick from standing for hours with a moving extended arm, the pre-air conditioning summer heat?)

And, of course, for small children, there were dire, but necessary, warnings.

Beware the dreaded wringer in which careless children get their arms caught and broken and maybe even dragged in and squished to death!  And don’t forget; the release bar to open the jaws is along the top, so…!

In the early Sixties, life took my mother and me to Barbados in the West Indies. It was not the shiny tourist trap it is now. At one time, we lived in the countryside which meant in a big temporarily for rent house—the “Bajan” owners were in the UK, attending to some business there. The big white house with louvered windows stood in a grove of large trees surrounded by what seemed to be almost endless cane fields. A maid from a cluster of houses further down the road, came along with the rent—that is, mother paid her the going rate to stay on with us and do laundry and some weekly housework, so that she would be support in the regular owner’s prolonged absence.

It was a long bus ride from Bridgetown where my school was, and in the evening, when I got home, I’d enter a small lane that had a bridge over a steep-sided, fast moving creek. Down below, among the rocks, local women always seemed to be doing laundry. Many small children, wearing undershirts and nothing else, crouched and played in the water, like little kids everywhere. Here, sometimes, I’d see Elsie, who worked for us, banging a piece of clothing I’d recognize as mine, on a rock as if it had done some terrible crime and needed punishment. First she’d scrub up lather from a big cake of Fels Naphtha soap which she kept beside her balanced on a rock. Next, she’d pound, and last she’d rinse it out in the stream. When I saw that laundry method for the first time, I came to fully appreciate the high tech of the chugging basement wringer washer at Grandpa’s.

Later, after coming back to the US, entering college and getting married—all in quick time order—my husband, new baby and I lived in an apartment building which rented to married students. It was a spacious old side by side duplex, now split into four apartments. I worked part time--part time school--in order to afford my first washing machine, a long-lived trendy bronze color Sears Kenmore top loader. Wet wash was hung from the back porch on a super long reel line. 

The kindly owner of our building had set lines up for both upstairs and downstairs apartments, although the tenants overhead had to hang their laundry while leaning out a window. As this was Massachusetts, sometimes it was too wet or too snowy or cold, so we all had drying racks for such occasions. As everyone knows, with babies, there is always a lot of laundry. And with diapers, it’s best to hang them out, even if they freeze for a day or so. 

As the old saying goes, “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” even if it’s 10 below...or in the 21st Century.   

~~Juliet Waldron

 http://amzn.to/1UDoLAi    Historical Novels by JW at Amazon

http://amzn.to/1YQziX0  A Master Passion   ISBN: 1771456744