How a new dating technique solved a Westminster mystery
The Palace of Westminster has many secrets. Serendipitous research and a new scientific dating technique have revealed the story of a historic passageway that was hiding in plain sight. Elizabeth Hallam Smith reports
In 1895 the First Commissioner of Public Buildings & Works unveiled a bronze plaque on the wall of Westminster Hall, near the entrance to St Mary Undercroft. The first of several intended to publicise key places in the history and heritage of the House of Commons, this “tablet”, as it was known, was the brainchild of the Clerk of the House, Sir Reginald Douce Palgrave.
Framed by brass studs which purport to mark the precise site, the plaque announced to posterity that this was “the position of an Archway which for upwards of 130 years, from the first year of the reign of King Edward vi, a.d. 1547. – until the year 1680, was the principal access to the House of Commons”. It added that members “passed down the Cloister, which is built against the other side of this wall, ascended a flight of steps leading from the South-West corner of the Cloister to a vestibule attached to the West front of St. Stephen’s Chapel, & entered the building by the Western doorways. King Charles i passed through this archway, when on the 4th. January 1641–2, he attempted to arrest … the five members of Parliament.”
Palgrave, a respected proceduralist with a passionate if not always accurate advocacy for Parliament’s history, had written the text. While correct about a doorway and passageway and – broadly – their location, it gave spurious certainty to some of his colourful and self-confessed “showman’s suppositions” about dating and history. These had first appeared in Palgrave’s excitable book about the House of
Commons, published in 1869 as a rather unlikely tribute to the working men of Reigate, where he lived.
That was, as far as we knew, all there was to say about the matter. The plaque is affixed to a solid wall of stone and all signs of the doorway and passage had gone. However, that changed in 2018 when I came across some overlooked records in Swindon. Further archive research, a new scientific dating process and the help of the Parliamentary locksmith led us down a quite unexpected path. We have rewritten a little corner of the Palace of Westminster’s extraordinary and still poorly documented history.
A hinged panel
Posterity paid little heed to Palgrave’s memorial. So it came as a great surprise to the few people who were told, when in 1949 a blocked-in passageway was discovered behind it. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and the Ministry of Works were completing a major restoration project on the cloisters. While installing a heating and ventilation system in the west walk, Scott’s workmen unexpectedly broke through the wall into a small chamber. Official files show that this was immediately linked with the plaque and thus identified as the “Tudor” passageway, originally leading through to St Stephen’s cloisters. Although the discovery was not reported to the press, Scott himself took a considerable interest in it. He carefully recorded the space, and to allow for future access he left a small entrance in the brickwork. This was concealed behind a lockable hinged panel in his new wooden cloakroom furnishings in the west cloister. He also wired and lit the space before closing it up again in about 1950.
Some minor graffiti in the passageway hint that it may occasionally have been accessed for the next decade or so. In 1967, however, the west cloister was converted into office space for Labour mps, and from 1997–2017 continued to be so used by the Parliamentary Labour Party. The space was notoriously cramped and inconvenient (Jack Straw mp called it a “Gothic slum”), and desks, filing cabinets and sofas were soon crammed up against the cloakroom furnishings. Experts who were working on the fabric and history of the Palace of Westminster from the 1970s confirm that by that time, knowledge of the hinged panel and what lay behind had in turn been lost. The plaque remained in situ, and over the next few decades, academics studying the topography of Westminster Hall knew from historic plans that a passageway had indeed existed. However, while they cast some doubts about the plaque’s dates, the feature remained unresearched.
Fast forward to 2018 and to the research project on the history of St Stephen’s cloisters and St Mary Undercroft, supported by the Houses of Parliament, the University of York and the Leverhulme Trust and conducted by myself, Elizabeth Biggs (whose book on St Stephen’s College, Westminster has just come out) and Mark Collins, Parliament’s estates archivist and historian. During a most fruitful trawl by the team through Houses of Parliament material in the Historic England Archive in Swindon we found a photo of the timber ceiling lintels and upper walls of the passageway, taken for Scott in 1949, along with his survey plan.
Excitement about this discovery was tempered with the view that the space was tantalisingly inaccessible! But then I noticed Scott’s plans for a hinged access panel in a Ministry of Works file. This in turn led the team to a tiny brass keyhole set in the cloister panelling, which was locked shut. The Parliamentary locksmith was called in –
and opened the panel to reveal the passageway once more. Collins was the first person to enter the space for several decades.
A route for luminaries
What did he find? Most immediately he located a light switch which activated a still functioning Osram lightbulb of a George vi vintage, and therefore made before 1952. This illuminated what was at first sight a rather unassuming space, 2.65m wide at the widest, east end, 2.75m deep and 3.50m high. Its walls – mainly exposed brickwork and plaster, with some stonework – clearly dated from several different eras. There were four great iron pintles on the Westminster Hall side, which would have once supported two great doors. An elderly and dusty barrister’s wig hung on a nail and faint pencil graffiti, some recorded by Scott, were to be seen on the walls: some are Victorian, but one, scrawled by one of Scott’s workers, reads, “1950 Alex Leiper Mason Stonehaven”. The dusty floor of Purbeck flagstones was worn at the centre, and above was the ceiling of timber lintels, laid flat, once covered in lath and plaster, and still supporting the masonry above. We immediately called on archaeological consultant John Crook to join us in recording and advising on the space.
The oak lintels are a critical part of this tale, not just because it was a photo of them which led us to the discovery, but because they have provided a critical key to the archaeology through the innovative technique of isotopic dendrochronology. Applied in the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey World Heritage Site for the first time, the process has, say the scientists who developed it, “the potential to revolutionise the dating of wooden structures and artefacts”.
Dan Miles and Neil Loader describe the research and the principles behind this on page 22. The outcome was successful, and we now know the passageway lintels were cut from timber felled in spring 1659. This was the second lightbulb moment for us all. The claim on the bronze plaque that the passageway had been closed only shortly after this date, following well over a century of use, could not be true. Further documentary research and analysis of the remains tallied precisely with the isotopic dendro date. Revisiting a range of relevant evidence, it became clear that right up to about 1660 the route from the Hall to the south end of the Palace and to the House of Commons remained via the original medieval door on the south wall of Westminster Hall.
The works accounts show that this southern door and route were blocked off in 1660–61 when the dais at the Hall’s south end was remodelled and extended for Charles ii’s coronation. These accounts also show that our passageway was at the same time knocked through the wall to replace it. They are the clincher, for Crook has confirmed that the dimensions given in them match exactly those of our doorway and passageway. The stone they record for the door cill, Kentish Stepp or Ragg, also looks right as seen in a photo of the cill on the Hall side, when it was exposed during repairs in 2014.
Our doorway and passageway were created to form part of a grand processional route for the king, used for coronations, as shown in Francis Sandford’s plan for
his History of the Coronation of James ii published in 1687. This was also the main way to the House of Commons, and for a while to the south end of the Palace. And as noted in the accounts, a representation of Charles i’s head was set above the doorway, at first in a cartouche – a highly symbolic gesture, as he had been tried for treason in Westminster Hall only metres from this location. In 1704 the cartouche was replaced by a bronze bust, its design later attributed to Bernini but in fact after Hubert le Sueur. This remained there on and off until the 1790s.
There is a unique depiction of the doorway in a print in Britannia Illustrata (1727), where it is described as “the enterance of the House of Commons”.
By this time another more recent door in the centre of the south end of Westminster Hall, also shown here, had replaced it as the main route through to the House of Lords and Old Palace Yard. But this remained the way which great political luminaries, such as the diarist Samuel Pepys, the first de facto Prime Minister of Great Britain – Robert Walpole – and archrivals Charles James Fox and William Pitt the younger would have made their way to the Commons chamber. Throughout the 18th century the doorway and passageway appear in numerous plans of Westminster Hall and its surrounding buildings. In 1794 the cloisters and the grand house surrounding them passed to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Celebrity architect James Wyatt now remodelled it at vast expense for Speakers Henry Addington and Charles Abbott, removing the partitions from the west cloister and by 1807 blocking off our great doorway in the Hall. However, the cloisters side of the passageway remained open. As this was a service area, it must surely have provided useful storage space.
Fond of Ould Ale
The Palace suffered a devastating fire in 1834 (see feature May/Jun 2017/154). As Charles Barry’s new Palace of Westminster was built, the two Houses of Parliament remained on site in constantly shifting temporary buildings. Complex circulation arrangements were needed, particularly to bypass St Stephen’s Entrance and
Hall when they were under construction. In 1846 Barry had to reopen the Hall side of the passageway to provide access via the cloisters to the north end of the site. But finally, in 1851 it was walled in on both sides, when Barry was restoring and remodelling the cloisters.
Graffiti inside the passageway marks this event in a most vivid way. They read:
“This room was enclosed by Tom Porter who was very fond of Ould Ale The parties who witnessed the articles of the wall was R. Congdon Mason, J. Williams, H. Terrey, T. Parker, P. Duv[a]l These Masons w[ere] employed refacing these groines [of the cloister] August 11th 1851 Real Demorcrats” [sic]
All of these festive worthies – Barry’s workmen, who were surely using the space as a messroom – turn up in the 1851 census. Thomas Porter was a bricklayer’s labourer living in Water St near the Strand; Richard Condon, a stone mason, lived in St Marylebone; and the other four, also stonemasons, all lived in Ponsonby Place – a terrace of houses which are today near Tate Britain and a highly desirable address. Tom Porter, clearly the ringleader, also wrote his name in very large letters on the plaster right at the top of the adjoining wall before escaping through a narrow aperture in his new brickwork and sealing it up.
Their restoration completed in 1852, the cloisters were embellished and adorned with Minton tiles and stained glass designed by Pugin and were one of the glories of Barry’s new Palace. To meet their new use as the mps’ cloakroom and circulation space, with Pugin’s help Barry carefully designed the requisite cloakroom furniture, coat hooks and umbrella stands. Behind these, the walled-in passageway remained unseen until its surprising rediscovery by Gilbert Scott in 1949.
After its further rediscovery in 2018 it took us well over a year to assemble the evidence outlined above (and soon to be published in more detail), and to overturn many of the showman’s
suppositions of Sir Reginald Douce Palgrave. Sir Reginald’s contribution to the story is however worthy of much respect, for it was he who recorded the existence of the doorway and more generally strove to bring Parliament’s history and heritage to a wider audience.
Today, without the backing of leaders who value them, our research breakthroughs can languish unseen. In February 2020 Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons, who championed our research findings on the doorway and passageway, said, “To think that this walkway has been used by so many important people over the centuries is incredible. I am so proud of our staff for making this discovery and I really hope this space is celebrated for what it is – a part of our parliamentary history.” The Speaker’s support has been vital in allowing that to happen.