A touch of class in the garden: a family metalworks Jeremy Musson
Down a west London lane, Jeremy Musson visits the tiny forge that made garden ornaments for Vita Sackville-west and Gertrude Jekyll
‘People come in for a dancing girl and walk out with a Mercury,’ says Peter Mcbride, who runs H Crowther Ltd in west London, founded in 1908.
Crowther’s is a survivor of another age, a hidden wonder tucked away behind Chiswick High Road. It is one of a small number of long-standing businesses which carry on in the same old brick-built workshops, providing traditional goods and services – just as they have always done. Crowther’s occupies an old forge and workaday brick shed at the end of a garden behind a typical London terrace.
Stepping into its garden, where stand the dancing girls, piping boys, the lion’s masks and the pirouetting Mercurys, one feels an echo not just of the early 1900s but of the 18th century.
Crowther’s still continues to make these traditional lead garden statues and urns, supplying and repairing dancing figures, personifications of the seasons and vast lead cisterns (now usually used as planters) for town and country houses in the UK and beyond. Mcbride points out, ‘A few years ago, we replaced two lead figures at Hestercombe, the lost originals of which had been bought here from us in around 1910.’ They have recently supplied figures as part of the restoration of Stowe landscaped gardens.
The founder was Henry Crowther. He was a son of one Thomas Crowther, an experienced London stonemason who was also, from the 1870s, a dealer in antique garden figures and ornaments, which he could expertly repair. Henry Crowther drew heavily on his father’s stock for creating newly commissioned works in lead. Most are modelled on original 18th-century figures by leading sculptors such as John Cheere. Also in his father’s stock there were urns designed by neoclassical champions such as Robert Adam, circular bas-reliefs, medallions and all manner of classical and baroque urns.
Crowther’s still stocks many classical versions of artistically poised gardeners (as if plucked from a painting by Watteau), nymphs, shepherdesses and ‘French drummer boys’ – originally produced by Cheere in the 18th century. Sculptors like Cheere would even attend the ceremonial ‘pouring’ of their figures into moulds.
Giambologna’s Mercury is one of the all-time most popular products by Crowther’s. The 16th-century original can be seen in the Bargello in Florence; one copy stands in a fountain in the middle of Tom Quad at Christ Church, Oxford – where generations of undergraduates, including Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, have been dunked.
Crowther’s also produces many bespoke lead cisterns in the 18th-century manner, for use as large planters. New lead figures on classical models were supplied direct to Vita Sackville-west and Harold Nicolson when they were creating their gardens at Sissinghurst. These H Crowther products can be seen there still, namely their ‘Adam finial’ urn.
The Crowther name is resonant for another reason. Bert, Henry’s brother, founded his own architectural salvage company in 1927, which occupied a former dower house to Syon House, known as Syon Lodge, in Isleworth. Henry became even better known than his father and brother. He was an important conduit for the many figures and garden fittings which came from collections being broken up, as death duties began to take their toll on country estates.
Crowther’s of Syon Lodge supplied grand clients, including King George VI and William Randolph Hearst. Lord Fairhaven, the connoisseur collector, brought many of the statues and urns for his garden at Anglesey Abbey, near Cambridge, from Crowther’s. Beverley Nichols, the garden writer, describes his pleasure on a visit to Syon Lodge in 1951: ‘Leaden cupids flock under the trees;
fauns and satyrs grimace from the undergrowth; round the ancient fountains, a cluster of grey stone figures extend their arms, gazing at the dancing water.’ Crowther’s of Syon Lodge was in Bert’s family’s hands until 2002.
H Crowther Ltd has carried on, hidden away in its small brick outbuilding, with a daily output of shepherds and shepherdess, putti and peacocks. There is a catalogue of some 300 items, now seen via a website in glorious colour: fountains, figures, birdbaths. Most of these were also available in the first H Crowther Ltd catalogue in 1908.
The titles have a classic but oddly cheeky ring, as if plucked from a poem by Betjeman. ‘Pike Boy’ is not a modern-day superhero – half-fish, half-human – but a copy taken from a fountain by Verrochio, full of fluid movement from any direction you view it. Pike Boy was one of the figures ordered from Crowther’s by garden designers such as Thomas Mawson and Gertrude Jekyll. Some models came from figures associated with the sculptor Walter Gilbert’s arts and crafts work with the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts. One guild member, Swiss-born sculptor Louis Weingartner, designed many of Crowther’s figures, with an art nouveau touch.
Mcbride himself arrived in the 1980s. ‘I saw a man pushing something interesting in a barrow – it turned out to be Jimmy Crowther, a son of Henry, with a lead statue in the barrow, and I got talking to him and then got a job working at the workshop, and I have been here since I was sixteen.’
When Jimmy’s son, Paul Crowther, retired, Peter Mcbride took on the management. Paul Crowther, who has worked at Crowther’s for 45 years, still comes in a couple of times a week and
remains a director. His nephew, Richard Crowther, Jimmy Crowther’s grandson, works full time there. Paul’s daughter, Camilla Crowther, is the secretary for the business.
It’s a small team of four. The office is a modest loft, hung with photographs and portraits of the Crowther family going back to the 19th century – with books by Gertrude Jekyll and Laurence Weaver on the shelves. This room was, until recently, crammed with plaster casts and models for their work, and the old bellows from the original furnace.
‘We gave the bellows to a museum of smithing a few years ago,’ says Mcbride.
The moulds are stacked carefully on shelves in the core of the old building, and smaller moulds (like the head and limbs of the putti) are kept in labelled cabinets along the walls. The workshop is surprisingly small, with a small furnace where lead ingots are melted, poured into the aluminium moulds, and then swiftly poured out again, as lead cools quickly. A lead skin is left behind, forming the hollow sculpture. It is a matter of ‘eye and judgement’ how long this takes.
‘We have just learned how long it takes with each mould,’ says Mcbride. After casting, there is a certain amount of work on the lead figures which goes into removing the evidence of the casting process: filing off the lines where the parts of the mould meet, smoothing and evening out. The sculptures emerge somewhat silvery but the lead naturally dulls to that uniform grey, which then gets a patina when exposed to the elements.
As Mcbride says, ‘Lead figures and urns are very hardy in the English weather and last a very long time.’
Crowther’s has flown below the radar and doesn’t advertise. Its reputation spreads by word of mouth – one of its American clients has been coming for more than sixty years.
On the same day I visited its workshop, I attended the launch of a book by garden designer Jinny Blom. Finding myself in a corner with three well-known garden designers, I mention H Crowther’s lead figures and urns. ‘We all know about them,’ one said as if I had stumbled on a state secret of the grandee gardeners. The same might well have been said by Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-west.