Felicity Ashbee
The death of Felicity Ashbee at the end of July severed on of the last links with the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century. The movement had a profound effect on architecture, furnishings and designs right up to the Second World War - and after the triumph of modernism in the fifties and sixties has been rediscovered and reappreciated in recent years. But Felicity’s father, CR Ashbee, was much more than a maker of buildings. In his ‘Mile End Experiment’ he attempted to remake society - at least in microcosm. The Guild of Handicraft may have failed in business terms, but it gave a start to a generation of East End craftsmen and a legacy that lasts to this day.
Charles Robert Ashbee was the son of a wealthy London family. After studies at Wellington College and reading history at Cambridge he moved back to London and into Whitechapel’s Toynbee Hall, where he lectured in arts and crafts. The multiskilled Ashbee was a furniture designer, silversmith and architect, and was inspired by the ideas of William Morris and John Ruskin. He embraced not just their ideas on craftsmanship but sought to liberate the craftsman themselves. The ‘mission statement’ of the Guild said it all:
” To seek not only to set a higher standard of craftsmanship, but at the same time, and in so doing, to protect the status of the craftsman. To this end it endeavours to steer a mean between the independence of the artist— which is individualistic and often parasitical— and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to purely commercial and antiquated traditions, and has, as a rule, neither stake in the business nor any interest beyond his weekly wage”.
Ashbee established the Guild in 1888 while still at Toynbee Hall, moving it on to workshops at Essex House in Mile End, with his partner, MH Baillie Scott. But he visualised a sylvan setting for his craftsman, and Mile End was never that. So in 1902, Ashbee made the bold decision to improve the quality of life for his craftsmen by moving the various Guilds - some 50 jewellers, enamellers, woodcarvers, cabinet makers, silversmiths, French polishers and bookbinders – from workshops in the East End of London to Chipping Campden in the centre of the Cotswolds. With wives and children, the group totalled around 200. It’s hard to imagine what the people of Chipping Camden felt about 200 cockneys descending into their midst, but the influx gave the town a fresh injection of life, bringing new ideas and making the little market town a centre for the study of Arts and Crafts and contemporary design in the early 1900s.
Charles and wife Janet settled in the neighbouring village of Broad Campden and four daughters followed (Felicity was born in 1913). But while Ashbee was a visionary and a genius, he was alas not a businessman. His craftsmen, with a limited local market, faced stiff competition from cheaper, mass produced goods. In London, the Guild had its own shop in Brook Street, Mayfair, and plenty of rich patrons willing to buy - Chipping Campden was rather different. Arguably today they would have a better chance of survival - there has been a revival in interest in handmade pieces, and there are numerous small workshops in the Cotswolds and other far-flung parts of the British Isles, marketing their goods over the internet.
The Guild was liquidated in 1907, though the Ashbees stayed on in Broad Campden, watching as the 50 original craftsmen slowly dwindled in number. It was a dispiriting end, and Charles drifted, unsure of where to turn next. That turn would be characteristically bold, the family decamping to Jerusalem, where Ashbee would work as a town planner and conservationist. In the thirties, Felicity would train as a painter at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, become a teacher and designer and member of the Communist Party. During World War II she worked at the code breaking centre at Bletchley Park, and in peacetime returned to London to teach art. In later years she would write, and in 2002 penned Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which brought her mother firmly out of the shadow of husband ‘CRA’.
Back in the Cotswolds, the cockney craftsmen did struggle on, but the sole survivor today is Hart Gold & Silversmiths, on Sheep Street in Chipping Campden. Ashbee would have approved of how things have gone for Hart and Co, with the business and skills being handed down from father to son. George Hart came down with the original 200 and in 1912 set up his own workshop. In 1930 son Henry came on board. And the tradition of fine work is carried on today by his grandson David Hart, along with Derek Elliott, William and Julian Hart. The company still proudly has (Guild of Handicraft) in parantheses beneath its name, though they are the only ones left. Anyone who happens to be passing through Chipping Campden between 4 and 11 October should drop in to see the company’s Guild of Handicraft 1908 - 2008 Exhibition.