Henley Society

THIS is an edited and augmented version of a talk by Michael Redley, a member of the Henley Archaeological and Historical Group, to a recent meeting of the Henley Society.

The foundation stone for Henley’s new town hall was laid with great civic ceremony on Friday, June 9 1899.

The old town hall, built a century earlier in another era, was demolished to make way for the new.

A grandstand hung with bunting was built over the new foundations from which dignitaries — town councillors, mayors from neighbouring towns, freemasons and grandees from the estates around the town — could watch proceedings.

The fire brigade and the band of the local military volunteers, the Oxford Light Infantry, were in attendance.

The town council asked all local shops to close for the afternoon so that townsfolk would watch, although 3s 6d was charged for admission to an enclosure for ordinary spectators from which very little could be seen. Some shop assistants bunked off to enjoy their unexpected free afternoon instead.

Spectators improved their view while evading the charge by hanging out of windows around the market place. A bottle containing a copy of the Henley Standard, with a photograph of the old town hall and an architect’s drawing of the new one, was put under the stone before it was lowered into place.

The ceremony was performed by William Smith, the heir to the W H Smith newspaper distribution and railway bookstall empire, who lived at Greenlands on the Thames — now the business school of Reading University — and gave half the money for the new hall.

What was the new building all about? Its ostensible purpose was to celebrate Queen Victoria’s 60 years on the throne.

But there was considerable opposition to the idea of marking the occasion with a new town hall. Several other ideas, including a new sports and recreation ground, a riverside garden and a cottage hospital, would have done the job at much less cost.

The old town hall was much-loved. With its pillared front and balcony facing on to the square from which proclamations and election announcements were made, some thought that it looked like a proper town hall, whereas the new design did not.

There were objections to tearing down the old building when Henley should be conserving its older buildings which attracted visitors to the town.

The council’s appeal for donations from local tradesmen and private individuals raised hardly a penny.

Feeling in the town can perhaps be gauged from the fact that, in defiance of the council’s request, many shops remained open on one of their busiest trading days of the week.

The new town hall was, however, the culmination of a process of change which had begun 25 years before.

It was designed to mark the town’s modernisation and to round out its redevelopment, which had begun with a piped water supply in the 1870s and a sewage system in the 1880s.

In the early 1890s, the boundaries of municipal control were pushed out to the south, for the first time taking in the new suburbs growing up rapidly along the Reading road and on the rising ground of the St Mark’s estate to the south-west.

The extra rates from these areas gave the town more revenue for improvements.

When the post office was relocated from Market Place to the corner of Friday Street and Reading Road the town’s centre of gravity was shifting away from the old centre and the council began actively to reshape the town around the new reality. The old higgledy-piggledy streets were straightened and widened for modern motor traffic and commercial activity.

The commercial heart of “greater Henley” was no longer the Market Place as it had been since medieval times.

The new town was celebrated in the elegant clock tower and lantern of the rebuilt Congregational church in Reading Road, which was finished in 1908.

Much was being done. But, as one councillor said in 1896, the town still lacked a recreation ground for its young people, a factory for the town’s unemployed and a better town hall.

This modernisation was the work of a single-minded group on the council, teetotal and Liberal in political sympathies.

They included Charles Clements, a builder, Frederick Ball, a plumber, William Coates, a linen draper, Joshua Watts, a tailor and outfitter, and Edmund Chamberlain, a grocer. These were the pioneers of elected local government in Henley, all from humble backgrounds.

Progressive local government could perhaps achieve more then, when the central state was much weaker, than it can today. Even so, the achievements of the early elected council represented by these men in transforming the town were remarkable.

A new town hall, therefore, had to be worthy of the larger modern town Henley aspired to be.

The idea initially came from Clements when he was mayor 10 years earlier.

The large meeting room of the old hall could seat only 120 people and what was now needed was a space with at least four times the capacity.

Freezing cold in winter and without modern sanitation, the old building was “a lathe and plaster shame”, according to Watts.

Clements would have located the hall further up Gravel Hill and West Hill so that the new Kings Road would pass in front of the hall instead of behind it as it does now, creating an even grander market place as the focal point for the town.

As well as a fitting municipal building, the Liberal progressives saw a new town hall in political terms.

Election to the town council on a broad popular franchise was introduced in 1884. This resulted in the old Anglican establishment with strong links to the countryside losing control to the town’s traders, builders and small businessmen, many of them from non-conformist backgrounds.

A building big enough to accommodate the town’s electorate meant there could be no going back as well as enabling the town to attract the speakers of the new popular Liberalism to address political meetings.

However, this brought out the political opposition and when in 1886 Clements proposed a major overhaul of the old building — even showing that it could be done without costing ratepayers a penny — a public meeting voted down the idea.

Clements complained that the meeting had been packed with Conservative supporters who sympathised with the project but were not going to let the Liberals have the satisfaction of bringing it to completion. In the end a political truce was needed for the project to proceed.

A centre for the town’s freemasons had been built in the extended town, opposite the Congregational church in Reading Road.

Chamberlain, a progressive Liberal, was made mayor in 1896/7 when a decision had to be made on a memorial for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. He was also a Freemason, as was his successor, James Lidderdale, a local doctor and Conservative.

The truce was marked by the fact that Chamberlain’s name appears together with Lidderdale’s on the foundation stone, which was finally laid during Lidderdale’s second term as mayor in 1899. Everything was done to keep politics out of the project.

Chamberlain announced at the outset that nearly all the money had already been pledged by local grandees — William Smith, William Makins, of Rotherfield Court, Archibald and George Brakspear, Frank Crisp, of Friar Park, and George Gardiner, of Bolney Court — so that ratepayers would have to contribute only a minimal amount.

The competition among architects to design the new hall produced six entrants. The winner was chosen by an external adjudicator unconnected with the town purely on the architectural merits of the design. Henry Hare was a rising young architect who had recently also won the competition to design Oxford’s new town hall.

The larger hall, said Smith in his speech at the laying of the foundation stone, would allow “meetings, exhibitions, bazaars and industrial exhibitions”, adding “to the dignity of their local life and institutions in this town”.

The ceremonial side was covered by the Freemasons, who laid their own substantial stone as part of the celebrations.

When the new hall was completed, the town didn’t quite know what to make of it and there was a debate about whether it should now be known by its older name, “The Guildhall”. The public opening in May 1901 was a low-key event. The Queen, in whose honour it had been built, had by then died.

On the day of the opening, Smith was prevented from officiatingby the illness in his family.

The role was performed instead by the local MP, William Hermon Hodge, with literally only five minutes’ notice. Somehow he found some appropriate words.

In any case, exuberant public ceremony would have been out of place as the Boer War, in which many local men were fighting, was continuing.

The general verdict in the town was that the new building was dour and forbidding from the outside. The Builder’s Journal was quoted in the Henley Standard to the effect that, wonderfully modern though it was in concept and design, it did not give very clear or obvious expression to “the town hall idea”.

The grumbling subsided when townsfolk were allowed inside on the opening day. The upstairs hall in particular was much admired as something genuinely new in the town.

In his speech at the ceremony, Makins said the new hall provided space in which “young men can drill and young women can dance”.

Hare the architect claimed that at least the building was “absolutely English”, without “meretricious ornaments” and a character in keeping with the town. He hoped that in time it would “be regarded with more indulgence”.

The old town hall has never been entirely forgotten. Clements acquired the building in 1896 as part of a contract to demolish it and re-built it as his own home at Crazies Hill on the Berkshire side of the river. It is still there today.

In his speech at the opening of the new town hall, he said that knowing the love and veneration of townspeople for their “old friend”, he thought it would not be out of place if he
re-erected it. They had only to cross the bridge to see it there in its “native simplicity”.

The old world had been simpler, but it had gone. The new hall gave expression to the “greater Henley”, which elected municipal government had created in its place.

• Thanks to Hilary Fisher and David Feary of HAHG for permission to use the photographs.