WOLVES AND SNOWSTORMS, camels and unbearable desert heat; bandits, murder attempts and night raids by enemy tribes; precipices, dangerous rapids; convicts, Cossacks, nomads – as well as balls and a fourteen-course dinner party for an archbishop: all this (and far, far more) was experienced in Thomas Witlam Atkinson’s seven years’ travels with wife and infant son by foot, horse, sledge, carriage, boat and raft for nearly 40,000 miles in the remoter parts of the Russian Empire, resulting in 560 watercolour sketches and fame as ‘the Siberian traveller’.
It had all begun in the year 1846 when a forty-seven-year-old, humbly-born Yorkshireman, stonemason and architect wrote the following letter:
To His Imperial Majesty Nicholas the First, Emperor of All the Russias
Sire,
The encouragement which your Imperial Majesty has always extended to Art and Science induces me to petition for your gracious permission to visit a province of Your Imperial Majesty’s Mighty Empire, The Pictorial features of which have not yet been much developed.
It has been suggested to me by Baron Humboldt [the famous scientist, explorer and geographer] that the Ural and Altai mountains would supply numerous and most interesting subjects for my pencil.
I am induced to hope that my great experience in sketching and painting would enable me to bring back a vast mass of Materials that would illustrate these portions of your Imperial Majesty’s Empire. As I should be accompanied by a gentleman who has devoted much time to Geology he would take notes of the Geological features of the Country and thus I wish render our united labours of great value.
Permit me Sire in profound deference to solicit permission to lay before Your Imperial Majesty my drawings of India, Egypt, Greece as a proof of my competence for such an undertaking.
With sentiments of Profound respect for your Imperial Majesty I subscribe myself
Sire,
Your Imperial Majesty’s most devoted and most faithful servant
T.W. Atkinson St Petersburg 19 August 18461
This is the extraordinary story of a village lad born a little over two hundred years ago who rose from nothing to being a successful architect, gave up all to travel with a passport granted by Tsar Nicholas I for remote parts of the Urals, Siberia and what is now Kazakhstan, returning with hundreds of watercolour sketches now mostly lost, of the books he wrote and the fame he won and his descent into near-oblivion today. It is a story too of his indomitable wife, Lucy, and of what became of her and of their son, Alatau Tamchiboulac Atkinson, born in a remote Cossack fort, and his own significant career in Hawaii. It is a story of a talented and ambitious self-made man, of determination, endurance, narrow escapes from death – and love. It is a story that includes many famous people both in England and Russia, embracing Queen Victoria and two Tsars, Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Livingstone and the famous Decembrist exiles. But it is a story too of the conflicting demands of artistry and reputation on the one side and fidelity on the other.
The village of Cawthorne, mentioned in Domesday Book, lies on a hillside in the lee of the Pennines. At the end of the eighteenth century most of the 1,000-odd inhabitants were labourers working on the land or in some trade, and the quiet, middle-class village of today (bypassed now but then on the main turnpike road from Manchester to Barnsley) is bereft of those earlier coal and ironstone mines, tanneries, mills and smithies and their bustle. Built of the local grey stone, the village was basically part of the Cannon Hall estate owned by the Spencer Stanhope family, and the eighteenth-century mansion set in a rolling, landscaped parkland lies half a mile from the village. Head mason on the estate then was a widower, William Atkinson, who fell in love with and married a housemaid in the big house, Martha Witlam. To them was born on 6 March 1799, in their ‘two-up two-down’ next to what was then the Wesleyan chapel, a son, Thomas.
Headstone, St Mary’s churchyard, Cawthorne
As a young man Thomas designed and cut this fine headstone to his parents and his father’s first wife. It was this first example of his talent that led to his executing the altar tomb in the adjoining church.
He was the first child of their marriage (a second son, Henry, died aged only a year old), and there were two later daughters, Ellen and Anne.2 Tom attended the one-room village school (today the seventeenth-century parish hall) on the edge of the churchyard. Some of his schoolfellows described him years later as ‘a lad of dull parts with no aptitude for learning’ and ‘no indications of future promise’, but others thought he was ‘likely to make his way in the world’.3 Tom Atkinson, as his schoolfellows called him – only in adulthood did he add his mother’s maiden name – often took part in boyish escapades as well as in the village sports, which he greatly enjoyed.
From the age of ten his father took him from school in the summer months to act as his labourer, probably in a quarry on the estate. The boy’s innate intelligence luckily made up for this interrupted education, and the journals he was to write on his adult travels are both well-expressed and literate, bar some idiosyncratic punctuation and spellings (here retained). And he would at least have learnt from his father how to cut stone – fundamental to his upward progress. In the winter, however, he continued his schooling and, fortunately, his elder half-brother, Charles, who had been to a good school in Sheffield, gave the young Tom lessons in writing and drawing, ‘and he soon displayed great proficiency’. Furthermore, at about this time he was given4 a set of mathematical instruments, a great prize to him and an important step forward which unknowingly pointed the way ahead.5
Continuing to assist his father, he steadily acquired a stonemason’s skills. In 1817, when he was eighteen, his mother died, aged forty-six. His father was to live another nine years, dying at fifty-six, according to the fine headstone at Cawthorne – ‘considered at the time as a very creditable performance’ – which the young Atkinson cut in memory of his parents and his father’s first wife.6 The headstone therefore negates the statement in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography among others that he was left an orphan when a child; and there seems to be no evidence to support the assertion that ‘he began to earn his own living at the age of eight, first on a farm, then as a bricklayer’s labourer and quarryman, and subsequently in a stonemason’s yard’, although certainly he began his career as a mason’s labourer under his father.7 The suspicion must arise that Atkinson may have invented this story, either to solicit sympathy or to add admiration for his upward social climb.8
The year of his mother’s death, he was walking every day to Barnsley, five miles east of Cawthorne, helping to rebuild the old St George’s Church, now not only as a mason but a stone-carver as well, producing such fine work that, according to one source, he was ‘recommended to move on’. At this time he was noted for his steady habits and profitably employed leisure time,9 which perhaps meant studying the principles of architecture. Two years later, on 1 April 1819, aged only twenty and giving the occupation ‘mason’, he married in Halifax, a town known for its woollen mills and stone quarries, the twenty-four-year-old Rebekah Mercer,10 daughter of a local shoemaker, about whom almost nothing is known.11 Was this a ‘shotgun marriage’, given his youth and the disparity of ages? Yet a first child, Martha, was born only the following year, a second daughter in 1822 and a son, John, in 1823.12 Or was it even a secret marriage, as it does not figure in any biographical entry?
It was, indirectly, the death of the squire of Cannon Hall, Walter Spencer Stanhope, in 1821 that set the young Atkinson on his career. The genial Walter Stanhope, who had added ‘Spencer’ to his name on inheriting the Hall from his uncle, would present his tenants at Christmas with joints of beef – thus earning Cannon Hall the sobriquet ‘Roast Beef Hall’. Educated at Oxford and the Middle Temple, he attended the wedding of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette at Versailles. He was an assiduous MP for thirty-nine years, representing five parliamentary constituencies, and a staunch supporter of the Younger Pitt, whom he claimed to have persuaded to colonise Australia.13 His friend, William Wilberforce, the abolitionist and another Yorkshireman, often stayed at Cannon Hall.
Already wealthy from his estates and the Spencer iron and coal, Walter married – happily ever after – the heiress and youngest daughter of ‘Coke of Norfolk’, the famous agriculturist and later 1st Earl of Leicester. She bore him fifteen children (ten of whom were inoculated against smallpox by Baron Dimsdale, who had inoculated Catherine the Great’s family),14 and Cannon Hall became the centre of a happy family life.15 The family was to produce in time its own artist, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829–1908), a well-known Pre-Raphaelite.
Shortly after Walter’s death the young Atkinson showed the sixth son (later the Rev. Charles, four years older than Thomas) his design for a Tudor-style tomb in Cawthorne church to commemorate the late squire. The future cleric felt it showed so much talent that he told Atkinson that ‘he had his fortune at his fingers’ ends but not as a mason’ and ‘I let him have no rest’, he wrote much later in an unpublished memoir, ‘until I had persuaded him to leave home’.16
John, Charles’s elder brother and the new squire, was equally impressed and also did what he could for the talented young villager. John’s wife, Lady Elizabeth Spencer Stanhope, was to write to her husband in May 1825, ‘you have done a real good deed in introducing Atkinson to Westmacott’ (Richard Westmacott, 1775–1856, well-known sculptor). Nothing, however, seems to have come of it, perhaps because Atkinson saw himself as a future architect rather than a sculptor.
Both brothers were nonetheless crucial to Atkinson’s career. While Charles encouraged him, acted as a quasi-patron all his life and eventually wrote his life story, John, ‘an amiable intellectual’ and twelve years older than Thomas, fired him with the zeal to travel by his own particularly adventurous, indeed almost calamitous, travels as a young man. In 1810, aged twenty-three, with Westminster and Oxford behind him, he set off for Greece, and disappeared. His return to Cannon Hall three years later was ‘the happiest day of his life’,17 signalled by great demonstrations of joy both in the Hall and Cawthorne itself, where he had been presumed dead.
For Atkinson, the young squire’s adventures were pivotal. His ‘desire for travel had been kindled at an early age by the[se] stirring incidents’ ‘and his young mind [was] so impressed with the romance of travel … that … [it] was imbued with the idea that to travel in an unknown land was the greatest achievement any man could aspire to’. It inspired him with his life’s ambition: ‘to emulate or even surpass’ the researches of his former patron.18 But all this was well in the future.
Around the year 1820 (when he would have been twenty-one), Atkinson moved to Ashton-under-Lyne, a market town on the road to Manchester dating from Norman times. Here he worked as stonemason on the new St Peter’s parish church, showing his talent for carving and sculpture as at Barnsley,19 and for some years taught drawing as well. When he drove by the church many years later, now a successful architect himself, he would point with his whip to the corbels he had carved in his early career.
Altar tomb, St Mary’s, Cawthorne
Thomas’s headstone in St Mary’s churchyard so impressed the two Spencer Stanhope sons that they commissioned him to produce an altar tomb in Gothic style to their late father, Walter, the previous squire, and Charles persistently urged Thomas to seek his fortune. A plaque was dedicated in 2015, in the presence of his descendants, to commemorate Thomas’s handiwork.
After seventeen years as an architect (see Appendix I), he went to Hamburg, where he failed to win a major competition to replace a historic church burnt in a devastating fire. Coupled with this huge disappointment was an even greater one, the death at twenty-three of his only son John,20 who seems to have come to Hamburg with him in 1844, only to die there in April 1846.21 He had shown artistic talent young; taught by his father (they lived together in Hampstead for a time), he had exhibited in the Royal Manchester Institution aged only fourteen, and a five-line obituary in Manchester said ‘his talents were various; as a marine painter they would have been great’. His sketch of ‘The Phantom Ships’ was said to be ‘of a very high order’.22
Barnby Hall, Cawthorne
Designed on the edge of Cawthorne for John Spencer Stanhope, who never seems to have lived here, this is one of Thomas’s few designs to have survived and overlooks open fields.
Thomas may possibly have travelled to Greece and Egypt23 and perhaps even India in 1845/46, although there is a dearth of supporting evidence, but the famous geographer Humboldt, whom he perhaps met in Berlin, recommended that he should go to Russia.24 Four months after John’s death we find him in the St Petersburg of Nicholas I, having apparently abandoned his architectural career – unless he had entered another architectural competition of which nothing is known. What is certain, however, is that in the Russian capital on 19 August 1846 he wrote a letter to the Tsar that would transform the rest of his life, begin seven years of extraordinary travels and finally bring him, if not fortune, fame and distinction and three meetings with Queen Victoria.