12. Laurence Henry Forster Irving 1897 [1456]
Unloading gravel at Whitstable Harbour.
LAURENCE HENRY FORSTER IRVING was born at Bloomsbury, London on the 11 April 1897 and died in Ashford, Kent on the 23 October 1988, aged 91.
He married ROSALIND WOOLNER in London in 1920 (2Q Pancras)
Laurence was an artist and scenery designer.As artist and scenic designer he was responsible for the décor of many London productions, including Priestley's The Good CompanionsI Have Been Here Before (1937) and T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He designed Michael Redgrave's Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1950 and later worked for John Clements (including Ibsen's The Wild Duck, 1955) and Donald Wolfit. He was also the first chairman of the British Theatre Museum Association. (1931)
The young Irving, son of the Edwardian actors Dorothea Baird and H.B. Irving, himself the son of the famous Sir Henry Irving, spent summers and weekends at the windmill on Borstal Hill, after his parents bought it at the beginning of the 1900s. The family lived in the miller’s cottage, often entertaining well-known figures from the stage and screen, while leaving the abandoned mill as a magical playground for their son. Laurence Irving served with distinction as a pilot in both World Wars and made a career for himself as an artist (often painting the coastal views of his boyhood ), a book illustrator, a set designer for theatre and cinema, a biographer of his famous family and the author and illustrator of 'Windmills and Waterways' (1927), an account of a boat journey through Holland. He continued to live in Whitstable with his own family, building another house attached to the mill, whose first floor he converted into a studio for his work. The Irving family was associated with the mill until 1961 when the site was developed for hotel and restaurant use. The mill still stands, now somewhat incongruously, in a residential area. None the less, the view from the top floor must be every bit as striking as when Irving described it in 'The Precarious Crust' (1971):
Quotations
No windmill can have been more magnificently situated; though its sails would never turn again it lived on to serve as a charted landmark that gave the local seamen bearings on their fishing ground. To the north of Whitstable Borstal Hill rose steeply from sea level to a height of some 200 feet, its shoulders sloping gently to the east and west. It commanded a superb view of the approaches to London River. On a clear day the coast of Essex, the opposite shore of the estuary, could be seen and lost to sight in mid-horizon. To the westward lay the Isle of Sheppey, separated from the marshes of the mainland by the broad reaches of the river Swale flowing eastward to mingle its muddy water with the sea-salted Thames in Whitstable bay. Over this delta landscape the sun set in splendour through the industrial haze of London.
For the young Irving, the mill was a wonderful playground:
To a curious boy each floor had its own enchantment ... The second floor was crammed with rough-hewn machinery – wheels geared with apple-wood cogs, grading drums driven by leather belting, and stone governors hanging from the ceiling like giant bats. Though these mechanisms were, as it were, petrified and would rattle and rotate no more, in their suspended animation they made a cave of stalactite wonders. On this floor large doors opened onto a wooden gallery that ran round the mill. The miller aloft, like the master-mariner on the poop deck, always had his eye cocked on the weather ... There, on windy days with the spreading sweeps above me, I would imagine myself on the flying bridge of a great ship.
... The intermediate floor was divided into bins, little cells with strangely angled wooden walls in which I could crouch in some discomfort but in unassailable privacy with a book or drawing pad. But my most daring delight was to climb up into the cap, to straddle the fat windshaft and, clambering through the spreading spokes of the great driving wheel, to work my way to the square trap door that opened onto the huge iron axle into which the intersecting sweeps were wedged. Unbolting it and lifting it to one side with difficulty for, like everything in the windmill, it was solidly constructed, I could gaze from my Olympian perch over the vast panorama framed in the massive butts of the sweeps.
Child of LAURENCE & ROSALIND IRVING
i PAMELA M. F. IRVING was born in London in 1921 (2Q Pancras)