TODAY IS Boat Race Day on the Thames in London, writes Peter Thompson. In Hammersmith, along the course of this annual contest of the oarsmen of Oxford and Cambridge universities, the Bampton and Gowen families will gather with their friends and neighbours, as they do every year, to celebrate the event in a garden running down to the river from their home, a four-storey 17-century house replete with history, eccentricity and magic.
The history speaks for itself in this house. Dove Cottage, a low-ceilinged residence, located at the Upper Mall, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited houses in London. A framed print of the Thames at Hammersmith, now on the wall as one enters the drawing-room, dated very early in the 18th century, clearly shows the house, almost exactly as it is today, unchanged. Its present owner is Heather Bampton, whose husband, Cyril, a retired architect, dates Dove Cottage to "very probably about 1680", which means its residents witnessed Charles II, James II and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, not so glorious for us Irish, of course, but nonetheless, ironically, one of the seminal events in the development of modern parliamentary democracy.
Outside, on the front wall of the house is a blue plaque commemorating an earlier inhabitant, TJ Cobden-Sanderson, one of the great figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, who, with Emery (late Sir Emery) Walker, the antiquary, co-founder of the Art Workers' Guild and adviser to that giant of Victorian design, William Morris, set up the world-renowned Doves Press in Dove Cottage in 1900.
Morris himself lived literally a stone's throw away - about 20 yards in fact - in Kelmscott House, a magnificent five-bay Georgian mansion overlooking the Thames.
Now a private residence, its basement, however, houses the William Morris Society (www.morrissociety.org), which can be visited, and is well worth visiting, on Thursday and Saturday afternoons.
Cobden-Sanderson it is who brings eccentricity into this story.
A Victorian barrister who abandoned the law for book-binding in 1883, he moved into Dove Cottage in 1893 to set up the Doves Bindery, creating beautifully tooled editions of the great classics of literature. There, in 1900, he was joined by Walker, who was also a calligrapher. Over the next nine years, until their partnership broke up acrimoniously, Cobden-Sanderson and Walker combined classic book-binding with outstanding graphic design to produce books to a standard of beauty regarded today by collectors and museums throughout the world as exceptional and unique. The Encyclopaedia Britannicacomments that "the restrained splendour of its books is unsurpassed".
The masterpiece of the Doves Press was the Doves Bible, a rendering of the King James text produced in 1903 with a typeface by Walker of a simple, spare design, itself based on a type by one of the earliest printers, the 15th-century Nicolas Jensen. This work, in five volumes, is now very rare and extremely valuable, in every sense.
After Walker's departure, the Doves Press continued until 1916 until Cobden-Sanderson, in a fit of pique and perhaps fearing that his former associate would demand the return of the unique Dove typeface, went out one day to Hammersmith Bridge and threw the whole font down into the slime of the Thames where, presumably, it remains today!
History does not record if the former friends were ever reconciled, and, sadly, Cobden-Sanderson died alone a few years later.
There is a very strong Irish connection to this story.
Among the visitors to Kelmscott House in the 1890s were the members of the Yeats family. WB Yeats's sister, Elizabeth, or Lolly as she was known, an art teacher, studied embroidery under May Morris, William's daughter, who was romantically linked in a "mystical marriage" to George Bernard Shaw, another Kelmscott House habitué.
Emery Walker encouraged both Lolly and her sister Susan, known as Lilly, in their artistic endeavours, and later advised them on their choice of typeface for the Dun Emer Industries' press, which the sisters set up in Dundrum, Co Dublin, in 1902.
Happily, Walker's house, a short distance away at No. 7, Hammersmith Terrace, which contains a perfect William Morris interior, is preserved today by the Emery Walker Trust and is open to view by escorted groups of up to eight people, by prior arrangement, this year commencing next Thursday, April 3rd. (Interested readers should see its website www.emerywalker.org.uk for details of viewing arrangements).
There remains the magic.
In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, the hero, Pip, stays in an old detached house in Hammersmith which has a side-gate, leading into a garden running down to the Thames. The only house in Hammersmith still extant which answers this description is Dove Cottage.
In 1995, the Irish actor Peter Gowen, now resident in the old house, and married to Heather's daughter, Anna, played none other than Pip in the Gate Theatre's production of the great Dickensian novel. . . Could it be true? It has to be.