Ilkley Toy Museum - Part II

Today it's the turn of the dolls' houses - though saying that, I'm actually going to start with a hotel!

'The Original Swan' will be familiar to anyone who owns a copy of 'The Vivien Greene Dolls' House Collection' (1995) as it is featured in that book.

The house is dated to 1865-70 and is a back-opener. It was bought in a derelict state and converted into a hotel by Ms Greene.

 

The bar was specially made for the hotel. [There is a cellar in between these two downstairs rooms.]

  

Though it's furnished in a similar style, I can only spot one or two of the original contents (on the bar) shown in Vivien Greene's book, so guess it must have been purchased unfurnished.

We know that the next house, Yew Tree Cottage, was at one time owned by Faith Eaton as eagle-eyed Jenny spotted it in an old exhibition catalogue, produced by Faith Eaton and Michal Morse in 1986.

It is dated to the 1880s and has eleven rooms, stairs, dairy and stable.

It was apparently built for an Ellen Richards at the family iron foundry and it is a replica of the family home near Birmingham. 

The rooms are small but have a very charming and cosy feel to them.

The kitchen (or maybe it's the dairy?) and the stable are brilliant!

Next up is Stafford House which appears in 'Dolls' Houses' by Olivia Bristol and Leslie Geddes-Brown (1997)

  

The house is furnished as one dwelling inside but when the doors are closed it looks like two terraced houses, each with its own front door - maybe for two sisters to play with.

The house is dated by Bristol and Geddes-Brown to c1830.

The toilet apparently has a working flush!

Happily, much of the furniture seen in the Bristol & Geddes-Brown book has stayed with the house, though a couple of rooms have switched floors.

The inhabitants are still there too, though the lady in green might be a visitor.

This looks like relatively recent wallpaper to me - Laura Ashley? I might be completely wrong.

I LOVE the treen tea set on the dresser!

Well, that's it for today - more houses from the museum very soon.

Until next time,

Zoe

Ilkley Toy Museum - Part I

Yesterday, my friend, Jenny and I visited Ilkley Toy Museum.

I'd seen their beautiful Victorian pet shop featured in a dolls' house magazine some years ago, but other than that, I didn't really expect there to be a great deal in the way of dolls' houses.  Boy was I wrong about that!

I hardly know where to start but, as I've already mentioned it, I'll start with the Victorian pet shop:

I'm not a fan of pet shops in real life but I find this Victorian miniature version utterly charming.

Downstairs left-hand side. The shop seems to sell both domestic, farm and wild animals! I think those are ducks or maybe geese poking their heads through the bars of the cage under the mirror.

Downstairs right-hand side. Birds, cats and dogs.

Upstairs left-hand side. The galleried landing is a lovely feature of the shop.  

Upstairs left-hand side. Perhaps some of the prettily dressed ladies prefer to view the 'wares' from a distance.

Centre foreground. Fish and rabbits.

As I said, I had heard about the pet shop but I hadn't heard about the toy shop:

It's amazing! So many tiny dolls!

My friend Claire, or 'Bobadoll' as she's become known, would have been in seventh heaven if she'd been with us. Unfortunately, she lives several hundred miles away - next time you visit, Bobadoll!

Tiny doll heaven!

Such an array of wonderful objects.

Some very lovely customers too.

And finally (for today) I was absolutely blown away by Mrs Kendall's Glass Shop:

Here is the proprietress herself doing a spot of knitting behind the central counter. 

Left-hand side. The information in the museum said that the contents are from the 1840s.

Right hand side. The assortment of tiny glass and china items on display is astounding.

The little Grodnertal customers are fabulous too.

And I'd give my right arm for the AMAZING glass dog, reclining happily at the front of the shop!

So that's it for today. Next time I'll post photos of the dolls' houses - some of which were surprisingly familiar to us!

Until next time,

Zoe

Sassy Teenage Grecon

Dolls' housing and blogging largely had to be put on hold this week as I had a [non-dolls' house fanatic] visitor, so it's a pretty low news week.

It did, however, herald the arrival of this sassy young Grecon lady.  Initially I thought she had quite a punky look but that didn't seem to fit with her age.

After much Googling of fashions, however, I'm thinking that she's trying to rock this 1960s psychedelic mod look, though maybe not as quite as successfully as the lady on the left..!  It seems to me that she has thick black eyeliner and/or heavy mascara like the model too.

The cowl neck on her dress does seem to have been a feature of 1960s fashions.

  

Her pale blue fishnet tights are fab. I've had a close look at them and think they're probably original as they're well-sewn on and go right up into the waist of the dress.   My Googling also threw up an advert for pale blue (and various other colours) fishnet tights and knee-highs from an article in the April, 1968 edition of 'Seventeen' magazine.

This is her from the back where her "GRECON MADE IN ENGLAND" label is tacked to the dress.  Her hair is in a pony tail and looks like either very fine baby hair or mohair, though it could possibly be fine Nylon - I don't know if there's a way to tell for sure.

We don't have many teenagers in Grecondale but this young miss is certainly different to the ones we do have.  Perhaps Antonio and Guy will see a sharp rise in teenage girls coming in to Curl Up And Dye hair salon and asking for fringes!

Until next time,
Zoe

And a tiny more about Beatrix Potter's Dolls' House!

Another little post because I like snippets of information like this!

Beatrix kept in touch with her last governess, Annie Carter, who was only three years older than herself. Annie subsequently married, becoming Annie Moore, and went on to have eight children.

The two lovely miniatures above the fireplaces in the living room of the dolls' house at Hill Top are of her two youngest children.

  

This miniature is of Hilda Moore, born May 1902.

And this miniature is of Beatrix Moore, born November 1903.

The miniatures were painted by Annie's older sister, Rosie, who was a miniature artist.

Until next time,
Zoe

[Source: Lindeth Howe Country House Hotel blog]

Dolls' House Doings Today

One or two minor dolls' house happenings here today.

Firstly, this little object arrived in the post. It's two inches high and I don't know if it was originally made for a dolls' house, but it will make an excellent (if sizeable), decorative ice bucket.    

The inside is painted with enamel and it has a little pair of tongs with it.  It was very inexpensive and as soon as I saw it I knew the inhabitants of my Ultra Modern (Triang 53) would have to have it.

I filled it with ice (broken car windscreen glass - a tip I got from Cestina) and Percy, Liz, Antonio and Guy are delighted with it.  If any household needs a large ice bucket it's this one..!

Next, a bonnie wee Scots lassie called Jeanette, reminded members on the Dolls' House Past & Present website that now would be a good time to collect tiny flowers to press.  I would love to have a go at making a dolls' house picture with dried flowers so, while I was out walking with the dogs today, I collected this assortment of flowers and foliage.

This is what I ended up with from that pile - flowers that looked tiny outdoors actually looked much larger when I started visualising them in little picture frames!  Anyway, I arranged the little flowers and leaves on a piece of watercolour paper and placed another on top.

The flowers are now squashed beneath a pile of books on a bookshelf and I will wait with baited breath (I'm not sure for how long - I'll have to look into that!) to see if I end up with anything I can use. I will report back on how I got on in due course.

Finally, I have been trying to make my mind up between two fabrics for the bedding in the Triang Princess 2. 

I received these very pretty small-print fabrics during a fabric swap with my friend, Edel.

The sprigged fabric at the back is gorgeous but I think I'm favouring the striped one at the front as it seems to provide a bit of contrast to the green walls whereas the other one seems to be absorbing the green. I will continue to mull it over.

Until next time,

Zoe

More About Beatrix Potter's Dolls' House

Well I was very pleased to learn that the dolls' house I saw at Hill Top last week definitely was owned by Beatrix Potter!

However, it wasn't her childhood dolls' house and it wasn't the inspiration for the dolls' house illustrated in The Tale of Two Bad Mice either.

Beatrix acquired the house over thirty years after The Tale of Two Bad Mice was published and she would have been about 73 years old at the time. The house is though to date to circa 1865.

The National Trust House Steward at Hill Top said:

"Beatrix acquired the doll’s house in Hill Top from the sale of the estate of an amazing American lady called Rebecca Owen [d.1939] who lived near Hawkshead; being so similar to the one that Norman [Warne] originally made that it was too good an opportunity to miss."

And what about Winifred Warne's Dolls' House which did inspire the illustrations for The Tale of Two Bad Mice?

Very sadly, this house has gone missing, though it so nearly ended up at Hill Top as the National Trust House Steward at Hill Top explained:

"Fruing [Warne] asked Beatrix to look after the original dolls house after Harold [Warne] was arrested for embezzling the company's money in 1917, serving 18 month hard labour. However, Beatrix suggested that the original dolls house should be lent to a children’s hospital; Her mother hadn’t seen the scandalous reports in the newspapers and Beatrix didn’t want to make her aware of them – having the doll’s house back at home would have aroused her suspicions………..from all the research that has been done over the years it seems the doll’s house never emerged from the hospital and its whereabouts is no longer known."

[Fruing and Harold Warne were Norman Warne's brothers and Beatrix's editors; by this time Norman Warne had passed away.]

'Beatrix Potter's Letters' (1989) by Judy Taylor, states that although Beatrix suggested the house go to a children's hospital: "The doll's house was sold to the family who lived next door to the Warne family and it has since been lost." No source is attached to the note so I don't know who is right.

Either way, the house seems to be lost and what I do know is that I will now dream forevermore about finding it peeping out from under a stall at a car boot sale or hiding in a dusty corner of a junk shop!

Many thanks to everyone for the great feedback and information I received following my last post.

Until next time,
Zoe


[For anyone interested in the details:

After an appeal for information on the amazing 'Dolls' Houses Past & Present' website (DHP&P), Rosemary Myers quickly confirmed Beatrix's ownership of the house by reference to 'English Dolls' Houses of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries' (1955) by Vivien Greene. Unfortunately, I don't own a copy of this book. 

This prompted me to look through my own dolls' house books (I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before!) and I found the following entry in 'The Collector's History of Dolls' Houses' (1983) by Constance Eileen King:

"The doll's house at Hilltop, now owned by the National Trust, though often thought to have been the inspiration for the well-known story, was in fact obtained at a much later date.  It seems likely that the well-made battlemented house in the style of the 1860s-70s was bought locally, as it appealed to Beatrix Potter's fascination with miniature objects and made a suitable repository of th food she had made for The Tale of Two Bad Mice."  

[I'm not sure about "food she had made" as Beatrix's correspondence with Norman Warne mentions that the food was purchased by him from Hamleys toy shop in London.]

Edel from DHP&P also confirmed that there was a good photograph of Winifred Warne's house on page 124 of Margret Lane's 'The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter', taken from the same angle as the full view of the house in the book and very kindly sent me a scan of it (see above). 

Apparently Lane's book mentions that Beatrix Potter's mother wouldn't allow her to visit Winifred Warne's parents to see the completed dolls' house as she thought the family beneath her in status. Beatrix had seen the house under construction by Norman Warne in his parents' basement, but only thought of using it for a story after it had gone to his niece Winifred, so she had to work from photographs.

Jenny from DHP&P mentioned that she had read somewhere that Winifred's house was missing, which led me to find an online excerpt from 'Beatrix Potter's Letters' (1989) by Judy Taylor, which contains a transcript of the letter in which sending the the dolls' house to Hill Top and/or lending it to a Children's hospital is discussed, as well as the note indicating that in fact it was actually sold to the Warne's next door neighbours instead.]