No.8 Woodstock Road: Yeats family home, 1879-1881

Location 6

No.8 Woodstock Road
No.8 Woodstock Road — one of the earliest Bedford Park Houses, John Butler Yeats moved his family here in 1879 to be in the company of artists, but moved to Dublin in 1881
Architect's plan of Woodstock Road houses
Original plan by Edinburgh-born (1831-1912) Norman Shaw, one of the chief architects of Dublin-born Jonathan Carr’s Bedford Park

Bedford Park was a place of wonder to a thirteen-year-old WB Yeats. Having lived at various London addresses, the family were living in a steep attic-and-basement Kensington house, when his father mentioned the new village Jonathan Carr was having built in Chiswick, houses with gardens and no basements, but still within reach of Godolphin in Hammersmith, then a boy’s school, which the young Yeats was attending. So Yeats had the pleasure of living in one of the first houses completed in what was almost open country beside the railway. Including the pleasure of playing among the ladders and foundations of houses still being built.

The idea of an authentic village appealed: The streets were not straight and dull as at North End, Yeats writes, but wound about where there was a big tree or for the mere pleasure of winding, and there were wood palings instead of iron railings.

More interesting still were the people: We went to live in a house like those we had seen in pictures and even met people dressed like people in the storybooks. That comment of Yeats’s tells us that Bedford Park people took the Aesthetic Movement seriously, even though it was much satirised.

In fact the “village” had been built in Queen-Anne style which was less traditional English village and closer in some ways to a Dutch style of architecture which had been imported after England’s campaign in the War of the Spanish Succession.

But alongside the Arts-&-Crafts movement’s idea of a return to the use of traditional decorative skills, Bedford Park life, and art, was very much influenced by the mediaeval themes in paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

And in mediaeval terms Yeats sees himself, in an early poem, as a jester, someone whose talent is to amuse a queen, but who cannot win her love by his wit, just as the poet finds he cannot win a lover by his words, however wise-tongued his soul or sweet-tongued his heart. Maybe it’s only by sacrificing his art, by giving up his poetry, that he will conquer?

Hear Ciarán Hinds read the poem ‘The Cap and Bells’:

The Cap and Bells

The jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,
When owls began to call:
It had grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;
She rose in her pale night-gown;
She drew in the heavy casement
And pushed the latches down.

He bade his heart go to her,
When the owls called out no more;
In a red and quivering garment
It sang to her through the door.

It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming
Of a flutter of flower-like hair;
But she took up her fan from the table
And waved it off on the air.

‘I have cap and bells,’ he pondered,
‘I will send them to her and die’;
And when the morning whitened
He left them where she went by.

She laid them upon her bosom,
Under a cloud of her hair,
And her red lips sang them a love-song
Till stars grew out of the air.

She opened her door and her window,
And the heart and the soul came through,
To her right hand came the red one,
To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,
A chattering wise and sweet,
And her hair was a folded flower
And the quiet of love in her feet.

Two Pre-Raphaelite paintings
Bedford Park’s Pre-Raphaelites and their ‘mediaeval’ world, a ‘romantic excitement’ to young WB Yeats: ‘The End of the Song’ by Edmund Blair Leighton (around the corner on Priory Avenue), ‘Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund’ by Evelyn de Morgan who exhibited in Grosvenor Gallery (dir. J Comyns Carr, bro. of Jonathan Carr) Queen Eleanor, in the picture, is seen in her house at Woodstock!