Tales from the River Bank by Simon Loxley
On Tuesday 11 November 2025 Simon Loxley joined us at Stationers’ Hall and gave a talk titled ‘Tales from the River Bank: Emery Walker and the power of place’. Several members asked for the transcript of the talk, which Simon has very graciously allowed us to post here.
Tales from the River Bank: Emery Walker and the power of place
I first came across Hammersmith Terrace in the autumn of 1982. Not long out of my degree course, through the help of a friend I had ended a summer of unemployment with a temporary job in the design department at Island Records, who were at that period based in an elegant white stucco building on the south-west corner of St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith. One lunchtime, wandering, I went through the underpass of the A4 at the foot of the square, crossed over into South Black Lion Lane, and found myself in front of the east end of the terrace. I can remember seeing the blue plaque to Edward Johnston at no 3, which I’m sorry to say probably meant little to me at that point. If I noticed Emery Walker’s plaque further down at no 7, I can say with confidence it would definitely have meant nothing whatsoever. The fact that here were two people involved in lettering, might have struck me as an interesting coincidence, but nothing more. I would have turned to go back and continue work on my own immediate typographic problems – possible a piece of instore promotion for the rerelease of the Waitresses’ ‘Christmas Wrapping’ single, or something to keep the momentum going behind Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
Brian Eno, musician and producer, and for a while himself on the Island label, once coined the slightly awkward portmanteau word ‘scenius’, a combination of ‘scene’ and ‘genius’. He said:
‘Like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on, who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.
‘As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture. What really happened was that there were sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.
‘So I came up with this word ‘scenius’ – the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people. I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture.’
What I didn’t realise on that day in 1982 – partly because Eno didn’t think of the word until 1996 – was that I had stumbled across evidence of scenius myself. At the risk of straining the Eno analogy too far, he once did a track called ‘By This River’, and the River Thames, which runs along the foot of the gardens of the Terrace, itself became, not just a physical frontier for the Hammersmith creative community, but a contributor and player in that particular ‘ecology of talent’.
Who was in Hammersmith first, creatively? A good starting point, graphically speaking, might be the Chiswick Press, arriving in 1809 in Chiswick Mall, further to the west along the river bank from where Walker would later locate. In 1855 they would print an edition of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which contained a short story written by future interior designer William Morris. Morris came back to the Press in the following decade to print volumes of his poems.
In the late 1870s the Morrises, William, his wife Jane and their two daughters, Jenny and May, were living not far away from the river in Turnham Green, but wanted somewhere larger. That sometime third wheel in the Morris marriage, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself househunting, went to look at a Georgian place on the river called The Retreat, recently vacated by the novelist George MacDonald and his family. Rossetti thought the house was dismal, appallingly decorated by the MacDonalds, and the proximity to the river a definite minus, with the basement probably liable to flooding. Indeed the MacDonalds had moved to Italy because they thought the river was adversely affecting the health of one of their daughters. However Morris thought it had possibilities – nothing that some Morris & Co wall hangings and rolls of wallpaper and a few Oriental carpets couldn’t fix. He negotiated a cheap rent and overcame Jane’s objections that it was too far out of central London, advocating the river as an incentive for friends to come and visit. One of those attractions became the annual Boat Race party; though Morris would object to the tendency of some of his guests to climb onto the roof to get longer sightings of the contest.
The Morrises moved in in 1878, and The Retreat becoming Kelmscott House, Morris feeling that the original name sounded too reminiscent of a psychiatric institution. It was here he would hold his socialist meetings in the house’s coach house, here he would write his most influential – and arguably his best – book, News From Nowhere, and where, at the north end of Hammersmith Bridge, he and the Socialist League would squabble with the Salvation Army over street-preaching time slots on Sunday mornings. And it’s where he would found the Kelmscott Press. It was a venture that would only become a continuing reality with the assistance and advice of the man whose arrival in the neighbourhood would in time raise its cultural status to stratospheric heights. Emery Walker’s back story was in stark contrast to Morris’; the latter, born into money, University-educated, Walker forced at the age of about 12 to become the family breadwinner, following his father, a coachbuilder, losing his sight. He worked in warehouses and in clerical jobs.
However, Walker seems to have kept his soul nourished. Sydney Cockerell, business partner and later Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, said, ‘He had already imbibed an interest in some of the studies which made him later a prominent member, and for some years a vice-president, of the Society of Antiquaries.’
Walker deserved a break, and life duly offered him one. While still attending Sunday School, he had met the painter Henry Dawson, whose son Alfred founded the Typographic Etching Company in 1872, its offices in Farringdon, but the works in Chiswick. Walker joined the following year, and was with the company for a decade, during which he developed his knowledge of new and existing reprographic processes, particularly in relation to the reproduction of images.
In 1879 Walker, his wife Mary Grace, and year-old daughter Dorothy moved to Hammersmith Terrace, not to what is now Emery Walker’s House, no 7, but no 3, which later became first an annex to the Doves Press, and then home to Edward Johnston and his family, hence his blue plaque on that house. Johnston’s daughter Priscilla, in her biography of her father, talked glowingly of living in the Terrace, and of the fascination of the river:
‘Sunsets flushed the water with pink and gold, and the moon spanned it with silver. Bridget, found gazing from the window, excused her absence from bed with the wholly understandable explanation that the river “could not be left alone”.’
For someone as easily distracted from his work as Johnston, it probably had a similar effect. His and Walker’s work would become intertwined over the following years: calligraphic flourishes for the Doves Press, and a troublesome italic for Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach Press. Proximity once again must have been useful. For someone who ran his deadlines as closely as Johnston did, it was probably helpful to be able to call in on him easily to ‘see how he was getting on’.
But all this lay in the future. The Morrises were long aware of Walker before they formally met, seeing him on his way to and from work, or out with Dorothy, dubbing him ‘the brown velveteen artist’. The two men met properly at a socialist meeting in Bethnal Green in either 1883 or 1884, and the friendship took off from there.
Given Walker’s profession, it’s probably unsurprising that Morris’s interest in book design, kindled by his contacts with the Chiswick Press, started to grow again, and with it the idea of having his own press. Walker’s 1888 lecture on letterpress printing, given to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, is one of those golden evenings with which typographic history is lightly but significantly decorated. Walker was an inexperienced and unimpressive public speaker, but it didn’t matter. His audience (and it feels like anyone who was anyone was there) were completely overwhelmed by his slideshow presentation of Renaissance book types, photographed from Morris’ of course impressive personal library, the impact of seeing things that in reality are very small, on a large scale. At one slide the audience broke out into applause at what they were seeing. It was a tipping point for Morris. He decided on the journey home that he was definitely going to start his own press.
Morris was a wealthy, Oxford-educated man from a family of considerable means and social status; Walker’s roots were artisan, and he was through circumstance an auto-didact. Cockerell compared the two: ‘Though Morris was the more forceful character, each could tell the other much that he did not know, and they saw eye to eye on all important topics … Morris … did not think the day complete without a sight of him.’
In Morris’ correspondence with Walker it is possible to detect a certain master-servant tone, Morris issuing instructions and orders, whether for work, or relaxation and dining; just to give a flavour, this from possibly 1893:
‘You didn’t come last night. I should be glad if you could look in this afternoon.’
And from October 1894:
‘I am going down to Kelmscott today, and shall come up on Friday afternoon and stay a day or two: so if you are in town I shall be pleased to see you to dinner on Friday 7.30 Saturday 7.30 or Sunday 1.30 any or all of them.’
Although the creative energies of the Hammersmith river bank at this point swirl indisputably around Morris, the effect of ‘scenius’ worked for him too. Without Walker, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the Kelmscott Press would have brought out a few editions, but Morris would have become frustrated with not being able to translate his personal aesthetic onto the page to the standard he wanted, and closed down the enterprise, leaving it as a footnote in his career, rather than the crowning achievement of his ‘late period’. He might have found someone else with Walker’s knowledge, but would they have been able to devote an endless amount of small but impactful fragments of time that a near neighbour was able and willing to?
Morris knew, or came to realise, what he wanted for the Kelmscott Press in terms of typographic style. Walker’s company took the photographic enlargements for Morris to work from, and Walker found the man capable of cutting the punches – Edward Prince, whom he’d encountered while working for Alfred Dawson. He sourced the paper manufacturer, Joseph Batchelor, based near Ashford in Kent. And he solved the long-running problem of ink. No British manufacturer made any black enough for Morris’ aesthetic, but Walker came up with Jänecke and Schneemann in Hanover. And Walker persuaded Morris to make life a little easier for himself, using technology to make electrotypes of his wood-engraved ornamental letters for repeat use on a sheet, rather than creating each by hand. This came in very useful for The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, in particular the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, so many of the descriptions of the characters beginning with the indefinite article.
The boundaries of the ‘scene’ were expanding. To the north of the houses on the river bank lies Bedford Park. It has been claimed to be the first garden suburb, begun in 1875 for – and this is key – the artistic middle classes who couldn’t afford to live in Chelsea. And like one of London’s underground rivers, it seems like a creative tributary, its energies trickling down, drawn as if by gravity to mingle with those by the river.
May Morris, in a letter to Emery Walker, possibly from 1907:
‘That good creature Pissarro called yesterday, wanting something. I like him and do so admire his utter single-handed enthusiasm: he would never sacrifice to Mammon, like some of his and my friends.
‘I’m afraid Pissarro has a great struggle of it. I wish people would buy his books. I thought one he gave me lately perfectly charming. They would make good wedding presents.’
Lucien Pissarro, son of the painter Camille Pissarro arrived in London in 1890, hoping he might find a more sympathetic environment for his work than in France. He was fortunate almost immediately to gain access to the circle of Charles Ricketts, artist, designer and publisher, another attendee of Walker’s lecture who was inspired to found his own imprint, the Vale Press. Pissarro’s cousin Esther Isaacson introduced him to Walker, to whom he showed his colour wood engravings. According to Marcella Genz’s A History of the Eragny Press, Walker thought the English public were not aesthetically ready for them, but showed them to Morris and others, who were equally impressed – and equally unhelpful. Pissarro attended socialist meetings at Kelmscott House for a while, but Genz suggests he wasn’t particularly accepted as a member of the group.
But who needs William Morris? Pissarro’s Eragny Press produced its first book, The Queen of the Fishes, in 1895. Ricketts’ Vale type was used until 1903, and the books were published by Ricketts’ company Hacon and Ricketts. And it was Ricketts who influenced the move of Pissarro and his family to Bath Road in Bedford Park in 1897, considering the area a fitting place for artists to live and work.
Pissarro, although his books clearly carried a Kelmscott influence, disapproved of the historicism of Morris’ books; the Eragny output featured his own woodcuts, showing more contemporary scenes, and with a greater use of colour, the effect of the pages, lighter, brighter, more playful than those of Morris. Thirty-two books were produced by 1914, but financially the press always struggled, and the war effectively killed it.
There is an air of slight patronage in May’s letter that might give support to Marcella Genz’s suggestion that Pissarro was never fully accepted in the group. Although his pursuit of colour images may have been counterproductive in terms of the financial viability of the Press, he was ahead of the game, arguably further ahead than Morris and Walker, in envisaging the direction of twentieth-century publishing.
There are further indications of something like a wall between the Pissarros and Morris and his immediate circle. In her article ‘Pissarro’s Curtains’, Lieske Tibbe tells how Esther Isaacson, with an idea of getting Camille Pissarro’s second son Georges into gainful employment through an apprenticeship in the Morris & Co workshops, wrote to Morris, but got no reply. Pissarro senior, no fan of Arts and Crafts, had nevertheless backed this idea as an opportunity to make one of his children less financially dependent on him. But maybe some of these adverse opinions had reached Morris’ ears, and he’d decided he wanted nothing to do with the Pissarros, any of them.
By contrast, some other Bedford Park arrivees received a large amount of help from Morris’s family, and from Emery Walker. John Butler Yeats came to England from Ireland in 1867, abandoning his legal career to try his luck as an artist. The Yeatses lived at two addresses in Bedford Park, No 8 Woodstock Road, and No 3 Blenheim Road. Blenheim Road has a plaque to mark it as their home, the males only: John, poet William Butler Yeats and brother Jack, also an artist. Sisters Susan, known as Lily, and Elizabeth, known as Lolly, are not mentioned – although they do have the honour, dubious or not, of being designated ‘the weird sisters’ by James Joyce in Ulysses.
John Yeats and WB first met Morris in Dublin in 1885, and back in England in 1886, WB attended the Sunday lectures at Kelmscott House, got invited to supper afterwards, and was able to return the invitation at Blenheim Road.
Lily and Lolly made their Kelmscott House connection in 1888, when Morris, with a view to attendance at an upcoming congress in Paris, thought it would be a good idea if members of the Socialist League had the opportunity to learn a bit of the language, so arranged some French lessons. The sisters managed to get WB to take them along.
Once again proximity came into play. The sisters couldn’t afford public transport, but from Bedford Park Kelmscott House was walkable. The two families got on well together. As a result, and because of the perpetual shortage of money in the Yeats household, May Morris suggested that Lily join the Morris & Co embroidery department to learn the craft and get an income. She worked for May for six years, first of all at Kelmscott House, and later at No 8 Hammersmith Terrace, where May lived and subsequently ran the department. Lily is a merciless commentator on the Morrises, William and Jane, but particularly her direct employer, May, who became ‘the Gorgon’, obsessive and unforgiving about timekeeping, allowing no time off for illness. According to Lily everyone eventually had enough of May and would leave, and claimed that once, when May, now hosting the Boat Race party, invited people round to no 8, everyone one by one quietly made their excuses and left, only to reassemble next door at Emery Walker’s and carry on the festivities.
In 1900 John Yeats returned to Ireland. Another returnee was Evelyn Gleeson, who had been secretary of the Irish Literary Society. Attracted by the growing Arts & Crafts movement in Ireland, she had the idea of starting a workshop to produce hand-woven goods, including tapestries and carpets. Lily and Lolly were short of money again, and Gleeson’s concept seemed a good fit for Lily, with her experience at Morris & Co. But what could Lolly, Elizabeth, do? She now had the idea of starting a private press herself, producing a series of books by Irish writers. But she had no printing experience and no knowledge of how to go about it.
Once again, Emery Walker was the great enabler. According to the sisters’ biographer Joan Hardwick, Walker advised her to go to the Women’s Printing Society, which had been founded in the mid-1870s to train women for paid employment, but their activities were focussed on hand-composition, whereas Elizabeth would need to be able to operate a press as well. However Walker encouraged her ambitions. He advised her to advertise in the Dublin newspapers for an Albion press. It worked; a provincial newspaper upgrading its equipment answered the advertisement. But it’s a huge jump to go from no experience in printing to running what was intended to be a profit-making enterprise that also carried a self-imposed responsibility to represent Ireland and Irish culture.
It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine that scenius came into play once more, and that Elizabeth could have watched the Doves Press, admittedly in its fledgling stage at this point, in action, two doors down from Walker at No 1 Hammersmith Terrace. Walker gave her technical advice just as he had done with Morris; use the same ink as the great man, and set the books of what would be the Dun Emer Press in 14pt Caslon. Walker, or more probably one of his draughtsmen at Walker and Cockerell, also created a colophon device for the press, albeit never used.
Walker’s help seems to have been long-running. He was giving advice on paper and layout for the Press’ 1909 edition of J M Synge’s Poems and Translations, and page proofs for their 1920 edition of WB Yeats’ Michael Robartes and the Dancer were heavily annotated by him.
The Dun Emer was renamed the Cuala Press in 1908, and when it was relaunched in 1969, it was announced that ‘the typographical standards set by Emery Walker will be adhered to. The same typeface, Caslon, in the same size, will be used. The books will be printed at the original handpress used since 1903.’ They also used the same paper, which was made according to Walker’s specifications in Co Dublin. It was a remarkable achievement on Walker’s part to have a game plan followed nearly 70 years after its creation.
Perhaps every ‘scene’ needs, or ultimately acquires, whether sought-for or not, a leader. In the 1880s this role was naturally taken by Morris – poet, novelist, designer, businessman, publisher, ardent political activist – who could compete? But following his death in 1896, the big candidate, whether consciously or not, was the man with whom Walker now decided to be a partner, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. Together they founded another great Hammersmith Press, the Doves Press, bankrolled by Cobden-Sanderson’s wife Annie – yet another example of a geographically convenient enabler.
Unfocussed and career-drifting, Cobden-Sanderson came to bookbinding in early middle age, supposedly as a result of a suggestion by Jane Morris. The Doves Bindery opened in 1893 in Upper Mall, across the alley from Kelmscott House. At this point the Cobden-Sandersons were living in Hampstead, but in 1897 they sold their house and moved to rent No 7 Hammersmith Terrace, where they lived until 1903, at which point the Walkers took over the property, the logic to the move being that No 7 had an extra storey to the building, and a slightly longer garden. The Cobden-Sandersons moved to 24 Upper Mall, River House, next door to Kelmscott House.
There seems to be little doubt that Cobden-Sanderson was a complex personality and generally a difficult man to deal with. As early as 1886 he was resolving in his journal to control his ‘ever-growing irritability, which bursts out ever and anon over trifles’. Sydney Cockerell’s brother Douglas, who worked as an apprentice at the Doves Bindery, described his egotism as ‘almost pathological. He lacked the power of co-operation almost entirely and was almost insanely jealous of any reputation, even Morris’, that might rival his own… I doubt if he was capable of true friendship.’
Walker seemed to be able to get along with a wide variety of people, and to have been well spoken of in return, but the glaring exception is Cobden-Sanderson. It would be fantastic to have been able, perhaps in The Black Lion at the end of Hammersmith Terrace (avoid The Doves, just in case), to ask Walker, maybe on the third pint: ‘So what do you think of Cobden-Sanderson?’
The story of the most fractious relationship in type history is, I’m sure, well enough known by the ‘ecology of talent’ assembled here today for me not to go over it again, it but brings us back to the river in the most dramatic terms, and laid down another chapter in what can sometimes seem like an irresistible attraction between metal typefaces and water.
Cobden-Sanderson’s inspiration for submerging the Doves Type may have come from the almost religious connection he felt with the river. Contemplation of it, and the play of lights and shadow on the water, was a balm to his frequently agitated mind. Like Bridget Johnston, the river ‘could not be left alone’. It would become a key player in his personal spiritual system, the Cosmic Vision, which he defined as ‘the Cosmic consciousness, and self-expression – what I used to call self-assertion – self-expression in conscious self-union with the universe and its self-expression, the Cosmos’. No, I’m not sure I know what that means either.
Or he may have been influenced by the example of Charles Ricketts who, with the closure of the Vale Press in 1903, threw some of the type, the punches and possibly the matrices, into the Thames further downstream at Chelsea. It seems unlikely that Cobden-Sanderson hadn’t heard about this.
Perhaps by his actions Cobden-Sanderson secured for himself, in terms of legacy, the position of leadership of the Hammersmith scene. His dumping of the Doves type is such a bizarre and grotesque finale which, in our minds at least, brings the curtain down on this particular ‘ecology of talent’, that it, and he, remain seared on the imagination, whatever his achievements on the printed page. Whether he truly deserves it or not, we’ll give Cobden-Sanderson the last word because, say what you like about him, this man cared:
‘The river too was another heaven, full of light from the heaven above and flooded from bank to bank. I stood upon the bridge, and I walked to and fro and bethought me of the time when I had crossed and recrossed it in winter time, in the darkness, and as the buses brought protection threw the type from the bridge to the river. Then I lifted my thoughts to the wonder of the scene before me, full of an awful beauty, God’s universe and man’s – joint creators. How wonderful! And my Type, the Doves Type was part of it.’
Sources:
Peter Faulkner, ‘Dark Days in Hammersmith: Lily Yeats and the Morrises’, The Journal of William Morris Studies, Vol XI No 3, William Morris Society, London, 1995.
Marcella D. Genz, A History of the Eragny Press, 1894–1914, Oak Knoll Press, New Castle DE, 2004.
Joan Hardwick, The Yeats Sisters: a biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats, Pandora Press, London, 1996.
Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: a life for our time, Faber and Faber, London, 1994.
Lieske Tibbe, ‘Pissarro’s Curtains: a French view on Morris, Ruskin and Pre-Raphaelitism’, The Journal of William Morris Studies, Vol XXIII No 1, William Morris Society, London, 2018.
Simon Loxley, Emery Walker: arts, crafts, and a world in motion, Oak Knoll Press, New Castle DE, 2019.
