Endanger’d Species

A photocopy of this article was recently discovered in Handover’s archives, but its origins and the author’s identity are unknown. There are no details about when or where the original was published, but this piece appears to be part of a larger article written around 1970, recounting the author’s visit to Handover in Angel Yard and a search for the now-defunct “L. P. Brush Company” (who later became part of Handover).

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Endanger’d Species

Or, ON THE TRAIL OF THE VANISHING RED SABLE FROM PADDINGTON TO HAMPSTEAD HEATH

(Or, Eat your Heart Out, Alan. Ed.)

RETURN TO THE SOURCE

Some eighteen years ago I was given a set of red sable, chisel-edge lettering brushes, made in England by a firm known as “The L. P. Brush Company” : supple, pliant, razor-sharp, they were the best lettering brushes I have ever used. Over the years I have wondered what the company was like and where it was located. I never met anyone who had heard of it until last year, when I was given a London address: 51, St. Stephen’s Gardens. This January during a two-week visit to England, I decided to go there in person – if it still existed.

The telephone directory now gives the address as Number 43a, but when l ring up there is no answer, as there was none when I had called earlier in the week. In the popular London guidebook, London A to Z, “St. Stephen’s Gardens” appears in microscopic print near Royal Oak, one tube station away from Paddington. It turns out to be a residential neighbourhood.

At a bakery near Queensway a cheese and pickle sandwich stills my hunger pangs while I cash some travellers’ cheques at a nearby bank. Loitering in the bakery, I am tempted to buy a birthday cake beautifully iced with a portrait of Mickey Mouse on the top. “ls it for a girl or a boy?” the lady asks, pointing out that there are both pink ones and blue ones. Better judgement prevails, and I walk on, past rows of attached houses in crescents, terraces, mews. St. Stephen’s Church tells me that l am getting near. The entire neighbourhood is desolate, with here and there a scaffolded building in process of interior renovation – an incongruously war-torn look. And then, St. Stephen’s Gardens: I follow the uneven numbers down the street but there is no 43a. Perhaps it is Number 51 after all: I return to look but no, these are clearly private residences. I walk back to Number 43 and on intuition descend the stone steps and there by the trash cans is a basement flat, a small calling card wedged next to the doorbell: “L. P. ‘Vinci’ Brush Co.” I ring, but there is no answer. I wait, and ring again. No one moves behind the curtained window. Perhaps they are away. Upstairs across the street is a deserted playground with a jungle-gym. It is freezing. I am reminded of Holderlin’s words: “Im Winde klirren die Fahnen.” “The weather vanes clatter in the wind.” My time in London is short, and I leave.

The leading artists’ brushmaker in London is A. S. Handover at Angel Yard off Highgate High Street near Hampstead, a well known part of London but not to me. Earlier that week a voice on the telephone had told me that I should come well before 5 o’clock in order to choose a selection of brushes. I ride a double-decker bus through the winding streets to Camden Town, and in the underground from there to Archway Station I am fascinated by transport posters still printed in the sans-serif type face designed for them in 1916 by Edward Johnston. Once again above ground I look for a familiar red phone booth for more explicit directions to Angel Yard. None to be seen at this busy intersection, but I spy three bakeries in a row opposite the street and stagger from one to another like an explorer reaching an oasis in the desert, gradually fortified by a buttered scone, an apple turnover, a jam tart with flamboyant pink icing.

The phone booths are inconspicuously recessed into the concrete wall of the post office across the way. When I ring, there is no answer. “Take Courage!” crows a rooster from a nearby pub sign, advertising a local beer. l courageously assume it to be the lunch hour, and drop into the Archway Tavern for a glass of Watney’s Brown Ale, watching the regular patrons play the jackpot machines. After two o’clock when I telephone again, Mr Colin advised me to walk up the hill to Highgate Village and turn left at the Angel Pub. “Angel Yard,” he says, “is unmarked.” On the way, prevented from escaping by a high iron cage and garishly spray painted in red and blue is a statue of a reclining cat, celebrating the memory of Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London. Further on, set into a brick wall, is a bronze plaque with the following inscription :

FOUR FEET BELOW THIS SPOT IS THE STONE STEP FORMERLY THE ENTRANCE TO THE COTTAGE IN WHICH LIVED

ANDREW MARVELL,

POET, WIT, AND SATIRIST;

COLLEAGUE WITH JOHN MILTON IN THE FOREIGN OR LATIN SECRETARYSHIP DURING THE COMMONWEALTH; AND FOR ABOUT TWENTY YEARS M. P. FOR HULL.

BORN AT WINESTEAD, YORKSHIRE, 31ST MARCH, 1621,

DIED IN LONDON, 18TH AUGUST, 1678, AND BURIED IN TIIE CHURCH OF

ST. GILES-IN-THE-FIELDS.

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THIS MEMORIAL IS PLACED HERE

BY THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL, DECEMBER ,1898.

There are two bookstores along the way, and I browse in each. Turning into a triangular coachyard at the Angel Pub, I am confronted by an anonymous facade of identical green doors. On a balcony above, Mr. Colin awaits at the top of a narrow iron spiral staircase, pointing to the small white sign which I, a signpainter, had overlooked. “I was afraid you had gotten lost,” he says. Inside the tiny office, the walls are lined with shelves and drawers and boxes and cards of brushes. A family business since the forties, it is now run by Mrs. Irene Handover, who is seated at the desk attending to the paperwork. I recognise hers as the voice I had heard on the telephone, and by way of introduction we exchange the names of lettering artists mutually known to us.

It is like being in the candy store: ”I’ll take three of these. and four of those, and some of those over there.” Gradually I make a selection: some pointed red sables known as “signwriters’ pencils”, some short-haired chisel-edged brushes, some handle-less “coach liners’ quills” (the “lark”, the “crow” and the “‘large duck”). I am especially intrigued by a set of outrageously long-haired chisel edged brushes – the Taurus Series — that I had known from the Handover catalogue. I also hope to buy some fine red sable “brights” in order to follow Father Edward Catich’s instructions for drawing the Trajan capitals, and am shown a set on long red and maroon handles.

“I am embarrassed to tell you this,” I say to Mrs. Handover, “but I am going to cut these handles down – they’re too heavy.” “We have some on short handles,” she suddenly remembers, and brings out an assortment left over from a special order for a previous client. I am aware that I have exceeded my customs allowance by half, and mentally calculate that I will have to send some home by air, in amounts not to exceed the value of ten dollars a day. Mr. Colin graciously brews a cup of tea, and takes me next door where an assistant shows me how the sable hairs are sorted, measured, cupped and tied, inserted into nickel-plated ferrules and glued, the ferrules crimped, and the name stamped on the handles. Two of the three brushmakers are home with the flu and production is slowed. I am encouraged to test the brushes in a cup of water but time does not fully allow it, and the experienced signwriter knows that a brush dipped in water does not behave in the same way as a brush loaded with paint : he trusts to luck.

It is evening rush hour, and Mrs. Handover gives me a lift to a nearby underground station: “Just down that little slope to the right.” Brushes on cards in boxes under my arm and my head in the clouds, I realize a little later that I have completely forgotten about the slope. I retrace my steps in the early dusk when a local resident sets me straight, and within the hour I am back on the 1800 train from Paddington.

Read the article in it’s original format here >