The Institute that became an Institution

The Royal Albert Institute and its Trust

Published in Windlesora 22 (2006)

© WLHG

When Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emanuel, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Consort of Queen Victoria, died prematurely on 14th December 1861 aged forty-two at Windsor Castle in the same room where William IV expired, it was inevitable, given the widespread grief, that memorials in many forms would swiftly proliferate throughout the land.

In Windsor, a golden opportunity presented itself to honour the memory of the Prince Consort. There had existed in the town, since 1835 a Literary Scientific and Mechanics Institute for the propagation of literature and music similar to a multitude of such bodies in many towns created for the educational enlightenment of skilled manual workers and artisans. They were regarded by some as fostering revolutionary ideals, although this was by no means a universal condemnation.

At a meeting on 3rd December 1866, the Institute’s Trustees resolved to erect a new building to be called the Albert Institute to comprise ‘amongst other necessary rooms, a commodious lecture hall capable of holding at least 500 persons’ and to name it the Albert Institute. Such a choice of name was imaginative and appropriate. Through his twenty years at the Queen’s side, Prince Albert had energetically espoused a cornucopia of cultural activities, not the least of which was the cause of educational reform and expansion. It was he, for example, who was much involved with the foundation of Wellington College in 1856. His artistic and scientific interests were eclectic and wide ranging. At Windsor he instigated the building of the Royal Dairy and in 1850 he formed the Royal Society for the Improvement of the Conditions of the Labouring Classes which led to housing improvements and the building of Prince Consort Cottages. In 1847 the Windsor & Eton Choral Society, founded ten years earlier, made him their first patron. No better name for the fledgling institute could have been devised.

Such is the background to the creation of the Albert Institute, the original endowment of which was set up by a conveyance dated 31st December 1867, whereby the Great Western Railway Company conveyed two plots of land in Sheet Street, Windsor on which formerly stood the Royal Mews, to twenty-three Trustees for the sum of £600. On 3rd June 1869 the Trustees settled the same piece of land for the purpose of the Windsor & Eton Literary, Scientific and Mechanics Institution.

The building committee, whose Secretary was Frank Buckland, encountered serious difficulties, mainly financial. In 1870 fresh efforts, probably inspired by a stinging attack from the local paper, resulted in a flurry of donations from some of the more affluent members and one of £50 from the Queen herself. Thereafter the building committee engaged in a new surge of enthusiasm and the project prospered, the foundation stone being laid in March 1879 by Prince Christian, the husband of the Queen’s fourth daughter. The Queen herself occasionally visited the site to inspect the progress of the works, and that she regarded the Institute with Royal favour, was evidenced by the grant of the Royal prefix. On 10th January amid scenes of jubilation the new and very handsome building was opened by the Prince of Wales.

We are told that the Institute ‘contains Reading and Class-rooms, Lending Library, Gymnasium, a large Hall for Concerts, Lectures, Balls, capable of holding upwards of five hundred persons, rooms for Science and Art Classes and connections with South Kensington, a Museum of local and other objects of interest.’ The building had a frontage to Sheet Street of 70 feet and was constructed in the late Tudor style, harmonising with other Windsor buildings and was of red brick with stone dressings and mullions with reddish brown roof tiles. The total cost was some £6,000 of which, at the time of opening, £2,500 remained to le raised. The architects were Messrs H F Bacon and E Ingress Bell of London.

As befitted the magnificence of the edifice, there was positioned in a niche over the main entrance, a splendid marble statue of Prince Albert in the robes of a Knight of the Garter, by Signor Romanelli of Florence and donated by Mrs Richardson-Gardner, wife of the town’s MP. This statue, from fear of exposure to the weather, was later replaced in its elevated niche by a stone replica, the original being moved to the large hall.*

The opening ceremony was of sufficient import to merit a glowing report in the Illustrated London News which recorded the names of the building committee (in addition to the secretary) as the Revd F J Rawlins, Dr Fairbank, Captain Bulkeley, Sir George Elvey, Mr R Richardson-Gardner, Mr Drew of Eton College and the Mayor of Windsor John Webb. The journal also depicted line engravings of the ‘imposing facade’ of the building and of the royal opening. The Prince of Wales was accompanied by the Prince and Princess of Schleswig-Holstein, he at that time living at Cumberland Lodge as a Ranger of Windsor Great Park. The royal personages were received by the Bishop of Oxford the Rt. Revd. Bishop Mackarness and the Dean of Windsor the Hon. and the Very Revd Gerald Wellesley, nephew of the Duke of Wellington and a sagacious and trusted confidant of the Queen.

The ceremony was enlivened by the combined choirs of St George’s Chapel and Eton College, together with the string band of the 2nd Lifeguards, who performed a special cantata, composed by Sir George Elvey, the organist of St George’s. The Prince of Wales received an address to which he made ‘a suitable reply’ and the Bishop gave the Blessing. That evening the members of the building committee held a well-deserved supper at the Castle Hotel presided over by Dr Fairbank, whose sudden death about four weeks later, was a great loss to the committee.

The Royal Albert Institute was in business and only four days later on 14th January, the first concert took place with a ball following in the evening. The new venture rapidly became a focus for an ever increasing expansion of the town’s cultural life. For the populace, concerts were undoubtedly the main magnet. Thomas Dyson, who came to Windsor as a Lay Clerk in 1854 and became Mayor in 1890, had a music shop at 9/10 Thames Street and for some years had been responsible for putting on a series of concerts which were transferred to the new hall as soon as it was opened.

‘Art is universal’, said Guiseppe Verdi, ‘but it is created by individuals’ and what individuals flocked to The Royal Albert Institute! At one of the early concerts, Jenny Lind — the Swedish Nightingale — sang and Princess Christian played the piano and sang with ‘a soprano voice of pleasing and sweet tone’. Audiences were to hear her on several future occasions. It was appropriate that she should succeed the Prince Consort as patron of the Windsor & Eton Choral Society. At another concert on 7th November 1881, conducted by Sir George Elvey, there is an appearance by John S Liddle ‘soloist and accompanist’ who was later to acquire fame as the composer of the music to Abide With Me.

Between 1884 and 1928, the choir of St George’s lured to the Royal Albert Institute conductors such as Sir Walter Parratt, Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Walford Davies, Sydney N Nicholson, organist of Westminster Abbey (who later founded the precursor of the Royal School of Church Music) and Sir Edward German.

At a concert in October 1922, Dr Charles Macpherson, organist of St Paul’s Cathedral, conducted some of his own compositions and arrangements. In the following year violin solos were executed by Marie Wilson, who subsequently became leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. One of the local musical lions who appeared in the Royal Albert Institute concerts was Fred Naylor, a St George’s legend, who sang alto, retired in 1959 after sixty-two years as a Lay Clerk. He lived to the age of ninety-one and his memorial tablet hangs in the Dean’s Cloister.

The new building was highly regarded by the Royal Family as attested by the signatures in the handsome visitors’ book, which was saved when the Institute closed and now is part of the Royal Borough Museum Collection.

Queen Victoria’s signature in 1895 appears as the first in the book and between then and 1902 no less than twenty-eight members of the Royal Family inscribed their names therein. These include all seven of the Queen’s surviving children, starting with the Prince and Princess of Wales, later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. In 1898, the book was signed by the Queen’s eldest daughter, ‘Victoria Dowager Empress, Frederick Queen of Prussia’. On a separate occasion, fortunately, the Royal Albert Institute played host to her son The Kaiser, William Frederick of Prussia and his wife, the Empress Augusta. The last, chronologically, of the British Royal Family in 1901 was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Alice of Athlone.

Amongst the other celebrities – a term denoting rather more gravitas than it does today – whose signatures adorn the pages of the visitors’ book appear those of Sir Arthur Sullivan, Fred and Marion Terry and Edward Spencer Churchill, great uncle of Sir Winston, who lived at Queen’s Mead in King’s Road. Also in the visitors’ book are the signatures of Sir Charles Stuntord, Arthur Bigge Baron Stamfordham (the Queen’s Private Secretary), the controversial General Redvers Buller, and William Booth, creator of the Salvation Army for whom, braving heavy rain, the Windsor crowds turned out in force. Hillaire Belloc came in 1915 and the pioneering aviators Allcock and Brown were there in 1919.

Amongst the Windsor notables are recorded the names of Philip Eliot, Dean of Windsor in 1898 and his successor, Albert Baillie, who was President of the Royal Albert Institute from 1929 to 1932. Sir William Carter wrote not only his name, but added ‘Kt. JP, Alderman, Thirteen times Mayor of Windsor’ – which office he fulfilled between 1902 and 1927 including the whole of WW1.

In 1897 the Trustees purchased 5 Park Terrace, Sheet Street, which became known as the Royal Albert Institute Annexe providing much needed additional space.

For sixty years up to the Second World War, the fortunes of the Royal Albert Institute flourished exceedingly. For most of the cultural, and indeed other, societies in the town, this was their base. All the productions of the Windsor & Eton Operatic Society were performed there and it was also the venue for a small preparatory school run by a Miss Baillie at which, as a very small boy, the writer was for a short time a pupil. A diary belonging to the writer’s father contains many entries concerning his membership, starting on 27th September 1916 when, aged 15, he, with his friend Ernest Warburton, afterwards a fashionable painter, ‘went and joined the Institute’. The paternal
diary reveals attendance in that year at various concerts whilst on Tuesdays there seemed to be regular lectures on such various subjects as the town of Reading, Regimental Reminiscences (by General Carey), the Battle of the Somme, New Zealand, Russia and the Russians, and British Malaya. On the first anniversary of the Armistice in November 1919, a Miss Akery, who presided over a dancing class to which the writer’s mother belonged in the Masonic Hall in Church Street, decided to hold a celebratory ball. So successful was this function that a second was held the following year in the main hall of the Institute which memorable event was the scene of the first meeting of the writer’s parents. Such is fate.

Between the wars, regular Saturday night dances took place in the main hall, a flourishing gym run by Capt. Shardlow, a sports master at Eton College, was another activity. There was also a billiard room and a Royal Albert Institute Tennis Club, the members of which played on courts in the Alexandra Gardens.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, the benevolent role of the Royal Albert Institute in the life of Windsor and Eton began to diminish. Many of the clubs and societies which were its life blood shrank or closed. When peace at last came six years later, the decline of the Institute as a force in the cultural vitality of the town accelerated, the buildings began to deteriorate and in 1950 the majority of the premises were let to Berkshire County Council for educational purposes. The spread of television hypnosis reduced the desire for people to seek entertainment outside their own homes and membership diminished almost to the point of non-existence. Ata meeting on 28th April 1966, exactly one hundred years after the first meeting, the Trustees resolved that the buildings should be sold.

This momentous decision could easily have denoted finality for the Royal Albert Institute but Fate had other plans. It was the legendary Raffles who declared ‘we don’t alter, Bunny, we only develop’; and so it came about that the original conception of the Founders evolved into the Royal Albert Institute Trust. The Trustees on that historic day of 28th April 1966 were Edmund Luff, Sir Owen Moorshead, the Royal Librarian, Egbert Bastow and the Revd. Ralph Creed-Meredith former Vicar of Windsor. The long serving Clerk to the Trustees, Cyril Schnadhorst, Senior Partner of Lovegrove & Durant, had died suddenly four months previously and the writer was at that meeting appointed as Clerk in his place.

Negotiations intensified over the next few months. Interest from Billy Smart’s Circus and the YMCA having proved fruitless, estate agents were instructed. Disposal of the property became ever more urgent with partial collapse of three ceilings and a spiralling bank overdraft. After numerous meetings throughout 1967 and 1968, the Trustees decided to accept an offer from Daborn Properties Limited for the sum of £36,000. The Charity Commissioners made an Order approving the sale completion of which on 18th November 1968, and was reported to the Trustees at their meeting on 2nd December 1968.

In parallel with these negotiations was the disposal of the library and various artefacts. The fine collection of books was transferred to the public library. Three oil paintings, including portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, were sold to the Friends of St George’s for £60. The latter now hang in the Vicars’ Hall (formerly the Chapter Library) and busts of Mr and Mrs Richardson-Gardner, together with four stained glass windows bearing Royal Coats of Arms were also presented to the town.

Following completion of the sale there was left in the Trustees’ hands after discharge of the overdraft, the capital sum of £25,412.12s, which was invested with the Charity Commission. Only the interest from the capital fund was to be disbursed. The Charity Commission was invited to approve a scheme under the Charities Act 1960 and this scheme, after considerable wide ranging discussion, including possible alteration of the objects, was sealed by the Commissioners on 10th October 1972, the original 1880 objects being adopted. These were “The promotion in Windsor and Eton of the study of literature, science and the fine arts and the delivery of lectures on subjects of general interest.’ To this historic formula was added a second paragraph: ‘For the purpose of carrying out the said object the Trustees may make grants to other organisations’.

Although the formalities had of necessity occupied many months, the Trustees were not disposed to delay distribution of the Trust income and at a ‘meeting on 11th March 1969, the first distributions were made. The first, fittingly, was to the Windsor & Eton Society in the sum of £100. The Minute book records ‘Mr Handcock should advise the Secretary that the Society was invited to advance proposals for a specific concert or possibly lecture in memory of the Prince Consort to be suitably named with particular reference to the amount that would be required to put on such a project’. The first Royal Albert Institute Trust concert was held at St George’s Chapel on 18th April 1970 and thereafter the Society has made it, funded by the Trust, an annual fixture in the cultural life of the town.

In due course, the old Royal Albert Institute buildings were demolished and on 30th October 1978 the Duke of Edinburgh visited the new huilding erected on the site then occupied by the Windsor Life Assurance Company to view the two restored statues of the Prince Consort. Prince Philip presented the Mayor with the original visitors’ book which has as its final entry the following inscription: ‘This visitors’ book was presented, at the request and in the presence of, the under mentioned Trustees of the Royal Albert Institute Trust, for permanent exhibition at the Guildhall Windsor by His Royal Highness, the Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, KG, KT, to Councillor N Whiteley, Mayor of the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead on the occasion of His Royal Highness’s visit to Royal Albert House, Windsor on 30th October 1978.’ The visitors’ book was actually placed on view in the Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition at the GWR Station until that venture closed when the book was returned to the custody of the local authority. (The museum).

The Trust’s finances are commendably healthy: the opening capital sum of £25,412.12s has, with careful management, grown as recorded at the 2005 AGM to some £230,000 and every year applications for funding from a variety of organisations falling within the 1880 area and objects, receive favourable response from the Trustees.

As Miss Lucy Norton records in her book The Sun King and His Loves it was the conviction of Louis XIV ‘that great enterprises are bound to succeed if the details are carefully enough considered’. Over the generations it is on the solid basis of the painstaking attention by its adherents to the mass of details surrounding the concept of the Royal Albert Institute that its amazing success has evolved and flourished. The spirit of Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emanuel, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the Prince Consort, lives on and Queen Victoria would have been more than amused; she would have been ecstatic!

John E Handcock, CVO, DL

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Note

*When the building was sold and redeveloped more than eighty years later, both marble and stone statues were damaged by vandals. After expert repair by John Gough, a local architect, they were presented by the Trustees to the Royal Borough. The Romanelli marble statute was subsequently placed on loan in the vestibule to Holy Trinity Church and the stone replacement was loaned to the new owners, the Windsor Life Assurance Company and reinstated in its original niche which was incorporated into the redeveloped building.

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