7.30pm, Monday 16 November 2020, via Zoom

Members of the Society’s Chiswick Writers Research Group will be presenting some of their favourite authors. The Group has been researching authors’ biographies to enhance the Chiswick Books & Writers pages of the Chiswick Book Festival website.

We have six speakers:

Francis Ames-Lewis will be comparing Samuel Richardson, England’s first novelist with Pamela – or Virtue Rewarded (1740) & Don Taylor, playwright and director and a leading light in the Chiswick Youth Theatre

Meg Clarke on Robert Fortune, in the 19th century the manager of the Horticultural Society of London’s Chiswick hothouses. He then became their plant-hunter in China and Japan, discovering (among other plants) tea and kumquats

Hazel Dakers on Daniel O’Connell, the Irish lawyer & politician known as “The Liberator”, who campaigned for home rule and Catholic emancipation

Diana Oppé on the Tuke family, Victorian specialists in the care of the mentally ill, who had asylums at The Manor House and Chiswick House

James Wisdom on 3 generations of the Barnaby family, naval architects and Thornycroft’s chief designers

Val Bott on Jessie MacGregor, artist, teacher and writer, author of Famous Gardens and the Gardens of the Famous and Bedford Park resident

Details of this event have already been sent to B&CLHS members, but non members are very welcome to join us. To book a place at this Zoom talk, please email info@brentfordandchiswicklhs.org.uk.

Your details will be added to the list of participants and the Zoom link will be emailed to you a day or so before the event. We have 100 places available, so if your plans change and you won’t be attending, please let us know beforehand. Then, if we have a waiting list, we can re-allocate your place.

7.30pm, Monday 19 October 2020

We are delighted to have been able to rearrange this talk, originally planned for March 2020.

To book a place at this Zoom talk, please email info@brentfordandchiswicklhs.org.uk. Your details will be added to the list of participants and the Zoom link will be emailed to all a day or so before the event

Fiona Davison, Head of RHS Libraries & Exhibitions and author of the award-winning book of the same title, presents an illustrated account of her research. The young men who trained at the Horticultural Society’s Chiswick garden grounds in the 1820s wrote brief notes about themselves in an exercise book. Using these, Fiona Davison has traced the stories of some of these gardeners, revealing their careers from grand estates to suburban gardens, their success and failures (and even crimes), as well as following their connections across the world.