The shop in the square revisited

This image, a reproduction of a postcard of Hitchin, showing the market square in 1922, was recently posted on a local Facebook group. I was immediately struck by the fact that the distinctive black-and-white design on the frontage of the shop in the centre of the photograph, which would become ‘Maison Gerard’, owned and managed by Gerard and Alice Ceunis, was already in existence at this date.

In the last post, I shared what appears to be the 1921 census record for the Ceunis family, placing them at a farm in Essex, where Gerard (for some reason using the pseudonym Ernest) was working as a groom and Alice as a housekeeper. It seems unlikely that they would have opened their shop in Hitchin within a year of this, and therefore my pet theory that the shop frontage was designed by Gerard is somewhat undermined.

Hitchin market square – with ‘Maison Gerard’ clearly visible – undated but possibly 1950s?

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Marketplace’ (North Hertfordshire Museum)

In another earlier post, I shared my discovery of records which tracked Gerard Ceunis’ ownership of various premises in London in the 1920s and early 1930s. In June 1922, he and an erstwhile business partner dissolved their dressmaking concern in Rathbone Place in the West End, while a commercial directory from 1930 mentions Gerard’s ladies’ dress shop in Church Street, Enfield. However, an Enfield electoral register from the same year gives Ceunis’ home address as 7 Market Place, Hitchin – the site of Maison Gerard. By 1932, his home address had changed to ‘Salve’, the house Gerard built for himself and his family on Gosmore Road, Hitchin, though in 1935 he was still on the register in Enfield, suggesting that he kept his shop there even after opening Maison Gerard in Hitchin.

The site of ‘Maison Gerard’ today

From all of this, it seems likely that Gerard opened Maison Gerard in Hitchin market square in the late 1920s, or by 1930 at the latest. If the date on the postcard is correct, it means that the characteristic frontage, which can still be seen on the premises today, must have been erected by a previous owner. I wonder who that was?

A close-up of crocodiles

I’ve mentioned before that one or two signs of Gerard Ceunis’ art can still be seen on buildings around Hitchin. Perhaps the most prominent is the decorated carved awning that he created for what was once a café and is now a furniture shop at 9 Bridge Street. As I also noted in an earlier post, Ceunis’ granddaughter Tessa Cathcart has informed me that her grandfather actually owned the building, along with a number of other premises in the town.

A recent walk along Bridge Street gave me the opportunity to take a close-up photograph of the carving (see above): it helped that it was a Bank Holiday and the shop was shut. When viewed close up, it becomes clear that the pattern on the awning depicts a number of crocodiles: and I noticed that the current owners actually give their address as ‘The Crocodile House’, presumably in honour of their distinctively decorated doorway.

Examining the photo, I also noticed for the first time the carved wooden lettering on the corner above the door. We know that the awning was erected in 1935, and the number here – ‘1 35’ – appears to suggest that it was installed in January of that year.

But what about the peculiar symbol above the number: could that possibly be a swastika? However, on closer inspection, I came to the conclusion that the artist had actually interwoven the initial letters of his name – ‘G’ and ‘C’ – in an intricate pattern. And even if there were a secondary intention to create a version of the swastika, we should remember that this was an ancient mystical symbol (just the kind of thing that might have appealed to Ceunis with his interest in mystical symbolism in art and literature) long before it was appropriated by the Nazis.

Update

Walking past the shop again the other day, I noticed something I hadn’t spotted before: that the eaves of the gable end roof over the window are also decorated with crocodiles, presumably also by Gerard:

Finding ‘Salve’

If you were to leave the Hertfordshire market town of Hitchin, heading south towards London, a hundred years ago, your journey would have taken you, as it still does today, along a road through a deep cutting with steep tree-lined banks on either side. On its right-hand side, the road followed the border of the parkland belonging to Hitchin Priory, once a Carmelite monastery but by then a prestigious mansion on the edge of town, and now a popular wedding and conference venue. At a certain point, a narrower lane branched off to the right, winding up the steep hill, still running alongside the boundary of Priory Park, before striking out into the countryside towards the ancient hamlet of Gosmore.

It was on Gosmore Road, facing Priory Park, that Gerard Ceunis decided to build his house ‘Salve’, probably at some point in the 1920s. I’ve spent a while trying to identify which of the elegant early twentieth-century villas along this road might have been the Ceunis family home. However, thanks to some help from Tessa Cathcart, the artist’s granddaughter, I’ve now managed to find it. Tessa gave me a number of vital clues. One was her memory of two carved faces, on either side of the oak front door of her grandfather’s house. They are still there. Another was the well-lit attic room that functioned as Gerard Ceunis’ studio: you can still see the window in the photo below. Then there was the fact that the house was compulsorily purchased, some years after her grandparents’ death, when a new relief road was cut through the area. So I knew that the property must have bordered that new development.

‘Oakwood’, formerly ‘Salve’, Gosmore Road, Hitchin (author’s photograph)

Now renamed ‘Oakwood’, the former Ceunis property stands today in a kind of cul-de-sac. Where the road in front of it once ran back down the hill towards Hitchin, it now comes to an abrupt end and has been replaced by a footbridge that crosses Park Way, the busy relief road that was opened in 1981. A new entrance to Gosmore Road has been cut through from the new Three Moorhens roundabout. The garden behind the house is still quite extensive, and the aerial view on Google Maps reveals that there is even space for a swimming pool. But the property is now bordered by a fence and tall bushes screening it from the sight and sound of the main road, whereas Tessa Cathcart tells me that her grandparents’ property once extended across the land now covered by Park Way and by the large roundabout. This map, which overlays the new road layout on a Victorian plan of the area, gives some idea of how things must once have been, and what has been lost (I’ve added a small white dot to represent ‘Salve’):

This aerial view, and the photograph below it, both taken from Google Maps, show even more dramatically how the much-reduced property is now encircled by modern roads:

I wonder how many people, hurtling in their cars along the A602 on their morning or evening commute, realise that they are driving over the former vegetable garden of a Belgian émigré artist? And are the current residents aware that their house was the setting for a crucial scene in a postmodern Basque novel?

A Ceunis conversation

I’m extremely grateful to Mrs Tessa Cathcart, the granddaughter of Gerard Ceunis, for taking the time to talk to me, and for sharing her memories of her grandfather. Tessa is the daughter of Vanna Ceunis, the only daughter of Gerard and Alice Ceunis. After attending Bedales, the co-educational boarding school in Hampshire, Vanna married Henry Rutherford in 1936. The Rutherfords lived in Surrey, where their daughter was born. Tessa lived for a time in Gosmore, not far from her grandparents’ home. She married Nigel Cathcart and they now live in Bassingbourn, just across the county border in Cambridgeshire. Tessa Cathcart is her grandfather’s heir and has a large collection of his paintings, including some which she believes are much more interesting than those currently in the public domain, as well as many photographs of him and pieces of his unpublished writing.

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Cottages at Gosmore’, from Reginald Hine’s ‘The Story of Hitchin Town’, 1938

Mrs Cathcart described her grandfather warmly as a person who was great fun to be with, a man of lively interests, whose attic studio in Gosmore Road was full of his paintings, and whose garden was adorned with his sculptures. He was also passionate about cars and even tried to have a new kind of car engine patented. Apparently Gerard Ceunis fell in love with Hitchin on a first visit to the area and decided to settle and build a house here. In a recent post, I wrote about Ceunis’ decoration on the doorway of a building in Bridge Street in Hitchin. I hadn’t realised until speaking with Mrs Cathcart that he actually owned the building, as well as a number of others in the town, including some of the shops in Churchyard, close to St Mary’s church. Apparently Ceunis enjoyed nothing so much as touring his properties and talking to his tenants. As I’ve noted in recent posts, he was a close friend of the local historian Reginald Hine, and Tessa has a number of photographs of the two men together.

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Houses in Churchyard’ from ‘The Story of Hitchin Town’

Mrs Cathcart confirmed that Gerard and Alice Ceunis kept in touch with their old friends in Belgium, and occasionally visited the country of their birth. However, Alice, whom she described as a very fashionable lady, was not fond of travel, and Gerard often took holidays alone, with Brighton being a favourite destination. Their daughter Vanna also remained in contact with Johan Daisne, the Belgian novelist who became infatuated with her after spending a summer with the Ceunis family in Hitchin: he would send her copies of his books as they were published, which are also now part of the Cathcart collection.

When Gerard Ceunis died in 1964, his funeral took place at the parish church in St Ippolyts, and both he and Alice are apparently buried in the churchyard there. The ashes of my wife’s parents are also interred there, and we visit the churchyard regularly: once this lockdown is over, I shall certainly seek out Gerard and Alice’s grave.

Ceunis and the visual landscape of Hitchin

In previous posts on this site I’ve noted that Gerard Ceunis’ output as a visual artist, particularly in later years, is dominated by scenes of his adopted town of Hitchin. I’ve paid less attention to Ceunis’ own impact on the visual landscape of the town.

In the very first post on this blog, I wrote about Maison Gerard, his clothing shop in Hitchin marketplace, which is now the local branch of Starbucks, and the striking monochrome timbered pattern on its frontage. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that Ceunis might himself have been responsible for that design, which remains such a distinctive feature of the Hitchin townscape. However, a register of listed buildings in the town, which describes 6-7 Market Place as ‘linked early nineteenth century buildings, possibly containing still earlier structures’, claims that the ‘mock timber framing’ was added ‘c. 1920s’. I haven’t established exactly when Gerard and Alice Ceunis opened their Hitchin shop, but it seems likely it was some time in the 1920s or early 1930s, meaning that they were probably responsible for the distinctive design of its frontage. The only differences between the appearance of the building then and now are that the pale horizontal strip at the top that once bore the legend ‘Gerard’s’ is now blank, and the lower strip, which one featured the name ‘Maison Gerard’, also on a pale background, has been replaced by ‘Starbucks Coffee’ in the brand’s familiar white and green colours.

I’ve recently come across more old photographs of the building, or at least a part of it, that show something of what it was like when it was Ceunis’ shop. In these pictures (above), the first from 1929 and the second from 1955, we catch a glimpse of women’s clothing on display in the shop window, but also distinctive patterns on the awning outside the shop, which, together with the unusual frontage, betray the fact that its owner was a visual artist as well as a shopkeeper.

These photographs also reveal that the space immediately above the display window and below the awning was taken up by a row of square frosted glass panels, each divided into nine smaller squares, with a floral design in the middle square. I assume that these were also installed by Ceunis. These glass panels survive to this day, as can be seen in this recent photograph of the building from Google Maps Street View:

I’m not sure whether one would describe the patterns on these panels, or these awnings, or on the front of the building, as influenced by Art Nouveau or Art Deco. However, there is a distinct ‘Nouveau’ feel about another architectural feature, elsewhere in the town, for which I’ve discovered that Gerard Ceunis was responsible. Bridge Street, not far from the market place, is a road full of historic buildings, named after a bridge of the River Hiz that runs through the town. The road runs past Hitchin Priory and turns into Tilehouse Street, where one can see a blue plaque marking the birthplace of George Chapman, the contemporary of Shakespeare and translator of Homer. Before the opening of the Parkway bypass, this was the main road through the town in the direction of Luton.

A corner building at 9 Bridge Street, close to the bridge itself, is now occupied by a furniture shop, but apparently was once a café. According to the book Hitchin Through Time, ‘the carvings adorning the doorway…were added by Belgian First World War refugee Gerard Ceunis, proprietor of Maison Gerard in the Market Place, in 1935’. A proper close-up photograph of Ceunis’ carvings will have to wait until after the current lockdown is over, but in the meantime here are some images taken from Google Maps Street View:

Ceunis’ contribution to the Hitchin streetscape invites comparisons with his fellow Hitchin-based émigré artist, Theodor Kern (1900 – 1969), whose life I’ve also been researching. On my blog about Kern, I wrote recently about the stained glass window that he designed for the door of Perks and Llewellyn’s chemist shop in the High Street, and which is now on permanent display in North Hertfordshire Museum.

Theodor Kern’s stained glass window for Perks and Llewellyn, on display in North Hertfordshire Museum (author’s photograph)

Of course, the two artists were from different generations – Ceunis was fifteen years older than Kern – and they were refugees from different wars, Ceunis fleeing his native Belgium in 1914 and Kern his home in Vienna in 1938. Ceunis would have created the Bridge Street feature a number of years before Kern arrived in Hitchin. The two men were also very different in temperament, with Kern being devoutly Catholic and Ceunis, at least in his youth, affiliated with a number of radical social movements. However, given that both were relatively well-known artists, both emigrants, both living in the same small market town, and both having some involvement in Hitchin Art Club (Ceunis as competition judge, Kern as tutor and critic), it seems likely that they knew each other. It would be fascinating to discover the nature of their relationship, and what they thought of each other’s work.