A Few of Our Favourite Things: A common or garden chamberstick
by volunteer Adrian
I wasn’t one of the lucky people who went to a sale in the Garden of Eden in 2001, when as instructed by the Charity Commission, items including ornaments, furniture, jewellery and paintings were sold by auction. They were possessions that had accumulated by the Society over many decades, originally owned by members who had come to live near Mabel Barltrop, and which gave an indication of the lifestyle and preferences of those dedicated but perhaps eccentric community members. The sale raised a very large amount of money.
I’ve met several visitors who bought items at that sale, including one who still uses a small table for occasional afternoon tea in her garden, and another who always sleeps in a Panacea bed, complete with heavy iron framework. They are proud of their memorabilia.
And I’ve got a chipped white enamel chamberstick. Yes, it’s the kind of thing that you associate with the the Nursery Rhyme Wee Willie Winkie, which young children would read while looking at illustrations in their bedtime book, illustrated generations ago, of an eccentric wandering through the town, dressed in a nightgown and holding a chamberstick. It was one of the leftover items offered to visitors a few years ago, for a voluntary donation.
But whose was it? Antiques programmes on television stress that the provinance of an item is vital in determining value, and I have no idea who used it originally. The fact that it was used shows how the residents were more likely to stumble up rickety staircases in the winter dark holding a flickering candle than switch on a light. Community Houses had fairly basic ameneties, with no modern electrical appliances until the latter years. Life wasn’t as comfortable as it might have been, and that included the trip up the timber hill to bed, in the semi-darkness.
Did it belong to a grey and stooping Peter Rasmussen, or did Margaret Conde-Williams use it on the way upstairs, after taking off one of her magnificent hats? More likely, it belonged to a servant. It certainly doesn’t look like the kind of thing a refined lady member might use every day. We’ll never know.
It’s sometimes pointed out that if you found a pre-decimal penny coin from the 1880s in your change, then it might feasibly have been once handled by any well-known person in the following century or so… Virginia Woolf, Churchill, Roger Bannister or Charlie Chaplin. The Panaceans aren’t as famous as those, but one of them did use that chamberstick.
