I include here a story told by my father and written up by him. It is quite charming and self-explanatory, and explains his, and my, attachment to South Kensington and its museums—and also the Albert Hall. It relates a time when some people with vision forced through vast and expensive public works for the common good.

My great grandfather, Frank Maggs—my father's grandfather in the tale—was born on Salisbury Plain; his father William Maggs was a shepherd, and his mother, Rhoda Kyte was the daughter of a shepherd. My great grandmother, his wife, was Harriet Elizabeth Chilman, one of six daughters of James Chilman and Jane Brookson, born in Merton in what is now South West London.

The Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens—opposite the Albert Hall—stands pretty much in the centre of where the original Crystal Palace containing the Great Exhibition of 1851 stood for that six months of wonder and optimism. 

All Because of Crystal Palace

When I was a boy in the thirties, growing up in a London suburb, there was a man living up on the hill above us who had a large telescope on his house. Well behaved children could visit him and look through it. Older ones went there on clear dark evenings and saw the moon and planets. In the daytime, especially during the summer holidays, the telescope was pointed at things on earth.
 
One fine morning when I went up there the man said I was in particular good luck. I would see the sun’s rays reflected in prismatic colours on Crystal Palace, which stood on a high point right over the other side of London. The effect was unique, he said; no artist had ever been able to capture it. I was fascinated to have seen a palace of crystal that actually existed and must contain wonderful things. I went round to see my grandfather about it. He was something on the Council to do with getting Works done so he would know about anything special that had been built, how it had been done.
 
Grandfather could be funny, serious or stern. He used to fight the canary to amuse me, putting his finger up at it, threatening to have it cooked for his dinner. The canary just spread its wings and put its tongue out at him which made him shake with laughter and his head go red all over because he had no hair on top. When I went round after looking through the big telescope, grandfather was sitting at one end of the table and granny at the other. “Did you ever go up to Crystal Palace?” I asked him. To my surprise he began to shake as he did when fighting the canary. Eventually he stopped and, grinning, said: “I went up there many years ago but I wasn’t looking at that old palace; my idea was to get my arm round my beloved here!” Granny feigned embarrassment and said: “What a wicked man he is to tell a child such a thing!” But grandfather was unabashed. “All the same,” he declared, “it so happens that because of that old Crystal Palace, I am here, your father is here and, by consequence, you are here!” Then he became reflective as he began to relate the reason why.
 
“My mother that was to be,” he said in measured tones, “was born in a village of Salisbury Plain way back in the 1820s. Now Salisbury Plain be not flat but a mighty expanse of rolling downs where the sky meets the horizon on every side so that people living there think they can see away to the edge of the world.” Grandfather paused, then added: “Some of them get the idea they’d like to fly over and see what is on the other side!” He grinned again. “My mother that was to be was such a one,” he announced. “When she grew up she gave out that village people ought to see London and like places to broaden their minds!” Grandfather gave a serious chuckle. “But those old village people were like a lot of people everywhere,” he went on. “On one account, they’d like to fly away, while on the other hand - ‘better the devil you know’ - they prefer to stay put.” He allowed the point to be taken. “However,” he then said, leaning forward in a characteristic manner of his: “That old Prince Consort, who married our Queen Victoria, got to thinking, according to his idea, that if the different people of the world got to know each other, they might get on better. He reckoned that a Great Exhibition of the Arts and Industries of all Nations, to be held in London, would do the trick. People didn’t like the notion of all those foreigners taking over London, but the old Prince had his way, and there was the question of putting up a building in Hyde Park to house the Exhibition. They did not want an affair of bricks and mortar, so in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one they gave the job to a maker of greenhouses! He puts up a mighty greenhouse of iron parts bolted together, paved over with thousands of panes of glass, for which reason it got to be called the ‘Crystal Palace’”.
 
“Now when my mother who was to be heard about that, she announced that, being a young woman of full age, she were going up to see it! Why, they said, she’d be murdered on the way! She was persuaded to take a situation with a lady at Plymouth, but that was a mistake: excursions went from there to Crystal Palace, and my mother who was to be went off and saw the Great Exhibition!”
 
Grandfather paused as he laughed, yet seemed to reflect seriously at the same time. I supposed that having some of his mother’s spirit in him he would have run off himself to see the wonder of the world of that time, while marvelling at the risks his mother had taken. “When she comes back,” grandfather began again, “she were mighty told off for the worry she had caused.” He stopped as if to let the point sink in, children being inclined to view their parents as just strict rather than concerned for their welfare. But then grandfather shook with laughter: “There was only one thing for it,” he declared, “that was for her to be married off! She had her eye on a handsome young master shepherd of the locality and she hauls him away to the altar!”
 
Granny now had to protest. “What a thing to say about his mother,” she observed, “that she carried off his father!” It was the accepted view – I had often heard my mother express it – that men inveigled ladies into marriage and not the other way round. “I hope he has finished his tale,” added granny. “Nope!” said grandfather decisively. “I be now going to relate the siege of Fiddler’s Barn!” Granny sat back with a really embarrassed smile, for this part of grandfather’s tale plainly concerned her.
 
“When that Great Exhibition of 1851 ended,” said grandfather, “they found they had made a good profit of money. They decided to apply it to education for all classes of people, building colleges and museums. Then Crystal Palace itself they made fly away to Sydenham Hill. They took it apart bolt by bolt and rebuilt it bigger still.”
 
“On Salisbury Plain, my mother and father had sons and daughters, but sheep rearing there were out of fashion. When I grew up I had to leave to seek my fortune in the town, and it was when I was working for a council near London that my eye lighted upon a certain damsel! Why, that put me out of sorts!” he said, shaking with laughter as granny tut-tutted. “Says I to her,” went on grandfather, “‘will you come up with me to see the great fireworks at Crystal Palace?’ Well, she agreed, and sitting in the dark gardens there, lit up only by those old coloured rockets bursting over our heads, I broached the notion of matrimony.” He shook with mirth again and added: “she were for it!” Granny just managed to remark: “What a silly old man he is!” as grandfather continued: “I took my beloved away to Salisbury Plain to see my mother.”
 
“Now life on the Plain was natural,” he said, meaning it was near to nature and a challenge. “A man would need a woman and woman a man to get on there, and both of ’em must be fit!” he added as a serious aside in the manner of stating a fact of life. “My mother says to my beloved: ‘Could you walk alone over the Plain to Stonehenge and back?’ Now it’s not all that far and the road is straight, having been made by the slaves of the Romans, but it rises and falls quite steeply in parts, and it could be creepy even in daylight, with not another soul to be seen for miles around. But my young lady agrees to do it, and she got to Stonehenge and, after resting on the grass within the circle, she set out for the return. She was not far off home, however, when a cloud came over, bringing a shower with it. Fearing to be wetted, she looked around for shelter when she sees the wide open door of Fiddler’s Barn. Not wanting to get her finery damp, she hurries straight to it and sits down on a bale of hay.”
 
“Now it so happened that a troop of mounted Hussars in ceremonial uniform, all polished and smart, were out riding on the Plain, probably rehearsing their appearance on some State occasion. The officer, mad at the idea of their uniforms being spoiled, ordered his men to make for Fiddler’s Barn at the charge. They went through the doors uttering lusty oaths, only almost to fall off their horses with embarrassment on finding a damsel sitting there! ‘Why, ma’am,’ cried out the officer, doffing his helmet, ‘I had no idea . . .’ He wanted to send one of his men to order a carriage, but hearing she was contracted to walk, declared that the least he could do would be to escort her once the shower was over. So it was that my beloved here arrived back in the village, escorted by an officer of Hussars with his troop leading their horses. My mother took the view therefore that if she was capable of commandeering a unit of the army she was capable of taking me over.”
 
Grandfather laughed as granny said: “What nonsense!”, then made his point: “So you see that it was all on account of that old Crystal Palace that we are all here!”
 
In 1951, a hundred years after the Great Exhibition, the government mounted the Festival of Britain to mark the centenary. Unlike its predecessor, it made a financial loss of eleven million pounds. One section of it, however, did make a profit, and this was a show in the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the site just below where Crystal Palace had originally stood, of exhibits surviving from the Great Exhibition of 1851. In a case containing small items, I spotted a souvenir lead model of the facade of the 1851 Crystal Palace and I gazed at it with emotion. For a card told me it had been lent by a lady of my own surname, which gave me a sensation of travelling through time. I thought it likely I could guess who had originally bought that souvenir a hundred years ago, when the variety of the world had been brought together in Hyde Park for that six months of wonder and optimism.
 
Norman Maggs, 1994 ​

​Today I sold the 500th (and 501st) copy of my book, Murder in the Red Barn. The book analyses the circumstances surrounding the notorious murder of Maria Martin by William Corder in 1827. Coincidentally, on Saturday The Times newspaper published a letter from me about the murder. This was on the question of whether two books bound in the murderer’s skin at the Moyses Hall museum in Bury St Edmunds should be kept on show as a historic archive or respectfully cremated as human remains. I inclined to the latter view. Possibly due to my Catholic upbringing, I have a horror of the display of bits of dead people masquerading as ‘relics’, which are to be found in some churches. Respect is due to the dead; the morbid, ghoulish, and macabre public display of body parts belongs to medieval times.