The working life of Museum of London

Now that we have established that Countess Hamon collected beautiful shoes, it is about time that we start looking at some of her other clothes. Judging from the items we have at the museum, the Countess had a penchant for strong colours. Below is one of her dresses (we have three), probably from the late 1920s.

The object is very fragile, that’s why I had to photograph it in its box, and why I could not really rummage around inside to look for a label, but I suspect there isn’t one anyway. I wonder whether she wore the dress with her red and silver Pluchino shoes?

In the hope that it will form a more complete picture in your mind to accompany the following text, here is a counterfeit of the Countess from the 1920s, taken from one of Cheiro’s books (from an internet version, which accounts for the, strangely fitting, ghost-like quality).

Amazing, non? I showed the photo to a friend who thought she had a touch of Mae West about her, not a bad thing in my book.

So, what do we know about the Countess? Having so far refrained from quoting much from Cheiro’s works (not that newspaper articles are necessarily more accurate), I want to start this time with Cheiro’s recollection of his first encounter with his future wife, as told in Confessions: memoirs of a modern seer, published in 1932.

Cheiro relates that his own palms clearly indicated that he was going to get married, albeit late in life. Nevertheless he ‘felt strong in the fact that I was a member of an anti-marriage society’, even when he was visited by a female client who had the kind of ’small and beautifully formed hands’, this connoisseur so admired. The palms of the 16-year-old girl foretold a ‘cruel fate’ and the palmist had to tell her that

she would marry within a year, lose her husband in some mysterious way that would for a long time prevent her remarrying. She would meet again and again the man she would eventually marry but be prevented from doing so for many years; finally, overcoming all difficulties, she would be successful in the end.

The young girl decided on the spot that Cheiro was the only man she wanted to marry. If she could not have him as her first husband, she hoped he was going to be her second. Years passed and lo and behold, the palmist and she with the beautiful hands met again, this time in New York. As predicted, husband no. 1 had disappeared, but as he had left no trace, the woman was going to have to wait seven years before marrying again.

Fate, or something else, would lead again and again to brief encounters of the two globe-trotters, in ‘China, Cairo, Monte Carlo and Paris’. On her return from a long sojourn in Egypt, where she had lived ‘in her own caravan, travelling the confines of the Sahara’ the mystery lady returned to England. There she was alarmed to read a newspaper advertisement announcing that Cheiro was gravely ill and appealing for relatives to come forward (you’d think that would have been the last thing he wanted). The woman rushed to the palmist’s side, nursed him back to health and, following a Mediterranean cruise, the wedding predicted so long ago, finally took place.

Luckily, Cheiro follows this romantic story with a ‘brief biographical sketch’ of his spouse’s career. She too can trace back her family many generations, although only to the 14th century, not quite as far back as the Count. Like her husband, Mrs Cheiro has many talents: while her formerly ‘extremely beautiful voice’ had been affected by an operation, she exercised her other artistic skills on inventing enamelled jewellery and developing ‘painting by crayons’.

That the Countess was indeed no bad draughtswoman can be seen from the cover of one of her husband’s books, published in 1928.

The Countess’s travels took her to Japan, China and the two Americas, where in Mexico she had the ‘unique experience of being kidnapped by bandits’. Having designed ‘her own electric furnace’ to aid her jewellery work, the Countess later used her ‘bent for chemistry’ to study ‘pests that injure plant life in various parts of the world’ (more of this at the end).  These accomplishments, so Cheiro, proved his theory that ‘persons with extremely small hands have a natural desire to attempt large things’. His wife’s work, so he predicted, ‘may in the end extend its influence to every nation of the world to whom the question of the protection of plant life appeals’.

I realise that this entry is already inordinately long, but let’s just add a few ‘real names’. It seems that Countess Hamon was born Katie Florence Bilsborough in Lanes in West Derby in 1882, which makes her 22 years younger than her husband. In 1891 (census data), the then 8-year-old Katie lived at 79 Derby Street in Prescot, Lancashire with her father Thomas, a wood broker and timber merchant originally from Manchester, her mother Kate, interestingly from Quincy, Illinois, and her two younger brothers Thomas and Joseph. Eight years later, in June 1899, Katie married a certain Henry Archibald Hartland in Kingston, not far from London. In the same year, some time between October and December, the couple’s only son was born, which makes me wonder whether the wedding was entirely voluntary. At the time of the 1901 census, which I believe was taken on 31 March that year, the couple resided in Battersea in London. There the 25-year-old Henry was ‘living on Means’ with his 19-year-old wife and little Jack.

Katie and Cheiro must have first met in 1898 and they eventually married in 1920. What did really happen to Katie in the intervening 22 years? Particularly, when did Henry disappear, or did he? Until the next, and possibly last installment, which will reveal a surprising twist in this tale, I want to leave you with proof that the Countess indeed had a ‘bent for chemistry’ (thank you, Judy, for scanning this for me). By the time the photo below was taken, the couple had moved to Hollywood and the image might well show them (and a mysterious stranger) in their living room.