J.M. Barrie blue plaque funding appeal

[Lord Richard]

J.M. Barrie Blue Plaque in Bloomsbury Funding Appeal

Dear J.M. Barrie admirers

A number of you were very helpful in finalising the details for the proposed J.M. Barrie blue plaque in Bloomsbury - see the document below: The Marchmont Association’s commemorative plaque to J.M. Barrie - Background information

See also: http://www.marchmontassociation.org.uk/news-article.asp?ID=124

It has taken some time to obtain the consent of the owners of the building due to a long-running dispute over the freehold, which has now been resolved.

We are now able to launch our funding appeal, which is why I am posting this notice today.

The total cost of manufacturing and installing the plaque is approximately £1,200.00.
Contributions of £200.00 from 6 donors, or £100.00 from 12 donors would clearly cover the cost and enable is to proceed with this plaque.

The background paper (minus the images which I am unable to load) follows below.

The Marchmont Association have launched the appeal with a donation of £200.00.

If you would like to contribute, no matter how little, the Chair of the Marchmont Association – Ricci de Freitas – would be delighted to hear from you.*

Please feel free to forward this message to others who you think might be interested in contributing.


*Donors should contact Ricci de Freitas at ideas@marchmontassociationorg.uk indicating how much they wish to donate and how they would prefer to pay (i.e. by cheque or BACS transfer).

Thank you for your help with this project.

Richard Ekins for Marchmont Association, Bloomsbury



The Marchmont Association’s commemorative plaque to
J.M. Barrie - Background information:
 
J.M.Barrie [Sir James Matthew Barrie, OM] (1860-1937), born in Scotland, moved to London (initially, to Bloomsbury) in 1885 to pursue a writing career. Although ‘he wrote more than forty plays and dozens of short stories, novels, and magazine articles, Barrie is best known today for a single creation: the tale of Peter Pan, which he told in various forms in stories, novels, and most notably the play Peter Pan (1904). The play has been staged throughout the Western world, particularly in Britain and America, where it has been nearly continuously performed since its first production . . . Barrie has been compared favourably to Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen for his creation of one of the most popular children's works ever written.’ 

Barrie (1937) writes (in the third person) about his first residences in London in The Greenwood Hat: Being a Memoir of James Anon 1885-1887. Here we learn that after a brief period residing in Guilford Street in March/April 1885, he moved to cheaper lodgings at Grenville Street. According to the respected Mackail (1941), Barrie was at 8, Grenville Street in 1885, then again from September 1886 to August 1888. According to Barrie (1937: 20), Barrie ‘was in that Grenville Street house . . . off and on for years, sometimes in its finest apartments (all according to the state of his finances)’. Although Peter Pan was not written from his Grenville Street address, Barrie places the Darlings’ home in Grenville Street in his own words, in the first scene of the play, thus confirming that the ‘imaginary Bloomsbury’ of Peter Pan and the Darling family draws extensively on Barrie’s time at Grenville Street, in particular, in relation to the location of the Darlings’ family home, and its views overlooking Brunswick Square. The c.1929 image of 8-10 Grenville Street, cross-referenced to the Horwood map of 1799, shows that No. 8 was on the corner of Grenville Street and Bernard Street, with windows facing into Brunswick Square – a perfect fit with the narrative suggested by Barrie scholars. Grenville Street was never re-numbered and 8-10, Grenville Street, which had been a Nurses' Home run by the Throat Nose & Ear Hospital in Gray's Inn Road, was demolished in 1938 and replaced the following year by the present-day Downing Court.
             
The Bloomsbury-Peter Pan connection continues to this day. In 1929 Barrie gifted all the rights to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), a gift confirmed in his will.

Adapted from a paper presented by Richard Ekins to the Marchmont Association Committee 1.2.2013


Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Professor Rosemary Ashton, UCL and Christine De Poortere, Peter Pan Director, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity (GOSHCC) for their help in preparing this document.

References
Ashton, Rosemary (2010) ‘Peter Pan and Bloomsbury’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 5619 (10 December), p. 15.
Ashton, Rosemary (2014) ‘Barrie and Bloomsbury’, in Andrew Nash and Valentine Bold, eds., Gateway to the Modern: Re-Situating J.M. Barrie, Glasgow: Scottish Literature International.
Barrie, J.M.  (1937) The Greenwood Hat: Being a Memoir of James Anon 1885-1887, London: Peter Davies.
Mackail, Denis (1941) The Story of J.M.B., London: Peter Davies.
Rennie, N.J.S. (2011) ‘Imaginary Bloomsbury: Peter Pan and Dynamite’. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project/articles/events/conference2011/rennie.pdf

[GOSH]

A very worthwhile proposal! It will be great to see Barrie commemorated in Bloomsbury, where he lived for many years when he first came to London, before his marriage and move West to South Kensington and Bayswater. The house itself is no longer there, but the "leafy square" still is.