20th January 2025

The Stephens House & Gardens veteran Black Mulberry tree, in North London’s Finchley district, is an exceptional knot of twisted branches, even by mulberry standards. Standing on a high slope overlooking the garden's rockery and pond, it looks more like a coiled python up a tree than a tree in itself, with branches looping over and under each other. A massive limb snakes off to one side, diving for cover into a fenced-in bush, while others compete for a bit of sky.

 

The tree was probably planted around 1878 by celebrated landscape designer Robert Marnock who laid out the gardens under the watchful eye of Henry Charles “Inky” Stephens, who had recently purchased Avenue House and its 100 acres of land.

Henry Charles "Inky" Stephens

Henry Charles had taken over the Stephens ink manufacturing company in 1864 on the sudden death of his father, chemist and inventor Dr Henry Stephens, who, in 1832, had patented an indelible, ”blue-black writing fluid”, which became famous as Stephens’ Ink. Over much of the next 130 years it became the standard for legal contracts and official records and was used for the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended the First World War on 28 June 1919.

The young “Inky” Stephens was a passionate and innovative amateur horticulturalist, working with Robert Marnock to create an arboretum of exotic trees that are now in their prime, around 150 years later. Stephens and Marnock also created The Bothy, a walled garden with glasshouses, forcing pits and fish ponds – part of a plan to make the whole 100-acre estate (and farm) self-sufficient.

Interestingly, a few years later, in 1886, Marnock, a proponent of John Claudius Loudon's  ‘gardenesque’ style of lanscaping, designed the original Royal Botanic Society Garden in what is now Queen Mary’s Gardens in the Inner Circle of Regents’ Park, where a half-collapsed Black Mulberry still stands, hidden in bushes by the Rose Garden. 

“Inky” went on to become a Conservative MP and much-liked figure in the Finchley community. He was also a driving force behind the creation of nearby Victoria Park, in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887,  where there is another well-preserved Black mulberry, probably part of the original arboretum.

Avenue House, set in its "gardenesque" grounds designed by Robert Marnock with input from Henry Charles Stephens

"Inky" extended and embellished the house, fitting its 12-bedroom interior with lavish wood panelling, bespoke doors, stained glass and an unusual staircase. It also had a fireproofed laboratory in the basement. Having suffered bomb damage in WWII and a fire in the 1980s, the Grade II listed building is slowly being restored by the Avenue House Estate Trust.

The perils of public foraging

The mulberry fruit is popular with foragers - who have been found climbing in its canopy

Given the mulberry tree's contorted branches, I can’t help wondering what catalogue of stresses the tree has had to cope with since it was planted. Apart from competition for light with nearby taller trees, one of the persistent stresses, says Garden Supervisor, Helen Bevan, is the prevailing west wind to which the tree is exposed. More recently though, adds Visitor Manager, Melanie Wynyard, some visitors have been discovered high in the canopy foraging the prized mulberry fruit in the summer months, . “One man even asked if I could lend him some shears so he could cut off a whole branch with its fruit”, she says. As Henry Stevens gifted the House and Gardens to the people of Finchley  on his death in 1918, she explains, “some local visitors think: ‘it belongs to us, we can do what we like’. So I ask them if they would also like to take on the bills!”.

Reunited

An unexpected bonus of my visit to The Bothy part of the gardens was to be shown a strapping young Black mulberry sapling. This turns out, explains trustee, horticulturalist, and garden volunteer, Alison Dean, to be one of the 100 saplings the Morus Londinium project, under the aegis of the Conservation Foundation, donated to schools, non-profit and community gardens, as part of its original Heritage Lottery Fund award, back in 2016-17. After correcting a characteristic, but unwanted Morus nigra lean, the young tree is going strong, and is in the company, not far away, of a Medlar – another medieval orchard tree – as well as its older mulberry cousin.

Trustee and volunteer horticulturalist Alison Dean (left) and Garden Supervisor Helen Bevan in The Bothy, with a black mulberry sapling donated by Morus Londinium and the Conservation Foundation in 2016

Stephens' Ink

After Dr Stephens sudden death in 1864 at Farringdon station, on his way home from the company office, his son, Henry Charles (“Inky”), took over the business, gradually growing it into a global industry. In a purpose-built factory in Gillespie Road, Holloway, next to where Arsenal  tube station stands today the company not only made, bottled and shipped inks of different colours (including scarlet, violet and black), but also fountain pens, typewriter ribbons, glue, ink pads and a plethora of other inky artefacts.

Stephens' permanent blue-black ink became the standard for signing official documents

Visitor Manager Melanie Wynyard with the fascinating collection of Stephens Ink artefacts and memorabilia, including stoneware and glass bottles, pens, typewriters, archives and all kinds of advertising.

Another of “Inky” Stephens’ innovations, explains Melanie Wynyard, and continued throughout the factory’s early history, was a substantial budget for eye-catching advertising. This included enamelled thermometers and panels, posters and newspaper ads, often featuring the trademark “splash” logo.

Advert from a one-page feature in The Times, 20 June 1932

Memory Lane

The Collection brought back images from my own childhood, including a couple of years spent in a quaint but (in the 1950s) basic village primary school near Aylesbury. Our teacher (also the Head), a kindly but strict Mr Green, would come round with a large bottle of dark blue ink,  filling up the glazed pottery inkwells that sat in holes in our wooden desks. These were yellowed and graffiti-etched by the hands of generations of village children before me. The basic dip pens – if you didn’t have your own italic fountain pen (mine was made by Osmiroid not Stephens) – would leave an ink-stained dent in the last knuckle of my middle finger, after hours of writing.

This pen-and-ink-and-paper world of my childhood has, or course, all but disappeared, along with its blotting paper, ingenious fountain pens, ink bottles, and Basildon Bond watermarked pads of paper for ubiquitous letter-writing. This paraphernalia is beautifully and carefully displayed at Avenue House, where today’s digital-native schoolkids, raised on paperless swiping and backlit touch screens, get to write with a goose-feather quill, and also try their hand at a typewriter. ‘Where’s the delete button?’ they ask, laughs Melanie Wynyard.

The Stephens Ink factory

Stephens ink was made, for much of its existence, in a factory designed by Henry Charles’s son, Michael in Highbury. The factory sported some Italianate architectural features and a conspicuous chimney with ‘Stephens’ in large capitals up one side.

Aerial view of the ink factory on Gillespie Road (Islington) in 1923. The factory had its own railways sidings and was just across the road from the old Arsenal footbal grounds.

Surviving fragment of the ink factory wall a short distance from Arsenal Tube station.
The archway was not part of the original design. The entrance was 100 metres to the right, now a street and housing.

The Gillespie Road factory was demolished in 1970 after moving manufacture to nearby Drayton Park in a former dairy. That factory was closed in the 1990s and converted for housing.

 

Copy of a letter confirming demolition of the Gillespie Road factory held in the London Archives.

 

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