A Blue
Plaque for Ronald Fisher’s Childhood Home
In May 2002 an English Heritage
blue plaque was unveiled at the house in
The ceremony is described below
but first there is an account of the house and its place in Fisher’s life. The
information about Fisher’s childhood is taken from the biography by his
daughter, Joan Fisher Box, and the information about the house and gardens from
Cherry & Pevsner’s volume on
When Ronald was born in 1890 the family—there were five older children—was living in Finchley North London. The family moved to the Hampstead house in 1896. The move reflected their growing wealth. George Fisher, Ronald’s father, was partner in Robinson & Fisher, a firm of auctioneers whose reputation, according to Box, rivalled Sotheby’s or Christie’s. (A Google search on “Robinson and Fisher” produces some traces of its former activity.)
House from the back (March 2003) Another photo
Box describes the house and what it provided, “In 1896 George Fisher moved from his home in Finchley to Heath House, a mansion he had built near the top of Hampstead hill, set in five acres of parkland and gardens. There were ponies for the children and a goat-chaise [Harness Goat Society] which they drove round the grounds and a carriage and pair for the parents.” (The account in Baker suggests that the house was not Heath House but Hill House and that George Fisher rebuilt an existing house.)
Ronald’s mother died aged 49 when
he was 14. Within eighteen months his father lost his fortune and the family
had moved to Streatham. Ron relied on scholarships to keep him at Harrow and to
send him to
In 1933 when Fisher succeeded Karl Pearson as Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London he did not follow his predecessor’s example and live in Hampstead. (See Karl Pearson’s Hampstead home.) Fisher stayed in Harpenden close to Rothamsted Experimental Station where he had been Chief Statistician.
There is another blue plaque (London remembers) on the
property, commemorating William
Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925). It reads “Soap-maker and Philanthropist, lived and
died here.” Lever lived there
from 1904 and in his time the property was known as The Hill. (The entry
in Cherry & Pevsner is under this name and is about Lever’s house.) Lever had
the house remodelled and enlarged and the garden redesigned by Thomas H. Mawson (see the nice aerial view). The garden, called The Hill,
is much admired (1 2 3 4) and has been a public park
since 1960. It was restored in the 1990s after a long period of neglect.
See also Camden
Listed Buildings and Parks
and Gardens UK.
There is no plaque for Lord Inverforth, the shipping magnate, who acquired the
property after Lever’s death. Dorothy
Dawes has left an account of life as a maid in the Inverforth
household in the 1930s. Inverforth died in
1955 and left the property to Manor House Hospital and renamed Inverforth House it became the women’s
section of the hospital. The house still has that name, though it is now
divided into flats.
Activities
Economists’ Walk 5: Hampstead A very nice walk around Hampstead taking in the homes of Jevons, Edgeworth and Marx as well as those of Fisher and Pearson. This is one of five walks mapped out for the Econometric Society World Congress 2005. See Ian Preston’s interesting account of London and the Early History of Economics and Statistics. David Singmaster’s BSHM Gazetteer of London is another useful guide.
Hampstead Heath Trails. (4.2Mb!) These walks emphasise the wild-life to be seen. Trail 3 takes in Inverforth House and the Pergola.
Sources
Joan Fisher
Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner (1998) The
Buildings of
T.F.T. Baker (Editor) (1989) A History of the County of Middlesex, volume IX, Hampstead and Paddington, pp. 66-71 and pp. 138-145, London: Victoria County History of the Counties of England.
For more information about
Fisher see A Guide to R. A. Fisher.
There are sketches of Leverhulme and Inverforth in the 1920 bestseller The Mirrors of Downing Street by A Gentleman with a Duster (pseudonym of Harold Begbie).
I am grateful to Jessica Jackson for the photograph of the house and to
A. W. F. Edwards for the photographs and description of the unveiling ceremony
below.
John Aldrich,
The Blue plaque ceremony
(from the International
Statistical Institute Newsletter Volume 26, No. 2 (77) 2002)
On Friday 17 May the Royal Statistical Society held a
meeting in
The plaque was unveiled by June Posey, one of Fisher's daughters, in the presence of her brother Harry Fisher and one of her sisters, Margaret Fisher, and three of Fisher's grandchildren, David Newsom, Ruth Hodson and Amanda Posey.
The chairman of the ‘blue plaque’ committee of English Heritage, Francis Carnwath, and the President of the Royal Statistical Society, Peter Green, gave short addresses, before a gathering of some thirty wellwishers.
The house, now called Inverforth
House, is half-way along
In the afternoon papers were read at the Royal Statistical Society to mark the occasion. M.J.R.Healy spoke on Fisher's statistical work, A.W.F.Edwards on Fisher's genetical work and Alan Grafen on Fisher's contributions to evolutionary theory. *
|
A.W.F. Edwards |
|
Chair - ISI History of Statistics Committee |
* The papers have appeared in The Statistician (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series D), (2003), 52 (3) pp. 297-330.
