Sir Henry Cole(1808–1882)

Henry Cole was born at Bath in July 1808, son of a captain in the 1st Royal Dragoons who had served at the siege of Copenhagen, and Laetitia Dormer, a Bath dressmaker's daughter. The family moved to London on his father's half-pay retirement. He was schooled at Christ's Hospital from nine to fifteen and went straight into the public service as a junior clerk at the Record Commission in 1823, fifteen years old, on a salary of ninety pounds a year. The Record Commission was a corruption-riddled Georgian sinecure whose business was the supposed cataloguing of state papers; he spent the next eleven years assembling, partly on his own time, the documentary case for reforming it, and gave evidence to the parliamentary select committee that abolished it in 1834.

The Public Record Office Act of 1838 was effectively his bill. It created the modern state archive, the central repository at the Rolls Estate in Chancery Lane that became the Public Record Office (the precursor of the National Archives at Kew), and the post of Deputy Keeper to run it. Cole did not get the keepership, having made too many institutional enemies in the campaign, but he served as senior assistant under the first deputy keeper for the next four years. The catalogue reform he and his colleagues pushed through made medieval English government records, for the first time, systematically findable, and is the foundation on which every English historian's primary-source work since has stood.

He left the Record Office in 1842 and moved into design reform and decorative-arts publishing under the pen name *Felix Summerly*. The Felix Summerly Art Manufactures (1847–50) commissioned everyday objects (tea services, pottery, ink wells) from contemporary artists, on the founding principle that good design was a matter of public education and could be undertaken by the state. In the same productive decade he served on the Royal Commission that designed the Penny Post stamp with Rowland Hill, ran a children's-book imprint that pioneered illustrated cheap editions of the Aesopian and folkloric canon, and at Christmas 1843 commissioned John Callcott Horsley to design the first commercial Christmas card. The card was a three-panel hand-coloured lithograph printed by Joseph Cundall, an edition of about a thousand, addressed to Cole's friends and family with the text *A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You*. The custom of sending printed Christmas cards descends from it directly, and the inland Penny Post that made the practice possible was, of course, the other Cole-Hill project of the previous decade.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the project on which his career turned. He served as a executive commissioner to Prince Albert and the administrative team that took the proposal from a Royal Society of Arts dinner in 1849 through Hyde Park to opening day on 1 May 1851. He oversaw the design competition that produced Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace; he wrote much of the catalogue; he ran the operational logistics for the six million visitors who came through across the summer. The Exhibition turned a profit of nearly two hundred thousand pounds, the largest single surplus on any nineteenth-century English public project, and Cole was the one who proposed using it to buy an estate at South Kensington and build there a permanent quarter of museums, schools and learned societies devoted to design and science. He saw the proposal through against the entire opposition of the post-Albert Tory governments after 1861. The South Kensington Museum opened in 1857; he ran it as its first general superintendent for the next sixteen years; it was renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum on its move into the new buildings in 1899. The Royal Albert Hall (1871), the Royal College of Music (1882), the Natural History Museum (1881) and the Science Museum (1857) all sit on the South Kensington estate he assembled.

He retired from the V&A in 1873, was knighted in 1875, and died at his Kensington home on 18 April 1882, seventy-three years old. He is buried at Brompton Cemetery, half a mile from the museum quarter he built. The Cole name today, the swarthy nickname and Nicholas pet-form and Welsh Coch anglicised, carries the founder of modern English design education at its national-civic head; the museum quarter at South Kensington is what he left, and the Christmas card sent across the country every December is what one weekend of his administrative imagination invented.