Wallpaper manufactures in Islington, founded as Jeffrey, Wise and Co. By 1840 the firm had introduced roller printing of paper on the principle previously employed for the printing of calico. In 1864 the firm was engaged by William Morris to print the Morris firm's first wallpapers. In 1866 Metford Warner joined as a junior partner, and it was due to his adventurous design policy that C. Eastlake, William Burges, E. Godwin, Lewis F. Day, B. J. Talbert and C.F.A. Voysey were associated with the firm, which also printed designs by Owen Jones for Jackson & Graham and by A.H. Mackmurdo for the Century Guild.
In 1871 Metford Warner became the sole proprietor of the company. The much publicized 'combination papers', with integrated designs for dado, filling and frieze were devised for the company by the Ipswich architect Brighwen Binyon. Other designs by H W Batley, Heywood Sumner, Henry Wilson, G. Audsley, W. Neatly and George Walton were also printed. A series of tripartite papers by Walter Crane gained two gold medals at the 1876 Philadelphia Exhibitions. Many more prizes followed, among others at Paris in 1878, 1889 and 1900, and at Chicago in 1893.
Metford Warner continued to direct the company with his sons until the 1920s; in 1930 Jeffery & Co. was absorbed by Arthur Sanderson.
The peacock was an established symbol of the Aesthetic movement, and around 1900 Jeffrey & Co. adopted it as their logo to emphasise their association with the highest artistic standards in design.
Note: Morris designed his first three repeating wallpapers; Daisy, Trellis and Fruit in 1864 however, failing in all his attempts to print these papers with engraved zinc plates, Morris approached Jeffrey & Company, the famous wallpaper block printers in Islington and asked their Managing Director, Metford Warner, who was renowned for his artistic sensitivity, to produce these first papers. After successful trials Morris entrusted all his wallpapers to Jeffrey & Company, who continued to print all Morris & Co. wallpapers until 1927 when the wallpaper blocks were transferred to the Sanderson factory at Chiswick.
The Roger Warner Collection of historic textiles was given to Temple Newsam (Leeds) by Roger Warner. This private collector had acquired many fabrics during his fifty year career as an antique dealer. They were mostly furnishings bought at country house sales. The rest he inherited from his grandfather, Metford Warner, who was the owner of the leading Victorian wallpaper printing firm, Jeffrey & Co. of London (see above).
Metford Warner collected pieces of textile from many sources as design inspirations for his wallpapers. As a result, many of the fragments have especially interesting or unusual patterns. The textiles range from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, and include both furnishings and dress fabrics. There are silks, cottons, linens, and embroidered pieces, all of which together are able to provide an insight into developments in pattern design and manufacture.
Obituary Roger Warner: Discerning antique dealer
The Independent Obituary THURSDAY 05 JUNE 2008
For 50 years between 1936 and 1986, traffic on the steep High Street of Burford in Oxfordshire might be arrested by the display in a double-fronted shop. Sometimes it was dominated by a stuffed Pomeranian dog under a glass dome, or a bust of a broken-nosed Roman emperor, or a painted steed from a fairground carousel. Museum curators, eccentric collectors, local duchesses with their house-parties in tow (one included Queen Mary) and shrewd dealers regularly called. The establishment was owned by Roger Warner.
Warner's discernment gave him a legendary reputation and a lasting importance. He directed taste towards objects that previously had been disregarded or even derided. With pioneers such as Enid Marx, Margaret Lambert, Barbara Jones and John Fowler, he fostered appreciation of the naοve, the humble and simply the quirky. Thereby he ensured that popular, regional and vernacular arts, whether wooden furniture, pottery, treen, metal-wares, textiles and domestic utensils, were saved and studied.
Unobtrusively, but firmly, he ensured that rare survivals from fragments of 18th-century wall-coverings, chintzes, cottons and worsteds, early daguerreotypes to urns designed by Robert Adam entered appropriate institutions. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Temple Newsam House outside Leeds, the Museum of Rural Life at Reading, Colonial Willamsburg and the Ashmolean in Oxford all benefited. Much in the bizarre accumulation of Charles Wade at Snowshill Manor in Gloucestershire (now owned by the National Trust) came from Warner's shop. Similarly, Christopher Gilbert's innovative account of English vernacular country furniture (English Vernacular Furniture 1750-1900, 1991) was heavily indebted to Warner's acquisition and documentation of the subtly differing regional types of stools, chairs, benches and cupboards.
Warner, the posthumous son of an engineer, had decorative arts in his lineage. A grandfather, Metford Warner, had owned the wallpaper manufacturers Jeffrey and Company. He and his sons, inspired by William Morris, pursued fresh designs in Italy and the Low Countries. Even while at school, Warner revealed the collecting urge, although it was channelled initially into the unpromising hobby of postage stamps. Illness then obliged him to be educated at home. With his widowed mother, he divided his time between Bournemouth and the north of England, in the 1920s both fertile grounds for finding a startling range of antiquities.
Indiscriminate enthusiasm was disciplined by an apprenticeship engineered by his mother. In part, Warner educated himself as so many others of that generation did by spending hours in the London museums. Also, he was schooled by Fred Winter, a polymathic lecturer. This grounding was supplemented by forays into buying and selling. Minding a shop in Paddington, Warner gained practical experience, which emboldened him to set up with his mother on his own account. His capital amounted to £600.
In 1936, the spacious and handsome premises in Burford were found. Elizabethan behind a robust classical frontage, the building had previously been a draper's shop. For 50 years, it was a magnet for buyers. During the Second World War, the shop was shut and he as a Quaker, a conscientious objector applied his formidable skills to organise hostels for evacuees and then (in Holland) for refugees.
Resuming business in 1947 and marrying in 1949, he flourished. Knowledge, luck and stamina enabled him to identify and buy rarities at auctions and privately in remote hill farms or decaying mansions. Obsolete agricultural implements or the furnishings of servants' quarters were more likely to take his fancy than the geegaws of grandees. To industry, acumen and fairness, he added the extra ingredients of charm, sometimes mischievous but never malicious. He himself noted how his role in handing around thinly cut bread and butter at the genteel tea-parties given by the gentlefolk (distressed and otherwise) around Burford created trust among those who normally shunned antique dealers. Always, he was aware of the ancestry of what he bought and knew the importance of remembering it. Records were kept meticulously: sound business sense was matched by a scholar's belief in accurate documentation.
Warner personified traits that are often associated with Quakers: method, directness and total honesty. With his mother, he helped to restore the Meeting House just behind the shop, and remained a stalwart in its communal life. In retirement, he was persuaded to write about some of the experiences with which he had delighted lucky visitors to the house. On the railway station at Charlbury, on his annual visit to the Chelsea Flower Show he was an ardent and expert gardener, and in later years realised his ambition to have an auricula frame he would share a little from his seemingly inexhaustible fund of recollections. He drew on his detailed stock-books and annual summaries to reveal that he had handled 70,500 items.
The reminiscences Memoirs of a Twentieth-century Antique Dealer (2003) if reticent about his own generosity to numerous institutions, include many of his stories. Suits of armour brought by taxi and train from London to Oxfordshire terrified the local station-master; silver chandeliers so tarnished that all except Warner assumed they were wooden; a gorgeous silken tent from the Orient that had never been unpacked from its sack until Warner did so. As a raconteur he evoked a now vanished era before eBay and FlogIT. Yet he was always eager to share his enthusiasm and expertise, being an early participant during the 1960s in Going for a Song, a precursor of The Antiques Roadshow.
Something of that delight is communicated by the published memoir. It offers remarkable insights into the social, economic and cultural history of the 20th century. Yet, it is the objects which individuals and institutions acquired from him that will constitute permanent memorials to a modest but remarkable man. Thanks to Roger Warner's acumen, the fabrics of otherwise forgotten or obscure lives have survived and can be comprehended.
Toby Barnard
Roger Harold Metford Warner, antique dealer: born 3 May 1913; married 1949 Ruth Hurcombe (died 2007; one son, two daughters); died Burford, Oxfordshire 13 May 2008.
Antiques magazine, March, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes
The bucolic setting of the town of Sudbury on the border between Suffolk and Essex Counties in England is well known through the works of two of the country's most venerated artists: John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Gainsborough actually lived and worked in Sudbury and, when an entrepreneurial silk weaver named Reginald Metford Warner established a textile mill there in 1903, he named it after the artist.
Warner's father, Metford Warner, was the proprietor of Jeffries and Company, which was well-known for the manufacture of wallpapers, some of them designed in collaboration with William Morris. The younger Warner, however, preferred weaving to printing, and as a young man studied weaving in Switzerland and was later apprenticed with the English Silk Weaving Company.
He established his Gainsborough Silk Weaving Company with two second-hand looms, and in 1907 he enjoyed a visit by a member of the royal family, Princess Alexandra. Today the company is designated a Royal Warrant Holder to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England. Warner was not only an entrepreneur, but also a designer and an engineer. He worked on the development of the water-jet loom and collected samples of silks from European weavers, particularly those in France, where silk weaving was in decline. These samples provide a rich archive of historical textiles to which Gainsborough's own weavings--some of them now almost a hundred years old--have been added.