Double bedstead of oak, in Arts and Crafts style, with open and panelled sections on the headboard and footboard, which each show a serpentine top rail. The bed-frame is chamfered and shows double through tenons at the joints. The bed is set with two mattresses covered in blue cotton with white wool tufts.

Double bedstead of oak, in Arts and Crafts style, with open and panelled sections on the headboard and footboard, which each show a serpentine top rail. The bed-frame is chamfered and shows double through tenons at the joints. The bed is set with two mattresses covered in blue cotton with white wool tufts.

Design
The headboards and footboard are of similar design, although the solid panels of the headboards are made slightly taller and set slightly higher between the uprights, to allow for pillows as well as mattress (now missing) and to create the traditionally greater height for the headboard. The frame of each shows two intermediate cross-rails, flanked above and below by an open section. Above and below the open section, which runs the full width of the bed, the headboard and footboard are both divided by framing into five sections, two wider and three narrower. The top rail on both headboard and footboard is serpentine in elevation, rising above the two wider sections.

The upper section on each is an open frame, the lower filled with oak panels. On the foot side of both headboard and footboard, these panels are carved with stepped panels adding thickness to the centre, the panels of the narrower sections showing two stepped panels, those of the broader panels showing an additional panel, with canted corners, making the deepest area of the panel an octagon. On the head side of each element, the panels are plain. The frames of the headboard and footboard are heavily chamfered between the areas of the joints, which show double, through-tenons, these pegged with a single peg on the joint between the top rails and the uprights.

The side rails are plain, with gentle chamfering on the upper and lower edges on the outer face.

The body of the bed is occupied with two box mattresses, each covered in heavy duty blue cotton with a satin-faced weave and set with 18 white wool tufts, holding down the upholstery of the top of the boxes. They are set across the bed so are wider than they are long. Over this there would have been a shallow (10 cm deep) horsehair mattress, also in blue cotton, with white tufting. This is now missing.

Construction
All the construction is visible in the double-tenoned joints and the pegging.

The side rails are set at either end with short, iron tangs, each cut with a recess on the lower edge, to form a hook. These serve as tenons for the bed rail and each engages with a short, iron rod that pierces the uprights of the headboard and footboard at bed-rail level and sits within a mortise-like recess. From the outside of the bed, these rods appear almost as pegs for a tenon holding the bed rails in place. The bed rails are also set on the inside face, at the lower edge, with iron bands, the lower edge of which is shaped to form an angle-iron that provides a lip for the box mattresses to sit on. These bands are inset into recesses on the back of the bed rails and are screwed into place with three screws.

The two box mattresses are made of softwood, the bases with open slats (approximately 20 cm wide), the top webbed and upholstered in horsehair, wool and cotton wadding. The bases are covered with hessian, tacked on. The corners of the boxes are probably reinforced by and built around triangular pieces of softwood, set vertically.

The legs of the bed are now fitted with bronze-painted Shepherd castors, added to the bed after 1946 (the date of invention of such castors).

Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by H M Government and allocated to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014

This bed belonged to Sir Emery Walker (1851-1933) a typographer and antiquary who was a friend and mentor to William Morris. Walker's house from 1903 was at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, London. The house, now owned and managed by the Emery Walker Trust, encapsulates the spirit and taste of a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement and his circle. The mixture of Georgian objects with those made or designed by Walker’s contemporaries, including Philip Webb and Sidney Barnsley, characterise one of the last authentic Arts and Crafts interiors in Britain.

Walker also spent much time in the Cotswolds, its strong artistic community supported by Gimson and his friends Ernest and Sidney Barnsley; this bed is made in a style closely associated with the Cotswold school. It was given to Walker by Rev. Cannon, the Vicar of St Mary, Primrose Hill. Together with an étagère designed by Webb also in the Museum's collection (W.5-2014) it was inherited by Walker's daughter Dorothy. She gave both objects to John Brandon-Jones (1908-1999), an architect and scholar, from whose estate they were acquired by the Museum.

W.4-2014