Ambrose Isted, Queen Victoria’s Deaf BSL Teacher

Please indulge me in a stretch in topic to wish a Happy 200th Birthday to Queen Victoria, born 24 May 1819! Deaf Victorians loved and celebrated VR1 as much as their fellow Britons.

But she is often specifically associated with British Deaf history, for two reasons:

• • The famous account of the widowed queen in her mid-fifties fingerspelling with her deaf beneficiary Elizabeth Groves Tuffield (1840–1874), whom she visited on the Isle of Wight.

• • This story was popularized by the 1889 painting “Royal Condescension” by deaf artist William Agnew (1846–1941):

You’ll see plenty about that story and the various versions of that picture this week. My bicentennial gift to you is evidence of the roots of Queen Victoria’s interest and ability in BSL fingerspelling some 40 years prior.

When Victoria was 15 years old, she was staying at Calverley House, Kent (now a shopping district of Tunbridge Wells), where she met many visitors who came to hunt, socialize and dine with her family.

We owe young Victoria herself for many of the details, which she recorded in her journals. Among the aristocrats gathered for dinner one September evening in 1834, the guests included: 

Lady Julia Hay Hobhouse Wife of Hard-of Hearing Baron De-facto Interpreter?
Ambrose Isted, Esq.  Deaf Country Gentleman Ecton Hall, Northampton

Isted sat across from the Princess, who observed, 

“Poor Mr. Isted has the misfortune to be both deaf and dumb; but he is a very pleasing, agreeable and intelligent person.”

Sure, teenagers (and week-ends) hadn’t been invented yet, but this was a very insightful and generous memory to record in One’s journal. How did young Victoria arrive at this conclusion? Because she was privy to his counsel with Lady Hobhouse: 

He talked a great deal with his fingers to Mrs. Hobhouse who sat next to him.

According to highly gifted and trusted Deaf historian Tony Boyce (2001), Ambrose was private pay pupil under Joseph Watson in London, and in adulthood, remained a patron of the London Association in Aid of the Deaf and Dumb. He did not have intelligible speech, so relied on his personality, pencil and paper, and of course fingerspelling in conversation with hearing people who demonstrated the ability. 

This 1834 recollection from Princess Victoria is particularly tantalizing, because Deaf historians have never concluded how the Queen would come to be fluent enough in the alphabet to be friendly with a deaf subject in the 1870s. I am confident we now have an answer!

See the moment that her curiosity and ease with Isted leads her first tenuous steps: 

He
sat just opposite to me
^at dinner^ 
and he asked me some-
thing with his fingers, which
I almost understood, only
that I was very much
frightened to speak my-
self.

A few weeks after this exchange, Isted combined his talents of foxhunting and drawing, and presented the Princess with what she called “a very pretty little pen-drawing.” She kept it, and it has been preserved by the Royal Collection Trust: 

For the first time, we can draw all of these details together, to form a picture of Isted’s effect on the Princess. Her reign saw great developments in the lives of signing deaf Britons, and as I mentioned, her personal interest has been well-documented. Thank you, Ambrose Isted, elusive Squire of Ecton Hall. You are on my list. Stay tuned for more! 

Queen Victoria’s Journals (2012), Royal Archives & ProQuest