Ella’s home was to be in newly fashionable Belgravia – Victoria Square, site of some smart if modest town houses tucked away behind Grosvenor Place and Buckingham Palace Road with households of military men, civil servants and the like (Fig. 15). He had searched hard for an acceptable location, Belgravia seeming sufficiently upmarket for a man of his position, and convenient for travel. Victoria station, gateway to many southern suburbs and the music at Crystal Palace, was a short walk away, and we may imagine there was the advantage to Ella of being able to relive memories of those nocturnal journeys to Vauxhall Bridge Road in nearby Pimlico. In Belgravia, as in much of London, well-to-do districts were buttressed by areas of poorer housing.

In August 1868 Ella moved into no. 9, having taken the lease for twenty-one years – a gesture that suggests he fully expected this would be his final dwelling place. He was approaching his sixty-seventh birthday, and must have wondered how many more he would see. Men of artisan class born around 1800 were unlikely to live more than forty years, and he was now well in excess of this, thanks in part to an improved social and economic situation that had brought countless benefits to his health and well-being. James Ella (b. 1804), seemingly the last of his brothers and sisters surviving in England and the one who had become the confectioner, had died in Birmingham in 1860; and John Ella had already outlived several of his contemporaries from the musical world, as well as subscribers and patrons, many of them younger than him: among others, Henry Hill (d. 1856), Frederick Beale (d. 1863), Giacomo Meyerbeer (d. 1864), Heinrich Ernst (d. 1865), the Earlof Falmouth (d. 1852), Lord Saltoun (d. 1853), W. M. Thackeray (d. 1863) and Sir George Clerk (d. 1867). Within a few years he would hear of the deaths of others: Gioachino Rossini (1868), Hector Berlioz, Charles Lucas, Bernhard Molique (all 1869), and F.-J. Fetis (1871).