In the run up to the re-opening of the Charterhouse on 1st April 2023, Historic Coventry Trust has published an edition of Heritage Park Times, guest edited by our own Peter Walters. The following article, written by Peter, is reprinted with the kind permission of the Trust and thanks to the funding provided by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The names of Lizzie Stuart and Vitruvius Wingrave have not, until now, featured among the roll call of famous Coventry folk from the past. Yet that might be about to change.
The Victorian ballad singer and the medical scientist are among thirteen people buried at London Road cemetery whose lives are being researched for a project aimed at highlighting some of the cemetery’s less well-known stories.
The first ‘Meet the Residents’ trail, established last year, featured a number of well-known names, including cycle pioneer James Starley, industrialist George Singer, prize-fighter Paddy Gill and architect James Murray.
Francesca Marsland, Heritage Engagement Co-ordinator for the Historic Coventry Trust, says the new list aims to include lives that are not as well-known.
“We thought it would be a good thing to find out more about those whose lives are not as familiar. There are so many interesting people in the cemetery and it’s one way of making sure kids grow up knowing a little bit more about their own city.”
The work is being carried out by a group of around ten researchers, including students and well-known local historians like David Fry and Stuart Fergusson. The next phase of the trail is expected to be unveiled by the end of this year (2023).
LIZZIE STUART
A classically-trained singer, Lizzie Stuart was widely known as the Scottish Songstress, even though she was born in Dublin of English parents.
Her performances, notably at the Burns Festival at the Crystal Palace in 1859, were received with huge acclaim and she appeared in concert halls and music venues all over Britain.
In 1857, Lizzie married Coventry ribbon manufacturer Albert Tomson, who would go on to become a leading figure in the nineteenth century city, elected Mayor of Coventry eight times.
Sadly, Lizzie did not live to share in his civic success . She died, at the age of just thirty, in November 1861, not long after giving a musical lecture at Birmingham Town Hall, in support of distressed Coventry weavers, who had been reduced to penury by the collapse of their industry.
VITRUVIUS WINGRAVE
Born in Coventry in 1858, Wingrave was a keen rugby player and cyclist as a young man, and claimed to have ridden the first bicycle brought into England from France.
He became a doctor, later specialising in diseases of the ear and throat, and was for thirty years a leading specialist at the London Throat and Ear Hospital, writing several books on the subject.
He retired to Lyme Regis in Dorset in 1920, founding the town museum that still exists and endowing it with his own collection of fossils.
He retained close links with Coventry and on his death in June 1938 his funeral service was held at Coventry Cathedral, before interment in London Road.
JOHN BAILEY SHELTON
Regarded as Coventry’s first archaeologist, Shelton was a Nottinghamshire-born farm labourer who came to Coventry in his early twenties to work as a drayman for the railway.
In 1907 he started his own haulage business in Little Park Street and while laid up in hospital with a broken leg discovered a fascination with Coventry’s medieval history and archaeology.
During the wholesale city centre demolitions of the 1930s he was to be seen constantly clambering around building excavations, and the objects he collected then became the basis of his own Benedictine museum, which he opened at his home in Little Park Street.
Shelton was ‘bombed out’ of his home during the Blitz but continued his archaeological work. In 1945 he was appointed as one of two City Chamberlains for Coventry and in 1956 was awarded the MBE for his services to the history and archaeology of his adopted city.
Two years later he was killed in a motorcycle accident, but his museum became the core of the archaeological collection of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.
THOMAS STEVENS
From the ruins of Coventry’s ribbon industry sprang very few successful entrepreneurs. But Thomas Stevens was one.
Born in Foleshill, Stevens was a ribbon manufacturer, working and living in Hillfields, when the Cobden Treaty with France in 1860 destroyed the local ribbon industry, almost overnight.
Innovative and ruthless in pursuit of new markets and new products, within two years he had perfected a way of using a Jacquard loom to weave colourful pictures from silk.
Some of these ‘Stevengraph’ pictures were used for bookmarks and greeting cards and Stevens even secured contracts to produce specialised products for the Admiralty.
By 1875 he was employing 300 people in his new Stevengraph factory in Cox Street. His reputation had spread beyond the UK, to the United States in particular, and in 1878 he moved to London to manage his growing business.
There seemed no bounds to his success, but in the autumn of 1888 Stevens was taken ill and underwent an operation on his throat. Complications set in and he died on October 24. His work is still popular with collectors around the world.
JOE VICKERS
Inventor and prize-fighter seems an odd mix of careers, but London-born Vickers could boast of some success in both.
The son of a publican, he came to Coventry at the age of ten and four years later was apprenticed to a watchmaker in the city.
During the 1860s, in his twenties, he became a well-known prize-fighter in Coventry, good enough to challenge for a world title at seven and a half stone. His longest fight, against Jack Lamb in 1869, lasted a gruelling twenty-eight rounds, a total of two hours and seven minutes of bare-knuckle combat.
By the late 1870s he was appearing in trade directories as a watchmaker and shortly afterwards invented the Portrait watch, featuring images of the Royal Family, famous actors and sporting personalities, which became popular over the next two decades.
Following his father into the licensed trade, he took on the Old Wheel in Leicester Row, turning it into a sporting pub. But by 1904 life had turned sour for Joe Vickers.
His marriage ended, he gave up the pub and two years later was found dead in the yard of the Cranes Inn on Bishop Street, after a drinking bout.
NATHANIEL TROUGHTON
In life, Nathaniel Troughton was much admired for his work as a doctor in helping to found Coventry’s first hospital. But his legacy now lives on much more as a skilled chronicler of the mid-Victorian city he knew.
Born in Hampshire into a family with strong Coventry connections, Troughton and his wife Augusta moved to the city in 1826, settling at 11 Priory Row, close to Holy Trinity Church.
He set up in practice as a doctor and mindful of Coventry’s appalling state of public health was among those driving a campaign to set up the city’s first proper hospital, in a house in Little Park Street in 1840.
He became a trustee, secretary, fundraiser and one of three house surgeons at the new Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, later rebuilt on a much larger site in Stoney Stanton Road.
When he wasn’t engaged on medical matters, Troughton liked to rise at four or five in the morning in summer and go out with his sketchbook, making pencil drawings of Coventry’s prolific medieval buildings.
His volumes of pencil sketches, more than a thousand in number, were presented to the city in 1892, more than twenty years after his death. They showed a post-medieval city, many of its ancient buildings and architectural treasures lost long before the devastation that the Luftwaffe inflicted on Coventry.
MARY EAVES
By the time of her death, in December 1875, midwife Mary Eaves had safely delivered a staggering 4438 babies.
The illiterate wife of a ribbon weaver from Spon End, over a 35-year career Mary was clearly trusted to minister to the city’s poor and its wealthy alike. The records show many repeat customers from all walks of life.
Sworn in as a midwife in July 1849, Mary, herself a mother of seven, averaged an astonishing 200 births a year. In one year (1857) she delivered 286 babies and on one day, January 13, 1865, she attended to five different women all in different locations.
Where Mary acquired her midwifery skills isn’t known, although there’s a clue in the 1841 census, which reveals that her neighbour, an older woman named Elizabeth Roberts, was a midwife. A hundred years before the NHS, with health care still primitive, it was often the case that skills were passed on in this way.
Whatever the source of Mary’s expertise, there must have been many who had good reason to mourn her passing when she died from bronchitis on 11 December 1875, at her home at 97 Spon Street.
WILLIAM GEORGE FRETTON
Antiquarian and school teacher, William Fretton was instrumental in raising the profile of Coventry’s medieval history at a time when the study of the distant past and archaeology was in its infancy.
Born in Coventry in 1829, he succeeded his father as headmaster of Catherine Bayley’s School in 1856, introducing his pupils to a number of innovations, notably a library, a band, drawing classes and excursions.
In the mid-1870s, during major renovations to St John the Baptist Church in Spon Street, he was instrumental in highlighting the building’s historic fabric so that it could be preserved. A decade later he was prominent in the campaign to keep the Old Grammar School in Hales Street from being sold to an American businessman who wanted to ship it to the United States.
Fretton compiled many reports on local treasures for institutions like the Society of Antiquaries and also edited Thomas Sharpe’s monumental book on the History and Antiquities of the City of Coventry.
When he died in 1900, civic figures and former pupils in large numbers turned out to pay their respects to a man whose love of his native city’s past knew few bounds.
CHARLES WALTER HATHAWAY
Siegfried Bettmann may have founded the Triumph Company, but it was his legendary works manager Charles Hathaway who made it work.
Born in London, the son of a piano manufacturer, Hathaway moved to Coventry in 1890 and after a short spell in the watch-making industry joined Triumph.
He made an instant impact and was credited with ‘simplifying the construction and improving the mechanical efficiency’ of the firm’s products.
Alongside his gifts as an engineer and factory organiser, Hathaway possessed a genius for man management and over the next twenty-five years became one of Coventry’s most admired managers.
When he died in July 1915, at the early age of 51, thousands lined the streets to pay their respects to his funeral procession as it passed on its way to the London Road cemetery. Tragically, his son Sydney, an observer in the Royal Flying Corps, was killed in France just six months later. They are buried in the same grave.
EDWIN BROWN
As a painter, Edwin Brown knew where his talent lay – in the carefully composed animal pictures commissioned by local well-to-do clients.
The son of a builder from Mancetter in north Warwickshire, Brown arrived in Coventry around 1840 and began advertising himself in local directories as a teacher and animal painter.
In his early years in the city he also painted landscapes. His 1848 painting of the statuesque Binley Oak is in the Herbert Museum’s collection.
But in 1850 he secured a lucrative commission from the Benn family, prosperous bankers and philanthropists from Rugby, to paint their private pack of hounds, with a favourite hunter saddled up and ready for the chase.
Other commissions followed, but to supplement his income Brown took a job as second master at Coventry School of Art in the late 1860s. When he died in 1891 he had over a hundred paintings to his name.
JOHN MILLER DALE
In life, John Dale may have toiled in a relatively humble occupation as a moulder in an iron foundry, but his legacy lives on.
In the 1870s Dale founded the Coventry Hospital Saturday Fund, taken over by Bupa in 2010 and still helping people to pay for dental and eyesight treatments.
Coventry’s first general hospital, the Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, opened on the Stoney Stanton Road in 1867, was funded entirely by voluntary donations, and the Saturday Fund, so named because payments were made on a Saturday, was for many Coventry people a lifeline before the coming of the National Health Service.
Dale himself enjoyed a long life and when he died, aged 96, in the early 1940s, he had outlived his first wife and two of his three children.
SYDNEY BUNNEY
As a chronicler of the Coventry of his day, Sydney Bunney has few equals.
More than 500 paintings and drawings, now held by the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, cover the city’s landmark historical buildings, architectural details, street scenes and open spaces. And they are still regarded by architects and historians as an accurate record of Coventry as it was in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Born in 1877 in Paynes Lane, where his father worked in the ribbon industry, Bunney became a student at Coventry School of Art as a teenager and in 1899 secured a place to study at the South Kensington Art School, now the Royal College of Art.
Up until 1913 his output was small, but while working in the armaments industry during the First World War Bunney spent almost every minute of his spare time sketching and painting his home city. For the rest of his life he carried a pad of water colour paper with him so that he could sketch whatever caught his eye and colour it later when he got home.
Many of his paintings served as a social record of the streets he knew and Bunney himself had a strong social conscience, setting out his views in a hardback exercise book on subjects as varied as poor housing in the city and the politics of the General Strike. He was still sketching and painting Coventry, right up to his death in 1928.
DAVID GEE
The son of a Spon Street watch-maker, David Gee seemed destined to follow his father into the trade. But within a year of leaving school he had sold his first painting, his own visual commentary on the death of Nelson.
That earned him five shillings and for the rest of his life the self-taught Gee made a comfortable living, becoming Coventry’s leading artist of the nineteenth century.
As a young man he was encouraged by one wealthy patron to try his luck as a painter in London, but within months he was back in Coventry, claiming he found the capital ‘distasteful’.
In truth, his style was probably considered too provincial for the London palate and his portrait painting too honest for cosmopolitan egos. Yet that should not detract from his achievements.
More than just a portrait painter to the local gentry, Gee possessed a touch subtle enough to restore the Coventry Doom painting in Holy Trinity Church and versatile enough to produce a portfolio of major civic commissions, many of which still survive.
When he died at the age of 78 in 1872, much was made of his ‘quiet and retired disposition’ and unblemished reputation. Yet at his best, Gee matched the quality of artists whose reputations loom much larger than his own.
Find out more on the Heritage Trust website, where you can order tickets to visit the Charterhouse.