Perkins, Bacon & Petch, bank note engravers

Tags

engraver

Street Views: 15 and 13 Suppl.
Address: 69 Fleet Street

In a previous post, we saw that Samuel Parker, cut-glass manufacturer, occupied 69 Fleet Street with his partner William Perry up to 1820. The tax record for 1821 lists Jacob Perkins for the first time. They have not yet worked out the correct spelling of his name and call him ‘Perks’. By 1822, they have amended the name and the property is listed for Jacob Perkins & Co. According to the Baker Perkins Historical Society (see here), Jacob came to London from Boston, America; not as a young man seeking his fortune, but as a 53-year old who had already made his mark as an inventor and engineer. He had worked in Boston and New York, but moved to Philadelphia in 1814 (according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography it was in 1817), where he was involved in the business of printing banknotes from a number of separate engraved plates to prevent counterfeiting. “Jacob’s engineering genius had a very significant influence on the banknote printing industry both in the United States and in England and led him to set sail for England on the sailing ship ‘Telegraph’, with his eldest son, Ebenezer Greenleaf Perkins, his engraver colleagues, Gideon Fairman and Asa Spencer, some workmen and many cases of machinery, on 31st May 1819, in the hope of gaining a contract with the Bank of England”.⁽¹⁾

portrait of Jacob Perkins by Chester Harding (Wikimedia Commons)

Perkins and Fairman started their work in London at 29 Austin Friars and were joined at various times by other partners, some only for a short period. Already in December 1819, for instance, one Joseph Chessborough Dyer left the partnership he had with Perkins and Fairman⁽²⁾. That same month, Charles Heath, engraver to King George III, joined the partnership and they moved the business to 69 Fleet Street. On 16 October 1821, Jacob Perkins, Gideon Fairman, Charles Heath, George Thomas Heath and Marcus Bull dissolve a partnership, because Bull wanted out; the remaining partners continued the business in Fleet Street.⁽³⁾ In August 1822, Fairman decided to return to America and relinquish his share in the business.⁽⁴⁾

The London Gazette, 3 August 1822

Jacob Perkins was much more interested in inventing new things than in running a solid business, frequently exasperating his partners as he withdrew large sums of money from the business to fund his inventions, and in November 1824, G.T. Heath withdrew from a partnership he had with Perkins at Regent’s Park.⁽⁵⁾ This seems to have been a separate partnership from the Fleet Street one. The remaining partner, Charles Heath, dissolved the partnership with Perkins in Fleet Street in January 1826.⁽⁶⁾ In May 1929, Joshua Butters Bacon, who had married Jacob Perkins’ second daughter, joined the business and it became Perkins and Bacon. In 1834, Henry P. Petch was taken into the partnership – he had joined the firm in 1823 as an engraver – and the company became Perkins, Bacon & Petch.

banknote Derby Old Bank (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

Jacob’s son, Ebenezer, was not in good health and returned to America. He is listed as an engraver of metal work in the 1829 Boston Directory. Jacob’s other son, Angier March, also came over when the contract for producing banknotes had been obtained:

We embarked in the ship Electra, 500 tons, about November 1821 and arrived in England in thirty days where we found my father and brother and all our friends. I … went at once into the employment of my father and his partners and was engaged for the next eight years in manufacturing banknotes, dies and plates. During the latter part of the time I taught other parties to do the work I was engaged upon and my services in the firm became unnecessary and I found myself obliged to obtain other business.⁽⁴⁾

James Findlay, View of no. 69 Fleet Street (© London Metropolitan Archives, Collage)

According to the censuses of 1841, 1851 and 1861, 69 Fleet Street was not occupied as a house, or at least, no one slept on the premises when the census people came round. The Perkins family may of course have lived above the business before 1841, but they had moved out by the time of the first census. In 1841, Jacob could be found living in Great Coram Street with his son Angier, his daughter-in-law Julia, and his own daughter Henrietta. After Angier left his father’s business in Fleet Street, he established an independent business as heating and steam engineer, first at Harpur Street, Holborn, but after a few more moves, he settled in 1843 at 18 Regent Square, where Jacob also came to live and where he spent the last years of his life. Jacob died on July 30th 1849, aged 83, and was buried at Kensal Green.

Jacob’s method of printing bank notes in several layers with ‘siderographic’ plates to combat forgery also attracted Sir Rowland Hill, who was a friend of Jacob, and Perkins, Bacon & Petch obtained the contract to produce the Penny Black, which was first issued in 1840. Within a few years, twenty-two thousand million stamps for Great Britain and the Colonies had been printed by the Perkins process.

ice-making machine as invented by Jacob Perkins (patent 1834, no. 6662) and constructed for him by John Hague and two of his apprentices. According to one of them, Frederick Bramwell, it actually did produce ice. Bramwell described the process and drew the sketch in a letter to the Society of Arts who published it in their Journal (8 December 1882).

According to the 1886 insurance map, the engravers’ workshop ran backwards from 69 Fleet Street towards Whitefriars Street, comprising house numbers 36-40. You can still see the division at number 69 where first Chaffin and later Robinson had their shop. Following the death of Henry Petch in 1887, the firm became Perkins, Bacon & Co. Ltd. In 1904, they moved the business from 69 Fleet Street to Southwark Bridge Road.

(1) Website Baker Perkins Historical Society, see here.
(2) The London Gazette, 19 August 1820.
(3) The London Gazette, 20 October 1821.
(4) The London Gazette, 3 August 1822.
(5) The London Gazette, 23 November 1824.
(6) The London Gazette, 28 January 1826.
(4) G. Bathe and D. Bathe, Jacob Perkins: his inventions, his times, and his contemporaries (1943). Quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Angier Perkins.

There is lots more information to be found on Jacob Perkins and his inventions, see for instance:
Jenn Nguyen, blogpost ‘Happy Birthday, Jacob Perkins’, 9 July 2018
Wikipedia page Jacob Perkins
Website Baker Perkins Historical Society
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Neighbours:

<– 70 Fleet Street

68 Fleet Street –>

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Thomas Cazaly, engraver and stationer

Tags

book trade, engraver

Street View: 52
Address: 48 Tottenham Court Road

Looking for a subject for this post, I came across the name Cazaly and that rang a bell. Not so long ago, I wrote a post on my other blog about one of the Postman’s Park heroes, Herbert Peter Cazaly who drowned whilst attempting to save someone who had fallen into the Thames. Was the Cazaly mentioned in Tallis’s Street View related to the hero? Most likely, as Cazaly is not a very common name. A bit of research indeed proved a connection; Herbert Peter’s grandfather was the brother of Thomas Cazaly, the engraver. The Cazaly family tree has been extensively recorded by Libby Shade, so thanks go to her. See here for her webpage (click on ‘Cazaly family’ and then on ‘Cazaly.pdf’ to see the whole tree). To make life easy, I have taken the relevant characters of this post and produced a small Cazaly tree (click on it for a larger version).

Thomas Cazaly’s parents, Pierre (Peter) and Sarah had eleven children of which Thomas was number 6 and Herbert Peter’s grandfather number 9. Another child of Pierre and Sarah (number 8), William, was a linen draper in Red Lion Street who has been given a blog post of his own. Thomas was baptised on 2 December 1792 in the French Church L’Eglise de St. Jean, St. John Street, Spitalfields, not surprising for a descendant of a Huguenot family, but the next generation no longer married or baptised their children at the French Church. Thomas married Henrietta Louisa Brand on 8 August 1825 at St Botolph without Bishopsgate; they were both of the “Liberty of Norton Folgate”. Their son Thomas Peter was born in 1831, or at least, he was baptised on the 25th of that year in the parish of West Hackney. The family’s address is given as Derby Road, Kingsland and Thomas’s occupation as bank clerk, but in May 1834, when their next child (Henrietta Louisa junior) is baptised at St. Pancras Church, Thomas is working at Tottenham Court Road as a stationer. The couple’s third child (Ellen Julia, born 1837) is also baptised at St. Pancras’s with the same address and occupation for Thomas. We still find him there at the time of the 1841 census and in 1847 when his name appears in an advertisement (see below), but in 1851, the family has moved back to West Hackney and are living at 18 Ufton Road; Thomas is now listed as a printer and young Thomas Peter as a clerk. The next census of 1861 still finds Thomas and Henrietta there, but Thomas is now listed as ‘Pensioned Cl. Bank of England Printer’. Thomas Peter has embarked on a family of his own and is living with his wife Emma and young son Alfred at Bay Street, Dalston and is listed as clerk in the lace trade. Thomas died in March 1868 and was buried on the 13th in Abney Park Cemetery, as were quite a number of other Cazaly family members, not least of course Herbert Peter, but also Thomas’s wife (in 1883) and his daughters (Ellen Julia in 1863 and Henrietta Louise in 1906).

Publishers Circular and Booksellers’ Record 15 October 1847

Very little is known of Thomas’s professional life. He is variously described as a bank clerk, an engraver, a printer, or a stationer. His father Peter was employed by the Bank of England in the Note Office and it is not unlikely that Thomas obtained his position as bank clerk through his father’s influence and that the engraving of bank notes was how he got involved in the printing business. On Wikipedia I found the following information on bank notes: “notes were originally hand-written; although they were partially printed from 1725 onwards, cashiers still had to sign each note and make them payable to someone. Notes were fully printed from 1855”. Whatever the exact circumstances of Thomas’s involvement in the Bank, he apparently also had a shop in Tottenham Court Road where he offered his services as an engraver and a stationer. I have found only one advertisement for a publication in which Thomas’s address is given as the place to obtain the book. Whether he was financially involved in the publication or whether he just sold it remains unclear. He certainly did not print it himself, the actual printer was one George Taylor. In 1846, the 16-page booklet concerned was written by one F.N. with the very long title of A few observations on the mismanagement and consequent barrenness of numerous out-of-door grape-vines, in and about London, and of the means likely to restore many to a state of fruitfulness.

Jacques Le Moyne ©British Museum

The booklet was favourably reviewed in The Gardeners’ Chronicle of 5 September, 1846, despite, according to the reviewer, its “quaint, we had almost written queer, style”. Apparently the language was full of “hereinbefores and hereinafters, hereofs and thereofs, singulars enforced by plurals, expletives, and aforesaids” which made it more like a law treatise than a work on vine-growing. But, the author had valuable points to make on pruning vines, although they appeared to be more suitable for growing the fruit in the countryside than in London as the ever-abundant soot was always to influence the taste of the grapes. Not only did the six-penny booklet strike a cord with the editor of The Gardeners’ Chronicle, it also found favour with the public and one year later, it came to a second – enlarged – edition of 35 pages. This was the edition advertised by Cazaly. Cambridge University Library, who owns copies of both editions, tells us that the initials F.N. stand for Francis Newnham of Chelsea, but who he was remains a mystery, nor do we know why Cazaly was involved in this publishing enterprise. Did the two gentlemen know each other? Did Newnham just pick a likely outlet for his booklet? Or …. ? Suggestions welcome.

I had a look at 48 Tottenham Court Road and you can still recognise the building as it was at the time Cazaly lived there in the present building. Above a picture of numbers 47-51, on the left the Tallis Street View and on the right Google Street View. Cazaly’s number 48 has turned into Sunrise Digital, but has not been altered all that much. Number 47 has been given a different top floor, number 49 has a totally different front and has been extended upwards, but number 51 can still be easily recognised as the Henson property.

Recent photograph of the premises (November 2015)

This story has been put together from the information on Libby Shades website, census records, and some additional research.

You may also like to read about Thomas’s brother, William Cazaly, who was a linen draper at 48 Red Lion Street, or about Postman’s Park hero Herbert Peter Cazaly, the grandson of Thomas’s brother James George.

Neighbours:

<– 47 Tottenham Court Road

49 Tottenham Court Road –>

Joseph Cross, engraver

Tags

book trade, engraver, maps

Street view: 3
Address: 18 Holborn

18 Holborn

Joseph Cross, bookseller, publisher, copperplate printer and engraver had his shop at 18 Holborn at least since 1823 when he engraved A new map of the county of Monmouth. The shop was often styled as being at “18 Holborn Hill, opposite Furnival’s Inn”. Not much has been discovered about his life, but a Joseph Cross, bachelor, died on 19 November, 1865 at the age of 44 and his estate (effects under £3.000) was left to Jane Cross, his mother, being the only next of kin.⁽¹⁾ He was buried in Highgate cemetery on the 23rd of November.⁽²⁾ Maps published between 1847 and 1854 were designated as coming from “J. Cross & Son”, so I assume the Joseph who died in 1865 was the son of the same name and that the father had died in 1854 or thereabouts. Joseph junior was born on 27 October 1821 and baptised on 24 January 1822 at St. Andrew’s, Holborn as the son of Joseph Cross, engraver and Jane.⁽³⁾ At the time of his death Joseph had two addresses to his name; the Holborn shop and 1 Horningsham Villas, Junction Road, Upper Holloway where his mother also lived. It is not known whether the Cross family rented the Holloway property or bought it, but we do know that one Henry Lea lived there in December 1871 when he was elected a member of the Quekett Microscopical Club.⁽⁴⁾

Advertisement in Mechanics Magazine 1826

As publishers, the Crosses brought out several books on exploration, for instance: Journals of Several Expeditions made in Western Australia, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1832; under the sanction of the governor, Sir James Stirling and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A letter from Sydney, the principal town of Australasia. Cross senior advertised in the Mechanics Magazine for James Atkinson’s An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales which contained “information important to those who are about to emigrate to that country” as coming out in the early part of June 1826. The Account itself contained a 3–page list of “colonial publications” which could be obtained from 18 Holborn. The list was subdivided into Australia, Tasmania, Canada and the United States, and South-Africa and contained, besides the occasional book, many maps.

Advert in Tallis’s Street View

List of colonial publications

Cross and son were engravers and produced, for instance, the medical labels they advertised in Tallis’s Street View, but they specialised in maps and street plans. For London, they produced Cross’s New Plan of London, with all the improvements to 1840 (many editions between 1828 and 1865) and Cross’s London Guide, a street map and directory (5 editions between 1837 and 1851). In 1846 they also produced the folding Cross’s Miniature London of which you can see photos below.

Cross’s Miniature London cover

Cross’s Miniature London

See for the larger version of Cross’s London map of 1851 here.

Cross’s old shop at number 18 no longer exists; together with the neighbouring properties at nos 14-17 it has been replaced by a much grander building designated as 14-18 Holborn with the Melton Mowbray pub on the left-hand corner, still at number 18, but now roughly comprising the ground floor space of what were once numbers 18 and 17, if not also half of number 16.

14-18 Holborn. Source: Google Street View

(1) London Gazette, 29 December 1865, notice to creditors and other claimants to send in claims on the estate before 8 February to Sidney Smith & Son, Furnivall’s Inn, solicitors. National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1865, p. 560-561
(2) London Metropolitan Archives, Highgate Cemetery of Saint James, Swains Lane, Saint Pancras, Transcript of Burials, 1865, p. 1756.
(3) London Metropolitan Archives, St Andrew Holborn, Register of Baptism, P69/AND2/A/01/Ms 6667, Item 21, p. 50.
(4) Seventh Report of the Quekett Microscopical Club, July 1872, p. 42.

Neighbours:

<– 19 Holborn

17 Holborn –>