William Shaw, ironmonger

Tags

ironmonger

Street View: 57
Address: 253 Blackfriars Road

In 1826, William Shaw insured premises at 74 Blackfriars Road with the Sun Fire Office. His occupation is given as ironmonger, so that would match the information I had from Tallis, but the house number did not match, or did it? The policy register kindly informs us that the ironmonger’s business was situated on the corner of Holland Street and that does match the information in the Tallis Street View booklet. An 1829 insurance with the Sun Fire Office, and indeed many later ones, list Shaw’s business at number 174, so I assume that there was a transcription error in the 1827 registry, and the house number was in fact 174. In 1831, the numbering had not yet changed to 253, but the name of the street has changed and is now referred to as Great Surrey Street. The 1835 and 1836 insurance records were hedging their bets by naming it ‘Great Surrey Street Blackfriars’. According to The Survey of London “the road was known as Great Surrey Street until 1829 when its name was changed to Blackfriars Road.”⁽¹⁾ Well, not quite, but we get the picture. In 1836, the insurance records still number the house as 174, but Tallis has no. 253, so the numbering must have been altered somewhere around 1837 or 1838.

In 1823, the stock of a tea dealer who had his business at number 174 Great Surrey Street came on the market, certainly suggesting that the owner had either gone bankrupt or died.⁽²⁾ Kent’s 1823 directory listed a Mr. Greenhill, grocer, on the premises, but whether Shaw took possession immediately after the tea dealer/grocer had left is not clear, as the earliest mention of him is 1826. The property was fairly substantial as we can see from the vignette in Tallis’s Street View. The street on the left with the covered wagon is Holland Street and the one on the right with the carriage is Blackfriars Road. Despite the size of the building, not many people actually lived there; the 1841 census only lists Robert Shaw, 24 years old, an ironmonger; Eliza Shaw, 17 years old, no occupation given; Charles Stephenson, 18 years old, an apprentice; and Mary Cook, 24 years old, a servant. Whether and how Robert and Eliza are related is not made clear. Ten years later, we find Frederick F. Shaw, 26 years old, an unmarried ironmonger, at number 253 with his sister Mary A. Staff, a 36-year old widow; and Frederick Bates, 18 years old, a servant porter. Frederick Francis was most likely the son of William and Mary Shaw who was baptised on 24 December 1824 at Christchurch, Southwark, but not much else is known about the family. The numerous entries in the various records for people with the name Shaw do not make it easy to search for a particular individual with that name, and the combination with William certainly does not make it any easier, so we will concentrate on the business itself.

The 1843, 1848 and 1851 Post Office Directories all list William Shaw senior as ironmonger at number 253. One William junior can be found at 39 Newington Causeway, but whether he was William senior’s son, or in any other way related is not yet clear. I will try to solve that puzzle when I get round to writing the post on 39 Newington Causeway. The 1853 Shopkeeper’s Guide and the 1856 Post Office Directory list Frederick Francis as the ironmonger at number 253, suggesting the demise or retirement of William senior. Although the directories keep it simple and just call the gentlemen ‘ironmongers’, they were much more than that. As you can see from the substantial advertisement of four times a third of an oblong page in the Street View (bottom of this post), Shaw was a wholesale ironmonger and stove and range maker. They supplied their customers, be they householders or farmers, with all kinds of metal goods, cutlery, kitchen furniture, garden and other tools, not to mention the ‘sundries’. In other words, whether you needed a teaspoon or a weather vane, a fruit basket or a Dutch oven, a screw or a sickle, Shaw was your man.

But Shaw also invented implements, such as this ‘carriage lifter’, which was praised by a William Baddeley in the Mechanics Magazine of 3 October 1840. Apparently another model had been described in an earlier instalment of the magazine and “a still more ingenious contrivance” had been rewarded by the Society of Arts, but Baddeley thought that “the simplicity and efficiency” of Shaw’s tool was recommendation enough and need not be given more explanation of its merits than a small drawing with a description of the handles and levers involved.⁽³⁾

Frederick Francis does not seem to have been as astute a businessman as his father was, and in 1857 he got into trouble. A bankruptcy claim was filed against him in February 1857, and if that was not enough in itself, it turned out that he had also involved himself in the London and Birmingham Iron and Hardware Company Ltd. who had bought the business at 253 Blackfriars Road and were trying to raise money by giving out shares. Shaw was “engaged to continue the active management of the concern”. This ruse did not work and a bankruptcy claim was filed against the Company in April of that same year.⁽⁴⁾ Shaw had been promised £600 by the directors of the Company, but they failed to pay up. A legal wrangle in the Court of Exchequer ensued to work out whether the wording of the agreement had made the directors personally responsible for the sum of money, or whether the case was one of limited liability.⁽⁵⁾

The Era, 15 February 1857

The records of the London and Birmingham Iron Company seemed to have been a bit of a shambles and one Mr. Harrison who had given Shaw 50l. for 25 shares never received his certificate of shares, but, as he was a friend of Shaw, he saw it more as a loan than an investment. He had been told by Mr. Harris, one of the directors, that he did not have any shares, although his name later appeared in the list of shareholders. Harrison was not the only one slightly confused about the procedures of the Company; even George Shaw, the brother of Frederick Francis, was listed for more shares than he thought he had. Did the company deliberately fiddle the books, or were they just sloppy in their accounting? The meeting to sort it all out at the Court of Bankruptcy was adjourned, so the report in the newspaper⁽⁶⁾ does not give us the final outcome, but the third and final dividend to the shareholders was only made payable in 1896! The shareholders certainly needed a lot of patience with the London and Birmingham Iron and Hardware Company. And Frederick Francis? Well, in 1871 he could be found as a coal merchant in St. Helier, Jersey, and there is a good chance that he was the Frederick Francis who died in the second quarter of 1878 at Lewisham. I cannot prove it, but, at that time, he may have been living with his daughter Emily who was certainly to be found in Lewisham in 1881.

(1) Survey of London: Volume 22, Bankside. Originally published by London County Council, London, 1950. Via British History Online.
(2) The Morning Chronicle, 5 May 1823.
(3) The Mechanic’s Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal and Gazette, Volume 33, no. 895, 3 October 140, p. 356 (online here).
(4) The Era, 15 February 1857; and The London Gazette, 24 February and 27 November 1857.
(5) The Jurist, July 1857.
(6) Daily News, 26 November 1858.

Neighbours:

<– 254 Blackfriars Road

252 Blackfriars Road –>

John Lee Benham, ironmonger

Tags

ironmonger

Address: 19 Wigmore Street
Street View: 50

John Lee Benham had his business at 19 Wigmore Street, a substantial building on the corner of Welbeck Street. From the vignette he had in Tallis’s Street View, we learn that he was a furnishing ironmonger, a stove manufacturer, and a portable warm & vapor bath manufacturer. An 1857 Old Bailey case in which a policeman was accused of stealing from Benham’s under the guise of patrolling the area, tells us more about the property. John Lee was called as a witness and he relates that the firm was in the processs of incorporating 65 Welbeck Street into the business at Wigmore Street. Number 64 Welbeck Street was already part of the business and workmen were employed to knock out the partition wall. John Lee’s bedroom was on the second floor in Wigmore Street, on the corner of Welbeck Street, and when he was woken up one morning by the ringing of the doorbell, he found the door at number 64 open. The back door of the Benham property opened into Eastley Mews and anyone using a ladder could have got onto “the leads” and hence into the property through one of the windows the builders were working on. Sons Frederick and James gave evidence about petty cash stolen from their respective desks. The policeman was found guilty and transported for life.⁽¹⁾

John Lee was born in 1785 in Reading, Berkshire, the son of Avery Benham (1753-1829), a smith. Avery moved to London in 1791 and set up a tinplate workshop in Commerce Row, Blackfriars Road. John Lee worked for his father until 1817 when he bought his own business in Wigmore Street (then called Edward Street). In 1824, he moved to the former home of the bishop of Chicester at number 19. John’s first wife died giving birth to their second child, leaving him with daughter Emily⁽²⁾. He remarried in 1818 to Jane Kirkpatrick and there were to be seven more children. A basic family tree can be found below. An extented tree with the next generation can be found here as a PDF-file. I offer no pretence at completeness, but it will give you some idea of the various generations. On some family members, more information can be found outside the bare dates of birth and death and these are listed in footnote 3.

(click to enlarge)

elevation from The official Illustrated Catalogue Advertiser (1851)

With the exception of Edward, who became a printer in Colchester, the sons of John Lee came to work in their father’s business and so did some of the grandsons. At some point, a separate partnership was entered into by John Lee, his son Augustus and one Joseph William Froud under the name of Benham and Froud at Chandos Street (later at 170 Regent Street). In 1848, John junior was apprenticed to his brother Augustus, but later came to work in his father’s business. In 1863, John Lee retired from the Froud partnership, but Augustus and Joseph William Froud carried on.⁽⁴⁾ Why it is frequently said that it is not clear whether Benham and Froud had anything to do with the Benham’s of Wigmore Street is a mystery to me. The London Gazette notice about the partnership is clear enough. That the Benham & Froud business was successful, can be seen from the 1871 census where August is described as a coppersmith master, employing 110 men and boys. In 1874, Froud and Benham were mentioned for their improvements in refrigerators.⁽⁵⁾

But back to the business in Wigmore Street. John Lee died in 1864, and the executors were sons James and Frederick.⁽⁶⁾ Various members of the family can be seen living above the property in subsequent censuses, either in Wigmore Street itself, or round the corner in Welbeck Street. At some point in the 1860s, the numbering in the street must have changed as in 1871, James and John Benham can be seen living at numbers 50 and 52 respectively and the business address changes from 19 Wigmore Street to 50 Wigmore Street without an actual move taking place. If we compare the 1799 Horwood map with the 1893 Ordnance Survey map, we can see that the property on the corner of Welbeck Street has developed into a substantial iron works covering most of the inner space in the block with the original property in the right hand lower corner and an additional entrance in Wigmore Street, closer to Marylebone Lane. A photograph of that new entrance can be found here.

1799 Horwood map

1893 Ordnance Survey map

Stanley, John’s son and author of a history of the firm, printed by his uncle Edward’s firm in Colchester, wrote that number 26 Wigmore Street (afterwards nr 66) was taken with “a great deal of land at the back with an entrance to Easley Mews”. There the Benhams “built what was for those days a very fine new factory which was well arranged and had excellent facilities for our class of work”.⁽⁷⁾ Numbers 58-65 Welbeck Street were purchased between 1860 and 1870. The houses were let to medical specialists and large showrooms were built over the gardens. According to Stanley, when John Lee started out for himself, all the manufacturing was at first done by his father in Blackfriars Road, but when the business moved to 19 Wigmore Street in 1824, he started manufacturing his own products. The workshops were in the basement and cellars, the showroom was on the ground floor and John Lee lived on the first floor.

When the Reform Club was built in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, Alexis Soyer, the head chef at the Club, designed the kitchens and Benham secured the order for fitting them up. All the equipment for the kitchen was produced in Wigmore Street. In 1922, Stanley was asked to advise the Club and he found the original open fire roasting ranges still in use. The Illustrated London News and The Builder both produced illustrations of the new kitchens of the Club, but the latter also illustrated some of the equipment that Benham’s had provided.

Steel engraving of part of the kitchen drawn by G. B. Moore, engraved by W. Radclyffe 1841 (Source: http://www.antique-prints.de)

James died in 1885 and things went downhill from then on. The patent cooking apparatus, one of the steady sellers, was dropped and ambitious new ideas did not work out. According to Stanley “it was absurd to attempt to make large Lancashire steam boilers, calorifiers, pumps, lifts, radiators, etc., in the heart of the West End of London”. Gross mistakes were made in the estimated costs of contracts, and it was found that in one instance, the actual costs of a large contract had exceeded the estimate by 40 per cent. The idea to build showrooms over the gardens was an idea of Frederick, but Stanley doubted that it ever paid. Frederick died in 1891 and the firm was formed into a private company. According to Stanley, his uncle Frederick had been a nice chap, but not strict enough and when Stanley entered the business in 1892, he “found an incredible amount of drunkenness. Quite a dozen or more of the staff and some of the workmen were drinking much too much”. Stanley’s father John died in 1899 and Walter (the son of James) became chairman and some of John Lee’s grandsons directors.

Benham’s mark on a copper pan ±1910 (Source: National Trust Collections, Ham House)

In 1901, there were serious disagreements within the board after troubles over noise from the factory and a subsequent reshuffling of leases in the area, resulting in Percy’s (son of Frederick) resignation. A few months later, Percy’s brother Arthur Howard died. The Frederick side of the family wanted out and in 1907 a new Company was formed with Walter and Stanley as managing directors. The business was moved to Lombard Road, Battersea in 1906, but that site turned out to be too small with the additional naval work acquired, so they relocated the factory to what had been Macmurray’s Paper Mills in Garret Lane. The Benham offices remained at Wigmore Street.

The Navy work gained more prominence and better ranges were developed for on board ships and Benham’s even supplied Captain Scott for his Antarctic Expedition with a stove that could work on burning blocks as well as on whale blubber. In World War I, cooking and baking apparatus, depth charges, aerial bombs and rings for mine sinkers were produced by Benham’s. One night there was a – relatively minor – fire at the factory and the firemen were faced with water jets turning into fire. The stronger the jet, the greater the flames. This was caused by the phosphide of calcium with was used in the anti-submarine devices. War is a dirty business indeed. The family connection with the business ceased in the 1960s and Benham’s became part of Thorn Electrical Industries.

Advert from Murray’s Handbook Advertiser (1864)

Advert for gas lights (Source: Ebay)

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Do not forget to look at the comments on this post, especially at the one from the London Museum of Water & Steam who have restored a steam driven pump supplied by the Benhams.
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(1) Old Bailey, case t18570105-226.
(2) Emily was to become the second wife of Edward Bean Underhill who wrote, among other things, The West Indies: their Social and Religious Condition, published in 1862 by Jackson & Walford.
(3) Edward Benham, newspaper proprietor and printer (see here).
William Gurney, son of Edward, continued his father’s newspaper and print shop and was knighted in 1895 (see here).
Gertrude Emily, daughter of Frederick, became an intrepid traveller and explorer (see here and R.J. Howgego, Gertrude Emily Benham 1867-1938: a ‘very quiet and harmless traveller’, 2009).
Most of the Benhams were baptists and contributed to the congregation (see here). James Harvey, husband of John Lee’s daughter Jane, was also a baptist and contributed generously to their places of worship (see here).
Charles Henry (1874-1916) was the son of Henry Charles (1847-1922), who was the son of James Benham (1820-1885). Rather than working in the business, Henry Charles and Charles Henry both became medical doctors. Charles served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and his life has been described here.
(4) London Gazette, 13 November 1863.
(5) London Gazette, 24 March 1874.
(6) England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1864.
(7) S. Benham, Under Five Generations. The Story of Benham & Sons Ltd (1937).

Neighbours:

<– 20 Wigmore Street

18 1/2 Wigmore Street –>

Charles Houghton, ironmonger

Tags

furniture, ironmonger

Street View: 18

Address: 44 Farringdon Street

Charles Houghton ran the Britannia Nail Warehouse in Farringdon Street and according to the advertisement he had in Tallis’s Street View, you could also obtain from him, besides nails, cornice poles and ends, rings, brackets, curtain bands, and any kind of article that a builder, cabinet maker, upholsterer or box maker might require. But also, as he proudly had written on the vignette in the Street View, Patent Buffalo Horn Furniture.

The horns were not from buffaloes specifically killed for their horns, but from the cattle slaughtered in the abattoirs, or so The Furniture Gazette of 1884 wants us to believe. Not that it mattered for the buffalo; it died anyway, and probably not in a very pleasant way. Better not think about the details. I found an example of such furniture on Pinterest – hideous I think, but there is no accounting for taste.

late 19th century horn furniture (Source: pinterest.com, pin-342766221609778944)

Charles Houghton probably started his working life as an apprentice ironmonger, but whether that was in his native town or in London is unknown. On the 1851 census he is listed as coming from Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. We know that he became a member of the London Bowyer Company as he is mentioned as such when he took an an apprentice of his own in March 1834, Thomas Mortin, the son of Thomas Mortin of 70, Red Lion Street, plumber and glazier. The link with the Mortin family became even closer when Charles married the daughter of Thomas senior, Mary, a few weeks later, on 19 April at St. Andrew Holborn. An 1834 advertisement (see below) mentions the 44 Farringdon Street address, but also the previous one: Skinner Street, Snowhill. The eldest son of the couple, Charles Solly Houghton, was baptised on 28 December 1835, and many more children were to follow⁽¹⁾, but from 1846, the family no longer lived at Farringdon Street. Thomas Mortin was not the only apprentice Houghton had. An Old Bailey case of March 1835 relates how another apprentice, Charles Woodward, got a consignment of nails together for one Henry Smith, purporting to be in the employ of John Brees, a customer of Houghton.⁽²⁾ Woodward states that he has been in the trade for three years, although he does not say that he was with Houghton these three years.

1834 advert (Source: gracesguide.co.uk)

Charles went bankrupt in mid-1846 and in the London Gazette notice of his problems, he is given the address of 58, Dudley Grove which is also from where his daughter Maud is baptised in late 1846. The 1851 census, sees the family living at 6, Arlington Square. Charles happens to be absent from home when the census is taken, but he can be found visiting one Mary Houghton in Bury St. Edmunds, possibly his sister. Charles is still described as ironmonger, but when in 1856, his daughter Isabel is baptised he is described as ‘gentlemen’ and living in Stoke Newington. The 1861 census sees the family living at Woodland Terrace, Islington and Charles is then ‘Collector to a brewery’. Charles dies on 25 August 1866 at 84, Newington Green Road and probate is granted to widow Mary the following May.⁽³⁾ The estate is valued as under £1,000. The following census of 1871 sees daughter Laura as the head of the household at Grange Road Terrace, Stoke Newington. She is described as a school mistress and with her are living her mother and four of her sisters: Gertrude, Fanny and Maude are described as governesses and Isabel as a scholar. And that is as far as I will take this story of the ironmonger’s family.

Avert from the Tallis Street View

(1) Laura Mortin (bapt. 13 Oct. 1837), John Rowland (bapt. 29 April 1840), Gertrude (bapt. 5 May 1842), Fanny (bapt. 14-01-1845), Maud (bapt. 30-12-1846), George (±1849), Mary Ann (bapt. 4 Jan. 1852), Arthur (±1854), and Isabel (bapt. 30-11-1856).

(2) Old Bailey case t18350302-842. Smith was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity.

(3) England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1867.

Neighbours:

<– 45 Farringdon Street

43 Farringdon Street –>