Articles from the Thoroton Society Newsletter
William Stephenson Holbrook: a Nottingham Benefactor
By Terry Fry
On various buildings round Nottingham there are several rectangular memorial plaques surviving from fifteen, which were originally erected in the early years of the 20th century. Because the money for them was left to the City Corporation in W S Holbrook’s will they are known as the Holbrook plaques. He left £1800 for six monuments of poets still to be seen on the Castle colonnade. Holbrook himself played an interesting if minor role in the ‘Arts’ world in Nottingham in the late 19th century.
William Stephenson Holbrook was born in Nottingham on 20 May 1826 and baptised on 22 October 1826 in St Mary’s Church. He was the son of Robert Gregory Holbrook, a commission agent, and his wife Marianne. On 17 April 1855 he married a schoolmistress, Susanna Williamson of Hundleby near Spilsby, Lincolnshire, at Hundleby parish church, which had been rebuilt the previous year. Hundleby is about 10 miles from Wainfleet, where Holbrook was employed as a schoolmaster at Magdalen College School, a delightful Tudor brick building which now houses a small museum. He was also the Honorary Secretary of the Wainfleet Horticultural Society in the 1860s. He had taken out several mortgages on properties in Wainfleet, Skegness, Boston and nearby villages so he was comfortably off.
Meanwhile, in Nottingham, a free library and free museums were being developed. In 1867 the free library took over the Artisans’ Library at Clumber Chambers, Thurland Street, where a plaque can be seen above the doorway. A sub-committee of the free library managed the free Museum of Natural History, which opened at 25 Wheeler Gate in 1872. Early that year Henry Cole of the South Kensington Museum visited Nottingham to confer with the Joint Committee representing the town and the School of Art about the establishment of a temporary museum in the ‘Exchange rooms overlooking the market place’. They were to be fitted up to receive pictures, lace, works of art, pottery, porcelain, etc, many of which would be on loan from South Kensington Museum. It was to be called the Midland Counties Museum of Science and Art.
Its first curator and secretary was William Holbrook. On his return to Nottingham he and his wife set up home at 12 Fourth Avenue, Sherwood Rise, but later moved to Welbeck House, 18 Bentinck Road. The Midland Counties Art Exhibition, as it became known, opened on 20 May 1872, and was the forerunner of the Castle Museum and Art Gallery. Holbrook worked hard in the interim years, but in 1878 he appears to have been ‘sidelined’ as merely secretary when George Henry Wallis was appointed the Art Director of the newly opened Castle Museum, designed by T C Hine. Holbrook’s salary was advanced to £300 per annum in 1882, but in December 1883 he resigned due to ill health. Since June of that year he had been arranging an exhibition of the works of the Sandby brothers and Richard Bonington. The Castle Museum Committee formally commented that it could not ‘part with Mr Holbrook who has been in their service since the funding of the Institution without expressing their regret at losing the service of one who has served them faithfully and well, especially in the early history of the museum’.
Holbrook was to live another 16 years. Little is known of him in retirement apart from his continued interest in collecting curios, his investments and his will. In January 1884 he wrote to his solicitor Thomas Timbleby of Spilsby, ‘As I have no near relations I care to benefit by leaving my money to, I contemplate investing the bulk of it in annuities for my wife. Unfortunately she died in 1894. He had invested £1200 in a life annuity with Manchester Corporation Waterworks and added £800 in 1887. By December 1898 Thimbleby reported his income from life annuities alone to be upwards of £1300, and other assets to be around £9000. After his death, on 24 March 1900, his property was valued at £11,228.
When his wife died Holbrook had to think again about the final destination of his assets. Fortunately for us he decided on ‘the application of his whole estate for the benefit of Nottingham’. Apart from a few legacies to relatives amounting to £700, and 50 guineas each to his executors Thomas Thimbleby and Sir Samuel Johnson, the Town Clerk of Nottingham, he left all his money and possessions to the city. Various local institutions benefitted by his will. For example, his scientific instruments and appliances went to Nottingham Corporation [sic] University; his water bed, bath chair, Turkish bath and all other invalid appliances to the hospital for Diseases of Women on Castle Gate. His Japanese collection, coins, old silver mourning rings, fans, pistols, guns, swords, engravings and works of art were left to the Castle Art Museum and were to be known as the Holbrook Bequest.
There were several Holbrook Bequests, William appearing to be keen to perpetuate his surname after his death. Every Christmas, for example, 400 people aged over 60 were to be entertained. Holbrook also directed that half of the net income from his trust fund should be used each December to distribute coal, clothes and food to the deserving poor in St Mary’s Parish. Consequently 400 children were included in the treats arranged by the Robin Hood Dinner Society each Christmas. Typically, Sir Samuel Johnson thought this was of no real benefit to poor people.
He also objected to Holbrook leaving £1000 for twenty historical cartoons, each 3ft x 2ft, to be painted representing the principal historical events connected with Nottingham. They were to be installed in the Castle Art Museum. Sir Samuel thought this ‘manifestly absurd as they would be placed in the cellars of the Museum and the money wasted.’ Little was done and in December 1911 the cartoon fund still stood at £967.
Holbrook wished to encourage ‘the development of the Art or painting,’ so left £2000 which, each year, would produce enough income to award four prizes of £10, £5, £3 and £2 to painters who were resident within 30 miles of Nottingham Town Hall. Harold Knight was one of those to receive £10, for ‘Toilers of the Deep’ in July 1903. Holbrook also instructed his trustees to choose one painting each year for the permanent collection in the Castle Gallery. They bought Harold Knight’s ‘The Last Coble’ in 1902 for £50 and ‘Flamborough Head’, a pastel by T W Hammond for £15 in 1917.
However, Holbrook’s most significant contribution to the city took the form of historical plaques and monuments. In a codicil to his will in January 1899 he left £1800 to pay for the memorials to Lord Byron, Henry Kirke White, Philip James Bailey, William and Mary Howitt, Robert Millhouse and Thomas Miller, which still grace the colonnade to the rear of the Castle Museum. He also left £200 to pay for the plaques. (For more details see Nottingham’s Plaques and Statues, a Civic Society publication in the Get to Know Nottingham series). Oliver Sheppard, then teaching in the Nottingham School of Art, received £25 in April 1902 for designing the plaques and £300 for executing the bust of Henry Kirke White in bronze on a granite pedestal. Enrico Cantoni of Chelsea moulded the bronze plaques for £4 each.
In his Will, Holbrook specifically stated that his trustees should encourage young sculptors rather than pay large sums to those of established reputation. However, with one exception, all the sculptors of the busts were well established, though all were happy to receive £300 for their work. Albert Toft, who modelled the bust of Philip James Bailey, had impressed the city fathers with his bust of Major ‘Jonty’ White, which was erected in the Castle grounds in 1891. Alfred Drury, who created the bust of Byron, made the fine bronze statues Morning and Evening in Leeds City Square around 1898. George Frampton (William and Mary Howitt bas-reliefs) was one of the most individual designers around 1900 and already an expert at designing bas-reliefs. The one exception was George Gillick, a distinguished student of Nottingham School of Art, who agreed to model both the Robert Millhouse and Thomas Miller memorials for £300 in total. In January 1904 G H Wallis, then Art Director of the Castle Gallery, wrote that ‘four times the casting had been a failure’ but this was an accepted risk as Gillick ‘is a young sculptor just beginning his career’. Wallis was obliged to support Gillick, having recommended him for the work.
There is no doubt that Holbrook regarded his contribution to the arts in Nottingham to be important. Indeed, he left a further £300 for the express purpose of erecting a memorial to himself for making that contribution. John Wildgust, a monumental sculptor on Derby Road, said that William Stephenson Holbrook had talked over the whole matter with him and even sketched the proposed monument.
Holbrook wanted it erected near his own and his wife’s grave in the General Cemetery, but the trustees decided the site was not at all suitable as there was a urinal only four paces from the grave. They selected a site on the other side of the cemetery but Sir Samuel Johnson thought no monument costing only £300 would be worth erecting. However, he had to eat his words after seeing the Celtic cross memorial designed by S Drake, another monumental sculptor on Derby Road, when he declared it to be ‘striking and beyond anything else in the General Cemetery for artistic excellent [sic]’. And it cost a mere £72 10s 0d. It is still there today, a monument to one man’s desire for immortality. The inscription reads:
In Memory of
WILLIAM STEPHENSON HOLBROOK
of this City
who died on the 24th day of March 1900
aged 74 years
By his will the deceased bequeathed
considerable sums of money for the benefit of the Poor, and
the advancement of Art in this city.
Have you noticed the plaques, busts and bas-reliefs, which form a Holbrook bequest? Or have you, like thousands of others, hardly given them a glance? Next time you see any, spare a thought for William Stephenson Holbrook who made a small but lasting contribution to Nottingham’s history.
Terry Fry
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