Entrepreneur – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

John Creemer Clarke

Although he came to play a significant role in many aspects of Abingdon life, John Creemer Clarke was not a native of the town. He came from Devon and remained proud of his roots. He was the son of Robert Clarke, a farmer, and Graciana, whose maiden name was Creemer.

As a young man Clarke was first employed in the drapery business in Bideford before moving to Berkshire and joining the firm of Hyde and Son, wholesale clothiers in Abingdon. He married twice, both his wives coming from Somerset. With his first wife, Anna Avis, he had a son, Heber (1846-98). Anna died in 1848, and the following year Clarke married Elizabeth Joyce. After a few years in Reading, he returned to Abingdon, took up a senior position at Hyde and Son, and lived for the rest of his life at Waste Court in Bath Street. Altogether he had ten children who, unusually for the time, all reached adulthood.

Hyde and Son did well, and during the Crimean War (1854-6) won a contract for army uniforms. The American Civil War (1861-5) also provided an opportunity. At the beginning of the war, Clarke persuaded his fellow-directors to allow him to buy very large quantities of cloth while it was still available − cotton imports from the USA essentially ceased for the duration of the war. Unlike the industry in Lancashire, the Abingdon factory was able to continue production and the workers remained employed.

Hyde and Son became Hyde, Son and Clarke, and finally Clarke, Sons and Co. It was one of the largest clothing manufacturers in the country, employing up to 2000 people at its height, including many home workers. The factory itself was at the bottom of West St Helen Street, next to the churchyard. The company owed much of its success to Clarke’s drive and enthusiasm and it was one of the first to adopt new machinery. At his death Clarke was worth £85,000, which would have classed him as a multi-millionaire today.

By 1860 Clarke was a member of the town council, serving as mayor in 1869-70, and he was also a JP. As a prominent local figure he was persuaded to stand as the Liberal candidate for Abingdon in the 1874 general election. He defeated the sitting Conservative member comfortably even though Disraeli and the Conservatives won nationally, and despite his opponents saying that his business commitments had prevented him fully carrying out his duties as a councillor. This was the first election with a secret ballot, which may have contributed to Clarke’s success. There were great celebrations in the town, and in the factory his workers drank his health in cups of tea. One critic still grumbled that he was not fit for the job, lacking the education and oratorical ability required. Clarke was not very active in parliament but was nevertheless re-elected in 1880 and held the seat until 1885 when the borough lost its separate representation. In 1888, County Councils were introduced and Clarke became one of Abingdon’s two members, the other being John Tomkins, a conservative.

Clarke was a leading Methodist and rarely missed a church meeting. He played an important part in the building of Trinity Church and is credited with largely financing it with its associated meeting rooms and the original manse. His family continued to support the church in many ways. The girls helped in the Sunday School and the summer treat was held in the Waste Court gardens.

Creating a local cottage hospital was another cause Clark strongly promoted. The hospital opened in 1886 after Christ’s Hospital had provided land in Bath Street and Clarke had covered the building costs. Contemporaries thought this was his greatest contribution to the town. The building remained in use until 1930 when the Warren Hospital, converted from a large Victorian house, was opened on Radley Road. The original site in Bath Street is now Mercers’ Court, part of Abingdon School, built in a style reminiscent of the original hospital.

From 1873 Clarke was chairman of the Abingdon Railway Company. He had been a director since it was founded in 1855 when Abingdon was, at last, about to achieve a railway link, although only a branch line.

Three sons followed him into the clothing business though one of these died when only twenty. Heber, the eldest, took over the company on his father’s death in 1895. He was also a councillor for several years and served as mayor. He and his family lived in Fitzharris House, opposite Waste Court. When he died only three years after his father, a younger brother, Harry, took over the company and later moved into Waste Court. This building is now an Abingdon School boarding house with the new name of Austin House. It was renamed after the first Old Abingdonian killed in 1914, to mark the centenary of the First World War. The boys had anyway disliked the previous name. The clothing company continued until 1932.

How should Clarke be remembered? The original Cottage Hospital, his gift to the town, has gone but Trinity Church is still flourishing. In 1879, Clarke had given the town an elaborate gold badge for the mayor’s chain, bearing the arms of Abingdon, with a link showing his arms and motto. Other mayors have contributed their own links, and the handsome chain is still in use today.

Reporting his funeral, The Abingdon Herald described Clarke as “a good man whose help and counsel both public and private will be very sorely missed”.

© AAAHS and contributors 2017 & 2023

John Maberly

John Maberly, Abingdon’s MP from 1818 to 1832, was an entrepreneur and a businessman before he became a politician. Born in London in 1770, he started working with his father as a currier (a tradesman who finishes and dyes leather), invested in steam engines, and, with the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars, became a supplier of uniforms and clothing to the army. This made him a very rich man, but it was his dissatisfaction with the inefficiency and corruption of the military supply chain that brought him into contact with government figures and tempted him in 1816 to enter Parliament.

This was before the reforms of the 1830s; his first seat was in Rye, a pocket borough where he was obliged, against his principles, to support the government. He began nursing the Abingdon constituency. In 1817 he gave ‘a splendid dinner’ to Abingdon voters at the County Hall and made generous donations to local charities. In the next year, he was elected without a contest.

Maberly was the sort of active independent back-bencher that ministers hate. He believed that all that was wrong with the British economy was that the government was spending and taxing too much, and was a fanatical opponent of almost all government spending. He was passionate, well informed and highly numerate. He spoke frequently and at length in debates, and was assiduous in committees.

On non-financial matters, he generally followed the moderately reforming agenda of the Whigs. He favoured the abolition of rotten boroughs and redistribution of their seats to the newly expanding industrial towns, but not extension of the franchise. The Corn Laws, protecting agriculture at the expense of townspeople, should be loosened but not abolished. This was broadly acceptable to Abingdon voters, and his local support was much increased when he voted for the repeal of the Test Acts which had kept religious Dissenters, who in Abingdon were numerous and generally prosperous, out of public affairs. There was anger at his support for Catholic emancipation which was popular neither with Anglicans nor with Dissenters. The Abingdon corporation, mostly Tory, produced a petition opposing the measure; he took it into the House of Commons as he had to, but made clear his dissent. There were limits on how far he was willing to compromise his principles to please his electors; when they complained to him of the decline of their hemp industry, he told them frankly that the fault was in their lack of skill and energy, and offered to send some of them to his factory in Aberdeen for training. Nonetheless, it is plain that he kept the confidence of the Abingdon voters; on the one occasion when there was a contest for his seat, in 1830, he easily saw off an outsider by 159 votes to 94.

In spite of his intense parliamentary activity, Maberly continued as an entrepreneur. This would be his undoing. His factory in Aberdeen, weaving jute and linen, was suffering from the excessive charges levied by the Scottish banks. In 1818 he opened a bank of his own, halving and then quartering the cost of transferring money between London and Scotland. The Scottish banks were furious, and determined to bring him down. They succeeded, and in 1832 he was made bankrupt and moved abroad to avoid the risk of imprisonment for his debts.

It was the end of Maberly’s parliamentary career, but what was possibly his greatest business achievement was still to come. Until 1834 he is heard of occasionally in Brussels or Madrid acting as foreign correspondent for the Morning Chronicle. But at some later time he settled in Amiens, a French industrial centre striving to catch up with the British lead in the production of specialty textiles. With local entrepreneurs, he set up a joint stock company, then still a rarity both in France and England, with himself as managing director. He introduced linen spinning to the region, building a large factory equipped with the latest English machinery that had to be assembled locally with expatriate labour to avoid British export restrictions. The business was in rapid expansion when he died in 1839. His memorials are a Maberly Street in Aberdeen and a Rue Maberly in Amiens.

Maberly married in 1796 Mary Rose Leader with whom he had eight children. She died in 1812, and in 1813 he married Anne Baillie, who would give him a further five. Maberly and his second wife are buried in Amiens.

In his public activities, Maberly was a conviction politician, who wined and dined his voters but followed his own principles. Yet he seems to have been well accepted by his electorate, and even after his disgrace there were some who wanted to retain his services. He was long remembered as an outstanding figure among Abingdon MPs.

© AAAHS and contributors 2016

The Tesdale family

The history of Abingdon before the twentieth century is largely a story of family dynasties which rose and declined, cooperated with or opposed each other, and often intermarried. The Tesdales were among the most important of these.A John Tesdale came ‘from the north’ at some time in the later fifteenth century. His son, also John, became a monk at Abingdon Abbey and rose to be prior by the time of its dissolution in 1538. He was also master of the Abbey’s school, which survived the dissolution and from which the present Abingdon School is directly descended.

A significant fact about the Tesdales is that they settled at the manor of Fitzharris, which was on the boundary of Abingdon and, arguably, looked as much outward to the county as inward to the town. The most notable family member, Thomas (1547-1610), showed early promise when he started a successful malting business at Fitzharris as a teenager. He was twice elected to be mayor though he never actually served. But he spent a large part of his career as an unusually entrepreneurial farmer at Glympton in Oxfordshire where he made his fortune by growing and processing woad, an expensive dyestuff which mostly came from France. That fortune was largely expended after his death for the benefit of his native town. Part of it went to Abingdon School – now refounded by the munificence of John Roysse – developing the scheme to provide scholarships for poor Abingdon boys, the ‘Bennett boys’ from the name of his step-uncle who originated it, and providing the means to employ a second schoolmaster to teach them. And, perhaps even more important, a large sum went towards the foundation of Pembroke College in Oxford which was to be where Abingdon School leavers would go to train for the ministry. Thomas Tesdale’s wealth and connections led to him moving in exalted circles – his trustees included a future archbishop, a judge who was of the Bennett family, and the head of an Oxford college.

After Thomas Tesdale’s departure from Abingdon, several cousins became active in local affairs, to be followed as time passed by their sons. This coincided with a period of conflict both in the Corporation and in Christ’s Hospital as family factions strove for control of their lucrative endowments. The Tesdales were hampered in this by their adherence to Puritan principles in religion at a time when these were not acceptable among the national authorities. Whenever there was a flareup of hostility in the local political arena, appeals went to the Privy Council or to the Court of Chancery which most often ruled against the Tesdales and their friends.

By the 1630s, the Tesdales had lost their position in Christ’s Hospital although they remained influential in the Corporation and in St Helen’s Church. There continued to be Tesdale mayors until after the Civil War. But after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 Puritanism was proscribed, and any further public activities were out of the question. Tesdales were frequently fined for attending unlawful assemblies, and in 1671 Tesdale boys were expelled from Abingdon School. Tesdales remained in Abingdon until well into the next century and seem to have prospered, but they were never again represented in its ruling bodies.

Benjamin Tomkins (c.1663-1732) showing off his wealth

The Tomkins Family

The Tomkins were a large family who were particularly prominent in Abingdon from the mid-seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. As maltsters, in an industry that was in rapid expansion at least until the late eighteenth century, some family members became very wealthy. They used their wealth for prestige building projects which embellished the town, but also for the benefit of the local Baptist congregation of which they were among the leaders. As religious dissenters, they were excluded until the nineteenth century from direct participation in the town’s government and from becoming principal burgesses or governors of Christ’s Hospital; yet as major employers, as landlords, and as important contributors to Corporation finances, they were always influential.

The rise of the Tomkins can be dated from 1646 or shortly before, when Edward Tomkins purchased a property in Ock Street that either included or gave room for the building of a malthouse. His second son John became rich by malting, and was also an early member and one of the financial backers of the Baptist community founded in Abingdon about 1650 by John Pendarves. When Dissenters were tolerated after the death of Oliver Cromwell he was given a government post as militia commissioner for Berkshire, but this period proved brief and he was soon dismissed. After the restoration, he and other family members were frequently in court for their religious dissent, but he was prominent enough to be invited to stand for Parliament after the ‘revolution’ of 1688. He refused the nomination.

John’s son Benjamin became even richer. He was the great builder of the family, responsible both for Stratton House in what is now Bath Street and the Clock House in Ock Street. He had his portrait painted, and there is a tradition that he showed off his affluence by having his wife and himself carried by sedan chair the few steps from the Clock House to the Baptist meeting room. Benjamin’s son Joseph bought and extended the malthouse that still exists as a building at the bottom of East St Helen Street opposite St Helen’s Church, and Joseph’s son, also Joseph, was responsible for Twickenham House in the same street.

Benjamin’s will gave the old Ock Street premises as a site for the Tomkins almshouses, with an ample endowment. He also provided for the residence and maintenance of the Baptist minister and set up various other charities, including some that were not limited to his co-religionists. These were developed and added to by later generations of Tomkins, and in the report of an official enquiry into Abingdon charities in 1905 the Tomkins name still appears frequently among their administrators and trustees.

In the later eighteenth century, having more cash than they could invest, the younger Joseph Tomkins with a brother and a Tomkins cousin diversified into banking. In 1777 they set up what became the Abingdon Old Bank. The venture was only moderately successful. In the next generation, control of the bank passed gradually into the hands of the Knapps. At the same time, the malting industry declined into insignificance. The bank finally failed in 1847.

But before then a new generation of Tomkins had come to the fore. John Tomkins was a mercer who set up the clothing firm of Tomkins and Harris, with headquarters in the part of the High Street known as The Narrows. They employed hundreds of outworkers to make the clothes they sold. There was now a significant change in the social position of the family. John Tomkins had ambitions in local politics; he became a member of the Council in 1836, was four times mayor and three times Master of Christ’s Hospital. John seems already to have left the family’s Baptist tradition behind, and in 1856 his brother Charles, his sister Elizabeth and several other family members openly converted to the Church of England.

John’s son, also John, succeeded him both in his business and in civic affairs; he was five times mayor. After his death in 1912, the Tomkins family was far from extinct in Abingdon, but it had long ceased to be a mainstay of the local Baptist community.

Acknowledgement: This article is derived in part from notes left by the late Reverend Michael Hambleton, and the authors thank Mrs Stella Hambleton for access to them.

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