Fortunes were made, then lost or given away
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THIS engraving of Gloucester’s Westgate Street first appeared in a book titled “Delineations of Gloucestershire” published in 1825.
Many of the buildings are recognisable to this day, including St Nicolas’s church in the distance with its pruned spire.
In medieval times buildings ran down the middle of Westgate Street.
Next time you’re walking that way take a look at the pavement beneath your feet.
The brown bricks in the block paving outline where the medieval buildings stood and with a little imagination and half closed eyes you can see what a maze of narrow alleyways this area of the city once was.
Going back to the engraving, on the far side of the street, outside the Guardian Fire and Life Insurance office stands a horse with a wheel-less cart in tow.
If you’ve been to Clovelly on the north coast of Devon you may have seen similar sleds being towed about the village by donkeys.
On the opposite side of the street a sign announces that the premises at number 22 belong to the Gloucester Old Bank.
Founded in 1716 this was one of the earliest private banks in England.
In 1802 it was in the hands of James Wood, grandson of the founder and a man whose meanness gained him national celebrity.
Although a multi-millionaire in today’s terms, “Jemmy” Wood dressed in rags, rarely washed, walked rather than pay for public transport and never troubled local charities with a donation.
He was Sheriff of Gloucester in 1811 and 1813, but never held the post of Mayor as he would have had to buy a new cloak and hat.
When he died he left £900,000 (worth about £4million today).
However, as he’d been too tight to pay a lawyer to make his will, most of the money was gobbled up by legal arguments.
Another fortune made and lost that of the Cheltenham born poet and author Thomas Henry Sealy.
His obituary says that his book “Chinese Legends, Or The Porcelain Tower” was “A work so popular it is needless to say anything in its place”.
Sealy’s collection of verse “The Little Old Man In The Wood” also seems to have been as popular in its day as the Harry Potter books are now.
Sealy died in 1848 and, of course, isn’t remembered at all today, though he was still being mentioned in Cheltenham guidebooks of the 1920s.
Neither remembered are the three journals he founded, titled respectively “Sealy’s Western Miscellany”, “The Western Archaeological Magazine” and “The Great Western Advertiser”, which proved so spectacularly unsuccessful that they bankrupted Sealy and left him with debts of £12,000 (about £1 million in today’s terms).
He never recovered from the burden and died at the age of 37.
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Sealy was born in a house called Alstone Lawn that stood in Gloucester Road opposite its junction with Malvern Road.
The grounds that surrounded Alstone Lawn extended to Alstone Lane on one side, the Vineyards Trading Estate on the other and Rowanfield Road to the rear.
The house was built in the first decade of the 19th century and when the Sealy family sold up the next owner of
Alstone Lawn Prescod.
He retired to Cheltenham having made his fortune in Jamaica.
Quite a character he sounds too, as he was often seen driving round the town in a yellow Roman chariot.
When our charioteer died, his wife the splendidly named Mary Prescod de Sales La Terriere stayed on until she too succumbed to the inevitable in 1911 after which the house was never lived in again.
It was put up for auction, but by then the Alstone area had become industrialized.
The town’s gasworks stood nearby, the estate had been dissected by the Cheltenham to Birmingham railway line and H H Martyn’s complex was adjacent, so the house found no buyer.
Mysteriously, on Sunday December 21, 1913, Alstone Lawn was set on fire.
Later the same day the charge of arson was brought against two suffragettes who’d arrived from Birmingham and were arrested in Tewkesbury Road with their clothes smelling strongly of paraffin.
Alstone Lawn was demolished and the land sold to Cheltenham Borough Council for housing in 1923.
Losing a fortune is one thing. Giving was
William
Hinds