Two hundred years ago this month, the idea for what became the Royal Manchester Institution, and later the Manchester Art Gallery, came into being. It was sparked off by three friends on a day out.
Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin and Gene Kelly in On the Town (1949) © Metro Goldwyn Mayer / United Artists Home Entertainment
No, not those three. These three…
“In the summer of 1823, three gentlemen residents in Manchester, namely Mr Brigham, Mr Frank Stone and the late Mr David Parry, went in company to view the exhibition of paintings and works of art in the Northern Establishment of Artists held at Leeds.
The exhibition that year was one of unusual attraction and merit, containing some very fine specimens of native talent with several good pictures of London artists of acknowledged celebrity.
The three friends soon after arriving at the rooms of the exhibition separated each to enjoy the works of art around according to his own particular taste and inclination.
Having thus been pleasingly occupied an hour or more, they met casually in the principal room and after expressions of much delight and gratification at the surrounding scene the question, “why can we not have such an exhibition in our own Town?” was the almost simultaneous expression of each individual.
The meeting of artists called for the sixth of August following as stated in the accompanying minutes was a result of this visit to the Leeds exhibition of 1823 and from this association of artists arose a course of liberal and spirited proceedings on the part of a certain number of opulent Gentlemen of Manchester enthusiastic admirers of art, which eventually led to the erection of the present classical building The Royal Manchester Institution, an honour to the town, and a high source of encouragement and advancement of every branch of Art and Science.”
- Introduction to the Society of Manchester Artists Minutes of the meeting on August 6th 1823
Royal Manchester Institution (c.1836) by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (1793-1864) watercolour on paper © Manchester Art Gallery
So who were these three men whose enthusiasm provided the seed of an idea that would one day become the RMI?
Well, for one, Mr Brigham wasn’t an artist, he was a surgeon. A surgeon with artistic interests.
William Brigham (1798-1864)
The Brighams were Catholics from the East Riding of Yorkshire Their ancestry can be traced back to Edward III. They held the manor of Wyton at Holderness, which was sold in 1767. The family head, William Brigham (1759-1815) later left for Manchester with his wife, Sarah. There, he practiced as a surgeon and man-midwife. His son, our William Brigham, was born in 1798. He would have served several years of apprenticeship with his father before he went to London to complete his training as a surgeon and sit his exams (it would have taken less than a year in those days).
He trained at St. George’s Hospital where he qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons on May 5th 1815 and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons on August 26th 1844. He later had a published paper, “Surgical and Medical Cases”, 1839.
Brigham was also involved with founding the Manchester and Salford Lock Hospital in 1818. It was a charitable hospital for venereal diseases, as the Royal Infirmary (then in Piccadilly Gardens) wouldn’t accept such cases. He became an honorary surgeon there.
He must have been doing well because in 1823, he returned to West Yorkshire to buy some land back in Brigham to erect a monument to the family's origins.
William Brigham doesn’t seem to feature much in the life of the RMI beyond the early days. However, he continued on the annual List of Hereditary Governors of those “who had assented to payment of the annual guinea, and who are entitled to the additional privileges.”
Top: RMI Hereditary and Life Governors’ List for 1825 Middle: Pigot & Dean’s Directory of Manchester (surgeons) 1821-22 Bottom: RMI Hereditary and Life Governors’ List 1841
In 1825, he was living on Princess Street, which back then was Manchester’s medical quarter. It was where the Eye Hospital had its first premises. By 1843, he was living out at Foxley House in Lymm.
Foxley House, Lymm Source.
William Brigham married Elizabeth Richards in 1838 at St. Mary’s Church in Leicester. They had one daughter, Henrietta Felicia, born in 1846.
In 1845, while on a walk with a friend, John Heyes, in the Whittle area of Chorley, Lancashire, Brigham drank from spring water bubbling up from old coal workings on his land. He recognised its carbonated alkali content and worked hard to promote the medicinal quality of the water. The resulting spa, Whittle Springs, became one of the most popular spas in Britain in the mid-19th century.
The surgeon, Samuel Ware, mentions Brigham in his memoirs, The Life and Correspondence of the Late Samuel Hibbert Ware M.D., F.R.S.E., published in 1882;
Mr. Joseph Jordan died only a few years ago, […] having acquired a very large fortune with strict integrity and credit to himself he practised his profession not only with skill but as a gentleman and a man of honour, never stooping to such acts as pouring in unnecessary visits to his patients and so forth. The same might be said of other eminent Manchester practitioners of his time, as Ainsworth, Brigham, Ransome, Thorpe, Turner [and] Wilson.
William Brigham died in 1864, survived by his wife and daughter. He left enough money to leave his wife and daughter well off. Unfortunately, for William, the most interesting thing about his family happened after his death.
There was an announcement in the British Medical Journal, 4th January 1868, that Henrietta had married a French lawyer named Henri Perreau. A happy ending, you may think, but far from it.
In April 1868, Scotland Yard sent Detective Chief Inspector George Clarke to Foxley Hall to investigate the suspicious death of Brigham’s widow. She had died from a gunshot to the head. Her new son-in-law, Perreau, claimed it was an accident, and the inquest returned a verdict of accidental death.
“The lady was dead–shot through the brain.” A Penny Dreadful illustration of Elizabeth Brigham’s death, with Henry Perreau on the left. Source.
Henrietta and Henri had a son, William Henri Brigham Tourville, born in 1869. Henrietta herself died shortly after, on 30th June 1871. Was foul play involved? There were certainly suspicions. The extended family put young William Henri into the safe keeping of a French couple to keep him out of Tourville’s hands.
Henri Perreau aka Henri Perreau Tourville, it turned out, was a con man marrying rich women for their money and then bumping them off. He was caught in 1875 after marrying Madeline Miller. He took out a large life insurance policy on her and they went on holiday to the Tyrol. One day, he returned to the hotel alone, claiming his wife had fallen off a cliff.
The police later arrested him on suspicion of murder. There were now also grave concerns over the deaths of Elizabeth and Henrietta, too. He was found guilty of Madeline’s murder and sentenced to eighteen years of hard labour at Karlau Prison in Graz, working in the salt mines, where he died in 1890.
"Saint Paul Globe," February 21, 1890, via Newspapers.com Source
Read about the second of our three amigos, Frank Stone, here.
And if you want to find out more about the beginnings of the RMI and Manchester Art Gallery, check out our History of Manchester Art Gallery Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3