Harriet Wetherill (1801-1859) and Thomas Lound (1801-1861).
My 5th great-grand aunt and uncle.
Harriet was born on 11 June 1801 and baptised on the 16th at St Nicholas’s Church in Great Yarmouth. Her parents were James Wetherill and Mary Proctor. She grew up in the coastal town without knowing her father, who’d died just weeks before her birth.
She next crops up in the county town of Norwich, where she married Thomas Lound on 25 December 1821 at St Simon and St Jude Church. This stands at the bottom of quaint Elm Hill – one of the city’s leading tourist attractions today – but was declared redundant in 1892. How the couple met is a mystery but Harriet certainly married well for Thomas worked for a local brewery as a manager and clerk and, as shown in the 1851 census, as a fire insurance agent. However, it was as a talented amateur artist and photographer that he made his name. He helped organise art exhibitions locally and was a leading figure in the local art establishment. Thomas, who was born in Sprowston, Norfolk, in 1801 and baptised in the parish on 9 August that year, is thought to have studied under the English marine and landscape artist John Sell Cotman and worked mainly in watercolour.
Thomas was a member of the Norwich Society of Artists and exhibited with them for some years. He was also involved in the establishment of the Norwich School of Design, which is now the Norwich University of the Arts, in the 1840s. At around this time he began exhibiting in London and a number of his works were shown at the Royal Academy. Most of his pictures are of Norfolk landscapes and beach scenes but he also painted in Yorkshire, Wales and the Lake District. Perhaps he took Harriet with him on his journeys around the country. As an enthusiastic amateur photographer and member of the Norwich Photographic Society, he exhibited a number of photos of Norfolk scenes.
Harriet and Thomas lived in King Street, Norwich, for many years. Harriet died in 1859 and Thomas followed from apoplexy on 18 January 1861. The Norwich Mercury of 23 January, reporting his death, noted his talents and also called out his abilities as a sketcher of important city buildings. They noted that he had been ill for some time and that the recent death of his wife and a son had “produced considerable constitutional tendency to the inroads of disease”. He left his effects, valued at below £3,000, to his surviving daughters.
A notice in the local newspapers a few weeks after his death advertised an auction of his belongings, including furniture, watercolours, oils, drawings, camera equipment and books. The auction catalogue stated that Thomas’s “attractive social qualities procured him a widely extended circle of friends; whilst his indefatigable and eminently successful application to art – in which a correct knowledge of chiaro-oscura, and perfect truthfulness to nature in colour, united with innate genius, were especially remarkable – earned for him a celebrity that many professional men might have good reason to envy.”
The couple had a number of children, who were baptised at St Etheldreda Church in Norwich and went on to school.
- Matilda Lound (1827-1907) married commercial traveller Edward Thirkettle in Norwich in 1859 and lived in Hackney, then in Essex, where the couple raised a family. He later became a clerk in the hops trade. The 1901 census recorded them in Woodford, Essex. Edward died in 1904 and was buried in Deal, Kent. Matilda ended her days in Eaton, a suburb of Norwich, and was buried there in 1907.
- Ellen Lound (1833-????) became the matron of St Philip’s Orphanage in Ladywood, Birmingham. I’ve not located her after this mention in the 1871 census.
- Harriet Wetherill Lound (1836-1905) married widower Francis Banham in London in 1890, lived in Norwich with him and died in 1905. He was a grocer who did well in business, lived in a grand villa at 4 Newmarket Road, Norwich, and died in 1904.
- Thomas Wetherill Lound (1837-1838).
- Henry Edwin Lound (1839-1860). The Norwich Mercury of 25 April 1860 reported his death from consumption (TB).
Sources: BMDs, census and other info at Ancestry.com and Findmypast.com. Records at Norfolk Family History Society. British Newspaper Archive. Websites linked to in the text. The Dictionary of National Biography. The picture top is Devil’s Tower Looking towards Carrow Bridge from Norwich by Thomas Lound.