Tower and Town, June 2015 (view the full edition)Editorial: The Hancocks Of MarlboroughThe Hancocks of Marlborough were a remarkable family. They came to Marlborough, like many other tradesmen, directly after the fire of 1653 to profitfrom the rebuilding, and they stayed and prospered. A hundred years later James Hancock was born and he grew up to be a highly regarded cabinet maker, timber merchant and upholsterer with a well equipped workshop. He was also fertile, fathering 4 daughters and 8 sons, of whom only 6 sons survived to adulthood; the remaining 6 children all succumbed to smallpox, consumption or other childhood killers (though one of the girls survived almost to complete her cabinet-making apprenticeship, and the family treasured the door she had made). All the children were well educated at the Marlborough Academy, run by the dissenters (although James was an Anglican and a parishioner of St Peters) and more forward looking than the grammar school. When James closed his businesses in the dreadful depression following the end of the Napoleonic Wars (exacerbated by the terrible harvests consequent on the 1815 Mount Tambora volcanic eruption - see Turner's sunsets for graphic evidence), two of the boys went to America and dropped from the record while the other 4 went to work in London. Between them they founded the British rubber industry, built the first steam vehicles to carry passengers on public roads (see cover picture), developed the gutta-percha insulation for the crosschannel and transatlantic telegraph, exhibited at the Royal Academy and much else besides. Throughout they remained close and regarded themselves as 'The Hancocks of Marlborough'. Alexander Kirk Wilson |