George was born (in Brighton according to the 1881 census return) in 1819, the youngest son of the Rev Solomon Piggott (sic) 1779–1845, who was “Curate and afternoon preacher at St James’s Church, Clerkenwell and Sunday evening Lecturer at St Antholin’s, Watling Street” in 1817 (and still in 1823), rector of Dunstable 1824-45 and Jane (nee Rotton) of High Wycombe. Died at 9 in the evening of 14 September 1889 at Annandale, Grange Gardens, Eastbourne. Faith Spicer/Estill says she had heard he had died of diabetes, presumably type 2.
He was at the Blue Coat School in London, kept three terms at St John’s College, Cambridge, was a pensioner of Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1838, Fellow of Peterhouse 1841-60, Dean of Peterhouse, 22nd Wrangler 1841, BA 1841, MA 1844. He studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, Addenbrooks and University College London. MD (Cantab) 1851? MRCP 1860, declined FRCP about 1874 having retired. He was a Fellow of the Cambridge Phil. Soc. and the Royal Astronomical Soc. (1869). He was a Member of the Microscopical Soc. of London (14.10.1863) and, after it got its Charter in 1866, Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Soc. He applied for Fellowship of the Royal Society on 10 Feb 1871 and was elected FRS on 12.6.1873. Many of his thirteen proposers were leading lights in the RMS.
He was a physician at Harrogate and then at Halifax, Yorks. On 25 April 1860 he took the additional name of Royston by Queen’s Licence and Letters Patent (see below; I do not know what this procedure entailed. Perhaps there were Royston arms to be assumed?) He made improvements in various scientific instruments.
He was author of Spring Water its Qualities and Tests 1852, On the Harrogate Spas and Change of Air 1856 (4th edition 1865), On Poverty of the Blood and its Sympathetic Disorders of the Liver, Stomach and Nervous System 1858, Savage and Civilized Russia, by W.R. 1877 (2nd edition 1879) and of various papers and articles in Philosophical Transactions (1870), Popular Science Review, Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science and the monthly Microscopical Journal. The Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers lists 33 papers, largely in the microscopy journals between 1869 and 1890. He gave as his interests in 1871 his “original researches in High Power Definition and Aberration with a view to detection of delusive [?] Microscopical Phenomena and to develop new powers of resolution in minute organic structure. Attached to Philosophical pursuits.” His medical works are probably fairly representative of the state of medical development at his time. His history of Russia derives largely from secondary sources, particularly the French edition of Karamsin’s history, and is an interesting polemic warning of the expansion of Russia and probably triggered by the annexation of Khiva. His portrayal of Russia and its policy could almost have been written during the cold war. Paradoxically he castigates what he sees as the cynical hypocrisy of the Russian excuse for expansion - that it was undertaken for the good of the subjects of tyrannical and bloodthirsty regimes. He does not acknowledge that such reasoning was often the justification for British colonial expansion or defend British policy as, in contrast, genuinely motivated. It casts an interesting oblique light on the mind-set that led to the Great Game and, in due course, Younghusband’s probably quite unjustifiable military expedition to Lhasa – in which his son-in-law H.F.P.Tulloch was to take part. I possess a copy and can not recommend it as a work of history. It is often unclear when he is quoting directly from other sources and its structure is confused.
The obituary published in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices in February 1890 follows.
George West Royston-Pigott was the youngest son of the Rev. Solomon Pigott, for many years Rector of Dunstable. He entered the University of Cambridge in 1838 and graduated twenty second Wrangler in 1841, his mathematical tutor being the Rev. W.R.Griffin and soon after taking his degree he was elected to a Fellowship at Peterhouse. He continued in residence at Cambridge several years longer, pusuing the study of medicine, and took the degree of MD there in 1851. Dr Royston-Pigott attained distinguished success as a physician during his subsequent residence at Harrogate, but after some years he retired from the active duties of his profession. Mean while he never relaxed the favourite studies which led him into the domains of astronomy and the world of marvels revealed by the microscope. He was a mechanician of the first order and many details of his costly and beautiful instruments were wrought by his own hands or carried out under his direction.
Finding himself at one time baffled by the imperfections of even the best microscopic objectives, he set himself to investigate the causes of the residuary aberration and to devise means of correcting it. Here his knowledge of mathematical optics told. By means of corrections of his own devising, applied to the highest powers of the instrument, he succeeded in resolving objects of hitherto invincible difficulty, and pointing out to other observers most interesting lines of work. It was in recognition of his eminent service to science in this respect that he was, in 1873, elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Shortly after this Fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians was offered to him, which, however, having then retired from medical practice, he thought it right to decline. The record of Dr. Royston-Pigott’s work is not contained in any great production, but lies scattered in numerous papers published in the Transactions of the Royal and other societies, and a record more abiding and more useful perhaps remains in improvements in various scientific instruments and more refined methods of research suggested by him. His ideas and discoveries were freely made public from time to time for the benefit of all who might find them useful.
He died at his residence at Eastbourne, September 14, 1889.
He was elected a Fellow of this Society, February 12, 1869.
We have the following addresses for him.
14 October 1863 11 Stanley Terrace, Kensington Park, W. and
Clare House, Halifax, Yorkshire
10 February 1871 2 Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill (very near Stanley Terrace)
- Hartley Court, Reading, Berkshire
1881 14 Grange Gardens, Eastbourne, Sussex
14 September 1889 “Annandale”, Grange Gardens, Eastbourne, Sussex
Most of the information above comes from the records of the Royal Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Microscopical Society and the Bodleian catalogue.
GWR-P had brothers and sisters. We know of sisters Jane Sarah 1803-84, Mary 1803/4 - 29.5.1822, Elizabeth 1810-27, one called Sarah who was born in 1810/11 and one called Ann. Jane Sarah married the Rev Frederick Arnold, Rector of Brimington, Derbyshire, on 2.10.1826, had ten children and is buried in Highgate Old Cemetery. The Boddington pedigree calls her Jane Mary. A brother, Samuel Rotton Piggott was an exhibitioner and bible clerk at St Edmund Hall, Oxford from 1831 to 1833. This would put his birth at around 1813. It looks as though this was the only charitable place on the foundation. He was BA by 1834 and Rev by 1836. Thereafter he drops off the lists of members of the Hall and the University – probably through not taking up his MA. He edited a long verse work by his father in 1852 after his father’s death. By that time he was Vicar of Bredgar, Kent. He married Catherine Debaufer and had four children according to the 1889 “Pedigree of the family of Boddington”. In that pedigree there is another brother, John David Pigott, who was at Merton College, Oxford, obtained his BA in 1837 and was Rector of Cuxham, Oxfordshire by 1853. This would put his birth at around 1817. He married Sarah Woodman or Woolman and had eight children. The Boddington pedigree also shows a brother “Richard Pigott, died young”. The Royal Society potted biography refers to George West P. as the youngest son. Elizabeth had nursed her brother George through what was called typhus according to a memorial sermon delivered and published by their father. He survived but she caught it, died on 18 July 1827 and is buried with her father in Dunstable Priory. At this time typhus, whose vector is the body-louse, was not distinguished from typhoid and it seems more likely that it was the latter they had.
We also know of another illness. In his book on the Harrogate Spas he wrote
“In the year 1841, the author suffered from a great many attacks of ague. They seized him suddenly, indifferently whether at home or travelling. For years after these attacks had ceased, he remained subject to deep-seated pain in the left side.” [An enlarged spleen, called ‘ague-cake’ was a consequence of the disease] “After many unsuccessful measures, he repaired to a water-cure establishment, and underwent hydropathic treatment at different times, for a period of about seventeen weeks, with no relief. He then, one day, consulted three eminent physicians in succession; each urgently recommended some preparation of steel,” [ie one of the categories of spa water] “each, independently and unknown to the others, taking the same view of the case. He immediately commenced a vigorous course of chalybeate medicine, which completely cured him, under very unfavourable circumstances as he was then working laboriously at a hospital, and in the dissecting room. The complaint has never returned.”
It is interesting that, as late as 1853, nearly half the admissions to St Thomas’s Hospital were diagnosed as suffering from ague (malaria – though perhaps they just meant fever).
In England’s first detailed census, on the night of 6 June 1841, the Piggotts were living in West Street, Dunstable. Solomon Piggott, the Rector, and his wife Jane were both 60; their daughter Mrs Jane Sarah Arnold was said to be 35 (though, if the Boddington pedigree is right, she must have been at least 37), presumably on a visit to her parents; Sarah Piggott was 30; George West Piggott was 20. There seem to have been no living-in servants and, as the microfilm is of poor quality, it is unclear where the household ends. It may include William Lindsay, aged 40 who, as far as I can distinguish it, was a botanist and also, possibly, Zilpah Lambrook, a 20-year old girl “of independent means”.
As plain G W Pigott at about 41 (it is not clear at what point he dropped the second g) he married Anne, according to the Boddington pedigree the widow of Ward Dyson Hitchin of Halifax, on 1 May 1860 at St George’s Hanover Square. Hitchin had died on 13 September 1853 at 55. That pedigree describes her as the only surviving child of James Royston of Halifax and sister and sole heir of Aquila Edward Royston of Halifax. The IGI index of parish register events shows the baptism of a daughter Anne of a James R. in Halifax on 23 December 1802. That would make her about 57 when she married GWP, which is consistent with the family tradition that she was childless and past childbearing and was concerned that the Royston name was going to die out. It was apparently part of the plan that GWP should add the Royston name and, after her demise, pass it on to any children he might have by a subsequent marriage. According to the same tradition, she had money. Haughton James family tradition has it that the money derived from the manufacture of hairpins. Her brother, her father, some earlier ancestor, or her first husband had made the fortune by inventing the zigzags in hairpins that stopped them falling out. These were hairpins not Kirbygrips. On page 186 of Edward Baines and W Parson’s Directory and Gazetteer of 1822, it says that “the cards used in the early operations of the manufacture both of wool and cotton are made here [Halifax] in great perfection and to a considerable extent.” James Royston is shown as one of two wire drawers. He is a “manufacturer of iron card brass and bobbin wire” in King Cross Lane. He is still there as a card maker and wire drawer in Pigot’s 1834 Directory. From this to hairpin maker seems a small step.
The year after Anne R-P’s death, GWR-P, then about 53, married Agnes Mitton (at Ilkley on 22 August 1872), the daughter of Joseph Mitton, the parson of Baildon not far north of Bradford Yorkshire, who had died about four years before, and Ann daughter of Thomas Barrett of Cambridge. She was 21. They had the following six children.
Agnes Helen R-P, born Notting Hill 17 May 1873 and, in the family, known as Helen,
George Arthur R-P, born Hartley Court, Berkshire 24 January 1875, in the family known as Arthur and in the Boddington pedigree called Arthur George,
Philip Mytton R-P, born 4 January 1877,
Margaret, birthdate unknown and died at 3 months – source Boddington pedigree,
Violet R-P, born Swallowfield Berks 6 June 1879 and, in the family, known as Itey,
Walter H Mytton R-P, born Eastbourne 8 February 1881,
I am not now sure what my source for the birthdays of Arthur and Philip was. Helen’s is recorded in HFPT’s birthday book; Itey’s birthday is from information from her daughter Faith and Walter’s from a letter from Robert Emmett, the family solicitor, in 1902. The spelling Mytton seems to derive from a misapprehension that the family were connected with that of “Mad Jack” Mytton, the famous eccentric and sportsman. AHT certainly used to speak of it. If there was any such connection it must have been extremely remote as we know the Mitton ancestry in Yorkshire with some certainty back to the mid seventeenth century and Mad Jack’s family was settled at Halston, Shropshire from 1549. Mad Jack flourished in the early nineteenth century. Itey used to say there was a twin of one of the children who died while still a tiny baby from being overlaid. Faith speculates that it may have been Philip who had a twin and that this was Margaret.
The transcript of the enumerator’s entry for 14 Grange Gardens, Eastbourne in the 1881 census clearly has some errors, probably by a drunk or dyslexic enumerator or possibly his informants. The household is shown as consisting of the following on the night of 3 April 1881.
Head: George PIGOTT, married, aged 64, Phycisson Man Art (sic), born Brighton, Sussex
Wife, Agnes PIGOTT, married, aged 29, Wife of ..do.. born Baldon (sic), Yorks
Daugh, Agnes R. PIGOTT, unm, aged 7, Scholar, born Notting Hill, Middlesex
Son, Arthur R. PIGOTT, unm, aged 6, Scholar, born Shinfield, Berks
Son, Philip PIGOTT, unm, aged 4, Scholar, born Cambridge
Daugh, Voilet (sic) PIGOTT, unm, aged 1, Infant, born Shinfield, Berks
Son, Walter PIGOTT, unm, aged 1month, Infant, born Eastbourne, Sussex
Servant Mary An BARNET, single, aged 31, Domestic Cook, born Shalkfield, Hants
Servant Fanny EACHSTRAN, single, aged 21, Domestic, born Nettlebed, Oxon
Servant Elizabt. EACHSTAR (sic), single, aged 30, Domestic, born Nettlebed, Oxon
Servant Esther NEWING, single, aged 17, Domestic, born Dimkirk (sic), Kent
Servant Mary WALKING, single, aged 18, Domestic, born Kidmr (sic), Oxon
As I can trace no places of the names recorded in the counties concerned, I take Kidmr to be Kidmore End, Dimkirk to be Dymchurch and Baldon to be Baildon; Shalkfield could be Swallowfield, quite close to Hartley Court. I take “Man Art” to stand for MA. The Eachstraws were presumably sisters; Faith says that their name was actually Rackstraw. Fanny Rackstraw married a man called Baker and they lived later in East Grinstead as mentioned in one of AHT’s writings. She or her sister acted as nanny to Itey. The birthplaces of the “Eachstraws” and Mary Ann Barnet and Mary Walking are close enough to Hartley Court for us to be able to suspect they had been of the household there. Shinfield and Swallowfield are presumably alternative addresses for Hartley Court. I know of no particular Cambridge connection that would explain Philip’s place of birth – except that Agnes Mitton’s mother Anne Barrett was the daughter of Thomas Barrett “of Cambridge” or, actually, Soham, and GWR-P had been a fellow of Peterhouse. Nor is it clear how GWR-P came to be born in Brighton. The Rev Solomon Piggott, his father, was perpetual curate of St James, Latchford, Warrington when he published a loyal sermon in 1809.
There was a Royston-Pigott Trust that was largely run by Anne and GWR-P until her death in 1871. He did not actually become a Trustee until 1879. The Trust was wound up on Walter R-P’s attaining his majority on 8 February 1902. On or before their marriages, Agnes Helen and Violet R-P had their own marriage settlement Trusts the money for which probably derived largely from the R-P Trust. One of the R-P Trust’s assets was Shroggs Mills. The Trust sold this property to a Mr Arnold in 1898. According to information from Henry Edgeworth Bicknell Arnold of Steyning Sussex sent to AHT in January 1917 and also the Boddington pedigree, Anne Royston was “of Halifax” and GWR-P’s sister Jane Sarah Pigott married Frederick Arnold, Rector of Brimington. Frederick died in 1873. The introduction to the second edition (1879) of GWR-P’s book “Savage and Civilized Russia” was by the Rev. Frederick Arnold of Christ Church, Oxford. This Frederick, according to the Boddington pedigree, was the nephew of the author – son of his brother-in-law of the same name and was at Christ Church, graduating in 1867 – suggesting a birth date of about 1846. Jane Sarah’s and the older Frederick’s third son, Alfred, was a barrister and a JP, was knighted on 18 July 1903 and, according to Shaw’s Knights of England (1906) was “of Woodroyde, Halifax”. He would still have been Mr Arnold in 1898 and a Mr Arnold was a trustee of the R-P Trust. There were clearly other collateral Arnolds but Alfred was the only one I know to have had a Halifax connection. I speculate that Shroggs Mills was the hairpin factory. My information on the R-P Trust derives from a letter of 28 February 1902 from the R-P family solicitor, Robert Emmett to AHT (nee R-P) on its winding up.
As he was retired by the age of 55 and lived in gentlemanly style, GWR-P was presumably fairly comfortably off by then. Family tradition says that he ground his own telescope and microscope lenses. As he was a mathematician and this was the period during which the problems of spherical and chromatic aberration in lenses were being solved, this seems likely. He is said to have had an astronomical observatory with a “huge telescope” in the grounds of Hartley Court. In an article On the Daylight Correction of the Collimation of Reversible Instruments by the use of Distant Scales of Inches in Observatory in 1878, he refers to “my own 8-feet equatorial”. That article ends “When skies are thick with clouds and even sunshine obliterated, the regulation of the collimation and meridian of instruments by solidly fixed distant scales becomes an economical and consolatory use of dull weather.” Small microscopes, suitable for schoolroom use, survive in the family. Tradition also says he was interested in the scales on the wings of lepidoptera. These were, at the time, regarded as a challenging test of the resolution of microscopes. He published an article in the Monthly Microscopical Journal in 1873 entitled On the spherules which compose the ribs of the scales of the Red Admiral butterfly (Vanessa Atalanta) and the Lepisma saccharina. An astronomical work that he owned was until recently in the family with J G Tulloch and is annotated in pencil. For example there is a correction in his hand of one of the book’s calculations.
From the notes for a talk on her childhood to the Women’s Institute by AHT we gather that GWR-P was very absent minded. On one occasion he carried a clothes brush to church instead of a prayer book and, when making responses to the parson’s questions during a christening, made mistakes: “Has this child been baptized?” “Yes” “You mean No”. Asked before the ceremony whether the baby was a boy or a girl, he replied “A girl” and was corrected with a hissed “Boy!” Confused, the curate proceeded with the prayers but instead of inserting “he” or “she” etc in their place as needed, called the infant “it”. It was perhaps more understandable that George sometimes addressed Agnes by his first wife’s name.
James family tradition says that GWR-P was a friend of Huxley and Keir Hardie and was a Fabian. Of his children, Helen (AHR-P) was probably a Liberal and would have become a Conservative when the Liberals split over Ireland. Itey (Violet) was a Fabian and a Socialist – even, at one time, a member of the Communist Party. We may assume, therefore that the R-P household was pretty radical. GWR-P did not send his elder daughter to school. She shared her brothers’ tutors. Whether the boys eventually went to school or whether they were privately educated throughout I do not know. Itey, who, according to her sister’s notes, was a very naughty child, screaming and scrabbling and hanging on Helen’s hair in the front pew in church, slapping the governess’s face and being carried home in a rug by two maids from kindergarten, was eventually sent to a boarding school. By her own account Helen, too was a naughty child, screaming and banging her head on the kitchen floor till she burst a blood vessel. But she escaped going to school. Arthur and Walter were both regular soldiers. Arthur was in the Boer War, got a DSO in the Northamptons at Loos and was killed on the third day of the Somme in command of the tenth battalion of the Worcesters. He married Hilda Pariss in 1915.They had no children. She later married Henry Hadrill and was a great friend of AHT. I have Arthur’s medals and the temporary wooden cross from his grave. Philip was referred to as “poor Philip” in the family. According to Faith he was rather bullied as a child by his brothers – probably Arthur as Walter was three years younger. She says Itey said he had never really recovered from scarlet fever in childhood. He was shell-shocked in the Great War, had a helplessly shaking arm and died in about 1926. Walter I remember to have heard to have been in the Army, concerned with cavalry remounts. He married Dorothy, lived in Ireland, died in Rhodesia and had a son Dennis and grandchildren. Itey married Montague G Haughton James, a Gurkha officer and later a parson and had nine children and many descendants. To some at least of her grandchildren she was “Barbie”. Helen was my grandmother and married Herbert Frederick Parry Tulloch of the Indian Postal Service. She had my father and three daughters.
I first saw Hartley Court many years ago and have seen the outside in March 2004. It is a large gentleman’s residence, with a stucco Georgian facade on an older brick, partly half-timbered, core standing in its park in the country, though now rather overwhelmed by the proximity of the M4 and A33 and the expansion of Reading. AHT remembered it as a paradise for children with stables and outhouses including a granary on staddles under which rabbits made their home. The marriage certificate of AHR-P gives her place of birth in May 1873 as Kensington and, as we have seen, the 1881 census gives it as Notting Hill. This was, I suppose, the Lansdowne Crescent house. She was married from Annandale on 29 September1892, by which time her father, GWR-P, was dead. He died at 9 pm on 14 September 1889 according to an entry in the “Birthday Scripture Text Book” of his son-in-law Herbert Tulloch, of which 75% has survived. Annandale was a large semi-detached Victorian house in brick in Grange Gardens, Eastbourne. There is a photograph of some of the family posed in what I take to be the garden of Annandale during the First World War and some of the front. In January 2000 I saw No 14 (where the family lived when the April 1881 Census was taken) and (wrongly) assumed it was Annandale. The Annandale photographs are of a different but rather similar house – but largely built of brick, not flint. The rear gardens were modest in size but there is a large space, common to all the gardens in the development, onto which the rear gardens open. It is now just an area of rough grass. I also saw 11 Stanley Terrace and 2 Lansdowne Crescent in January 2000. They are close together in Notting Hill and again both share in the large communal gardens onto which they and the other houses in their blocks back. Stanley Terrace is a stuccoed house and now again in single-family occupation. 2 Lansdowne Crescent is built in freestone and is a little bleak. It now has the Acorn Nursery School in the basement and half the ground floor and has flats in the rest of the house. It is opposite and built of the same material as St John’s Church. Both are substantial houses but whether they were owned or rented by GWR-P we do not know. I took photographs of both houses.
There was a large photographic portrait of GWR-P at the head of the stairs at Tyler Hill House while AHT (nee R-P) lived there. I do not know what happened to it. It does not seem to have been in the house while H M Tulloch and D E M Tulloch lived there. I remember a rather good-looking, middle-aged man, perhaps with a moustache but with no other facial hair. The photographer had used white body-colour to touch up some detail and, the paper having yellowed a little, it had become more obvious. I also have a small faded photograph of him sitting on a bench in a garden in a hat and with whiskers.
R.M.Tulloch
Oxford
Amended January 2014
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