John Fothergill was one of the earliest prominent Quakers to
make Forest Gate both his home and a place of national significance.
He was born in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, in 1712, and, after
an apprenticeship as an apothecary, studied medicine in Edinburgh.
After graduating, he moved to London and practised at St
Thomas', on the south bank. He worked with the poor, often without pay, and at
times subsidised wholesome food for his patients.
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Ham House, as Fothergill renamed Rooke Hall
- its grounds were to become West Ham
Park just over a century after Fothergill acquired it |
He was a doctor in advance of his time, successfully
treating what is now known as diphtheria, tuberculosis, migraine and influenza
and introducing innovative methods to cure sore throats. He was a strong
advocate of immunisation as a means of preventing smallpox, many years before it
became accepted medical practice.
His reputation grew rapidly and he began to attract many of
the rich and famous as his patients; among them, John Wesley, founder of
Methodism and novelist Fanny Burney. As Fothergill himself put it: "I
climbed on the backs of the poor to the pockets of the rich."
Such became his fame, that Fothergill had his portrait
painted by Hogarth (see below).
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| Fothergill, by Hogarth |
By 1774 he had the largest physician's practice in London,
was said to work up to 20 hours a day and was reputed to earn the truly phenomenal
sum of £5,000 per year (£700,000 in today's terms).
His medical fame and fortune provided him with an income to
pursue his other - wide-ranging - interests, with notable effect.
Fothergill's first purchase of note came when he was fifty,
and it was to become the foundation of his formidable non-medical reputation.
He bought Rooke Hall in 1762. This was a small estate of 30
acres that had belonged to the Rooke family for a century, from 1566. It then
passed through the hands of Sir Robert Smyth and his descendants until it was
purchased by Admiral Elliott. It was from Elliott that Fothergill purchased the
property.
Fothergill extended and developed the house and grounds
considerably - doubling its footprint to 60 acres. He renamed it Ham House. On
his death it was sold, enlarged yet again, and soon became the property of the
Gurneys (see here) and later West Ham Park.
It was, however, what Fothergill did with the property that
made his stay there so significant. He was a keen botanist. He laid the
enlarged lands out as flower gardens, surrounded by shrubberies, with a
wilderness beyond. A watercourse ran through the land and the banks were
planted with exotic shrubs.
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| Gilbert Stuart's portrait of John Fothergill (1712 - 1780) |
Cartographers, Chapman and Andre, writing in 1777, described
the grounds thus:
A winding canal, in the figure of
a crescent, divided the garden into two ... occasionally opening on ... rare,
exotic shrubs ... A glass door from the house gave an entrance into a suite of
hot ... and green houses, nearly 260 feet in extent, containing upwards of
3,400 distinct species of exotics ... and in the open grounds ... nearly 3,000
distinct species of plants and shrubs.
Five years later, Sir Joseph Banks - botanist, president of
the Royal Society for 41 years and advisor to George 111 on the establishment
of Kew Gardens - said of the estate:
In my opinion no other garden in
Europe, royal or of a subject, had so many scarce and valuable plants. It was
second only to Kew in attracting visitors from overseas.
 |
Sir Joshua Reynolds' portrait
of Sir Joseph Banks |
He was able to stock his greenhouses and garden with unusual
plants by paying plant hunters and sailors to bring back specimens of botanic
interest from their voyages in the Americas, Far East and Africa.
Such was his influence on botanists of the day, he had
species of plants named after him - for example Fothergill's Geranium and
Fothergill's Lily.
Fothergill. Although devoted to his botanic collection, was
too busy with his medicine, which funded it, to devote much time to cultivating
it.
He was rarely at Ham House, but paid 15 gardeners to tend
his impressive collection. He was not just a collector, but a recorder and cataloguer
of his stock A very detailed catalogue of it survives in the British Library
(see below).
 |
Above - the opening plate of the
catalogue of Fothergill's collection.
Below, the first page of the
detailed description of each plant |
He also employed four artists, full-time, to make drawings,
in vellum of each plant in full bloom. Below is a rare, surviving, black and white print of one of the Fothergill collection.
 |
Cortex Winteranus - one of the
thousands of drawings of Fothergill's
collection, painted on velum |
The 18th century was the golden age of botanical drawings, and Fothergill engaged some of the finest artists to help him capture the images, including George Ehret (1708 - 1770) and John Miller (1715 - 1792). Below are surviving examples of their work, in full colour.
As for the Fothergill collection; it was sold on his death, along with his house and plant collection. Bizarrely, the prints were bought by Catherine the Great of Russia (1729 - 1796) - see photo, below. She was a keen horticulturalist and had had medical encounters with Dr Fothergill, so was well aware of him and his works.
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Catherine The Great (1729 - 1796)
bought Fothergill's botanical prints
and took them to Russia |
The collection of 2,000 prints are now believed to be housed in the Komarov
Botanical Institute, St Petersburg
, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
They have never been shown in public and attempts to view them have been thwarted. It would be a fine gesture if the Corporation of London and St Petersburg's
municipal authority could jointly mount an exhibition of this magnificent and historic collection.
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The Komarov Botanical Institute,
St Petersburg - present home
to the Fothergill collection |
As with the other Quaker polymath dignitaries who have lived
in Upton over the years, Fothergill had a wide range of interesting pursuits.
In addition to his innovative medical practice and - literally and
metaphorically - ground-breaking botanical work, he played a full part in civic
society.
He, for example, advocated the proper registration of births
and deaths, sixty years before the national register was established and promoted
the use of public baths, as a health measure a century before they became
popular.
He was subsequently elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquities in
1753, and the Royal Society, a decade later.
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The front plate on the first volume
of Fothergill's collected works |
Like a fellow future Quaker resident of Ham House, Samuel
Gurney, he was an active prison reformer. Just as Gurney had supported his
sister, Elizabeth Fry, in the cause, so, a generation earlier Fothergill
provided support to John Howard - after whom today's prison reform pressure
group is named. Fothergill worked with Howard to try to get programmes of
employment for ex-prisoners in order to facilitate their rehabilitation - quite
a novel idea at the time.
Again, just as Gurney had become active in public affairs
(education, campaigning against capital punishment, slavery etc), so too - in the previous century - had
Fothergill. He was the founder of Ackworth public school, in Pontefract,
Yorkshire. It was co-educational from its foundation and offered free education to poor Quaker children. It survives today as one of only eight Quaker schools in
Britain.
Indeed one of the school's four houses remains named after him.
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| Ackworth school, today |
Fothergill had close associations with pre-independence America, and worked, to no avail, with Benjamin Franklin
trying to prevent the succession of the American colonies in 1776, having been
elected a member of the American Philosophical Society six years previously.
 |
An illustration Fothergill sent to
Philadelphia, to help illustrate
a lecture on anatomy there. |
On Fothergill's death, in 1780, the house and gardens were
sold up and the plant stock dispersed. The garden and greenhouses, however,
together with many of the trees survived Fothergill's tenure in the property.
The greenhouse function has continued until the present day.
For almost a century and a half the Corporation has used them as a nursery,
producing plants and shrubs for prestigious Mansion House events.
Until now, that is ... the Corporation has recently decided
to "out-source" the function and bring to an end almost two and a
half centuries of botanical pride and excellence to a small corner of Forest
Gate. The Park Management Committee and Corporation of London are currently considering alternative uses for the space occupied by the now redundant green houses and nursery.
And so another bit of Upton's great history (like the Old
Spotted Dog pub and Clapton FC) is facing extinction from those with cash signs
in their eyes and minimal regard for local heritage.
Fothergill is still remembered in West Ham Park today, as a flower bed and rockery, named in his honour, survive - see extract from park map, below.
Footnote
Thanks to the Friends of West Ham Park, whose recent exhibition on Fothergill, in the park, has provided assistance with the contents of this article. Views in the article are should not be taken as theirs.
