Looking
forward to the Morant Lecture 2015.
The
Disney Family and The Hyde, Ingatestone
Professor David Gill gives this year’s
Morant Lecture at Ingatestone Parish Church, on the subject of ‘The Wonderful
World of Disney: Collecting Classical Antiquity’.
The Disney family, who are not related
to the famous Walt Disney – that is a Mickey Mouse story - hailed from Norton
Disney a very small village in Lincolnshire not far from Newark.
Our account begins
with the Revd. Dr. John Disney (1746-1816), a Unitarian minister, who in September 1804 inherited the estate of Thomas Brand Hollis at
The Hyde, Ingatestone, and the collection of antiquities housed
there, which had been formed
by Thomas Brand Hollis and Thomas Brand (1719-1774) in Italy between 1748 and 1753.
Hollis died childless. Both Disney
and Hollis were antiquarian friends and in fitting tribute he had erected a
monument to his benefactor in Ingatestone Church. (There are memorials to the Petre family in
the church which can also be viewed on the night of the lecture.)
On the death
of the Reverend, on 26th
December 1816, John Disney, his eldest son, succeeded to the estate. Disney added
to the collection, and devoted much of his time to its study, and to other
work on Archaeology and antiquities generally. His interests naturally led him to Rome, where his bust was executed by Raimondo Trentanore (1792-1832) in 1827, the
year of Disney's
return to England. In April
1850 he gave 83 marbles
from his collection to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, of which a number are displayed and regarded as “the
museum’s corpus of classical sculpture”.
In the next year endowed a chair in Archaeology at the University, which still bears his name: “the first tentative steps towards
establishing the subject as an academic discipline”, Micheal Leach wrote.
In 1852,
on the foundation of the
Essex Archaeological Society, Disney became its first
President, serving until
the AGM in August 1855, when he relinquished his post which he felt unable to continue, being in his 77th year. Perhaps inevitably, the
inaugural lecture ('On Archaeology') given to the Society on 14th
December 1852, was by John Howard Marsden
BD (1803-1891), 'Disney Professor of Cambridge, and Rector of Great Oakley'. Marsden was one of 16
Vice-Presidents the Society elected that day.
Besides his antiquarian pursuits
Disney also practiced
as a lawyer, and unsuccessfully contested the Parliamentary seats of Harwich in 1832, and North Essex
in 1835.
John Disney is regarded as an
important archaeologist of the nineteenth century. Not only was he a founder of the Essex
Society for Archaeology and History but was also instrumental in the creation
of the Museum at Chelmsford.
The Disney family’s monument is a
large square tomb with urn and tall pillar to the north side of the churchyard
of nearby Fryerning Church where Revd John, his eldest son, John and other
family members are interred. In the
churches at Ingatestone and Blackmore is an identical memorial to the Revd’s
second son, Edgar, who succeeded John and who died in 1881. The remainder of the Disney family
antiquities were auctioned in 1884/85.
The Hyde is first mentioned in 1624,
but may date back to 1590, and was greatly remodelled by Timothy Brand (d.1734)
in 1719. After the Disney’s occupation,
the house later became a school for day pupils and boarders. Fifty years ago (in 1965) the previous home
of John Disney was badly damaged in a fire deliberately started by the school
cook, Mrs Ligo, who later served a custodial sentence for arson.
Sources:
Boyden, Peter. Library Corner. From
‘Essex Archaeological News No 55, Spring 1976’ (now available digitally)
Brereton, Graham. Thomas Brand Hollis
and the Disneys of Ingatestone (2005)
Leach, Micheal. Rev. John Howard
Marsden: Rector of Great Oakley & First Disney Professor of
Archaeology. From ESAH Transactions,
Series 4, Volume 1 (2010)
Wilde, E.E. Ingatestone and The Essex Great Road, with
Fryerning (1913)
Yearsley, Ian. Ingatestone and
Fryerning. A History (1997)
Final days of The Hyde, see http://www.blackmorehistory.co.uk/gatehouse.html
Andrew Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment