Person DS/UK/240 Richardson; John Wigham (1837-1908) Richardson John Wigham 1837-1908

Richardson, John Wigham (1837–1908), shipbuilder, was born on 7 January 1837 in Torquay, Devon, where his family was spending the winter, the second son in the family of four sons and seven daughters of Edward Richardson (1806–1863), leather manufacturer, of Newcastle upon Tyne, from an old Yorkshire Quaker family in Whitby, and his wife, Jane, née Wigham (1808–1873) of Edinburgh. Richardson was educated at Dr Collingwood Bruce's academy in Newcastle, and at a private school in the home of J. D. Carr, the biscuit manufacturer, in Carlisle, before spending two years at Bootham School, the Quaker school in York. He left in 1852 to work as a ship's draughtsman for a few months for a relative, Senhouse Martindale, a Lloyds surveyor in Liverpool. In 1853 he took up an apprenticeship with Jonathan Robson, a builder of steam tugs in Gateshead, making iron ships and marine engines. After completing this in 1856, he spent a year at University College, London, studying Latin, German, English literature, and mathematics, and in the summer of 1857 he studied German in Tübingen. However, after the collapse of the Northumberland and District Bank, in which his father was a large shareholder, in the same year, he returned to Newcastle to a job in the machine-drawing office of the Forth Banks engine works of R. and W. Hawthorn (Robert Hawthorn was a neighbour). In 1864 he married Marian Henrietta (b. c.1845), eldest daughter of J. P. Thöl of Wycombe Marsh, Buckinghamshire; they had five sons and two daughters. In 1860, with his father's help, Richardson bought Coutts's yard, a small shipyard at Walker, where the first iron ship on the Tyne had been launched in 1842, and founded the Neptune Works. He appointed Charles John Denham Christie, a naval architect, as his assistant: Christie became his partner in 1862. The Neptune Works occupied a 4 acre site, with 100 yards' river frontage and three building berths, and employment for 200 men. The first ship to be built, the Victoria, was a small ferry-steamer for the Isle of Wight–Portsmouth route, but business was slow in the early years. Relying mainly on overseas customers, Richardson persevered, and in 1865 secured an order from the Prussian government for a steamer to carry railway trains across the Rhine, the first of many such ferries built by the yard. As business grew, thanks to Richardson's energetic pursuit of new orders, he decided to open his own marine-engine and boiler works in 1872, and in 1879 he appointed a marine-engine designer, John Tweedy. By the 1880s the yard was building every kind of ship except warships, and despite the slump of the mid-1880s the Neptune yard prospered, launching the steel-hulled Alfonso XII for the Spanish Compania Transatlantica in 1888, the largest non-warship built on the Tyne at that date. The yard built a number of Italian emigrant ships for the crossing from the Italian ports to South America, and in 1889 it launched its first refrigerated ship. By 1898, when the north yard was added, the firm had a workforce of 2000 and the capacity for 30,000 tons of shipping. In 1899 the company built the engines and boilers for the Russian ice-breaker Angara, which had to be transported out to Lake Baikal for fitting, and in 1902 it launched the 500 foot Colonia, a cable ship carrying 4000 miles of cable built for the Telegraph and Maintenance Company Ltd. In 1899 a limited liability company, Wigham Richardson & Co. Ltd, was formed, with Richardson as chairman, and in 1903 the company amalgamated with CS Swan and Hunter of Wallsend to become Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson Ltd, the largest merchant shipbuilding concern on the Tyne, which survived until nationalization of the shipbuilding industry in 1977. Richardson became vice-chairman of the new company. Later in 1903 the company bought the Tyne Pontoons and Dry Dock Company to give 4000 feet of continuous frontage along the Tyne. Richardson was influential in the development of the shipbuilding industry in the north-east. As a result of his pamphlet Lloyd's Register of Shipping: its Effect … upon the Art of Shipbuilding (1874), the rules of Lloyds were modified. He was one of those who founded the journal Shipping World in Newcastle in 1882, and he was its first chairman. A founder member of the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in 1884, he served as president in 1890–92 and was a member of the North of England Institute of Mining Engineers and the Institution of Naval Architects, regularly contributing papers to all of these. He was president of the Newcastle Economic Society from 1896 to 1897. He also played an active part in local affairs as a member of Northumberland county council for many years, and as a JP for Northumberland he was chairman of the Castle ward licensing committee. An enthusiastic artist himself, he gave many paintings to the Walker Mechanics Institute, and donated a window in Christ Church, Walker, in memory of his elder sister, Anna Deborah Richardson. He was a director of the Walker and Wallsend Union Gas Company, and of the Tyne Pontoons and Dry Dock Company, and he was one of the first subscribers to the Tyneside Tramways and Tramroads Company, which opened in 1902. Richardson was widely read and cultured. He liked to write Latin verses, and in the 1880s he held a series of evenings reading and translating the works of Virgil with a group of friends including the shipbuilder Sir Benjamin Chapman Browne and the banker Thomas Hodgkin. His interests included political economy and sociology, military and naval history, architecture—he designed a number of houses—and chess, and he became an expert on the construction of sundials, contributing an appendix to a new edition of Mrs Alfred Gatty's Book of Sun-Dials (1889). A good linguist, he travelled widely in Poland, Russia, Greece, and Turkey, and was particularly interested in visiting the battlefields of the Crimean and Franco-Prussian wars. He also went to North America, the West Indies, and Africa, making watercolour sketches of all his travels. As he grew older he turned to the Church of England, and attended Benwell church in Newcastle. Richardson died suddenly on 15 April 1908 at 11 Nottingham Place, London, following an operation, and was buried on 18 April at Kensal Green cemetery. His wife survived him. The Memoirs of John Wigham Richardson were privately published in 1911. Anne Pimlott Baker Sources J. F. Clarke, Building ships on the north east coast, 1: c.1640–1914 (1997) · Launching ways: published on the occasion of their jubilee, Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson Ltd (1953) · Memoirs of John Wigham Richardson (1911) · W. Richardson, History of the parish of Wallsend and Willington (1923) · J. F. Clarke, ‘Richardson, John Wigham’, DBB · D. Dougan, The history of north east shipbuilding (1968) · L. A. Ritchie, ed., The shipbuilding industry: a guide to historical records (1992) · ‘John Wigham Richardson’, Mid-Tyne Link, 2/7 (winter 1905–6), 145–51 · census returns, 1881 · The Times (16 April 1908) · The Shipbuilder, 3/9 (summer 1908) · Engineering (24 April 1908) · Newcastle Weekly Chronicle (18 April 1908) · Newcastle Daily Journal (16 April 1908) · Transactions of the NE Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders, 24 (1907–8) · d. cert. Likenesses photograph, 1866, repro. in Memoirs · photograph, 1905, repro. in Memoirs · Bacon, photograph, repro. in The Shipbuilder Wealth at death £92,001: Clarke, ‘Richardson, John Wigham’ © Oxford University Press 2004–6 All rights reserved: see legal notice Anne Pimlott Baker, ‘Richardson, John Wigham (1837–1908)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/48151, accessed 24 Aug 2006] John Wigham Richardson (1837–1908): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/48151 Shipbuilder Oxford Dictionary of National Biography International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families - ISAAR(CPF) 2nd edition - ICA 2004 ISBN 2-9521932-2-3 National Council on Archives, Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997 Yes Lrees 24/08/2006 Rgill 22/07/2008 1dc82ec0-8efb-41c1-a2be-c97cfbb6a1db