Cod, Port and the Centenary of Lyme Regis Museum

Unusually for a very small town, Lyme Regis has a purpose-built museum which celebrates the centenary of its opening to the public this year. These days it is simply called Lyme Regis Museum. For a long time (and often still) it was the Philpot Museum, named after the man who commissioned it at the very end of the 19th century: Thomas Embray Davenport Philpot (1859-1918), a wealthy man.

Thomas’s grandfather John (1778-1850), a London lawyer, acquired a seaside home at Morley Cottage (now Mariners Hotel) in Lyme in the early part of the 19th century. He had three sisters, of whom Elizabeth (1779-1857) formed a geological collection with the aid of the eminent fossilist Mary Anning, which eventually passed to the Oxford University Museum in 1880. His only son, John Philpot junior (1809-1878) was brother-in-law of the wealthy City of London merchant Thomas Newman Hunt. The two families became close. He with his wife Elizabeth and children, including Thomas the youngest of their six boys, were sometimes guests at Hunt’s home in Portland Place, London.

Hunt was a major City figure: Governor of the Bank of England from 1867-69 and a chairman of the Imperial Life Insurance Company. His own business was Newman Hunt and Company, one of several companies founded in Dartmouth in the 16th century, all inter-related though marriage. Their business was a triangular trade. Supplies from Devon went to fishermen in Newfoundland; dried salt cod from there to southern Europe; port wine from Porto in Portugal (where Hunt was born) to Britain. In 1862 Hunt’s only child, also Thomas, died at the age of twenty and his wife three years later. Thomas Philpot, then a small child, seems to have taken his dead son’s place in Hunt’s affections.

On his death in 1884 Hunt left £175,000 and property in Britain, Portugal, Ireland and Newfoundland. £40,000 (perhaps £5 million today) went to Thomas, making him a very rich man at 25. Part of Hunt’s fortune and the lease of his house in Portland Place went to Thomas Philpot’s widowed mother. When she died two years later, he inherited a further large sum and the house. Thomas abandoned the bar, to which he had been called after Trinity College Cambridge, to lead the life of a gentleman in Lyme Regis. As a leading Lyme Conservative, he was elected unopposed to the new Dorset County Council in 1889. In 1890 he became Mayor of Lyme Regis, an event celebrated by fireworks and fairy lights on the Conservative Club. He was still only 30.

He bought Gatesfield, one of Lyme’s early 19th century suburban villas which he renamed Holme Cleeve, and commissioned the architect George Vialls to design a large three-storey extension and fashionable conservatory completed in 1886. With his wealth derived from cod and port, Philpot began a series of benefactions to Lyme. He gave £1500 towards the new cottage hospital; was a leading donor to the appeal after the great storm of Whit Sunday 1890; gave £1,000 towards the new elementary school and as Mayor laid its foundation stone; paid for the Lyme Regis banner (now in the Lyme Guildhall) which travelled to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893; and in 1894 bought the former sea water baths, where he built a drill hall at a cost of £1,000 for lease to the Artillery Volunteers, of which he was lieutenant – it is now the Marine Theatre. The same year Philpot resigned from the County Council and travelled abroad for his health.

Five years later, back in Lyme, Philpot embarked on his last public project: to build the Philpot Museum next door to the restored Guildhall (also by Vialls). He had acquired land in Cockmoile Square earlier, possibly not knowing it was the birthplace of Mary Anning, and asked Vialls to design a suitable building. We do not know if there were any collections to put in it, and it was certainly not for the Philpot geology collection which had gone to Oxford. There is a tradition that he had acquired collections on his travels, but we know nothing of them. It was completed in 1901-02, one of Vialls’s best designs, and his last. Philpot’s project gave Lyme a miniature big city museum in north European renaissance style with a grand staircase and imposing entrances to the galleries. Although apparently intended for the town council to run, Philpot never reached agreement on the terms under which it might take over the building. There were only temporary uses, including as a Red Cross depot in the First World War, and no collections were installed.

Philpot never married. Returning from a visit to New York in 1912, Philpot drafted his will, attempting to maintain a Philpot estate in Lyme by an entail; this was later abandoned. At his death on 4 April 1918, Caroline, daughter of his late oldest brother John Gold Philpot, was his sole heir. In February 1920, accompanied by her mother Winifred, she presented the Museum to the town council, handing over the deeds in a leather wallet inscribed ‘for the use and enjoyment of the inhabitants as a memorial of her uncle TED Philpot, Mayor of the Borough 1890-92’. Two years later the remainder of the Philpot estate in Lyme was sold.

The Philpot Museum was finally opened by the mayor on 24 March 1921. The driving force in the early days was Dr Wyatt Wingrave, who lent much of his own geology collection, supported on the historical side by Cyril Wanklyn. Reinvigorated as a museum by the writer John Fowles as honorary curator in the 1980s, the building was restored and the collections redisplayed in 1999. In 2017 the Museum added the Mary Anning Wing to provide a learning space and other facilities. Philpot’s vanity project is now a significant part of Lyme Regis and the Jurassic Coast.

Postcard of Lyme Regis Museum as originally built. Sadly, the upper storeys above the arches were taken down and replaced by tile hanging in the 1960s. (Lyme Regis Museums)

Max Hebditch
June 2021

The author is grateful to the Lyme Regis Society for permission to adapt his article first published in their newsletter All Over the Town (winter 2018).

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