Charles Heathcote Tatham
Charles Heathcote Tatham (8 February 1772 in Westminster, London – 10 April 1842 in London), was an English architect of the early nineteenth century. Early life He was born in Duke Street, Westminster, the youngest of five sons of Ralph Tatham who had come to London from Stockton in County Durham, by his wife Elizabeth Bloxham, the daughter of a well to do hosier in Cateaton Street. The father was first a "Spanish merchant", went bankrupt, became a horse breeder in Essex, went bankrupt again, and was then asked in 1779 by Captain (afterwards Lord) Rodney, whom he had sheltered from his creditors "a great deal of his time" at Havering, if he would like to be his secretary in his command of the Leeward Islands fleet. Ralph Tatham, at 47, rose to the challenge, accepted, and set out for Portsmouth; but he fell ill on the way and died of cholera at the Castle & Falcon in Aldersgate Street. Charles was educated at Louth Grammar School, Lincolnshire, as was his elder brother Henry, later a gun-maker and sword-cutler by Charing Cross; his eldest brother Thomas became a cabinet maker and "upholsterer to the Prince Regent", his brothers William and John respectively a naval officer and a London solicitor. Early career and travels Returning to London at the age of 16, he was engaged as a clerk by Samuel Pepys Cockerell, architect and surveyor. Learning nothing there, as he thought, he ran away, and returned to his mother's lodgings, where he remained working hard for a year or more at the five orders of architecture and French ornament and studying mathematics. When he was nearly 19 Henry Holland, the Prince of Wales's architect in the alterations of Carlton House and the Pavilion, Brighton, received him into his house, and two years later offered him £60 a year for two years to enable him to pursue his studies at Rome. He had been introduced to Holland through his relative John Linnell, who was in charge of one of London's leading cabinet-maker and upholsterer's firms and a rival to Thomas Chippendale. At Holland's office Tatham designed and drew at large all the ornamental decorations for Drury Lane Theatre. The whole proscenium was marked off from his drawings by Charles Catton the younger, who painted the designs in fresco. The executed designs for the boxes in the theatre were by Linnell and they survive at the V&A in the Print Room. Together with Samuel Wyatt he also designed Dropmore House in Buckinghamshire which was built in the 1790s for Lord Grenville, later the Prime Minister who pushed through the law abolishing the slave trade. With Holland's help, and a loan of £100 from John Birch, surgeon-extraordinary to the king, he felt justified in May 1794 in starting for Italy, travelling in company with his peer Joseph Gandy. He spent his time industriously, chiefly in Rome and Naples in company with Signor Asprucci, architect to Prince Borghese and Don Isidoro Velasquez, an exhibitioner from