I doubt if the Birmingham manufacturer Richard Tangye ever met a Chartist. When he arrived in Brum in 1852, the Chartists of the town were meeting at Wild’s Temperance Hotel in Hill Street. Now Tangye didn’t like meetings of any sort & usually managed to wriggle out of them. He didn’t spend his evenings in Hill Street talking over ‘The Charter and Something More’, but in his lodgings, his only treat being apple pie on Sundays. Yet Tangye had more in common with the Chartists than he ever knew. You see, just like them, he believed that the things that the educated elite enjoyed, the people should also enjoy. Things like the beautiful artifacts bought in Italy to stock the new art gallery in the town. … things like books … things like Shakespeare’s plays … these were the things that Tangye believed should be made available to the people. If we were writing a PhD, we’d call this the democratization of culture. Whatever we call it, Tangye believed in it & so did the Chartists.
Richard Tangye made a number of visits to Australia. He did this because his doctors advised him that the sea air would do him good. He also went because Australia was an important market for his jacks & pumps. And, of course, he was keen to see how they were getting on down under with the democratization of their culture. When he was not flogging his pumps or scoffing baskets of peaches & grapes – he loved fruit, did Tangye – he was inspecting their museums & libraries. On an earlier visit he had presented a number of items relating to Captain Cook to a museum in Sydney. So, when he returned, he popped in to have a look at them. They were nowhere to be seen. Eventually they were found … in a cupboard covered in dust. A greatly irked Tangye stalked off to the public library.
He hatched a plan. Back in England he was going to lay his hands on a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio & put it on a boat to Australia. The librarian, the plan went, would open the package & be stunned by what he found. First, though, Tangye had to acquire a copy of the First Folio. He went to Bernard Quaritch, the best-known antiquarian bookseller in the country. Getting a copy of the First Folio wasn’t that difficult … if you had the cash. Tangye had the cash. He never revealed how much he coughed up for this copy of the First Folio. The Sydney Evening News ( 3 November 1884) put the cost £126, but the Northern Territory Times (14 February 1885) estimated that he had paid ‘close upon £500’. Years later the Sydney Morning Herald (23 April 1923) said that he’d laid out £750. What Tangye had got for his dosh was an almost perfect copy of the First Folio. There were just two pages missing, but Quaritch supplied facsimiles of these.
This was going to be a special present for Oz and it needed a special casket made. Tangye commissioned the Birmingham furniture makers Marris & Norton to do the job. And what a splendid job they made of it.. The oak came from the Forest of Arden & the casket was beautifully carved in Elizabethan style & lined with blue velvet. A small silver plaque recorded that this First Folio had been presented by Richard & George Tangye of Birmingham in 1884. Meanwhile Tangye had been keeping the copy of the First Folio in the safe at the Cornwall Works in Smethwick. Customers who popped in to see him about an order for his famous hydraulic jacks were also treated to a glimpse of the precious volume.
Tangye’s First Foilio was sent to New South Wales in November 1884. It arrived in January 1885. Though there were number of copies of the First Folio in libraries in England, Germany, Italy & South Africa, most copies were in private collections. Tangye’s generosity really was the democratization of culture, the application of the civic gospel internationally, a First Folio for the people. Perhaps a few elderly men who had involuntarily made their homes in Australia in the 1840s saw it in Sydney. There is no harm in thinking they did, is there?
Why not read more about the remarkable Sir Richard Tangye?
Sir Richard Tangye: A Cornish Entrepreneur in Victorian Birmingham by Stephen Roberts is available from Amazon, priced at £4.99.