Three more blue plaques unveiled in Leamington

[dutchman]

Blue plaques marking the Leamington homes of three historic figures were unveiled last week.

The plaques are the latest in a series that has included the novelist and diplomat Nathaniel Hawthorne and French emperor Napoleon III and commemorated painter Thomas Baker, one of Warwickshire’s foremost artists of the period, groundbreaking historian Mary Dormer Harris, whose trust continues to benefit schoolchildren, and Victoria Cross holder Henry Tandey.

Leamington town clerk Robert Nash said: “They all achieved considerable fame in their own right, either in their own lifetime or, in the case of Baker, well after they died. For these people not to be recognised in the town would be a missed opportunity.”

The plaque at the Church Street house of artist Thomas Baker was given consent by Warwick District Council’s planning committee only days before.

‘Baker of Leamington’ was actually born in Birmingham in 1808 but moved to the then fashionable spa town to work. He lived at several addresses but spent longest at 13 - then 32 - Church Street.

Prolific and successful, Baker lived a colourful life, apparently fathering five children outside wedlock before dying at 56 of a stomach complaint. He was rumoured to have been poisoned by his housekeeper, but an inquest found no evidence of this.

A second plaque was unveiled at the house of historian Mary Dormer Harris, who was born in 1867 and studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University’s first college for women.

Returning to the area in 1896 to care for her mother, she moved from the family home in Stoneleigh to Clarendon Place and then to the newly built 16 Gaveston Road,

Dormer Harris devoted herself to researching the history of Coventry and Warwickshire, transcribing, editing and publishing the Coventry Leet Book between 1904 and 1913 and later writing around a dozen further books. She died as a result of a traffic accident in Rugby Road in 1936.

The final plaque was unveiled at the Angel Hotel in Kenilworth Road. The hotel backs onto the now demolished Swains buildings, the birthplace in 1891 of Henry Tandey VC, the most decorated private of the First World War.

Tandey fought at Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele. He was wounded three times, mentioned in dispatches five times and was awarded the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal, but suffered from a claim by Hitler that the Green Howard soldier had spared the future dictator’s life as he lay wounded.