Appendix E: Biographies
Hirst
Thomas Nelson Hirst (Huddersfield 12 November 17941 – St. Petersburg 22 May / 3 June 1863)2 and his sister, Mary Gent Hirst (Huddersfield bap. 22 March 17973 – St. Petersburg 23 July / 4 August 1844),4 were from Huddersfield in Yorkshire. Both they and their sister, Elizabeth Hirst (b. Huddersfield 23 June 1800 – between 1822 and 1844),5 were baptized at St. Peter’s Church, Huddersfield.6 They were the son and daughters of William (bap. 14 October 1767 – 6 April 1822) and Ann (Nelson) Hirst, who were married by license at St. Peter’s Church, Huddersfield on 5 January 1793.7 The Hirst and Nelson families appear to have been in business together as well as, or because of, being connected by marriage. Nineteenth-century Huddersfield directories from 1805 to 1817 cite them as “merchants,” “merchants and manufacturers,” “woolstaplers,” and “woollen manufacturers.”8
Thomas Nelson Hirst, bachelor, of the parish of Almondbury, in the county of York, married by license on 9 July 1817 at the Parish Church of St. Marylebone in London Anna Turnerelli, spinster, of the parish of St. Marylebone in the county of Middlesex.9 Anna (Turnerelli) Hirst (London 5 April 1796 – 20 May 1822) was the eldest daughter of the distinguished sculptor-in-ordinary to the Royal family, Peter Turnerelli (Tognarelli) (Belfast 1774 – London 20 March 1839), and his first wife, Margaret (Tracy) Turnerelli (d. 1835), who married on 19 May 1795.10 Anna was the sister of the artist, Edward Tracy Turnerelli (London 13 October 1813 – Leamington 24 January 1896), who, from 1836 to 1854, lived in Russia, where, under the patronage of Nicholas I, he visited “the most distant parts of that country … sketching its ancient monuments.”11 William Radcliffe, son of Thomas Nelson and Anne (Turnerelli) Hirst, was born in January 1820 (day not given) and baptized on 31 October 1820 at St. Patrick’s Church, Soho, Middlesex.12 Anna (Turnerelli) Hirst died on 20 May 1822, at the age of twenty-six.13
“Thomas Nelson Hirst and John Wood, now or late of Huddersfield, … Merchants, Dealers, Chapmen and Partners,” were declared “bankrupts” in May 1818.14 William Hirst Jr., father of Thomas Nelson Hirst, left his estate of about £3000 to his two daughters and to the children of his son, stipulating that the interest from the share of his estate going to his grandchildren when the youngest of them reaches twenty-one should, until then, be paid out in their maintenance and education.15 The will also indicated that he had lent his son money and required that the grandchildren’s share of the estate be reduced by deducting from it as much money as he had paid or advanced during his lifetime to his son.
How soon after the death of his wife Thomas Nelson Hirst moved to St. Petersburg has not been ascertained. It had to be no later than May or June 1828, when Caroline Holliday (b. 1801), spinster, whom he married in that city on 29 October / 10 November 1828,16 appears to have become pregnant. Their first child, Caroline, was born on 30 January / 11 February 1829. She died at the age of twenty-one days. A son, Henry, was born on 14/26 March 1830. He died on 15/27 July 1836. A son, Edward Radcliffe, was born on 29 June / 11 July 1833. Another daughter, Elizabeth Mary, was born on 15/27 October 1834. A second daughter named Caroline was born on 13/25 November 1835, but died at the age of sixteen months. A daughter, Maria, was born on 13/25 May 1837.17 Caroline (Holliday) Hirst died on 8/20 February 1842.18 On 20 November / 2 December 1842, Thomas Nelson Hirst married Margaret Gordon (c. 1809 – St. Petersburg 22 March / 3 April 1891), widow.19 He died on 22 May / 3 June 1863 and was buried in the Smolensk Cemetery on 27 May / 8 June 1863 by “Wm. Osborn Jenkyn, M.A. Assistant Minister of the British Church, St. Petersburg.”20 Margaret (Gordon) Hirst, aged eighty-two, of the Tenth Line, Vasilievskii Island, St. Petersburg, died on 22 March / 3 April 1891, and was buried on 26 March / 7 April 1891, in the Smolensk Cemetery by A.E. Watson, Chaplain.21
Nothing is known of Elizabeth Hirst.
Whether Mary Gent Hirst accompanied her brother to St. Petersburg or came later is not clear. She may have been from Preston, as Anna Whistler (see Images 1–5), on arriving in St. Petersburg, gave Margaret (Gordon) Hirst a letter for her from an unidentified correspondent in Preston.22 Anna Whistler, who became friends with her and frequently visited her, says she was lame and had been bed ridden with cancer for five years when she died in 1844.23
Thomas Nelson Hirst owned a house on Vasilievskii Island on the Fifth Line between Bol’shoi and Srednii prospects at No. 31, in which he ran a boarding school for boys. Mary Gent Hirst also lived here. Legend has it that Count Aleksei Andreevich Arakcheev (1769–1834) was born in this house (see Kleinmikhel’ in this Appendix and Image 244). The building has been described as German, two stories high, and shaped like an upside-down L, with another separate small two-storied stone wing in the courtyard.24
Thomas Nelson Hirst was issued a certificate (no. 762) on 28 May 1829 (OS) to establish his school. In his report for the second half of 1847 on private educational institutions in St. Petersburg under his supervision, the inspector, Court Councilor Iosif Somov, gave the following information about Hirst and his school. A British subject of the Anglican faith, Hirst had a boarding school of the first category for boys in his home. The subjects taught were the Orthodox, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic religions; Russian, English, French, German, and Latin; mathematics; practical arithmetic; bookkeeping; universal history; physics; geography; penmanship and dancing. The number of pupils, their social class and fees were: 82 boys: from the nobility and civil service, 18; clergy, 1; merchant, 57; petit bourgeoisie, 7. Boarding, 27; half-board, 14; day students, 41. Annual fees: boarding, 430 rubles; half-board, 230 rubles; day, 143 rubles. The inspector found that the fulfillment of Christian obligations was observed. Cleanliness, neatness, and discipline were extremely well observed, and the maintenance of the pupils, including sufficient school equipment, corresponded to the fees they paid. The inspector added a note saying that “the institution merits full praise just as it has in the past.”25
Joseph Harrison Jr. (see Image 226) sent his son, William Henry, called Henry, to this school. Henry liked it “much better than he did Jourdans,”26 but a year later his father wrote Anna Whistler, without clarifying, that they were “at present … not at all satisfied in sending Henry to Hirsts school.”27 This may not, however, have implied a negative assessment of the school but of Henry, who was eventually confined to a mental institution.28
After the death of Thomas Nelson Hirst, his son, called Dmitrii Fomich Girst by the Russians, became the owner of the house and director of the boarding school. Petr Ivanovich Shchukin (1853–1912), who became a wealthy merchant and one of the great art patrons of Russia, attended the Hirst boarding school from 1867 to 1871 and seemed to like it. He left interesting memoirs of his teachers and fellow students.29 In 1876, Dmitrii Hirst sold the house and school for forty thousand rubles to a man named Humbert, who in 1881 closed the school permanently.30 In 1884, a man named Bremer built an enormous house in its place.31
Notes
1 Huddersfield Parish Church Registers (HPCR), YK/R301, SoG.
2 PREC STP for 1863, no. 7502, p. 747.
3 HPCR.
4 PREC STP for 1844, p. 312. She was buried on 27 July / 8 August 1844, in the Smolensk Cemetery, the Rev. George Williams presiding.
5 HPCR; The Will of William Hirst the Younger; entry for Monday 17ƫ June [1844], NYPL: AWPD, Part I.
6 HPCR.
7 HPCR; IGI. They were both listed as “21 years and upwards” and “of this parish.” The bride spelled her name “Anne” (Index to licenses issued by the Prerogative Court of York, SoG).
8 From SoG: Holden’s Triennal Directory for 1805–06–07: “Nelson, Hurst & Whoolley, merchants”; Holden’s Triennal Directory for 1809–10–11: “Nelson Thos & Co, merchants”; Pigot’s Directory of Chester …Yorkshire (1814–1815), Merchants & Manufacturers: “Nelson, Hirst & Co, New Street”; and in Pigot’s Directory of Chester …Yorkshire (1816–1817), Merchants & Manufacturers: “Nelson, Hirst & Co, New Street” and “Nelson, Thomas & Co, Cloth-hall St”; Woolstaplers: “Nelson, Hirst & Co, High-St”; Woollen Manufacturers: “Nelson, Hirst & Co, High-street.”
9 Marriage licenses issued by the Faculty Office of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, SoG; Index to marriages in the Parish Church of St. Marylebone. Catholics were required to marry in the Anglican Church at this period; thus the marriage in St. Marylebone.
10 Microfilm copy of the marriage register of the Church of St. Marylebone, London Metropolitan Archives, SoG; photocopy of the register of christenings in the Roman Catholic Church of St. Patrick, Soho, Middlesex, Westminster Archive Centre, SoG; Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Turnerelli, Peter (1771/2–1839)”; Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660–1851, rev. ed. (London: Abbey Library, 1968), pp. 402–403; Gentleman’s Magazine (1839), pt. 2, p. 545).
11 Tracy (as he called himself) Turnerelli was the fifth child and only son of Peter and Margaret (Tracy) Turnerelli, and the only child still alive at the time of his father’s second marriage in late (December) 1835 (Edward Tracy Turnerelli, Memories of a Life of Toil: The Autobiography of Tracy Turnerelli “The Old Conservative.” A Record of Work Artistic, Literary, and Political, from 1835 to 1884 (London: Field & Tuer; Leadenhall Press; E.D. Simpkin, Marshall; Hamilton, Adams, 1884), p. 35). As this “marriage … rendered home less happy than before” (Turnerelli, Memories, p. 38), he decided to visit Russia, using the written invitation Emperor Alexander I had given to his father while in England in 1814. Peter Turnerelli had never taken advantage of the invitation and, at his son’s request, gave it to him (Turnerelli, p. 38). But instead of “practising his profession as a sculptor” (Turnerelli, p. 42), Tracy Turnerelli undertook to draw “the Ancient Monuments of the Russian Empire,” titling himself their “Delineator” (Turnerelli, pp. 44, 66).
Although he actually spent eighteen years in Russia, starting for that country “in the beginning of June, 1836” (Turnerelli, p. 40) and setting out for England in August 1854 (Turnerelli, p. 72), he himself called it a sojourn of sixteen years, counting only the time he actually spent in his “rambles” outside St. Petersburg, i.e., from sometime after mid-June 1837 (Turnerelli, pp. 48–49) until June 1853 (Turnerelli, p. 63). The title page of his earlier brief memoirs of Nicholas I, his patron, and of the Imperial family also clearly states that he spent sixteen years in Russia (What I Know of the Late Emperor Nicholas and His Family by Edward Tracy Turnerelli. Sixteen Years Resident in Russia. Author of Kazan, The Ancient Capital of the Tartar Khans, etc. etc. Second Edition. London: Edward Churton, 1855). See also The Times (London), January 25, 1896, p. 6.
There is nothing in the autobiography to suggest that he had any contact with his brother-in-law, Thomas Nelson Hirst, while in Russia. As Hirst was widowed in 1822, when Turnerelli was eight years old, and had gone to Russia some time in the 1820s, it is not likely that they maintained a relationship over the years. But, as Turnerelli attracted much attention and became a well-known eccentric Englishman by sitting out in the open in St. Petersburg and drawing the city’s landmarks, it would seem that news of his presence could have reached Hirst’s ears (Turnerelli, Memories, pp. 44–46). In any case, Hirst’s marriage into so prominent and wealthy a family has a certain mystery about it.
12 Photocopy of the register of christenings in the Roman Catholic Church of St. Patrick, Soho, Middlesex, Westminster Archive Centre, SoG.
13 “Obituaries,” Laity’s Directory, Catholic Record Society, London, 1822, p. 154.
14 There is little information about this bankruptcy, although some details can be found in The London Gazette, May 16, 1818 and The Times (London), May 18, 1818.
15 The official court copy of the will of William Hirst the Younger was provided by the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at the University of York. A transcription was provided by Michael Welch.
16 PREC STP for 1828, no number or page given.
17 Index to PREC STP, vol. 4, pp. 130, 131, 142, 175, 192, 203, 211, 221, 223.
18 PREC STP, no. 5143. Caroline (Holliday) Hirst was buried on 12/24 February 1842 in the Smolensk Cemetery.
19 PREC STP for 1842, p. 292, no number given.
20 PREC STP for 1863, p. 747, no. 7502.
21 PREC STP, no. 858, p. 1382.
22 Entry for November 28th 1843, NYPL: AWPD, Part I.
23 Entry for Friday August 2 [1844], NYPL: AWPD, Part I.
24 P.I. Shchukin, Vospominaniia Iz istorii metsenatstva Rossii [Memoirs from the History of Patronage in the Arts in Russia], ed. S.O. Shmidt, comp. N.V. Gorbushina [Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei, 1997], p. 30.
25 TsGIA SPb: Fond 139, op. 1, d. 5188. S vedomostiami o chastnykh pansionakh i shkolakh v Sanktpeterburge za 2 polovinu 1847g. 3 ianv. 1848 – 27 ianv. 1848 [With information about private boarding schools and schools in St. Petersburg for the second half of 1847. Jan. 3, 1848 – Jan. 27, 1848], fol. 38r and v.
26 Anna Whistler to James Whistler, St. Petersburg Wednesday November 1st 1848, GUL: Whistler Collection, W366.
27 Joseph Harrison, Jr. to Anna Whistler, Alexandroffsky, December 6, 1849, HSP: Harrison Letterbook No. 1.
28 Nutty, “Joseph Harrison, Jr.,” vol. 1, p. 131n87.
29 Shchukin, Vospominaniia, pp. 30–36, 46–47, 88.
30 Shchukin, p. 47.
31 Shchukin, p. 31.
