Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 50

CHAPTER 5

THE BANK OF ENGLAND SWINDLED!

An income of £250 a year from the trust fund allowed for a fairly expansive lifestyle, compared with the wages of less than a fifth of that on which artisans and manual workers were bringing up families. But for Wainewright and Eliza, grandfather Ralph’s grudging benison was never going to be enough. Money was to be begged, borrowed and stolen to fund their huge expenses.

In 1821, they had moved to one of central London’s most fashionable addresses, Great Marlborough Street, laid out in the early 18th Century, “inhabited all by fine Quality” and “one of the finest streets in Europe”1. At No.49, where they took an apartment, had lived the both the Earls of Sutherland and of Bute, and the actress Sarah Siddons.

It was a large four-storey building divided into apartments around a square central well around which rose an elegant staircase. The Wainewrights appear to have rented the apartment on the top floor, for he talks in one of his essays of “Janus’s

1. Survey of London. London County Council, 1963. Vol xxxxi, p.24. The area became known for its artists. At No. 49 In 1834, was another painter and exhibitor at the Academy, one A. Morton, followed by Charles Hullmandel, artist and print-maker. Later it became the Fine Arts Institute Nos. 49 and 50 were demolished in 1884 to make way for the church of St John the Baptist which itself was demolished in 1937. There is now an office block on the site.

THE FATAL CUP

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