One man's passion to record the history of Staffordshire lives on to this very day, writes Chris Upton.
This is a tale of Wood and Salt. An unlikely combination of materials, you might think, but one which has bequeathed to us a priceless legacy.
Safe in the arms of the William Salt Library in Stafford there is a collection of some 400 pencil sketches and watercolour views of Staffordshire, all executed over a period of just five years.
Together they comprise one of the most detailed visual examinations of a single county to be found anywhere.
If you’ve never visited the William Salt, let me encourage you to go. It’s a reminder of what libraries (and scholarship) used to be before they believed that everything could be done on a computer.
To call the place a local history library is to underestimate the extraordinary range of stuff within its walls: paintings and maps, manuscripts and stained-glass, prints and pamphlets.
Yet the man after whom the collection is named never even lived in Stafford. He spent almost the whole of his life in London.
The library’s eclectic mix is the result of a lifetime’s collecting by William Salt, whose banking ancestors provided him with enough spare time and money to pursue his hobby indefatigably: that is, to collect anything and everything relating to the county of Staffordshire.
On Salt’s death the collection came within a whisker of being sold and dispersed, but at the last minute the sale was halted, and through the good offices of William Salt’s nephew, Titus Salt MP, it was preserved and left to the town.
Most antiquaries are content simply to hoover up all they can find of historical or local interest. William Salt was more pro-active than this, commissioning artists to record aspects of the county, its towns and churches, landscapes and buildings.
At the time Salt was doing so the rising tide of industrialisation was threatening to sweep much of Staffordshire’s history aside. You might call it “rescue art”.
The man who benefited more than any from William Salt’s urgent quest was Thomas Peploe Wood, and from his hand came that large collection of views now preserved in the library, which also keeps his diaries.
A further 200 or so of Wood’s pictures are in the collections of the Staffordshire Museums.
Wood himself was born on New Year’s Day in 1817 in the village of Great Haywood, and spent much of his youth in nearby Colwich.
Wood perfectly fits the stereotype of the romantic artist. He was poor, largely self-taught, but innately talented. It’s said that travellers on the road from London to Liverpool saw his work and slipped him a little money, which he spent on prints of Old Masters.
Wood received some local encouragement too, and the architect Thomas Trubshaw took him to London to meet the print dealer and art connoisseur, Dominic Colnaghi, who bought some of his pictures. Suitably inspired, Wood began to exhibit his work at the Royal Academy and at the Birmingham Society of Arts.
