The Library at Merthyr Mawr a Bibliomaniac Great-Grandfather

121 The Library at Merthyr Mawr A Bibliomaniac Great-Grandfather by MURRAY McLAGGAN I must start by addressing the questions which my title immediately raises: Where is Merthyr Mawr? What is this library? And who is the great grandfather? Briefly, Merthyr Mawr village, and the house of the same name, are near Bridgend in Glamorgan. The house was built between 1806 and 1809 by my wife's great-great-great-grandfather, a politician, lawyer and judge named Sir John Nicholl. His grandson (her great grandfather, and the great-grandfather of the title) was John Cole Nicholl. The library today contains somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 volumes- nobody has made a precise count- virtually all collected before John Cole Nicholl's death in 1894 and the vast majority before 1870. Almost every conceivable subject has some representation, with particular strengths in English and French history, theology, classics, English, French, Italian and, naturally, Welsh literature, travel and exploration, topography, natural history, literary criticism, philology and the occult Bibliophilic interests are equally catholic including, in greater or lesser depth, fine printing, fine bindings, early private press productions, seventeenth-century pamphlets, colour-plate and other illustrated books, books with interesting associations, annotations and provenances, and so on. So much by way of background. 1 do not propose to try to describe 20,000 diverse volumes, and with this brief introduction now move immediately from the books to my true theme, which is the men who collected them: Sir John Nicholl and, more particularly, the bibliomaniac great-grandfather, John Cole NicholL Sir John Nicholl came of a line of parsons and minor gentry long established in the Vale of Glamorgan. He was bom in 1759, went to the local grammar school at Cowbridge and, via Oxford, to London and the profession of the law. He quickly made good, and the milestones in his subsequent successful career werç.his admission in 1785 as an advocate to Doctor's Commons, his appointment in 1798 as King's Advocate with a concomitant Knighthood, membership of the Privy Council in 1809, and elevation to a judgeship of the High Court of Admiralty in 1833. From 1802 to 1832, with hrief intermissions, he was a Member of Parliament for various constituencies. He died in 1838. 122 Murray McLaggan His practice and expertise lay in ecclesiastical and admiralty law. The ecclesiastical side doubtless contributed more to his status, the admiralty side certainly more to his pocket. The admiralty jurisdiction, because of the large sums of money usually involved, has always been profitable for lawyers; and must have been particularly so (luring the Napoleonic wars; a frigate captain might hit an occasional jackpot but it was the lawyers who enjoyed the steady income! It was a solid and meritorious, even a brilliant career, and it enabled him in 1804 to buy a substantial estate at Merthyr Mawr and to build there a substantial house. Throughout his life he kept meticulous accounts, apparently intended to be measures of his success as much as precautions against the risks of losing the fruits of that success. It was characteristic that in 1828, at the age of 69, with his career beginning to wind down, he totted up his net worth and financial position, and characteristic also that he took care to leave the resulting calculation amongst his papers. The total came to about £185,000, including £110,000 or so in the Funds; his annual investment income was £5,200 and the 'profits of [his) profession' since he became King's Advocate had averaged £10,600 per annum. Annual expenditure had risen from modest figures in the 1790s and settled by 1812 at around £6,000 per annum. Applying the Micawber formula, an annual surplus running into five figures, or nearly so, would appear to have left him a satisfactory margin of happiness. Sir John was beyond doubt an able man; his letters, his speeches and his judgements show admirable clarity of mind and perspicuity of reasoning. He was als-> a man of staunchly conservative views. But though certainly justified in being pleased by his own success, some tastes might judge him a mite too obviously so. It was only right that he should be painted by Lawrence and sculpted by Chantrey; but perhaps a little hard that his wife should be portrayed in both media only by Anon (even though she was somewhat plain), particularly in view of the fact that he had sensibly selected a very well-heeled father-in-law. Perhaps too, he was a little over- fond of writing to his relations in order to give them, at some length the benefit of his thoughts on the regulation of their lives. He commissioned 'at the suggestion of two or three friends' offprints of his Commons speech in 1812 on the State of Ireland; I cannot suppress a frisson of malicious pleasure on contemplating the 115 copies in our attic which were presumably left on his hands. I hope that bookmen will not misunderstand me if I suggest that he was perhaps too successful to be a good collector. I mean only that his turn of mind was active rather than reflective. He was, however, a book-buyer; The Library at Merthyr Mawr 123 and as an educated man of wide interests he bought in many fields He subscribed, naturally, to the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh Review, the Journal of Science and the Arts, and read widely in history, travel (a particular interest), natural history, topography, classical and English literature. He was not however, In any sense which most of us would recognize, a bibliophile; he bought books to read, in furtherance of that pursuit of enlightenment which was proper to a cultivated gentlemaa Any edition would do; and he had them clad in a decent serviceable, brown calf much of it now crumbling. He died leaving a library of 4,000 or so volumes, and though they have no pretension to being a distinguished collection, they do include some notable books; it would, after alt have been difficult to buy at all widely In the first decades of the last century (particularly in such fields as exploration and natural history), without leaving anything which the end of the present century would find interesting. His books were housed In handsome Gothic bookcases, the largest of which - the others were made to match - is said to have been bought at the sale of the forfeited property of William Dodd; it was Dr Dodd's mind, you will remember, which Johnson suggested had been wonderfully concentrated by the knowledge that he was to be hanged in a fortnight The provenance may be questionable in more senses than one, but the library was and is a handsome room, and even if its contents had possessed no intrinsic merit they would for bibliophiles still have the interest of presumably having been instrumental in turning his grandson's mind to book-collecting. John Cole Nicholl to whom I now turn, was a man very different from his grandfather. His father's career had followed Sir John's very closely; Doctors Commons in 1826, member of Parliament from 1832-52, of the Privy Council from 1841 and of the Board of Trade from 1846. He married, in 1822, Jane Harriot Talbot whose family owned the neighbouring estate of Margam, and their eldest son, John Cole, was bom in 1823. That marriage, in retrospect led eventually to the end of the family's prosperity, for several reasons. First a frivolous hindsight makes it clear that it was a little too early to marry into the Talbots Later in the century the coal underlying the thousands of acres of moorland of which the Margam estate largely consisted, and the outlet for that coal which they developed at Port Talbot made the family enormously rich. Emily Talbot Jane Harriot's niece, inherited nearly £6,000,000 and was said to be the richest woman in England. But in 1822 this was still in the future. In the second place Jane Harriot was too prolific. She bore ten childrea whose upkeep, portions and allowances nibbled away at that fortune in Consols I hirdly, and most important she suffered from ill health, real or imagined, and 12-1 Murray McLaggan spent a great deal of time abroad. From 1845 her husband found an escape from the pressures of a busy life in travelling with her; he largely gave up his practice, with a consequential drop in the family income. As so often happens; it was not the primary invalid who died; he caught a fever and was buried in Rome in 1853. Sir John had left everything to him: he in turn left everything to his widow, who lived for a further twenty-one years; she proved not to be the best of managers. To be fair, the family economy was already in decline; her husband had reckoned his annual income in 1852 to be about £5,000, and after his death the bankers told her that when all was in (discounting a bad debt of £18,000) her income from all sources would be £4,500 or so. Such figures no doubt represented more than a comfortable competence in the 1850s; but it was not the wealth of the Indies and she had substantial commitments - certainly the margin for happiness had narrowed considerably. But this is to anticipate. For the first twenty and more years of his life, John Cole Nicholl was the eldest son in a wealthy family possessed of a considerable estate in South Wales and a fashionable London house at 33 Belgrave Square.

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