C.H. Rickards, Esq.
(1812-1886)
1 April 1862
Volume 6, page 155, sitting number 7491.
Born on 5 February 1812 at Salford in Lancashire (today part of Greater Manchester), Charles Hilditch Rickards was the son of Charles Rickards, a cotton spinner and merchant, and his wife Frances née Broome, daughter of Thomas Broome of Sandbach. According to one online source, the money in the family came from ancestral land held by the Broomes.
Before he had attained his majority, Charles fils had established himself in the paper trade. At the time of the 1851 census, he was a ‘Paper Dealer’ living at Apsley Terrace, Chester Road, Stretford. The household included two servants: a cook and a housemaid.
When the census was taken in 1861 he was 49 years old and living with four servants at 11 Seymour Grove in Stretford, a market town also today in Greater Manchester. He gave ‘Paper Dealer [and] Magistrate’ as his profession. Aged 55, he was unmarried. In fact, he never married.
For fourteen years he held the position of Chairman of the Manchester Board of Guardians, having previously been a member of the board for twenty-seven years. He also endowed ‘a scholarship of £50 a year, bearing his name, at the Manchester Grammar School, where he received his education’ (Manchester Times, 30 October 1869). He was also a Justice of the Peace.
‘Mr Rickards was an intimate and admirer of [George Frederick] Watts, R.A., some of whose works he acquired, and his portrait by the same great artist is included in the permanent collection of the City Art Gallery in Mosley-street. [It is now in the Manchester Art Gallery.] Mr Rickards was a man of broad enlightened views, and a true philanthropist. […] I well remember him in his later years, his public spirit and generous sympathetic nature evinced in particular for the needy old and young’ (Manchester City News, 16 May 1914).
‘There is something interesting and even touching in the circumstances under which the late Mr Charles Hilditch Rickards formed the collection which were [sic] disposed of on Saturday. It is said that he took little interest in the fine arts until, while he was being painted by Mr Watts, the conversation between artist and model awakened in the latter the liveliest interest and sympathy with the aims of the former. From that time and almost down to his death Mr Rickards became the principal buyer of Mr Watts’s pictures. Some little time, however, before his death, […] he was stricken with blindness, and the collector’s treasures were no more to him than fading memories. The large rooms during the sale on Saturday were crowded to overflowing. […] The 57 pictures realised £15,686, or an average of a fraction under £300 each’ (Dundee Evening Telegraph, 4 April 1887).
Charles Hilditch Rickards died, aged 75, at The Beeches, Old Trafford near Manchester on 8 July 1886.
‘Mr Charles Hilditch Rickards, justice of the peace and deputy-lieutenant of the county of Lancaster, died on Thursday, at his residence, Seymour-grove, Old Trafford. The announcement will be received with much regret by a wide circle of inhabitants of Manchester and neighbourhood’ (Manchester Courier, 10 July 1886).
He left an estate valued at £511,188 which is the equivalent of more than £51 million in today’s money.