Colonel Thomas Holmes Tidy
(1808-1874)
11 May 1862

Volume 6, page 297, sitting number 8056.

[Identified as ‘J. H. Tidy, Esq.’ in the Silvy daybooks, the sitter had previously sat for Silvy on 19 April 1862 (Volume 6, page 214, sitting 7725) when his name was recorded as ‘Colonel Tidy.’]

Thomas Holmes Tidy was born ‘in barracks’ at Fermoy in Ireland in or about 1808, the son of Colonel Frank Skelly Tidy.

In 1844 at Trinity Church in Ripon ‘Captain Thomas Holmes Tidy [married] Catherine, daughter of Lieut.-General Maister, of Littlethorpe, near Ripon.' Their first child, a son, was born the following year at Valletta where Captain Tidy was serving with the 14th Foot.

On 28 March 1854 the War Office announced that ‘Major Thomas Holmes Tidy, from the 14th Regiment of Foot, to be Deputy Adjutant-General at Jamaica, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Army, vice Farquharson, who resigns’ (Hampshire Chronicle, 1 April 1854).

His wife Catherine Tidy died at Dublin on 28 May 1851.

On 11 December 1858 at St James’s in Paddington he married en secondes noces Margaret Jane Edwards, daughter of John Edwards, the Receiver-General of Jamaica.

When the census was taken in 1861 Colonel Tidy was visiting their grandmother Catherine Maister at Littlethorpe near Ripon with the four children of his first marriage. 

His many years of service were recognised in 1866. ‘Colonel Thomas Holmes Tidy, now Commanding at Colchester, and late Assistant Adjutant-General at the Horse Guards, has had conferred on him the pension for distinguished and meritorious service. He entered the Army April 14, 1825, and served with the 14th Reg. at the siege and capture of Bhurtpore in 1825-26 (medal)’ (Army & Navy Gazette and Weekly Chronicle of the United Service, 19 May 1866).

He and his second wife appear on the 1871 census living at Thorpe Hall near Wycliffe-with-Thorpe in Yorkshire with their two young sons and four servants.

Colonel Tidy ‘formerly of Thorpe Hall in the County of York but late of Whorlton in the County of Durham, a Major-General in Her Majesty’s Army’ died, aged 66, on 1 July 1874 at Chester.  He left an estate valued at £450.