On the 13th March 1805 Hollis Solly married Miss Charlotte Harrison, whose eldest sister Mary Harrison had previously married Isaac Solly my father’s eldest brother. The marriage was solemnized in the Parish Church of Hackney Co Middlesex by the vicar Revd James Watson in the presence of a large circle of relations. Old Mrs Solly and Mrs Harrison being present but the Fathers of the Bridegroom and Bride were both dead.
They went to reside first at a large house at Crutched Friars Parish St Olave City of London where their first son Richard was born on the 14th August 1806. A year or two afterwards Hollis Solly purchased one of the “Five Houses” at Clapton which he greatly enlarged and improved and where Hollis Solly Jnr was born in 1809, N Neal Solly in 1811, Edward Solly in 1815 and James Solly in 1817. During the greater part of this time his business was large and prosperous and he kept a chariot and pair, beside riding horses, one especially fine one had belonged to the celebrated minister Pitt, and was called after him by the name of “Billy Pitt”. At the close of the war in 1815 owing to the collapse of English commerce and the resumption of specie payments by the Bank of England trade became very bad in England and my father Hollis Solly met with a series of very heavy losses, one House alone which failed in the Havanah of the name of Van Harten owing him about twenty thousand pounds; my father’s health was also much affected at this time, and he was advised to retire from business which he did about this time 1817. His brothers’ Firm Isaac Solly and Sons assisted by Mr Edward Solly taking over his business and winding the same up, paying all the creditors in full and they also agreed to make my father an allowance of £600 per annum. My father therefore parted with his house at Clapton and with his town house Gt Winchester Street Broad Street. I recollect when I was a child we used to spend a few months each winter in Great Winchester Street Broad Street and it was there that my brother James (then an infant on my mother’s lap) nearly lost his life by a hot coal flying out of the fire and lodging between his chin and neck. Benjamin Travers the celebrated surgeon was then a surgeon in Broad St came promptly and said had the coal remained another minute death must have ensued. It was in Gt Winchester Street that my father’s counting house was also, and there in the winter of 1817-1818 Thomas Uwins RA who was a friend of my father came and made watercolour portraits of my brothers Richard and Hollis aged 11 and 9 which I now possess.
In the summer and autumn of 1818 my father hired a small country house at Notts Green near to Walthamstow and I recollect at that time walking to my grandmother’s house at Walthamstow where we also spent the Xmas, and my grandmother tipped me with the spade guinea which she was wont to deposit in the pocket of each of her grandchildren every Xmas day. About Easter 1819 my father finally left London, and he took a house for 3 months at Hastings – “Harpsichord Cottage”. He, my mother, Hollis and I posted in a Post chaise sleeping “en route”, the servants following by stage coach with the infant James, Richard being at school at Homerton. After leaving Hastings (St Leonards did not then exist) my father took a house at Brighton in Grenville place for a few months and it was there in the summer of 1819 that he received the news of the death of his mother at Walthamstow aged 77.
From Brighton my father and my mother moved to Hove; Cliff House Hove was repaired for them and there to the great delight of all the family on the 1st September 1820 their only daughter my sister Charlotte Augusta was born. The Unitarian School kept by Dr Morrell was at Hove House Hove, and there my brothers Richard Hollis and I went as day borders, and we were all afterwards sent to a boarding school kept at Antwerp by a German, Mr C Vollman. After leaving Cliff House my father lived at a pleasant house with a good garden in Hove called Capons cottage for 4 years and whilst there he purchased from his neighbour Mr I Vallance a long field of land near the sea, where he built his house Seafield Lodge and laid out the garden. He removed into Seafield Lodge about 1826.
In 1872 My father was offered the agency of their iron business in London by the celebrated ironmasters Walker and Yeats of Gospel Oak Iron Works Staffordshire, and in the autumn of that year he removed to their business house in Thames Street. This appointment was accompanied with a salary of £600 per annum which was of importance as the allowance made to my father by my uncles on taking over his mercantile business in 1817 was at this time discontinued. It was at this house Anchor Wharf Thames St, that I and my brother Richard took leave of our parents when we sailed from London in Novr. 1827 in the ship Auriga for Valparaiso, I, to enter the house of John James Barnard, an old friend of my father’s, as a clerk and my brother Richd to commence business on his own account. Messrs Walker and Yeats having got into difficulties as ironmasters, my father gave up his appointment and took a cottage at Rotherhithe in 1828, recommencing business again as a merchant in Cannon St London, but only on a small scale as compared with his former transactions. After a few years residence at Rotherhithe my father rented a house in Camberwell, Albion Crescent, where he lived 4 years, and then removed at the beginning of 1837 to Staffordshire.
My mother being too ill in the autumn of 1836 to travel to Staffordshire as had been intended, my father took lodgings for a few months at Pentonville London where my dear mother got rapidly worse and died on the 23rd Decr 1836 and was buried in the family vault of the Sollys in Walthamstow Church yard, where her sons Hollis and Edward had previously been laid. It was such an exceedingly heavy snowstorm a day or two before the funeral that my brother James and I who were attending to the iron business at Tividale in Staffordshire were prevented from travelling to London to attend the funeral, the coaches having ceased running, and no railway existing at that time. My sister Augusta, who with my father was with my mother to the last, nursed my mother during her long illness in a most devoted and tender manner, and our mother died she went to stay with her Aunt Isaac at Leyton House and in Feby 1837 she came down to Tividale Hall Staffordshire accompanied by her friend and cousin Lavinia Solly, my father having also come to reside in Staffordshire a short time previously.
The cause of my father’s coming to Staffordshire and entering on the iron trade was as follows: Dr Chas. Schafhäutel of Munich in conjunction with his friend Mr Theodor Boehm had taken out a patent in England for an improvement in the manufacture of iron by the introduction in the puddling furnaces of certain chemical compounds and this it was expected would convert the inferior English pig iron into the best steel iron. Mr Bartholomew Hounsfield of Sheffield assisted them with money to take out the patent which my father agreed to purchase from these parties for the sum of £11,000 payable part down and part by instalments. He had great confidence in the representatives of Messrs Boehm and Schafhäutl, which however were not borne out by the result. My father took the Tividale Ironworks in Staffordshire in the autumn of 1835 to work the patent but owing to the great capital required badness of trade the insufficiency of the patent process and other circumstances it did not pay and my father, unable to comply to all the payments for the patent, retired from the firm about two years before the business stopped payment and was brought to a close in 1843. After spending about a year in Dorsetshire where my uncle Sam Solly also resided, and during which period my sister Augusta married her cousin Thomas Solly, my father again returned to reside in Staffordshire in 1845 where he lived at Toll End with his son James who had taken works there.
It was from Toll End that my father came to visit me at Bron-y-Garth Portmadoc, in July 1851, and at that time my daughters Gertrude and Marion, the former about 2 and the latter an infant of about 3 months afforded him very great pleasure. Altho then 74years of age he was very active and could take walks of 8 or 10 miles without fatigue.. He met with his death on 30th of July whilst bathing in the sea near Portmadoc, he was carried out by a strong current and his body was discovered by some boatmen a few hours afterwards. My father’s funeral was attended by all his sons and he was buried in Yniscynhaiarn Churchyard Carnavonshire about 4 miles from Portmadoc, being the parish church. Most of my friends in the neighbourhood also followed my father to his grave, a slate tombstone was erected over it.
My father was a very upright man with a great deal of force of character, he was particularly fond of reading, especially works of history and biography, he could write and converse fluently in German and was also well versed in the French and Dutch languages. Ha had also good taste for drawing and for mechanics, and for gardening. His mercantile transactions in London were very extensive and of a first class character and he was highly respected there as a merchant of the good old school. He was a consistent Unitarian all his life, always attending the nearest Unitarian chapel on a Sunday, even if he had many miles to walk to it. His political opinions were liberal, that is rather of the advanced Whig party, but he never took any active part in politics or in political life. See letters written by my father from 1796 to 1803 in Germany France and Spain… My grandmother died in 1819.
© Nicholas McNair – reproduced by permission