Martineau family
The Martineau family is an intellectual, business and political dynasty associated first with Norwich and later also London and Birmingham, England. Many members of the family have been knighted. Many family members were prominent Unitarians; a room in London's Essex Hall, the headquarters building of the British Unitarians, was named after them. Martineau Place in Birmingham's central business district was named in their honour.
Harriet Martineau, the sociologist and abolitionist, is the family's most celebrated member.
In Birmingham, several of its members have been Lord Mayor. They worshipped at the Church of the Messiah. As Unitarians, they married into families of the same denomination, such as the Kenricks and the Chamberlains, though Harriet eventually became an atheist in contrast to her brother, the religious philosopher James Martineau. Several of the Martineaus are buried in Key Hill Cemetery, Birmingham, either in the family vault or separately.
Huguenot beginnings
The Martineaus came from a Huguenot immigrant background, and were noted in the medical, intellectual and business fields. In France, the family had registered their Arms: 'Azure three towers Argent'. Gaston Martineau, a surgeon in Dieppe, moved to Norwich after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; the edict had allowed French Protestants freedom of religion and the Huguenots left France for safety.French nobility heritage
Initially Calvinist dissenters, Gaston and his wife raised their children to be bilingual in French and English. Gaston's father, Elie, was the first cousin of Pierre Martineau, Sieur du Port, conseiller et avocat to King Louis XIV. Gaston's grandson, David Martineau II, was the third generation of master surgeons, and had five sons who made up the male line of Martineaus. David and his wife were buried in St Mary the Less, Norwich where a mural tablet commemorates his "eminence in his skill as a Surgeon" and his wife, Dame Sarah Martineau, who was "distinguished for sound judgement, warm affection and fervent piety". Their eldest son, surgeon Philip Meadows Martineau, of Bracondale Estate was an active member of the French community in Norwich – he was Deacon of the city's French Congregation - and lived in Paris for some time. A member of the Royal Society and the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, Martineau was spoken of in Paris as "le lithotomiste le plus éminent et le plus heureux de son époque".Religion
By the fourth generation the family was divided into Unitarians and Anglicans, the latter including Arthur Martineau, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University and Prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral. Arthur's wife was the Hon. Anne who, in 1862, was granted the rank of a Baron's daughter. Arthur was the great-grandson of David Martineau II and the son of John Martineau of Stamford Hill. He studied at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge - where he was one of the Cambridge Apostles - and was a chaplain to the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was Vicar of Whitkirk, near Leeds from 1838 until 1863.Philip Meadows Martineau and family
The eldest of the five sons of David Martineau II and Sarah Meadows was Philip Meadows Martineau. A surgeon, Martineau was "one of the most distinguished lithotomists of his day". Apprenticed to the surgeon William Donne, who was noted for skill in lithotomy, he studied medicine at several universities. After Edinburgh University in 1773, "in 1775 he passed through London for a turn of 12 months". He then returned in 1777 to Norwich to become Donne's partner, and carried on his speciality. Henry Herbert Southey was his student. He had one daughter. Martineau and friends set up the Norfolk and Norwich Trienniel Festival to raise money for the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.The Martineau and Taylor families were "at the head of the Whig party in Norwich" and by the 1780s, Philip's first cousin, poet and composer John Taylor was hosting radical parties at his home in Norwich which Philip's family attended, including his mother Sarah, to whom John Taylor, her nephew, was "much attached". A number of other Norwich Whig "worthies" attended these events. By 1784, the two cousins, Philip and John, had established the Norwich City Library and the annual reunion of the Martineau and Taylor families which continued well into the 1850s.
Martineau was a medical colleague and friend of Dr Sylas Neville. The two men and their families accompanied Martineau's cousin John Taylor to a great banquet at Holkham Hall on the night of 5 November 1788 celebrating the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Their host was Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester who encouraged John to sing the song he had written for the occasion – The Triumph of Liberty. Over 500 guests were invited to the event, almost all of whom, including invitee the Prince of Wales were "Whig elites".
Having purchased the Bracondale Woods on the outskirts of Norwich in 1793, in 1811 he acquired the adjacent property of Carrow Abbey. By around 1797 he had built Bracondale Hall, described in 1847 as a "handsome mansion with pleasure grounds delightfully laid out" by Humphry Repton who had also designed the gardens of Holkham Hall, owned by Martineau's friend, Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester. From the ruins of Carrow Abbey, Martineau also constructed on his estate a "small gothic priory with windows of ancient stained glass". By 1879, this estate, including the Manor of Carrow, had been sold following the death of Martineau's unmarried daughter Frances Anne.
The second son, David Martineau, had four sons and six daughters and the third, Peter Finch Martineau, had four sons and two daughters. The fourth son, John Martineau of Stamford Hill, had 14 children, including John Martineau the engineer and Joseph Martineau whose wife Caroline was presented to King George IV in May 1824 at St James Palace. The fifth son, Thomas, is mentioned below.
Thomas Martineau and family
The 1939 edition of Burke's Landed Gentry lists Thomas Martineau, as a "manufacturer" and the fifth son of David Martineau II and Sarah Meadows, whose siblings were Margaret and Philip Meadows, solicitor and Lord of the Manor of Diss, Norfolk. On 13 January 1855, the Examiner reported that the siblings' "collateral ancestor was Sir Philip Meadows, the ambassador of Oliver Cromwell".Thomas grew up in Norwich, attending family friend Mrs Barbauld's school, the Palgrave Academy in Suffolk. A "reading man" himself, in Martineau's family "there was always discussions about books and ideas". Thomas Martineau and his first cousin John Taylor were deacons of Norwich's Unitarian church, the Octagon Chapel. Alongside John Taylor, Martineau and his two brothers, Philip Meadows and David, are recorded in 1819 as being commissioners for the "City and County of the City of Norwich".
Thomas Martineau and John Taylor were both benefactors of Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, when the college was in York, and proprietors of the Bow Gas Company, which obtained their Act of Parliament on 1 May 1821, but had run into questionable financial circumstances by 1823.
Thomas married Elizabeth Rankin in 1793. Elizabeth had her portrait painted a year before her death by a member of the Bonham Carter family.
By the 1790s, Thomas had acquired the leasehold of Gurney Court in Magdalen Street, Norwich. His older children, including Robert and Harriet, were born at Gurney Court, which was owned by the Gurney family. The two Nonconformist Norwich families were close and would eventually intermarry with the marriage, in 1879, of Frances Julia Martineau – Peter Finch Martineau's great-granddaughter – to the Rev. Joseph John Gurney of Earlham Hall, the Gurney's family seat. Joseph John Gurney later lived at Bracondale Hall, once the home of Thomas' brother, Philip Meadows Martineau.
It was at Thomas's home – "commemoratively known as Martineau House" – that literary illustrissimo including Amelia Opie and Anna Letitia Barbauld were entertained. Thomas' finances and investments remained viable until around 1825–26, when, in the Panic of 1825, the stock market and banking system collapsed. Thomas died on 21 June 1826 and is buried at Rosary Cemetery, the first non-denominational burial ground in the United Kingdom.
Thomas and Elizabeth had eight children. Thomas and Elizabeth Martineau's eldest child was a daughter, Elizabeth “Lissey”, who married Dr Thomas Greenhow, a reforming doctor in Newcastle, co-founder of the city's eye infirmary. Elizabeth's cousin George, son of David Martineau married Greenhow's sister Sarah. Their daughter Lucy Martineau married Sir Alfred Wills.
The Greenhows' daughter Frances married into the Lupton family of Leeds. Frances was an educationalist and worked to expand educational opportunities for girls. Honouring the Martineau lineage, Frances' eldest son was named Francis Martineau Lupton whose great-grandson was Stephen Martineau Middleton.
Thomas and Elizabeth Martineau's eldest son was Thomas, a surgeon who co-founded the Norfolk and Norwich Eye Infirmary, which later became part of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.
Another son, Robert, became a magistrate, town councillor and then Mayor of Birmingham in 1846. He married Jane Smith. He hired John Barnsley to build a mansion in Edgbaston, with a large wing for his mother, who lived there till her death in 1848, and another for his own family. Barnsley had already built most of Birmingham's grand Victorian and Edwardian public buildings.
Their best known child was their sixth, Harriet, the political author and a pioneer sociologist. She sometimes stayed with her widowed mother and her brother Robert, including during his mayoral tenure. The three of them, and other members of the family, are buried together in the Martineau vault at the Key Hill Cemetery, Birmingham.
Their seventh child, James, was a religious philosopher and a professor at Manchester New College. He was a guest teacher in Liverpool, where his sister, Rachel, ran a private girls' school which was attended by Elizabeth Gaskell's daughters. James's daughter was the watercolourist Edith Martineau.