Frederick John Jeffery
| Frederick John Jeffery | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| File:Jeffery, Frederick John.jpg | |||||||||||
| Residence |
Wooltan Hall, Wooltan, Liverpool [1869] 97 Great George Street, Liverpool {1872} 24 Chapel-walks, South-castle-street, Liverpool [1879] Lyceum News Room, Bold Street, Liverpool [1881] 36 Gwendoline Street, Liverpool [1888] 91 Rosebery Street, Liverpool [1894] [no address in 1901] | ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
proposed 1869.02.02
Notes From Elsewhere
In 1869 he gave the ASL his work ‘A Genealogical Chart of the House of Bourbon’.
Frederick John
in 1871 appears to have been made bankrupt along with James Reddeclife Jeffery, William Samuel Jeffery, John Barnard, William Henry Watts and William Heard, silk mercers and drapers and copartners in trade
Compton House, a popular retail store run by Messrs Jeffrey which boasted of being able to provide everything the shopper needed ‘from the cradle to the grave.’ Colossal in its proportions, Compton House was staffed by hundred of men and women, many of them living on the premises. At 10pm on the Friday night of 1st December 1865, two policemen on their beat in Tarleton Street noticed smoke issuing from the basement of Compton House, which was the outfitting department. Within twenty minutes, a steam-powered fire-engine and a body of firemen were promptly despatched from the Fire and Police Station at Hatton Garden. The live-in staff members were rescued by the firemen, but despite the gallons of water hosed into the flames, the inflammable materials in the store were nigh on impossible to extinguish, and Compton House, which had begun life as a modest drapers in 1832 and grown to unimagined proportions, was gutted. How did the fire start? Well, it was started by one Thomas Henry Sweeting, a 20-year-old respectably-connected apprentice of Compton House who had been present in the store on the night of the blaze. He had gone into the basement shortly before 10pm that evening and lit a wax taper which he threw among inflammable goods. He then went upstairs to have his supper. He saw smoke gathering on the premises within minutes and cried ‘The house is on fire – make haste for your lives!’
Sweeting said he had no animosity against his employers, and could not provide the police with his motive for destroying Liverpool’s greatest store. ‘I must have been mad at the time,’ he later told the magistrate at the police court. He seemed unbalanced, and had also stolen seventy-four pounds’ worth of merchandise from the temporary store his employers had set up at Newington. Sweeting was charged with having unlawfully and maliciously set fire to Compton House, causing damage to goods and property valued in excess of two-hundred thousand pounds. Sweeting was also charged with larceny, and duly committed for trial. He was found guilty, and sentenced to twelve years’ penal servitude. Messrs Jeffrey never recovered from the actions of the madman Sweeting, and Compton House, once a magnificent grand emporium of trade, remained a charred eyesore on Church Street. Phoenix-like, from that charred rectangle of scorched ground on Church Street, there arose, on 4 January 1875, the Compton Hotel.
Woolton Hall: ... sold the house in 1865 to James Reddecliffe Jeffery who was the owner of Liverpool's largest department store Compton House, located on Church Street. A fire at the store on 1 December 1865 destroyed much of Jeffery's uninsured stock eventually leading to the business failing. Jeffery put the house up for action in 1869 but failed to find a buyer until 1877 when Liverpool shipowner Frederick Richards Leyland purchased the house for £19,000 moving with his family from nearby Speke Hall[4]
Publications
External Publications
Numismatic history of England, from 1066 to the present time. Part 1: 1066-1504
The medallic history of Napoleon the first
