George Ashmead & Co
Part 1
Early Period 1830 – 1862
Ashmead’s better cases do not simply pose a stuffed bird on a branch. They place birds in natural attitudes, doing what the species is observed to do, in an accurately recreated habitat.
The ambition was zoological precision as well as decorative, and it reflects a firm that prepared cases to the highest possible standard.
This is why collectors today keenly compete at auction when these pieces come up, and why Ashmead examples are relatively rare in the market – because the cabinets have been handed down and kept for generations, and collectors tend to hang on to any top class examples in their collections.
Introduction to Ashmead
A Family Business
The research evidence before me clearly described a family business founded by George Benjamin Ashmead Senior (b. 1796, d. 1858) that began with brushes, ivory and the making of cockades and which went on to became one of London’s top recognised naturalist houses alongside Ward, Gardner, Gerrard and Burton.
A small Mayfair business delivers a world-class heritage
After taking over the business fully when his father died in 1858, George Ashmead Junior (b. 1829 d. 1909) went on to win a medal at The London International Exhibition of Kensington in 1862 that was used as continued leverage for the rest of the firm’s existence, before leaving a modest estate in financial terms, but with a renowned name that still lives on.
But before the well-known Bishopsgate address and the prize medal in 1862, it was a three-storey Mayfair shop in Duke Street where Ashmead Senior made brushes, turned ivory, stitched cockades for officers’ hats that set the business foundations, and, from the 1830s, called its proprietor a naturalist.
Along my research journey, I also saw that George Ashmead employed a man whose life appears only in a single newspaper column. The Ashmead cases and domes (and sometimes fire-screens) that survive, with their aesthetic exactness and detail intact, deserve our full admiration. Similarly, the people who made them deserve the same exactness in their stories, so that’s what I will attempt to describe in part 3 of this story.
Not just exotic birds
It’s easy to think of the firm of Ashmead only as a maker of domes or cases for showy, exotic foreign birds, because those are the pieces that reach auction, but the records of rare British birds tell a different story.
British Birds
The Historical Rare Birds database credits Ashmead with preserving the 1867 Berkshire Little Bittern, the 1876 Kildare Pallas’s Sandgrouse, the 1890 Essex Great Bustard, and both Essex Nutcrackers of 1900. These are specimens from country gunners and local collectors who would send a bird to London to be properly set up.
Gentlemen Hunters
I also found a reference in the Zoologists Magazine to a client commissioning Ashmead to preserve a female Snowy Owl shot in Ireland in 1871 (can’t imagine how that was ever allowed to happen – but it did happen. Imagine deliberately shooting a beautiful Snowy Owl?!).
Ashmead’s Reputation
Ashmead also took in eggs: I found a newspaper’s “answers-to-correspondents” column dated 1878 that directs any enquirer wanting cases for birds’ eggs to one of the London dealers. It names Ashmead, 35 Bishopsgate Street, first, and Gardner of 426 Oxford Street second.
36 exotic birds by Ashmead & Co. Photo: Hampshire Trust
The company’s label first printed 1862
The Tree of Birds 1860 Ashmead & Co. Photo: Shapiro Auctions, Australia
The Making of a Mayfair Naturalist – 10 Duke Street
The 1841 Commercial Directory of London Trades records “Ashmead Geo. Benj. brush ma. ivory turner, military & navy cockade maker & naturalist, 10 Duke St. Grosvenor sq.” At first glance, this looks like a “clerk’s muddle”, with four trades listed for a single man, but on closer inspection it is the most informative sentence we have about how the Ashmead business began, because it describes a way of earning a living in which the craft of taxidermy and natural history was not yet the main occupation, but was already the destination.
A trade made of parts
The trade descriptions can all be tied to each other.
- A brush maker supplied the tools for cleaning and dressing plumage and fur.
- An ivory turner made the small turned fittings, handles, perches and stands that a naturalist’s shop would need.
- A military and naval cockade maker worked daily with feathers, silk and wire. That last trade matters more than it first appears, since military and naval officers wore the black cockade on their hats and, by long custom, the servants of gentlemen who held the Crown’s commission or office did too. A cockade maker in Duke Street therefore served two markets at once: the officers’ townhouses around Grosvenor Square and the liveried footmen who worked in them.
The directory does not, of course, say that Ashmead used his brush-making and turning to serve his naturalist’s trade, only that he practised all of them. But I’d say that the combination is far too coherent to be accidental. After all, feathers handled for hats are the same as feathers handled for birds, and a shop whose customers have wealthy households is also a shop where a stuffed pet, a cased bird, or a pair of mounted horns might plausibly be sold, ordered, or repaired.
The address
Duke Street lay in the parish of St George, Hanover Square, where the rate books first record George Ashmead Senior’s presence in 1829, and where his son, George Benjamin Ashmead Junior, was born the same year.
The address, 10 Duke Street, remains constant across every source for the next thirty years, including in the 1841 census, the 1843 trade listing, the 1851 census, Kelly’s directory of 1852, and the notices following Ashmead Senior’s death.
A high-end address
No. 10 Duke Street was near the famous Selfridge’s block, and on the corner of Wigmore Street. It was a luxury address, suited to the clientele that Ashmead was targetting.
Duke Street’s houses were part of the Grosvenor Estate’s second‑tier artisan stock, serving Grosvenor Square’s well-off households, and they typically had three storeys (occasionally four), with a brick front, usually stock brick with stucco at ground floor. They had a narrow frontage with the shopfront at ground level, with a bow window or flat Georgian sash. The workshop or yard was at the back, and importantly there were usually two floors of living rooms above the shop, and ultimately and attic or garret right at the top which was used for storage or the apprentice’s sleeping quarters.
Ashmead’s shop was on the corner of Duke St and Wigmore St, and it must have been distinctive. Today, the building serves as a restaurant.
Ashmead is known as a Naturalist from 1835
The first document I found in which Ashmead is called a naturalist is an advertisement from 1835, placed from 10 Duke Street, and it is not about a stuffed bird at all:
Carriage and drawing room fancy pet.—To be sold, price 25 guineas, a small, exceedingly high-bred, endearing and richly-furnished female spaniel, of the true Blenheim or Marlborough breed, that, as a type of fidelity, might, it is suggested, be applied as a most enviable Souvenir to any amateur gentleman of the elegant species.—To view, apply personally, from eleven to one o’clock, to Mr. George Ashmead, naturalist, 10, Duke-street, Grosvenor square, within the month; or inquiry by letter to be post-paid.”
Two things deserve attention here. First, the word “naturalist.” In the London trade of the 1830s, it did not mean a scientist; it meant a dealer in natural objects, often living ones, and the same shop might sell a dog, a cagebird, a case of shells, a preserved bird, or other animals. Ashmead was claiming a place in that trade six years after settling in the street, and he was doing so by selling to precisely the same clientele that his cockades already reached. The second is the prose. The advertisement is addressed to people who had carriages and drawing rooms. Twenty-five guineas was a high price.
The Census Tells The Story
The 1841 census still lists Ashmead Senior at number 10 Duke St, but the 1851 census paints a sharper picture.
Ashmead’s son is already described as an “assistant in the shop,” and George Ashmead Senior is listed as an “animal preserver & cockade maker,” employing one man (more about him in Part 3). Notice the order of those two trades.
Brush making and ivory turning have dropped out of the description. Cockades remained a useful line, as Mayfair’s officers still needed them, but the centre of gravity had changed.
Kelly’s 1852 directory still lists the business at Duke Street, and it was there when George Ashmead died suddenly in 1858.
In 1861, the census lists the son, George Benjamin Ashmead, at number 10 Duke Street, his father having recently died.
George Ashmead Junior’s Inheritance
We do not know where Ashmead Senior learned his trade, nor the circumstances of his sudden death. However, the 32 years at Duke Street (1829-1861) did establish a family business with a good clientele, an expansive trade vocabulary, and a son brought up in the shop.
LINK TO: Read Part 2 – beyond Mayfair to Bishopsgate
Sources for this article
The 1841 Commercial Directory, p. 297.
Rate books for Duke Street, 1829.
Birth record, George Benjamin Ashmead, St George Hanover Square, 1829. Censuses of 1841, 1851 and 1861.
Kelly’s Directory, 1852.
Newspaper advertisements of 1823, 1835 and 1838
Death notices and records, 1858 and 1879.
Look through the glass
Stay for the stories
This article is part of The World of Victorian Taxidermy section. Explore more research here →
Discover more from thevelvetdrawingroom.co.uk
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
