Charles Blachford Mansfield

He was born on 8 May 1819 at Rowner, Hampshire, where his father, John Mansfield, was rector; his mother was Winifred, eldest daughter of Robert Pope Blachford of Osborne House, Isle of Wight.

In 1848, after completing a course at the Royal College of Chemistry, he undertook, at August Wilhelm Hofmann's request, a series of experiments leading to the extraction of benzole from coal-tar, important for the dye industry.

[1] In the Chartist crisis of 1848-9 Mansfield joined Frederick Denison Maurice, Kingsley, and others in their efforts at social reform among the workmen of London; and in the cholera year helped to provide pure water for districts like Bermondsey, where every drop was sewage-tainted.

He arrived at Buenos Ayres in August, and having obtained permission from Justo José de Urquiza to go up the Paraná River, he reached Asunción on 24 November, and remained there two and a half months.

Paraguay, under José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia and his successor Carlos Antonio López, had been closed to the world outside for 40 years, and Mansfield was, if not the first English visitor to the capital, certainly the first to go there simply to investigate.

He had been invited to send specimens of benzole to the Paris Exhibition of 1855, and on 17 February 1855, while he was preparing these in a room which he had hired for the purpose in St. John's Wood, a naphtha still overflowed, and Mansfield was so injured that nine days later he died in Middlesex Hospital, at age 35.

[1] Mansfield wrote several papers in Politics for the People, edited by Maurice and John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow, and then in the Christian Socialist.