Charles Heathcote Tatham

Ralph Tatham, at 47, rose to the challenge, accepted, and set out for Portsmouth; but he fell ill on the way and died of cholera at the Castle & Falcon in Aldersgate Street.

Learning nothing there, as he thought, he ran away, and returned to his mother's lodgings, where he remained working hard for a year or more at the five orders of architecture and French ornament and studying mathematics.

He had been introduced to Holland through his relative John Linnell, who was in charge of one of London's leading cabinet-maker and upholsterer's firms and a rival to Thomas Chippendale.

Together with Samuel Wyatt he also designed Dropmore House in Buckinghamshire which was built in the 1790s for Lord Grenville, later the Prime Minister who pushed through the law abolishing the slave trade.

[4] With Holland's help, and a loan of £100 from John Birch, surgeon-extraordinary to the king, he felt justified in May 1794 in starting for Italy, travelling in company with his peer Joseph Gandy.

[5] He spent his time industriously, chiefly in Rome and Naples in company with Signor Asprucci, architect to Prince Borghese and Don Isidoro Velasquez, an exhibitioner from the academy of Madrid, both, like Tatham, students of classical architecture.

He left Rome a month or so before Bonaparte's first attack on the papal states in 1797; returning through Dresden, Berlin, and Prague, and making architectural drawings on the way.

He lived on intimate terms with Thomas Chevalier, surgeon to George III, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Samuel Bagster the publisher, and John Linnell.

He designed the rebuilding of Roche Court at East Winterslow, Wiltshire for Francis Thomas Egerton in 1804–5,[7] and the mausoleum at Trentham, Staffordshire for George Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland, 1807–08 (in neo-Egyptian style, now Grade I listed).

Thomas Grenville, the Duchess of Sutherland and others – rallied round him, and in 1837 obtained for him the post of warden of Holy Trinity Hospital, Greenwich, where he ended his days happily and usefully.

Tatham, who was member of the Academy of St. Luke at Rome, of the Institute of Bologna, and of the Architects' Society of London, left behind him copious reminiscences which had not been published by 1895.