[2][3] His father George Braikenridge (1738–1827) was from Brislington, Bristol, but was a tobacco planter and merchant living in the Colony of Virginia at the time of Braikenridge's birth in 1775, having married Sarah "Sally" Jerdone, daughter of Virginian merchant and planter Francis Jerdone.
[5] He subsequently became a merchant trading with the Caribbean and became a "senior partner in a leading and long-established West India firm".
[7] Although Broomwell House no longer survives, some of those items, in particular the library's heraldic ceiling, do as he later transferred them to a villa in Clevedon, Somerset which he purchased in 1839.
Only three other consistent patrons of the school have been identified, namely the industrialists John Gibbons, Daniel Wade Acraman and Charles Hare.
[12] The main focus of Braikenridge's activity was his copy of William Barrett's History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol.
[1] He had a further collection of over 1400 drawings and watercolours of Bristol landscapes and buildings, which he also organised in line with the chapters of Barrett's book.
He commissioned many of these drawings from local artists; over two-thirds of them from Hugh O'Neill, Thomas Leeson Scrase Rowbotham and Joseph Manning.
Others were mainly from Samuel Jackson, James Johnson, Edward Cashin, George William Delamotte, John Eden and Marcus Holmes, although around 40 artists are represented in total.