Thomas Witlam Atkinson

[1] He began to learn his trade at the age of eight, working alongside his father, who was a stonemason at Cannon Hall, home of the Spencer Stanhope family.

[2] Soon after he became clerk of works to a string of important Victorian architects, including George Basevi, who designed much of Belgrave Square in London.

This building, designed in a modified perpendicular style, together with his Italian villas and other structures, had a marked effect in improving the architectural taste of the district.

Returning to London, in 1842 he went to Hamburg, then to Berlin, and lastly, in 1846, to St. Petersburg, where he abandoned architecture as a profession for the pursuits of a traveller and artist.

He returned briefly to Moscow in February 1848 where he married Lucy Sherrard Finley, an Englishwoman who had been a governess in a noble Russian family in St Petersburg.

His avowed aim in these expeditions was to sketch the scenery of Siberia, and he brought back over 500 clever watercolours - some of them five or six feet square - and drawings.

[3] A second volume appeared two years later: Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor and the Russian Acquisitions on the Confines of India and China.

To the Proceedings of the RGS he contributed in 1859 a paper on a Journey through some of the highest Passes in the Ala-tu and Ac-tu Mountains in Chinese Tartary, and in the Journal of the Geological Society in 1860 he wrote On some Bronze Relics found in an Auriferous Sand in Siberia.

Thomas had planned to write his final book about the Siberian exiles, but he died, at Lower Walmer, Kent, on 13 August 1861 before it could be started.

Thomas' son by his first wife, John William Atkinson, who died in Hamburg on 3 April 1846, aged 23, was a marine painter.

[citation needed] In 1869, Alatau emigrated to Hawaii, where he became editor of the Hawaiian Gazette, director of education for the islands and later organizer of the territory's first census.