Bellamy, George Richard Wildman

London; cabinet maker (b.1844 – d.1915)

‘G. BELLAMY’ is stamped on at least five pieces of Kenton & Co. furniture, all of them designed by Ernest Gimson or W. Lethaby. They include plain items in solid oak but also a mahogany box with decorative constructional details and a veneered corner cabinet with elaborate marquetry (illus. Cooper 1987, fig. 484), so Bellamy was a versatile maker.

Contemporary records reveal a cabinet maker based in London who had 30 years of experience as a woodworker by 1891. Born in 1844 in Yarborough, Lincolnshire, George R. W. Bellamy was the son of Moses Bellamy, variously described in Census returns as a gardener, lodging-house keeper, butcher and farmer. In 1861 George was a joiner’s apprentice in Louth, Lincolnshire, but by 1871 he had moved to Hackney, London, where he lodged in the household of George Oakey. Both were cabinet makers. Ten years later Bellamy was head of his own household in Stockwell, Lambeth, having married in 1878. In 1891 and 1901 he was an employed cabinet maker living at 20 Raeburn Street in Brixton but by 1911 he was a widower, unemployed, and a boarder at the same address, now in the household of a Billiard Cue Maker, Chas. E. Bywaters. When Bellamy died in 1915 in Accrington, Lancashire, probate was granted to Bywaters and his wife Alice. His effects were valued at £200 2s 1d.

Bellamy was also listed in the London Post Office Directory in 1900 at 20 Raeburn Street, Brixton, and could probably be tracked more closely in the directories.

The 1893 London Arts & Crafts Exhibition catalogue records a G.B. Bellamy (possibly a misprint) as maker of an oak chair, designed by W.R. Lethaby (exhibit no. 27).

Annette Carruthers

Sources: Comino, Gimson and the Barnsleys (1980); Rubens, William Richard Lethaby (1986); Cooper, Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors (1987); Collard, ‘Kenton & Co’, The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present (1996); Carruthers, Greensted, Roscoe, Ernest Gimson. Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect (2019); ancestry.co.uk (2020); Revised 02/02/2024 with information from 1893 London Arts & Crafts Exhibition catalogue.