Mayhew, John (1736-1811)
Mayhew, John
London; upholsterer and cabinet maker (b.1736-d.1811)
John Mayhew was born on 21 February 1736 and baptised at St George’s Hanover Square on 26 February. His father, also John Mayhew, was a builder living at Green Street, Grosvenor Square. About 1750 he was apprenticed to the upholsterer William Bradshaw and in 1758, having presumably completed his apprenticeship, he went into partnership with James Whittle and Samuel Norman, taking over the former premises of John West in King Street, Covent Garden. Later that year he formed another partnership with William Ince, and they set up business as Mayhew and Ince in Marshall Street, Soho, facing the end of Broad Street.
Mayhew’s subsequent business career is described in the separate entry on Mayhew and Ince. What follows here is an account of his personal and family life only.
On 20 February 1762 John Mayhew married Isabella Stephenson at St George’s Hanover Square, in a joint marriage with William Ince and Isabella’s sister Ann. The two couples initially lived together in one house in Marshall Street, but soon they occupied separate houses either side of the ware rooms and workshops at 47, 48 & 49 Marshall Street. Isabella died in childbirth in December 1762 and John remarried in 1765 to Bridget Winsley, who brought with her £3,000 which in due course was invested in the business. John and Bridget had ten children of whom five outlived them.
Like many furniture makers, John Mayhew began to invest in property once he was able to do so. Indeed, after the death of his father in 1768 he was already a property owner, having inherited several properties in the parish of St George, Hanover Square. It is difficult to separate Mayhew’s other properties from those owned or leased jointly by the business, but a villa in Hornsey was likely to have been Mayhew’s weekend country retreat. Isabella Mayhew, John’s daughter from his first marriage, had her first child baptised at St Mary’s Hornsey in 1787 and together with William Ince, John was a surveyor for the parish of St Mary’s Hornsey in the 1780s. Mayhew had other land and property in the area of Crouch End and Hornsey, eight acres near New River, and seventeen between Middle Lane and Tottenham Lane.
John Mayhew was a member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and he was also a Freemason, being a member of the Lodge of Antiquity, one of the four ‘Old Lodges’ of London.
In 1799 Mayhew and Ince agreed to end their long business partnership and a notice to that effect was published in the London Gazette, 12 April 1800. Some stock in trade was sold by Christie’s in May 1801, and the three properties in Marshall Street were advertised as ‘…most capital Exhibition-rooms, Ware-rooms, Workshops, Accompting house and two eligible residences’. Disentangling business and private affairs was anything but straightforward, however, and Mayhew’s final years were mired in financial and legal wrangling with the Ince family (William Ince had died in 1804). In his will Mayhew stated that he was waiting for God to relieve him ‘from this troublesome life’, mentioning his ‘unhappy daughter’ Isabella and his eldest son John ‘whose imprudence was the origin of my sorrows’. His executors were begged to come to an agreement with the Ince family without waiting for the decision of the Chancery court.
Bridget Mayhew died in March 1805 and John died 11 May 1811. He was buried in St James’s Piccadilly where he had been a Church Warden in 1804. A memorial plaque can be found on the west wall of the church.
Source: Ingle, William Ince Cabinet Maker 1737-1804 (2nd edition, 2020).