Tat(h)am (Tatan or Tattem), Henry

Stamford, Lincolnshire; cabinet maker, upholder and appraiser (fl. 1772–1808)

Tatam was apprenticed to John Cobb of London and admitted freeman of Stamford in 1772. In that year he did fealty for a tenement in Butcher Row.

Image

Copyright (Attribution/Credit)

British Museum

Trade card of Henry Tatam (from M:^r COBB'S London) Cabinet Maker, Upholder & Appraiser. The Corner of the ButcherRow, Stamford, Lincolnshire. Makes & Sells every Article in the Upholstery & Cabinet Business. NB. Noblemen & Gentlemen may have their Furniture made in the French Comode, or any Other Taste, & Variagated with Different kind of Wood, as well Executed as in London & as Reasonable Terms, c.1780 [Heal,28.222]. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Bound an apprentice named John Dawkins for £30 on 1 June 1774; Thomas Boyden on 25 March 1781; James Cerrol for £40 on 15 June 1781; and William Barton from 1 May 1808. A Sun Insurance policy in his name, dated 1777, is for £1,000 on Stamford Town Hall and he was both Alderman and Mayor of Stamford in 1792 [London Metropolitan Archive (LMA) Sun MS vol. 262, p. 158; Stamford Town Hall Book, 2A/1/4]. In May 1804 as Alderman, his estimate of £2,200 for building the New Shambles at Stamford was rejected, and he promptly resigned from the committee dealing with this work.

Henry Tatam's name appears regularly in the Burghley Estate Day Books. Between 1772-1799 the daybooks of Brownlow, 9^th Earl of Exeter, and his successor, Henry, recorded payments of approximately £680 with a further £265 paid in 1804. Tatam possibly carried out repairs as well as supplying furniture. Payments are recorded for goods, mahogany and upholsterer's work and also for work as an architect and builder.

His label is recorded on a Pembroke table at Burghley, of ambitious design in marquetry, with an overall trellis pattern ‘in the French mode’, and carried out mainly in walnut and tulipwood, with free use of ebonized work at edges. The table is illustrated in Jones, Regional Furniture (1993), p. 58).

Another Pembroke table at Burghley, without a trade label, is clearly from the same workshop, with ebonised work and veneer in parti-coloured laburnum in complicated patterns, rectangular on the top and herring-boned on the legs. Of Tatam's building work, only his house at Barnhill is now identifiable, built between 1797–1802.

He is probably the H. Tatham who subscribed to Sheraton's Drawing Book, 1793. He is likely to be the Tatam, upholsterer named in the account book of Sir Gilbert Heathcote for Normanton Hall, Rutland, between 1797 and 1805 receiving payments totalling £101 19s 4d for ‘jobs at Normanton’, goods and upholstery [Lincoln Record Office, 3 ANC 6/24–25].

Sources: DEFM; Jones, ‘An Anthology of Regional Furniture with Makers Identification’, Regional Furniture (1993); Culverhouse, ‘Henry Tatam’, FHS Newsletter (May 2012).