close

Samuel Wood

( 1704 - 1794 )

Born c. 1704, son of George Wood late of Carswell in the County of Stafford gentleman deceased, apprenticed to Thomas Bamford 7 June 1721 on payment of £15. Free, 5 March 1730/?1. First mark entered as largeworker, 3 July 1733. Address: Gutter Lane by Cheapside. Livery, April 1737. Second mark undated, between September 1737 and August 1738, same address. Third mark, 15 June 1739. Court, May 1745. Moved to Foster Lane, and fourth mark entered, 15 July 1754. Fifth mark, 2 October 1756. Warden 1758-60, and Prime Warden 1763. Appears as plateworker, Southgate, in the Parl. Report list 1773. Heal records him as plateworker, Gutter Lane, 1733-40; and Southgate (?St.Paul’s Churchyard), 1773. That Southgate was, however, the northern suburb is clear from his obituary (below). Elizabeth, daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Wood, baptized 30 May 1738 at St. Vedast; Foster Lane is presumably his child. No others appear recorded. Wood’s obituary in the The Gentleman’s Magazine, 6 October 1794, paints the picture of a stalwart character: ‘at Southgate aged 90 of a second paralytic stroke, Mr. Wood, goldsmith of London. His daughter married Mr. Howitt, mercer of London whose only daughter is married to Mr. James Moore of Cheapside. For the last two years of his life he used to ride to town every week, to transact business at Goldsmith’s hall, being the father and oldest member of that company.’ Through his apprenticeship to Thomas Bamford, who himself had been bound to Charles Adam, Wood came of a continuous line of specialist caster-makers and in turn trained both Jabez Daniell and Robert Piercey (q.v.), both clearly established also in the same line of production. Wood’s cruets and individual casters, to judge from the very large number surviving, must have been produced on a wholesale manufacturing basis, but are, no less for that, of a uniformly high standard and one of the most attractively designed smaller items of plate, without which no reasonably equipped table of the eighteenth century appears to have been complete.