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General First nameWilliam Cecil
LastnameMarshall
GenderMale
CountryEngland
Date of birth1849-04-24
Place of birthWestminster, London, England
Date of death1921-01-24
Place of deathHindhead, Surrey, England


About

A Biographical Sketch of William C. Marshall

Introduction by Mark Ryan

In July of 1877, William C. Marshall made history by reaching the final of the men’s singles event at the first Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships tournament. He was beaten in the last match by Spencer W. Gore, but won the second-place playoff against Charles Heathcote. Surprisingly little remains known about the first runner-up at Wimbledon. The following sketch is an attempt to shed some light on his life and career.
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William Cecil Marshall was born in London on 24 April 1849, the youngest of the six children – five sons and one daughter – of Henry Cowper Marshall (1808-84) and the Honourable Catherine Anne Lucy (née Spring-Rice; 1813-52). Henry Cowper Marshall was the son of the wealthy industrialist John Marshall who introduced major innovations in flax spinning and built Marshall’s Mill and Temple Works in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

Three of Henry Cowper Marshall’s brothers became members of parliament (MPs), while Henry himself served as Mayor of Leeds from 1842-43. His wife, the Honourable Catherine Lucy Spring-Rice, was a native of Limerick in Ireland, and the daughter of Thomas Spring-Rice, 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon, who was also from Limerick, and Theodosia Spring-Rice (née Lady Theodosia Pery).

William Marshall attended Cheltenham College and Rugby School before going up to Cambridge University in 1867. While there, he excelled at several sports, including real tennis, obtaining a “blue” in the latter sport in 1870, 1871 and 1872. He studied architecture and was awarded a B.A. in 1872 and an M.A. in 1875. He was articled to John Middleton of Cheltenham in 1873 and for a time was also an “improver” with Basil Champneys and Thomas Graham Jackson.

In 1876, William Marshall opened an independent practice in Queen Square, London, with Vickers. Marshall became a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA) in 1906. After a very successful career, during which he was awarded several lucrative commissions, Marshall retired from his architectural practice in 1908 at the age of 59.

William Marshall had married Margaret Anna Lloyd on 23 July 1887 in Shottermill Church in the market town of Farnham, Surrey. She was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 21 July 1863, the daughter of the Reverend John Frederick Lloyd (1810-75) and Sarah Lloyd (née Greer; 1828-75). Both of Margaret Lloyd’s parents were Irish by birth. At the time of her birth, her father was a vicar in Auckland.

Margaret and her brothers and sisters were orphaned within months of each other in 1875 and she and three siblings – the four youngest of seven children – were sent to live with an uncle, Humphrey Lloyd, Provost of Trinity College in Dublin. After Humphrey Lloyd’s death in 1881, Margaret and one of her sisters went to live with some more relations in Brighton, England. Margaret first met William Marshall in 1886.

William and Margaret Marshall had six children together – four daughters and two sons. They were Horace Cecil Marshall (1888-1980); Julia Margaret (“Judy”) Marshall (1889-1979); Rachel Alice (“Ray”) Marshall (1892-1940); Thomas Humphrey (“Tom”) Marshall (1893-1981); Eleanor Saville Marshall (1897-1940); and Frances Catherine Marshall (1900-2004). Because her first names were Margaret Anna and her married was Marshall, Margaret was known to her children by the acronym “Mam”.

The youngest of William and Margaret Marshall’s six children, Frances, became a distinguished writer and diarist and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her association with the latter group brought her into contact with, amongst others, the painter Dora Carrington, the writers Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Partridge. Frances married Ralph Partridge in March 1933 and together they had one child, Lytton Burgo Partridge, who died in 1963 aged only 28. Ralph Partridge, whose real name was Reginald Sherring Partridge, had died in 1960 at the age of 66. Frances (Marshall) Partridge died in London in February 2004 at the age of 103.

William C. Marshall died on 24 January 1921 in Hindhead, Surrey; he was 71. Margaret Marshall subsequently lived for a number of years with her daughter Frances and Ralph Partridge at Ham Spray House, their home in the village of Ham in Wiltshire. Margaret Marshall died in a nursing home in Cambridge on 19 March 1941 at the age of 77.
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The following extracts from the biography of Frances (Marshall) Partridge by Anne Chisholm provide a good insight into the lives of William C. (“Will”) Marshall and Margaret Anna Marshall (“Mam”), their work and interests, and the circles in which they moved.

From Frances Partridge: A Biography, by Anne Chisholm
Publisher: Orion Publishing Company (2010)

Mam’s account of the man she married is admiring and affectionate. He was the youngest son of Henry Cooper Marshall of Derwent Island, Keswick, and belonged to a large and well-established Lake District clan. A Marshall forebear had made a small fortune out of cloth and linen manufacturing in the Yorkshire Dales and Leeds, and his descendants had moved out to the Lake District, where they built themselves several substantial High Victorian houses on the shores and islands of Derwent Water.

Will’s grandfather was an MP for Yorkshire in the early nineteenth century, and an uncle had become Father of the House of Commons. Will Marshall’s mother had aristocratic connections: she was Catherine Spring-Rice, daughter of an Irish peer. The Marshalls and the Spring-Rices were linked by other marriages, and one of Will’s grandmothers was the daughter of an Earl of Limerick.

By the standards of the day Mam had done rather well for himself. Not only was her new husband’s family prosperous and well-connected, but he had already established himself as a successful architect, with a thriving practice. Educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge, he had at first wanted to be a painter, but was persuaded by his father that architecture was a more reliable profession; he drew so well, according to Mam, that some of the drawings he made in Italy were admired by John Ruskin.

He loved poetry, and could recite Swinburne, Browning and Tennyson at length. He also had a keen interest in natural history, and had come to know Charles Darwin towards the end of the great man’s life, when he had been commissioned to build a new study at Down House in Kent. Will Marshall collected moths and butterflies, and even made a contribution to Darwin’s study of the fertilisation of orchids.

He was also vigorous and athletic. He played real tennis for Cambridge and built several real tennis courts around England. Later he took up lawn tennis, and was runner-up in the first English Championship at Wimbledon in 1877. Above all, he loved walking, swimming and skating in the Lake District, where he went as often as possible. ‘He would go any distance for good ice… and I have heard him speak of skating on Derwent Water.’ […]

Frances’s parents, as they embarked on creating the family into which she was to be born, sound both typical of their time and class, and yet agreeably free of that time and class’s limitations. They were unpretentious but confident Late Victorians, reasonably well-off without being glaringly rich, securely upper-middle-class without being grand, interested in art and literature without being especially intellectual or creative. They were not narrow-minded, but neither were they consciously unconventional. They believed in social progress and in education, for girls as well as boys.

At first, the couple lived in Will’s bachelor studio in Torrington Place, off Gower Street, while they looked for a house together. On 15 January 1881 they moved into one of Bloomsbury’s most handsome and substantial houses in its most splendid square. No. 28 Bedford Square was a finely-proportioned, solid and elegant five-storey Georgian house, with its grey stonework set off by black railings and white decorations. Mam in her memoir calls it a ‘palatial abode,’ and admits that she was daunted at first by the responsibility of running such an establishment.

The house had been in bad shape when they bought it; they put in a new drain, a decent bathroom and a new kitchen at the back with a study over it. Will must have been doing well to afford all this, as well as raising some of the ceilings on the upper floors, furnishings, complete redecorations, including the delicate painting of fine Adams mouldings in the main room in Wedgwood colours, and much fashionable William Morris wallpaper. It was Mam’s duty to deal with the eight servants they required, which she did not at first find at all easy. […]

There was much entertaining in their impressive new home, with its twenty-six foot drawing-room and double doors through to a huge room at the back; the housewarming party included dancing and amateur theatricals, and they soon embarked on a round of dinners, dances and suppers. […]

Many of their friends had artistic leanings, like their Bedford Square neighbours the Asquiths, the literary critic Walter Raleigh and the actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson. Mam especially became fond of the classical scholar Jane Harrison, already an academic star. And the young Marshalls soon came within the orbit of the founding families of what had not yet become the Bloomsbury Group; the Stephen family were still firmly based in Kensington in the 1880s and 1890s. However, Will was already a member of Sir Leslie Stephen’s group of serious walkers, who would set off regularly for ‘Sunday tramps’ in the countryside near London, and Virginia and Vanessa Stephen’s half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, were, Mam wrote, ‘great standbys at parties’.

Both the Marshalls had a social conscience, and although they loved to enjoy themselves they were not frivolous. Mam in particular felt it was her duty to improve the lives of the less fortunate. Early in their marriage, she records, she and her husband helped a college for working men and women in Queen Square; Willie taught mathematics, and she German, Jane Austen and music.

Will worked hard. He frequently had to go out of London to visit a site or meet clients, often to Cambridge, the Hindhead area or as far away as the Lake District. On Sundays he would take their dog Pan, a woolly poodle given to them as a wedding present, and set off to join Leslie Stephen’s walkers. Mam needed a day of rest, but even when she was pregnant and not feeling at all well she was expected to visit the Lake District with him. ‘I met so many new relations during these visits that I gave up as hopeless the attempt to disentangle them,’ she wrote, after mentioning six different sets of Marshalls, mostly amiable, some quite eccentric, all curious about the new bride. The Marshalls’ first child, Horace, was born in early April 1888, at home in Bedford Square, like all their children. […]

In the late nineteenth century Hindhead, then a village on a hill beside the London-to-Portsmouth Road, was sometimes referred to as Mindhead. The area had a reputation as a retreat for writers, scientists and other professionals, drawn there by the spectacular scenery around the Devil’s Punch Bowl, the bracing air, the fine walks through gorse and rough woodland, the excellent golf course, and the comparatively easy communication with London.

Will already knew the area, and it was not long before he had found the perfect spot: about eleven acres of copse and heather near the top of the steep hill leading up from Haselmere towards Hindhead itself; at the junction of three roads – hence the sugary name he and Mam chose for the house, Tweenways, a source of embarrassment to Frances in later life. Mam always remembered how one day, when they were exploring the site, ‘Alfred Tennyson appeared in his coat and soft felt hat. He told us he had nearly bought this piece himself but had decided in favour of a piece on Blackdown, further from main roads and traffic.’ He liked the look of their dog, ‘and stooped to pat him, saying in his deep growl, “What! The great god Pan!”’

Several of the new residents around Hindhead were unconventional by Victorian standards; one or two, like George Bernard Shaw, were positively subversive. He once told a class of local schoolchildren that the first duty of a child is to disobey its parents. […]

Tweenways was ready for occupation in the spring of 1889. The Hindhead of those days, according to Mam, was a beautiful stretch of heather-and-gorse-covered common and deep valleys thick with trees. There were very few houses on their hillside. […] At first, life at Tweenways was refreshingly simple. There was no water supply and no drainage system; ‘we all sank our wells, and had earth closets, and were lit by oil lamps and candles.’ The red-brick, red-tiled house the Marshalls called a cottage was in fact quite substantial, with a large drawing-room overlooking the garden, gabled roof, four bedrooms, servants’ quarters and stables.

They brought maids down from London to help, as well as an Irishwoman called Mary, ‘rescued,’ according to Mam, from an East End infirmary, to be resident caretaker. Soon they had to buy a pony and trap to transport them all the two-and-a-half miles from the station. ‘Mary-pony’, a small, grey half-Arab and half-New Forest, always remembered with amused affection by Frances, was bought from the Tennysons. Apart from planting bulbs during the winter before they moved in, the Marshalls did little to the garden at first; in due course they acquired a skilful and devoted, if completely illiterate, gardener, George, who later married one of the housemaids. […]

Mam was on the side of the Coming Woman, and it was around this time that she encountered two of the most formidable pioneers of votes for women, Miss Garrett and Mrs Fawcett, who lived round the corner from the Marshalls’ London house. Through them, she was drawn into being an active worker for women’s suffrage. Up till then neither she nor her husband had paid much attention to politics.

Will was, and remained, a Liberal Unionist, but was really more interested in the Eugenics Society, which sounds sinister today but then was regarded as a progressive cause, and also with the Society for Psychical Research, to which he had been introduced by his cousin from Cambridge, Frederic Myers. Unlike many Victorian husbands, Will did not at all mind his wife becoming involved in the suffrage movement. […]

Although the Marshalls spent as much time as possible at Tweenways, for twenty years it remained their weekend and holiday retreat. The big house in Bedford Square was the centre of their busy family and social life during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Mam led what she calls, wryly, ‘a fairly strenuous existence’; running two establishments and entertaining in both, she also produced five children in nine years: Horace in 1888, Julia (Judy) in 1890, Rachel (Ray) in 1891, Thomas (Tom) in 1893 and Eleanor in 1897. […]

In the last years of the nineteenth century, just before Frances was born [in 1900], Will Marshall was at the peak of his career; in the late 1890s he won several big public commissions, including a new wing of the East London Hospital, the Botanical Laboratory at Cambridge and the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease in Queen Square, opened in 1897 by the Prince of Wales. Mam attended the ceremony. ‘I am afraid I was not impressed. The Prince was not good to look at and he spoke like a foreigner.’

The Marshalls were a popular couple; as Mam put it, Will’s clients nearly always became his friends. They could afford to give parties, go regularly to the theatre – Will invested in a theatre company with Johnston Forbes-Robertson – take family holidays in the Lake District and in Ireland, and visit fashionable Biarritz in winter for the sea air. The Marshalls were doing well. […]

In 1908, as he approached the age of sixty, Will Marshall decided that it was time to give up the London house and his architectural practice and retire with his family to Hindhead. He had already extended Tweenways once; now, intending to spend the rest of his life there and with six children between the ages of nineteen and eight to accommodate, he did so again, adding an enormous new drawing-room along the garden side. After two decades of regular and often prolonged stays in the area it was hardly a dramatic or unexpected move for the family, and Mam records no regrets at leaving Bedford Square. […]

With the family settled at Tweenways, and all of them [the children] at school or university, Mam had more time and energy for her own interests, and soon began to stir up Hindhead and Haselmere Society. Always keenly concerned about material and child welfare, she ran the Mothers’ Union, became a manager of a local school and started a Health Society in Shottermill.

Will, in his retirement, also did his bit, becoming a leading light in the Golf Club, where he played regularly with his new friend and neighbour Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He also started a Dental Clinic, served on the Parish Council and set up a local branch of the Eugenics Education Society. […]

When Frances Marshall was in her last year at Cambridge, her father, whose health had been deteriorating for some time died at the age of seventy-three. She always maintained that his death was neither unexpected nor especially upsetting; even so, it seems extraordinary that she did not, apparently, attend his funeral. His slow decline after a series of strokes had overshadowed life at Tweenways, where Mam looked after him with relays of nurses.
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As already indicated, William Marshall had a strong interest in natural science and for a time corresponded with Charles Darwin (1809-82). One of Marshall’s letters to Darwin is reproduced in full below. It can be accessed in the Digital Library of Cambridge University via the following link:
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00058-00001/283

Derwent Island
Keswick

Saturday, September 5, 1874

Dear Mr Darwin,

I am sending you by today’s post some more leaves of pinguicula which have seeds on them for the most part. I also enclose a list from which you will see that 79 per cent of the leaves I have examined had insects on them. I have counted the remains of insects which had apparently been some time on the leaf and many small things which I could not have recognised as insects without the aid of a magnifying glass. I have also counted in several small spiders.

The insects were for the most part gnats and aizoides, but these seemed to be a great variety. I have found a few beetles, but no moths. The observations have been made during an exceptionally rainy week, with an average daily rainfall of ¾ of an inch! Pinguicula Vulgaris grows in wet places on mountain slopes, and has, as far as I have observed, a partiality for running water. The following are some of the more conspicuous plants that grow with it:

Parnassia
Drosera
Saxifraga
Anagallis
Erica
Palustris
Rotundifolia
Aizoides
Tenella
Tetralic

With regard to the secretion from insects, I cannot trace it; I observe fluid on the leaves, generally in the channel formed by the edge; but whether this is a secretion of the plant, or from the insect, or merely rainwater lodged, I cannot tell; but it is certainly sticky, and therefore rainwater must have dissolved some of the [illegible] matter on the points of the leaves.`

I have observed that the leaves are not infrequently eaten as if by slugs. Also I have no doubt you have noticed that there is a tendency in the leave to curl tightly over entrapped insects that get near the edge, and the same applies to seeds. I have noticed brown patches and in one or two cases holes under insect remains. I suppose this is the result of over [illegible]. I have noticed the same effect on grass; I mean the excrement of animals kills grass where it lies but forms luxuriant growth of grass round.

I have, I fear, put my remarks in a rambling and incoherent form. If there is anything I have answered indistinctly, please get Horace to write me a note about it.

Believe me,

Yours very truly,

William C. Marshall
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Archive statistics Career1877 - 1881
Tournament wins0
Matches14
Match wins8


Tournaments Irish Championships - 1881 Cirencester Park Tournament - 1881 Wimbledon - 1880 Wimbledon - 1879 Grand National Tournament - 1879 Wimbledon - 1877