Joseph Prestwich
by Ted Hofmann
by Ted Hofmann
Sir Joseph Prestwich (1812-1896), geologist, lived in Shoreham from 1869. He was born in then-rural Clapham and schooled locally and in Paris and at University College, London. At the age of 18 he joined the family firm of wine merchants in the City of London. For much of his life he had to snatch time for geological studies from the demands of commercial life, although travelling as the firm’s representative offered some opportunities for field work both in England and in France.
On visits to his grandfather, a porcelain manufacturer in Shropshire, he began to study the local coalfields, making perilous descents underground with the miners. Some faults observed in Coalbrookdale was the subject of his first paper, presented to the Geographical Society, of which he was elected a fellow in 1833 at the age of 21. At home his interests turned to the stratigraphy of the London basin, on which he was to become a great expert. Prestwich also began to take an interest in the antiquity of man. Although there was a growing acceptance that the earth might be millions of years old, it was almost universally believed that human beings had been on earth for only about 6,000 years, based on the chronology of the Old Testament. Even when worked flint tools began turning up alongside the bones of prehistoric animals this “Mosaic” chronology was not seriously challenged because it was not clear that the excavated sites were undisturbed. In April 1857 Prestwich and John Evans found the first incontrovertible evidence in an untouched drift of gravel in Amiens. His report a month later to the Royal Society was the beginning of a “time revolution”. |
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Meanwhile Prestwich had taken full charge of the wine business. In 1864, when his sister suggested a country cottage for weekends, Prestwich impulsively purchased eleven acres of chalk downland on the western hill above Shoreham, without “a drop of water and scarcely an inch of soil on the ground”. Water was no problem for the geologist who knew that a well would work, and turning the bare downland into a much-loved garden would be his greatest pleasure for the rest of his life. The house (not a cottage) was to be built, appropriately, of knapped flints and named Darent Hulme, recalling Hulme Hall in Lancashire, the ancestral Prestwich estate. The stone surrounds of the windows were to be decorated with carved fossils, the ceiling panels of the living room painted with flora and fauna of the coal age (but this has not survived), and the fireplaces to exhibit various kinds of marble. It took five years to build, knapping flints being slow work.
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In 1870 Prestwich married Grace Milne McCall, and in the same year he was elected president of the Geological Society. Grace was an able geologist in her own right and was able to help Joseph organize his notes and specimens; she also wrote two novels. In 1872 Prestwich finally retired and sold the wine business, finding commuting four hours a day too time-consuming.
In 1874 he was appointed to the chair of geology at Oxford, where for 13 years he lectured, led students on expeditions, continued his own research in the museum, and took up the problem of Oxford’s water supply. Meanwhile Grace served on the committee that led to the foundation of Somerville College, one of Oxford's first two colleges for women. They returned to Shoreham for their remaining years, Joseph working on his papers and tending the garden.
Prestwich was knighted in the New Year Honours list in January 1896 but was already failing and died on 23 June. Grace survived long enough to write his biography, dying in 1899. Both are buried in Shoreham churchyard and are commemorated, along with Joseph’s sister Civil, in the stained-glass window “Joy, Creation, and Love” in the church.
Prestwich wrote several books and more than 100 scientific papers, including one on the discovery of a mammoth's tusk in Shoreham and one on the geology of a possible Channel Tunnel. His lecture series The Ground Beneath is still in print.
Read more in Historical Society Publication No 8, “Sir Joseph Prestwich”