Thomas Paxton

The Red LIon and village street around 1900

Bedfordshire & Luton Archives & Records Service holds the archive of the solicitor's firm of Hobourn of Woburn and its predecessor practice of John Green, his son John Thomas Green and his nephew Frederic Thomas Tanqueray. Amongst the archives are correspondence and notes around the will of Thomas Paxton of Milton Bryan.

These records are quite tantalising. Milton Bryan was the birthplace of the famous Sir Joseph Paxton, the landscape gardener and architect who did much work for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth and who designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. His father William is variously described as a gardener and farmer. Thomas, by contrast was a publican and draper, he kept the Red Lion| in the village. Interestingly at his death in 1823 he was owed money by Sir Gregory Page Turner for supplying beer to the men constructing a lake in the grounds of Page Turner's extravagant new Battlesden House (which was largely responsible for his financial ruin and, perhaps, for his later insanity). The design of this water feature was Joseph Paxton's first piece of landscaping work (whilst still in his teens). Given the small size of Milton Bryan it seems quite possible that Thomas was some relation to Joseph, a distant cousin, perhaps.

In 1886, 63 years after Thomas' death his daughter Mary Ann Ricketts began an action against John Thomas Green the solicitor, for recovery of her share in her father's estate. The papers do not reveal the outcome of the action but do reveal that Green's father, John, was asked to be an executor of Paxton's will by Sir Richard Inglis, who was Lord of the Manor at Milton Bryan and concerned that the elderly Paxton was being taken in by a man named Philpot, who was suspected of carrying on with Paxton's young Irish wife.

When John Thomas Green was called on to find evidence to back his case that his, now dead, father never gave Paxton's children their legacies because Paxton's estate was insolvent, he had great difficulty finding any. Green senior had destroyed most of the papers. An exasperated John Thomas says at one point, in some notes on the case " [I] have spent 3 days already over the papers in the office and am sick of it. I cannot search every bundle of papers but I feel sure that the working papers relating to the matter are either mislaid or destroyed before 1857" [HN10/273/Paxton7]