Frederick Tudgay
Epithet: 1841-1921
Record type: Biographies
Biography: Ship-portrait painter born in Limehouse, probably in February 1841, as the youngest child of John Lashbrook Tudgay, since the June census of that year records him as then four months old. He presumably learnt his craft from his father, with whom he sometimes seems to have collaborated, and a painting of the ship ‘Ramsey’ now in the Manx Museum which he probably painted in or just after 1867 bears his father’s last address, 47 Three Colt Street, Limehouse, suggesting he was still there. The 1871 census notes him as a 27-year-old ‘artist’ (though probably then 30) lodging with his sister Clara (25) and others at 11 Oriental Street, Poplar. On 21st October 1872 at St Thomas’s, Stepney, he married Honora Sullivan (b.c.1845), apparently an Irish woman from Queenstown (Cork), and by 1891 they had five sons and two daughters: John (17), a labourer boiler-maker born in 1873; Frederick (15), a telegraph messenger and later a ship’s steward born in 1875; Sarah Anne (13), born in 1877, who was a mother’s help in 1891, a schoolteacher by 1901 and a headmistress by 1911; Honora /Nora (11), born in 1879, who also became an elementary school teacher; Henry (9), born in 1882, a plumber’s apprentice by 1901; James (4), born in 1886, a tinsmith’s apprentice by 1901 and foreman sheet-metal worker by 1911; and Arthur (2), born in 1889 and noted as still at school, aged 12, in 1901.
Apart from the final two, born in Stratford, the others were born nearer the Thames in Poplar (which may more specifically mean Limehouse as within its registration area). The family were in West Ham in 1891 and 1901 (31 Ranelagh Road and 14 Manbey Grove) and at 37 Belgrave Road, Wanstead in 1911 when Frederick was noted in the census as an ‘OAP [Old Age Pensioner] ship painter’, aged 70. His death was recorded in West Ham in the first quarter of 1921. The census of June 1841 had noted him as then four months old, so if he indeed reached 80, as registered, he only did so by a narrow margin.