| Description | The subjects of the letters cover minerals, geology, travel, news of friends, health, Gregory's paper, etc. Letters, (new nos.)16-47, are from William Creighton, ( 1778-1831), engine erector and drawing office clerk at Soho, from 1792. He and his younger brother, Henry, came from the Lake District and were both friends of Gregory Watt. William Creighton seems to have shared his passion for geology, and that subject concerns most of this correspondence. Creighton appears to be very well educated and the standard of his draughtsmanship is very high.They seem to have formed a ‘club’ at Soho, based on ‘Satanic’ jokes and nicknames. Such names had been given to the first steam engines, but the language jokes here seem Clayfield to relate mostly to the gathering of geological samples. There are also classical and biblical allusions. Creighton addresses Gregory Watt by names such as : ‘Most noble babylonian’, ‘Adorable centaur’, ‘Beneficent Demon’, ‘Beautiful blooming Cherubocolos’, ‘Flying Dragon extraordinary’, ‘Nitro-Sulpho-Carbonates’, etc. Creighton usually signs himself as ‘Chrononhautonthologos’, and Gregory Watt often addresses his letters to ‘Sawthorn’. In one letter, those men at Soho making boxes for minerals are called ’the saints’, and there is another reference to ‘the Great Hairy Saint’ [as yet unidentified]. Creighton includes many sketches in the letters. The nicknames etc. seem to stop after 1801 and there is almost no surviving correspondence from the period when Gregory was travelling in Europe in 1802-1803. There are also a number of letters from Davies Giddy (later Gilbert) patron of Humphry Davy, about Dr Beddoes, Davy, experiments, Cornwall, etc. |
| AdminHistory | There is a bundle label, in red ink, which reads as follows: ‘Letters from W. Creighton, Gilbert Hamilton and others to Gregory Watt. 1796-1805. No 1 to 126.’ This is also the description which appears on the list of ‘Tin Box 6’. This bundle was given the identification number JWP C2/14 in 1993.Within the large bundle there are eight smaller bundles, viz: Letters originally numbered 1-8; 9-23; 24-38; 39-44; 45-55; 56-90; 91- 117; 118-126. The letters are numbered in red pen, except two which have no number.
They were not arranged in chronological order, nor by correspondent. It appears that someone, perhaps when the numbering was done in the mid to late 19th century, may have begun to sort them either by chronological or by alphabetical order, perhaps starting to move them from one order to the other. This does not appear to have been completed. There are, for example, 8 letters from Davies Giddy, 1796-1800, [nos. 118-125]; then a chronological sequence, starting with Robert Muirhead in 1796, and progressing through to Charles Hatchett in 1805 [117 onward]. This sequence is interrupted by two groups of letters from William Creighton, the first, 1800-1801 [72-56] and the second, 1800-1803 [23-11], which do not follow the chronological sequence. There are, in addition, occasional letters out of sequence, where an attempt has been made to collect letters from an individual together, e.g Dr. T.C.Hope, 1800 [48], in the middle of an 1804 sequence. There were two letters with the number 4, one of which, a drawing by William Creighton, has been placed as no. 17 [14], as there was no letter with this number. There was one undated letter with no original number; from Dr Baumgartner. Hence, 127 letters in all. |