Author:John Rowland Fothergill

Brief Biographical Details
John Rowland Fothergill was born in Kent in 1876 and died in Rugby in 1957. A devotee and close friend of Oscar Wilde and Robert Ross,   he  left  the  dilettante / homosexual  life  style  behind  for  romantic  affairs with  women. He was painted several times as a young man, twice married, his second wife, Kate bore him two sons, John and Anthony Fothergill. He was first married to the little known artist Elsie Doris Gillian Herring, they were divorced in 1921. Elsie lived and died in Rome.

As a young man Fothergill  was associated with the Slade College of Art, Chelsea,  together  with the many  promising artistic men and women of the turn of the century including Augustus John,  Jacob Epstein and   William Rothenstein,  He subsequently  formed the  Carfax Gallery with Rothenstein, this  ran for several years with exhibitions featuring  many up and coming artists who later became well established and  whose work became  much sought after.

Fothergill had attachments to the Welsh landscape painter  James  Dickson Innes, who died in 1914 at the age of just 27. Later Fothergill wrote a  touching forward to a book of Innes’ works.

Descended from the Fothergills of Westmoreland and the  'tin plate'  Fothergills of  Caerleon, South Wales  John  Fothergill  carved out his own place in life and remains one of the great  one-off characters of the era of the Bright Young Things and  beyond. His culinary  skills and reputation  changed  dining standards in Britain, making it  in itself a  high  art.

John Rowland Fothergill  was  always  his  own invention,   a snob,  an  Innkeeper,  a  chef,  food and   wine  connoisseur, author, artist, bully  and  Wit.

Fothergill ran   the ’Spread Eagle’  at Thame, later managed  the  ‘Royal Ascot Hotel’   and lastly  the ‘ Three Swans’  at  Market  Harborough, his life as an Innkeeper was almost four decades long,  from the   1920s-1950s. The ‘Spread Eagle’ is mentioned by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was a regular  frequenter of   Fothergill’s hospitality. Fothergill was the author of “An  Inkeeper’s  Diary”, “Confessions of an Innkeeper”, “ My Three Inns “and   the    “ Fothergill Omnibus”,  the latter was also published as  “ Mr Fothergill’s Plot”. He also produced a book on gardening and wrote book reviews.

Fothergill is rightly celebrated in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in a wonderful tribute by Hilary Rubinstein. A colourful   array of  anecdotes about him appear in several memoirs of the generation of  notable men and women in the era of the 1920s and 1930s.

The Society writer/ biographer William Cross, FSA Scot is appraising Fothergill for a new  biographical sketch. Cross also plans to offer illustrated talks on Fothergill with quotations from  off the great man's  own  words  in   the  Innkeeper series of books.

Works

 * The Slade; a collection of drawings and some pictures done by past and present students of the London Slade School of Art, MDCCCXCIII-MDCCCCVII (1907) (Editor and contributor)
 * An Innkeeper's Diary (1931)
 * Confessions of an Innkeeper (1938)
 * My Three Inns (1949)

Contributions to EB1911

 * (in part)