Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/191

 Welsh descent. In 1825 he was apprenticed to a neighbouring mason, and later assisted his brother William, an architect at Birmingham. A monument by him at Huntingdon attracted the attention of Sir Charles Barry [q. v.], who employed him on the schools at Birmingham. He first attracted public notice at the time of the rebuilding of the houses of parliament, when, coming to London, he was at once engaged by Barry on the sculptural decorations of the new structure. His quick intelligence, technical facility, and organising talent soon marked him out as a valuable collaborator for the architect, and the army of skilled carvers and masons employed upon the ornamentation of the building were placed practically under his sole control. His labours in this connection and the many commissions of a like nature resulting therefrom naturally hindered the production of more individual work. His only noticeable achievements of a more fanciful kind were the ‘Queen of the Eastern Britons rousing her Subjects to Revenge,’ ‘Musidora,’ ‘Lady Godiva,’ and ‘Una and the Lion.’ Of the great mass of decorative work carried out by him the most characteristic examples, says the ‘Builder,’ are ‘the colossal lions at the ends of the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits, the large bas-reliefs at the Euston Square Station, the pediment and figures in front of the Great Western Hotel, figures and vases of the new works at the Serpentine, the decorative sculpture on the entrance piers of Buckingham Palace. … In Edinburgh there are specimens of his handiwork on the life assurance building, besides the group of figures at the Masonic Hall, and the fountain at Holyrood. In Windsor Castle he was much engaged for the late prince consort.’

He had further a considerable practice as an architectural draughtsman, and prepared the designs for the national bank at Glasgow, Sir Samuel Morton Peto's house at Somerleyton, the mausoleum of the Houldsworth family, and the royal dairy at Windsor.

His design for a grand national monument to Shakespeare and a design for a great majolica fountain (executed by Messrs. Minton, and placed in the horticultural gardens) were at the International Exhibition of 1862. He died at his house in Blomfield Road, Maida Hill, on 9 April 1862, leaving a widow and a daughter. Among the unfinished works in his studio at his death were statues of Joseph Sturge [q. v.] for the city of Birmingham and of Sir Hugh Myddelton [q. v.] for Islington. He was a frequent exhibitor of busts and decorative subjects at the Royal Academy from 1838 to 1862.

[Scott's British School of Sculpture; Art Journal, 1862; The Builder, 1862; Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Dict. of Architecture.]  THOMAS, JOHN (1795–1871), musical composer and Welsh song writer, also known as Ieuan Ddu, was born at Pibwr Llwyd, near Carmarthen, in 1795. He was educated at Carmarthen, where subsequently he also kept a school for a short time. He then removed to Glamorganshire to follow the same occupation, and, except for a short period when he was clerk to Zephania Williams the chartist, at Blaenau, Monmouthshire, his whole life was spent in keeping a private school of his own, first at Merthyr Tydfil, and from 1850 on at Pontypridd and Treforest successively. He was twice married and died at Treforest on 30 June 1871, being buried at Glyntaff cemetery, where a monument was erected over his grave by his ‘friends and pupils.’

Thomas was one of the chief pioneers of choral training in the mining district of Glamorganshire, and is justly described in his epitaph as ‘the first to lay the foundation of that prevailing taste for music which attained its triumph in the Crystal Palace (choral competition) in the years 1872 and 1873.’ For many years he regularly held musical classes at Merthyr and Pontypridd. In 1845 he published a collection of Welsh airs entitled ‘Y Caniedydd Cymreig: the Cambrian Minstrel,’ Merthyr, 4to. This contained forty-three pieces of his own composition and a hundred and four old Welsh airs, one half of which he had gathered from the lips of the peasantry of Carmarthenshire and Glamorganshire, and which had never been previously published. For almost all these airs he wrote both the Welsh and English songs, several of which have been adopted in subsequent collections of Welsh music (cf., Songs of Wales, pp. iii, 39, 62, 68, 70). In 1849 he published a poem on ‘The Vale of Taff’ (Merthyr, 8vo), which was followed in 1867 by a volume of poetry entitled ‘Cambria upon Two Sticks.’ Thomas also contributed many papers to magazines, and a prize essay of his on the Welsh harp was published in the ‘Cambrian Journal’ for 1855.

[M. O. Jones's Cerddorion Cymreig (Welsh Musicians), pp. 131–3, 160.]  THOMAS, JOHN (1821–1892), independent minister, son of Owen and Mary Thomas, was born in Thomas Street, Holyhead, on 3 Feb. 1821. Owen Thomas [q. v.] was an elder brother. At the age of seventeen he left the Calvinistic methodist