Edward Hitchings
Mayor of Oxford 1800/1, 1811/12, and 1821/22
Edward Hitchings (1749–1825) was the son of the Oxford tanner John Hitchings and his wife Mary. His parents baptised seven sons and two daughters at St Aldate’s Church, but five of the sons died young: John (26 March 1734, buried 1740); William (17 July 1735, buried 1761), Richard (16 June 1737, buried 1756), Mary (13 March 1738/9), an earlier Edward (12 May 1740, buried 1742), a second John (3 June 1742, apprenticed to a carpenter and joiner in 1751), Paul (25 January 1744/5, buried 1747), Edward (29 September 1749), and Elizabeth (12 May 1751).
Hitchings’s mother Mary died at the beginning of 1757 when he was only seven years old. At the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to the tailor Richard Horn for seven years from 10 December 1762.
Twelve years later, on 26 December 1774, Hitchings was established as a tailor and took on William Shepherd as an apprentice of his own, followed by three more apprentices in quick succession: Edward Aris in 1776, Richard Taylor in 1779 and Richard Kendall in 1781.
On 7 November 1775 Hitchings married Elizabeth Benwell at St Aldate’s Church, and they baptised eleven children there, five of whom died in childhood:
- Edward (1 September 1776, buried 1778)
- Sarah (4 October 1778, buried 1781)
- Henry Edward (17 August 1782)
- John Thomas (1 August 1784, buried 11 June 1790)
- Elizabeth (8 October 1786, buried the following December)
- William (16 July 1788, buried 1802)
- James (12 January 1790)
- George (14 May 1791)
- Mary (31 January 1793)
- Thomas (5 July 1795)
- Elizabeth (9 July 1795).
Hitchings was first elected on to the Common Council on 30 September 1780, and in 1786 he was elected Senior Bailiff.
On 18 September 1789 Hitchings’s father John died at the age of 90, and in the report of his death in Jackson’s Oxford Journal he is described as the father of the eminent Oxford tailor Edward Hitchings.
On 20 March 1800 Hitchings was elected one of the Assistants, and on 30 September that year began his first term as Mayor, naming John Hickman as his Chamberlain.
On 25 March 1790 Hitchings took on William Willmot as his apprentice, and on 12 April 1798 Joseph Taman.
Hitchings was made an Alderman in 1811. In 1811/12 he served a second term as Mayor, and as this was the year of the Royal Visit to Oxford, he was knighted.
In 1820 Hitchings gave stock yielding £6 a year to provide payments for six poor families (three from St Giles’s parish and three from St. Aldate’s), and also 16s. each for four poor aged tailors (two from each of those parishes).
Ten years later in 1821 Hitchings was elected Mayor for the third time.
Hitchings was also an Alderman. He died at the age of 76 on 21 November 1825.
Hitchings' son, George, became surgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary and the first of three generations of Oxford doctors.
See also:
- Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 26 November 1825, p. 3b: Obituary of Hitchings
- Malcolm Graham, Oxford City Apprentices 1697–1800, entries numbered 2009, 2274, 2536, 2553, 2603, 2679, 2870, and 3134
- PCC Will PROB 11/1706 (Will of Sir Edward Hitchings of Oxford, proved 24 December 1825)