Edwin Thomas Spiers
Mayor of Oxford 1866/7
Edwin Thomas Spiers (1808–1885) was born in London and baptised at St Andrew’s Church in Holborn on 14 September 1808. He was the son of the tailor Thomas Spiers and his wife Harriet.
Edwin became a stationer, and on 2 July 1838, when he was 27, he married Elizabeth Pearson, aged 22, at Upper Heyford: she is simultaneously described in the register as a farmer’s daughter and the daughter of Richard Pearson, a shoemaker. Spiers himself is already described as a "stationer of Oxford" when their first son, George King Prichard Spiers, was baptised at Upper Heyford on 27 January 1839, just five months after the wedding.
The 1841 census shows Edwin and Elizabeth living in Bear Lane, Oxford: he is described as a bookseller, and they have a female servant and a clerk living with them.
In 1848 Spiers contested the North ward with Isaac Grubb, losing by just one vote; and in 1851 he was returned for the West ward.
From the mid-1840s and in the 1850s Spiers was a bookseller, stationer, and newsagent (as well as managing a circulating library) at 96 High Street, and in the 1851 census he is shown living there with Elizabeth and their son George, now twelve years old.
Spiers’s wife Elizabeth died on 3 April 1852 at the age of 34 and was buried at St Mary the Virgin Church five days later. Her grave is one of the very few that remain in the grass to the north of the church (left) and reads :
In memory of
ELIZABETH the beloved
wife of E. T. Spiers
after long and patient
suffering
departed this life
April 3 1852
aged 34 years
Spiers was one of the four Liberal leaders on the city council, becoming Sheriff of Oxford in 1856.
By the time of the 1861 census Spiers had married his second wife, the widow Mrs Matilda Sheard, and continued to live at 96 High Street with his new wife and her two children from her former marriage. Spiers was evidently now a wine merchant rather than a stationer, with his stepson, Edwin T. Sheard, following him in his new trade. Spiers’s only son, George, now 22, was no longer living with his father, but lodged at 2 Museum Terrace; he probably still worked for him, as he too is describes as a wine merchant.
Spiers was elected Mayor of Oxford in 1866, and remained councillor for the West ward until he was made an Alderman in 1868. He was also a Justice of the Peace.
By the time of the 1871 census, Spiers was aged 61 and had married his third wife, Charlotte Matilda, who was twelve years his junior, and they lived alone with their two servants. Described as a wine merchant, he was now occuping both 96 and 97 High Street. (These shops were in the row demolished in 1909 to make way for the Rhodes Building of Oriel College.)
In 1871 Spiers’s only son, George King Prichard Spiers, was living at St Clement’s; four years later he died at the age of 34 at the Warneford Asylum, and was buried at St Mary the Virgin Church on 19 March 1875.
The 1881 census shows Spiers at the age of 72 living at "Rycote", 31 Leckford Road with his wife Charlotte, his stepdaughter Miss Charlotte Sheard (39), plus a servant.
Four years later, on 2 March 1885, Spiers died at his home in Leckford Road at the age of 76 and his funeral was held on 6 March at the church of St Mary the Virgin. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery (Plot G.120).
See also
- Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 7 March 1885 (obituary)
- 1841 Census: Oxford (St Mary the Virgin), 891/09/8
- 1851 Census: Oxford (St Mary the Virgin), 1728/92
- 1861 Census: Oxford (St Mary the Virgin), 893/69
- 1871 Census: Oxford (St Mary the Virgin), 1437/71
- 1881 Census: Oxford (St Giles), 1499/115