Thomas Pretious Heslop was born in the West
Indies in 1823 where his father, a Scotsman, was an officer in the Royal
Artillery. His mother was from Dublin, but had relatives in Staffordshire. Her
brother, the Rev J B Owen, was Vicar of Bilston and her sister had married Dr
Thomas Underwood of Tipton. To these relations the young Thomas was
sent for his education. He lived with Dr Underwood, to whom he was
apprenticed after leaving Burton Grammar School.
On finishing his term with his uncle he went to his mother’s city, Dublin, to
study under Professor Stokes and then completed the circuit of his family’s
roots by moving to Edinburgh, where he graduated MD in 1848. The subject of his
thesis was the fatty heart of typhus. The remainder of his career was
spent in Birmingham, which had the attraction of being near to his
Staffordshire relations. His first post was as House Physician to the General
Hospital. He held this post until 1852, when he resigned and set up in private
practice at a house in Temple Row. This was rather uphill work initially. He
was already a respected physician but was not very successful in
attracting patients. In 1853, however, he was appointed Professor of
Physiology at Queen’s College, the successor to the Royal School of Medicine and
Surgery founded by William Sands Cox. At the same time he was elected as an
Honorary Physician to the Queen’s Hospital, which Sands Cox had founded as the
college’s teaching hospital. He remained there until 1858 when he resigned in
disgust at the way in which Sands Cox, a notably difficult man, administered
the college, but he continued to hold his post at the hospital until 1860 and
again from 1870- 1882.
Dr Heslop was an active member of the
Birmingham medical profession. He was instrumental in the foundation of
the Children’s, Women’s and Skin Hospitals. He also took a prominent
part in the foundation of the Free Libraries and the Medical Institute.
But he is mainly remembered now for his donations to the library of Sir Josiah
Mason’s Science College, opened in 1880. He served on the council of the
college, which was very much better run than Queen’s, and he realised the
importance of a good library. Like many medical men he was a great book
collector, with wide interests. He was president of the Birmingham
Philosophical Society from 1878-1880 and his presidential address was
on Lucretius. Between 1880 and his death in 1885 he gave over 11,000 books to
the college library, at a personal cost of over £6,000; in June 1885 they
amounted to more than half of the library’s total stock. He aimed at
providing for two classes of reader – those pursuing original research and those
he called ordinary students. For the former he purchased many complete
runs of scientific periodicals and for the latter what he regarded as
student textbooks, although many of these are now rare books in their own
right. An example is the De Re Metallica of Agricola, printed in 1561 and noted
approvingly in an article on the library in the Mason College Magazine for 1883.
Dr Heslop died suddenly of heart failure
during a visit to Scotland on 17 June 1885. He was buried in Dublin, beside his
mother, three days later. The Professor of Greek, E A Sonnenschein,
and the College Secretary, George Henry Morley, represented Mason College at
the funeral. The obituaries were long and lavish and the Mason College staff
immediately decided there must be a memorial. They quickly decided on a marble
bust. A fund was opened, with a target of £1,000, and the sculptor
W J Williamson was commissioned; he had apparently had many opportunities to
study Dr Heslop’s features and there were, of course, photographs. One
former colleague was against this idea. In a letter to The Daily News
on 27 June 1885 the Birmingham surgeon, Lawson Tait, argued
that his attempts to persuade Dr Heslop to sit for his portrait had always been
rebuffed and he was sure that any posthumous effort would be “a ghastly
failure… Dr Heslop’s head was too picturesque for any but the happiest
effort”. He thought a better plan would be to call the library the Heslop
Library. He was ignored, however, and work on the bust proceeded rapidly. On
Founder’s Day, 23 February 1886, the result, which seems to have been generally
considered a happy effort, was unveiled by one of the women students, Mary Darby
Sturge, who had enrolled at the college during its first session, studying
Latin. The bust was placed in the library, where it can be seen in an old
photograph taken about 1890. Dr Tait’s idea was not entirely forgotten, although
he did not live to know it. When the new Main Library was built at Edgbaston
there was, for the first time, a rare book room and it was not difficult to
think of a name for it. On 24 May 1962 a plaque naming it the Heslop Room was
unveiled by Sir Frank Francis, Director of the British Museum. Victoriana being
then rather out of fashion the bust spent some years in an obscure corner of the
rare book stack, where it used to frighten new library assistants coming upon it
unexpectedly; but in 1975, the centenary of the founding of Mason College, it
was given pride of place in the Heslop Room, where the fine head can be seen to
good advantage, benignly surveying our students as it has done for over a
hundred years. Thanks to Christine Penny, University of Birmingham
