There's a paradox with memorials: they work as long as someone's alive who remembers you. After that they're only a record of your name.
The game then is finding out who that name belonged to. Here goes:
The starting point is a stained glass memorial/nativity scene in St. Saviour's on Hanley Road.
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| Memorial |
The scroll says 'And she laid him in a manger/they came with haste toward the Babe'.
The footer text is 'To the glory of God and in loving memory of William Thomas Blinco who died on April 5th 1922 this window is dedicated by his widow and friends'.
The choice of scene isn't helpful. A specialist saint would've been more informative.
The name is good though. There can't be many Blincoes out there.
The Land Registry brings up someone of that name who bought a timber yard in Mount Pleasant Road. He lived at 6 Sparsholt Road and called himself a timber merchant. I think we can assume that's him.
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| N.6 Sparsholt Road, 2013 |
This link takes you to Jan Cornelis Haccou's 'A Road by a Cottage', which was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1922 by a William Thomas Blinco. I'm guessing the bequest was an inheritance tax deal.
The painting is a sweet pastoral scene, the kind of thing that gets dismissed, often unfairly, as chocolate boxy.
So there you are. A timber merchant, married (presumably happily but without children), moderately successful and with conventional tastes in art. I wonder if William Thomas Blinco would have liked to be remembered like that, or if he had had wilder hopes. Even Blincoes can dream.
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