This anonymous monument stands immediately south of St Peter’s Church, Brighton. It is a familiar landmark to Brightonians, but the details of its dedication, once on engraved panels, were stolen in the 1990s. The Chatfield fountain was in fact given to Brighton in 1871, by Frederick Chatfield, shortly before his death. As an animal lover, he wished to provide a fountain for the refreshment of horses and their riders.
Frederick Chatfield takes his place in Brighton Lives because I decided I could no longer avoid the vexed issue of colonialism. The shelves of the University of Brighton Library at nearby St Peter’s House sigh under the weight of a large collection of searching and critical works on empire, colonialism, and of course, slavery. Maybe students do not know of the relevance to their studies of the obelisk they pass on the way to the library.
Frederick Chatfield had been a diplomat in the Foreign Office and had worked as British Consul to The Central American Republic, based in Guatemala from 1834 to 1852. Chatfield was an ardent imperialist, and set about his duties in Central America with a keeness far in excess of that required by the London Foreign Office. His priority for acquiring territory for Britain led him to neglect diplomacy to the extent that British relations with Central America and the United States deteriorated, and he was recalled in 1852.[i]For more details see Jay Sexton, Frederick Chatfield Sept 2010, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Although Chatfield never worked again for the Foreign Office, he still aimed to benefit from Britain’s world dominance, and set about consolidating his own financial position by investing in multiple foreign projects. At the time of his death in 1872, he was able to bequeath to friends and relatives the following stocks and shares:
£500 bond Gambian Loan
£2,000 Delhi Railway stock ( a favourite investment as the Government guaranteed a 5% return underwritten by the Indian taxpayer)
£3,900 Egyptian Loans 1862 and 1864 (loans raised by the Egyptian Khedive to finance the building of the Suez Canal, eventually leading to the colonisation of Egypt by Britain)
£2,500 Russian Stock
£400 Brazilian Loan
£500 Turkish Loan
£1,000 Grand Trunk Canada Railway share
£1,000 Havana and Matansas railway
Income from his investments enabled Chatfield to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, including his move to Brighton in the late 1860s renting Belgrave House, a fashionable mansion on Marine Parade, where he lived alone, except for four servants.
In later life, and at the time of his death in 1872, Chatfield supported a formidable list of Brighton charities. Brighton Council at the request of his friend the Mayor, and fellow freemason, John Cordy Burrows, voted him ‘The Brighton Peabody’ in recognition of his philanthropic bequests. Chatfield also gave a fine portrait of his mother, Mary Chatfield, née Coggan, painted by Sir John Opie, to Brighton Museum.
As far as I can tell, Mary Chatfield did not have any connection with Brighton, but her family history is useful for filling in some background influencing Frederick’s ambitions and career. Mary Coggan, born 1762, was the daughter of Charles Thomas Coggan, an Established Clerk of the East India Company. The Established Clerks were powerful and very well paid employees of the Company and C.T Coggan was for 40 years Clerk to the Shipping Committee. By the time of his retirement in 1801, he was receiving a salary of £500 a year. He is also recorded in 1787 in a list of the “Company of Merchants trading to Africa” [ii]TNA T70 1508 ITEM 6. as being an agent for The Royal Africa Company. It would seem that C.T. Coggan was involved in the peak years of the slave trade from England. This is hinted at by an entry of a baptism at the church of St Andrew Undershaft in the City of London (C.T.Coggan’s parish) of 1 February 1775, ‘baptism of a Negro serv[an]t of Mr Coggan’ [iii]London Metropolitan Archives P69/AND4/A/002/MS04108 p.7
Mary Coggan married Allen Chatfield, a captain of the East India Company in 1785 and the couple spent the early years of their married life on the Wanstead Grove Estate, where her father lived until 1798. Allen Chatfield’s father noted in his will “The employment of my son Allen Chatfield is hazardous and not always sure and certain ..” and this was certainly the case. Allen Chatfield sailed nine times to India and China, sometimes as Second Mate and at others as Captain. In this position he was able to trade on his own account. East India Company Captains built up considerable fortunes in this way, but unfortunately on his final voyage on The Devonshire in 1814, Allen Chatfield became ill, and had to resign his post in Calcutta, thus forfeiting his property on the ship. He made this very clear in his application [iv]British Library IOR/L/MAR/C/796for an EIC pension in 1815. Allen and Mary Chatfield spent the rest of their days at Welbeck Street, Westminster, and both died in 1831. Their son Frederick was at this time working for the Foreign Office in Memel on the Baltic Coast. After his next appointment, as Consul in Warsaw he commented that Poland could usefully become part of the British Empire! As British Consul for the Central American Republic he continued to rigorously promote British expansionism, for which over-zealousness he was eventually recalled.
So is the Chatfield fountain a monument to British Colonialism or Victorian Philanthropy? The answer is probably both, in Frederick Chatfield’s life, the spoils of Empire enabling great generosity ‘at home’.
