Samson Fox
Motto: Forti Nihil Difficile. (To the brave, nothing is difficult.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Fox
Samson Fox (11 July 1838 – 24 October 1903) was an English engineer, industrialist, and philanthropist. He was elected Mayor of Harrogate in Yorkshire and donated most of the cost of building the Royal College of Music in London.
Around 1890, he invited the Croatian artist Vlaho Bukovac to stay at Grove House and paint a series of family portraits. He collected many of Bukovac's other paintings but the collection was dispersed in an auction in 1911. The most important of all his purchases was the huge 'Suffer the Little Children', shown at the Paris Salon in 1888, which the Fox family later presented to St. Robert’s church in Harrogate.[8]
In 1892-1894 he provided most of the funds (£45,000, in two donations) to build the Royal College of Music in London, and a bust of him has a prominent place in the entrance hall.[1][2]
He died in Walsall, Staffordshire, in 1903.[9] The King sent Harrogate a telegram of condolence.[10]
He had married Mary Anne Slinger in Leeds in 1861. They had four children
His son, Arthur William Fox, married Hilda Hanbury, sister of actress Lily Hanbury. His grandson Robin Fox was the head of the Robin Fox acting dynasty, making Samson Fox great-grandfather to screen actors Edward Fox OBE and James Fox OBE, and great-great-grandfather to English actress Emilia Fox and her cousin Laurence Fox
Vlaho Bukovac and Samson Fox
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/bukovac/samsonfox.aspx
Bukovac first visited Fox in Harrogate in 1888. An art collector and a great lover of music, Fox had made his money as a mechanical and chemical engineer in Leeds, where his companies were responsible for many innovations in manufacture, notably in steamships and railways. In Harrogate, where he was elected Mayor for three years in a row between 1888 and 1891, Fox lived in palatial style at Grove House, a mansion that survives to this day.
Bukovac’s portrait of Fox exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1891, was one of a series of pictures of family and friends that the artist painted as Fox’s guest in Harrogate. But Fox also collected many other paintings by Bukovac. They included medium sized, sentimental works such as 'Scandal', but also several of the exhibition pictures which had made Bukovac’s reputation, including 'The White Slave' and 'Potiphar’s Wife'. Both of these are visible in photographs of the gallery at Grove House. Since the posthumous auction of Fox’s paintings in 1911, which included a total of 17 works by Bukovac, neither has been traced.
The most important of all Fox’s purchases from Bukovac was the huge 'Suffer the Little Children', which the Fox family presented to St. Robert’s church in Harrogate. Shown at the Paris Salon in 1888, it epitomised the unique blend of French academism and Central European exoticism that defined Bukovac’s appeal to British patrons.
Fox family actors return to great-grandfather's glittering Yorkshire hall
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2012/may/04/edwardfox-emiliafox-harrogate-royalhall-yorkshire
Edward, Emilia & Co are on stage at Harrogate's former Kursaal built by great (and great-great) grandad Samson Fox, inventor of the corrugated boiler flue
Fox hunters can have a field day in Harrogate this weekend when pretty much the entire acting dynasty takes to the stage at the Royal Hall.
Edward Fox, described by the promoters as the 'distinguished acting gent', which is spot-on, will present a collection of playlets, skits and readings with his wife Joanna David and their daughter Emilia and son Freddie.
This is good going, because all our busy, with Emilia filming daily for Silent Witness and Freddie appearing nightly in Hay Fever in the West End.
The get-together has robust local roots as well as thespian ones; the Royal Hall was originally known as the Kursaal, a name changed on the outbreak of the First World War because of anti-German sentiment, and was the brainchild of Edward Fox's great-grandfather. He was Samson Fox, an industrialist, inventor and all-round great son of Yorkshire, who returned from a Continental trip full of excitement at the kursaals, or 'cure halls' of foreign spas.
Michaela Noonan of Harrogate Theatre, which has just started joint work with the Royal Hall this month, says:
He successfully lobbied to have one built in Harrogate. Determined to make Harrogate's Kursaal as magnificent as possible, he enlisted renowned theatre designer Frank Matcham. The resulting splendour was known as 'a palace of glittering gold.'
In Edwardian times, entertainment was considered an important part of the stress-relief process in the greater spa cure. Having taken a dip in the relaxing mineral baths to ease their bones, strung-out Edwardian Harrogatians and their many visitors from all over the world would take in a concert at the Kursaal to ease their minds.
Opened in 1903, the hall has played host to every famous musical name since, from Elgar to the Beatles and has Bob Geldof and the Hallé orchestra coming (separately) this summer. The Foxes join the playbill with what they describe as:
A fascinating collection of the really good, truly wicked and those torn both ways, taking in everything and everyone from Genesis to Jane Austen, Richard III to Mark Twain, Mother Teresa to Lord Byron, popular ballads to anonymous limericks.
Samson Fox is well worth examining in more detail. Born in Bradford, his great achievement was the corrugated boiler flue which won him the gold medal of the Royal Society of Arts and the French Legion of Honour. He provided Harrogate with its first steam-powered fire engine and the rest of us with a family of very fine actors. He was also mayor of the town for three years from 1890-2, albeit not directly elected.
On that score, please see the rest of the Guardian website for oodles of election coverage. We will have Newcastle's Labour leader Nick Forbes commenting here at 4pm.
Saints and Sinners with the Foxes is on Sunday 6 May at 7.30. Seats bookable at www.harrogatetheatre.co.uk or 01423 502 116
Samson Fox
http://www.geni.com/people/Samson-Fox/6000000016164672588