The Oxford Mallams

 

Algorithms knew it was worth drawing my attention to an item in the Law Society Gazette dated 12 January.  I realise it is just applied maths, but I still find this weird. 

RWK Goodman…, Thames valley legal giant, is to acquire HMG Law, which is reputed to be Oxfordshire’s oldest legal firm…  Staff… will be integrated… at Minns Business Park…  Herbert, Mallam, Gowers can trace its history back to 1838.  Founding father Thomas Mallam enrolled as a solicitor and set up… in Oxford’s Turl Street.

My father’s parents were cousins.  Their mothers were sisters, both daughters of Thomas Mallam. 

I have a pair of pictures in my hallway which are the wedding group in 1864 and the Diamond Wedding Group in 1924 of Thomas Mallam’s oldest child Jessie with the Revd Henry Mullins.  Thomas Mallam and his wife Martha Joy are at the back in the first photo.  My father, aged two, wriggling on his mother’s knee, is at the front in the second one.

My first thought was that the Gazette had, quite understandably, missed the way Thomas Mallam was to move his firm to 126 High Street (a rare surviving Tudor building) when his father, who died in 1850, ceased trading there. 

So, businesses with the Mallam name have been trading from the same premises for at least two hundred years.  Although I find HGM Law’s website gives the firm’s address as 1 St Aldates, which suggests it must have moved since I was last passing by, and the striking link had been broken anyway.

Thomas Mallam’s grandfather, Richard Mallam, became a freeman of Oxford in 1788.  His son, an older Thomas Mallam, is then listed as an auctioneer in the 1841 census.  Mallam Auctioneers, operating today in St Michael Street, has 1788 as its logo.  So the Mallam trading name in the city goes back fifty years before the younger Thomas Mallam’s career took a different legal path. 

And it will continue with Mallam Auctioners, although no member of the Mallam family will have worked in any of those firms for the last hundred years.  The last to be involved were the younger Thomas Mallam’s sons, a further Thomas and an Edward, who were still working in their father’s legal practice into the early 1920s.

So, to be clear, there were actually three Thomas Mallams, father, son and grandson.  They have appeared in this Blog before, as a search for the Mallam name will reveal.

An particularly niche piece of information is that each died in a house in Oxford called The Shrubbery.  The first Thomas Mallam (son of the Richard made a freeman in 1788, and himself twice Mayor of Oxford) built a villa in the countryside north of St Giles; the house is now the lodgings of the Principal of St Hugh’s.  He died there, as did his son (the one who became a solicitor in 1838).  The third Thomas Mallam (brother of my father’s grandmothers, the one who continued to work at 126 High Street until the 1920s) gave the same name to his home in Littlemore, which is where he died; Littlemore’s Catholic Presbytery is now on that site.  

Meanwhile, the picture was taken this week in St Marylebone Parish Church.