The Tubbs Family Part 1:  Social background

The Tubbs family, at least as far back as John Tubbs (1723-1770), was involved in the weaving industry. The reason for the family’s entry into the trade may lie in the religious persecution of Protestants in France, and its reason for leaving it in the political and economic fall-out that ensued.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, which saw French Protestants deprived of religious and civil liberties, caused many to leave France in fear of persecution. A large number of these (over 13,000 according to the report of the French Committee report of 1687) took refuge in London, many in the Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Mile End New Town areas, large parts of which fell under the larger district of Spitalfields.1

A number of these Huguenot refugees were weavers from Lyons and Tours. They set up their looms in Spitalfields and taught the local inhabitants their skills. The importation, both legal and illegal, of cheaper goods from abroad brought about civil unrest on a number of occasions in the 1700s. In 1719 4,000 weavers paraded through London attacking women with ink and acid and tearing the clothes from their backs if they wore Indian calico or printed fabrics.

Another wave of unrest, in 1763, was due to smuggled goods and the cheaper importation of silks from France. Riots broke out in October 1763 and more followed throughout the 1760s. The Tubbs’s parish of St Matthew, Bethnal Green, was at the heart of things. The London Gazette of October 1763 reported the unrest.2

In May 1765 the riots were so serious that the citizens were compelled to enrol themselves for military duty after a mob of 5,000 weavers marched on the house of a cabinet minister in Bloomsbury Square.

The first Spitalfields Act of 1773 tried to settle wage disputes between journeymen and master weavers by setting fixed rates, briefly, this seemed to have a beneficial effect, but in 1785 the substitution of cottons in the place of silk dealt a heavy blow to the silk manufacturers. The journeymen were forbidden to work below the fixed rate set by the Spitalfields Act and consequently were made unemployed, so that in 1793 upwards of 4,000 Spitalfields looms were idle.

There was some revival from c.1798 but by c.1816 the situation was worse than ever. At a meeting in the Mansion House in November 1816, for the relief of the Spitalfields weavers, it was stated that two-thirds of them were unemployed and, ‘some had deserted their houses in despair unable to endure the sight of their starving families, and many pined under languishing diseases brought on by the want of food and clothing.’ 3

Given the uncertainty and deprivation it seems hardly surprising that the son of John Tubbs, William Tubbs I, might have sought alternative employment for his own children, the family trade having become untenable.

London Gazette October 1763


The second great wave of French immigrants around 1789, like the first, brought new skills and a new cultural richness. Whereas the first wave of the late 1680s stayed and assimilated, those in the second wave were more inclined to return to France once the revolution there had tempered its fury. Nevertheless their effect was felt in the musical world of London. The violinist Viotti came in 1792 and performed in fashionable venues.

‘Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun … gave soirées at which Madame Grassini and Mrs. Billington (the first two cantatrices of the London Opera) sang duets for her guests accompanied by the violin of Giovanni Battista Viotti.’4

Viotti was not the only French violinist to find success in London, the violinist/fencer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George, had been in London in 1787 as a guest of the Prince of Wales and visited London again in 1789. The vicomte de Marin was also in London from c.1792. ‘The vicomte de Marin … captivated London audiences. As a violin master he was so sought after that he returned to France with money to spare.’5

He received fulsome praise from a fellow countryman:

‘Pour M. de Marin le violon commença par n’être qu’un gagne-pain, mais il devint bientôt une abondante soaree de richesse. Il est vrai que cet instrument ne gardait aucuns secrets pour lui et qu’il en tirait de sosns qu’harmonieux. Je l’ai entendu une fois à Toulouse, où j’accompagnai mon neveu Édouard; j’ai entendu Paganini, l’an passé, à Paris, et je ne sais auquel des deux attribuer la palme de parfait exécutant.’6

‘For M. de Marin the violin began as a means of earning a living, but it soon became a source of abundant wealth. It is true that this instrument kept no secrets for him and that he drew from it sounds that were more than harmonious. I heard him once in Toulouse, where I accompanied my nephew Edouard; I heard Paganini last year in Paris, and I do not know to which of the two I should attribute the prize of perfect performer.’

The guitar was becoming very popular and French players offered their services:
‘Monsieur B. [Brillaud de Lonjac, 103 Marylebone High Street] has the honour to offer his humble talents to all the respectable French families exiled in this city. He proposes to offer, three days a week, to a limited number of people group lessons in singing, the English guitar and accompaniment’7

The renowned harp maker Sébastien Érard was particularly successful. He lived in London from late 1792.8

‘Érard sold £25,000-worth of harps in 1811 alone, having invented the double action harp, before returning to France in 1815.’9

Not all were so fortunate, the duc d’Aguillon was reduced to begging Michael Kelly, the manager of the Opera House and musical director of Drury Lane, for work copying music, ‘upon the same terms that you would give to any common copyist’.10

Other musicians of note including Cramer, Pleyel and Jarnowick had all come to London from Paris around 1789-1792.11

‘Jarnowick, que j’ai nommé plus haut était cité autant par l’originalité de son esprit que par son beau talent sur le violon.’12
‘Jarnowick, whom I named above, was cited as much for the originality of his mind as for his fine talent on the violin.’

According to Reboul the French artistic community was particularly adept at using advertising techniques to its advantage. ‘Constantly advertising collective concerts, theatrical performances or ballets, the artistic community relocated in London put aside its differences as immigrants and political/economic refugee[s] to form a coherent and cohesive group.’13

Thomas Rowlandson’s hand-coloured aquatint with etching of 1786 is at once poignant and humorous showing an impoverished French family aspiring to a former social, cultural and sartorial elegance, their surroundings now dilapidated, their Ancien Régime clothes now shabby.14


This briefest of summaries is enough to suggest that the Spitalfields area was a busy social/cultural melting pot where tradesmen may have had access to fine quality instruments and bows from fleeing French aristocrats and gained opportunities to see bows and instruments from some of Europe’s leading string players including those playing with the new Cramer-style bows. It was a shortlived and perhaps unique moment in British history where the worlds of the very rich and the very poor coincided. It was also a time when large numbers of artisans were forced to seek new skills and work opportunities in order to survive the perilous times; in such turmoil the Tubbs bow-making dynasty was born.

  1. See, British History Online, ‘Industries: Silk-weaving’, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 2…, ed. William Page, pp. 132-137, London 1911.
    https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol2/pp132-137
  2. London Gazette 11 October 1763 Issue 10356, p.6
  3. See, ‘Industries: Silk-weaving’, A History of the County of Middlesex, pp. 132-137, London 1911. Quotation cited in, McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce (1882), p.1279.
  4. The novelty of the French émigrés in London in the 1790s, Kirsty Carpenter, in, A history of the French in London: liberty, equality, opportunity, Edited by Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick, University of London School of Advanced Study Institute of Historical Research, 2013, p.82., see, ‘Les deux premières cantatrices de l’opéra de Londres’ (Vigée Le Brun, Mémoires d’une portraitiste, p. 191.
  5. The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the sword and the bow, Gabriel Banat 2006, p.168 and p.310 and for the quotation concerning de Marin, Carpenter, 2013, p.84.
  6. Le Chevalier de Pradel de Lamase, nouvelles notes intimes d’un émigré, ed. P. and M. Pradel de Lamase (Paris, 1914–20), p. 70.
  7. Courrier de Londres, 17 May 1793. Cited in Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Emigrés in London, 1789–1802 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 72
  8. French Emigration In Great-Britain In Response To The French Revolution: Memories, Integrations, Cultural Transfers, Juliette Reboul. Doctor of Philosophy submission The University of Leeds School of History, September 2014, p.179.
  9. A. Grangier, A Genius of France: a Short Sketch of the Famous Inventor Sébastien Érard and the Firm he Founded in Paris 1780, trans. J. Fouqueville (Paris, 1924), p.3. Cited in Carpenter 2013, p.82. (Reboul p.179 gives his return as 1814.)
  10. M. Kelly, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly of the King’s Theatre (2 vols., 1826), ii. 86–7. Cited in Carpenter 2013, p.84.
  11. Mémoires sur l’Impératrice Joséphine par Georgette Ducrest, ed. by Christophe Pincemaille (Paris: Mercure de France, 2004), p.38. Cited in Reboul p.217.
  12. Ducrest p.34.
  13. Reboul p.185
  14. Reboul, p.115, gives the date of this as ‘after September1792’ but the example in the Royal Collection Trust shows an earlier date. T Rowlandson delin / S.Alken fecit. / London Pubd. March 1786 by S.Alken No.3 Dufours Place Broad Street Soho. Sold by W.Hinton Sweetings Alley Cornhill. The Provenance is stated as ‘Purchased from William Holland by George IV when Prince of Wales, 1790, for 7s 6d (TNA HO73/20/1, f.17). https://www.rct.uk/collection/810179/a-french-family

In 1784, Thomas Rowlandson exhibited two watercolors at the Royal Academy, contrasting an Italian family with a French family, each dancing and playing music together in in their homes.

Samuel Alken printed and hand colored reproductions of the two scenes, which were sold at his Soho shop as well as William Hinton’s printshop at Sweeting Alley in Cornhill. They must have been popular because in 1792, Samuel Fores had a second edition of the French Family published and sold from his shop, this time printed without aquatint.

Text Copyright © John Basford 2024