Our resident historian explores the life of Sir James Paget Bt, the man after whom Great Yarmouth’s hospital is named
James Paget was born in Great Yarmouth in 1814, the eighth of 17 children of local businessman, Samuel Paget, nine of whom survived to adulthood.
Samuel was an extremely capable and entrepreneurial man who, at the age of just 20, took the opportunity to take over as the navy’s victualling agent on the death of the previous contract-holder, for whom he had worked as a clerk.
In 1794 he gained his first contract to supply the North Sea Fleet, which had been based at Yarmouth to blockade the Dutch fleet, thus preventing them from sailing south to join with the French, as a formidable joint force.
To face them, the admiralty was handicapped by the unrest among the navy in other ports, culminating in the Spithead mutiny a couple of years later, and had chosen Yarmouth as a well-positioned base to keep the Dutch in check.
Paget, senior, must have been a remarkable and convincing man, persuading local traders to invest in his enterprise. His naval contracts grew – Yarmouth did not have its own naval victualling yard, and he broadened his naval commissions.
His efficiency was well known. After the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, when Yarmouth-based Admiral Duncan handed out a walloping to the Dutch, who lost 11 warships without the loss of any British vessels, the victorious Admiral was quoted, admittedly by Paget’s son, James, as having attributed the victory to the efficiency, reliability and speed of Paget’s victualling service. The fleet had been completely re-victualled in just five days.
Samuel became a wealthy man, was elected mayor of Yarmouth in 1817, built a grand property and sent the three eldest sons away for an expensive education at Charterhouse School in Surrey, and on to Cambridge. However, when the time came for James to go to school, funds were in shorter supply, presumably because of a post Napoleonic War recession.
Even though Samuel was also a senior partner in a brewery, which he had inherited from his father-in-law, it seems that the expense of sending James to Charterhouse was deemed too high, and he was educated locally at a small private school in Yarmouth, run by a Mr Bowles.
In fact, Samuel eventually became quite seriously in debt and James was, in later life, to use his own success to help pay off his father’s debts.
James was obviously a good student and learned languages in addition to his normal school work. Leaving school at the age of 16 he became apprenticed to a local surgeon, Charles Costerton.
It was a good choice. Costerton had a wide-ranging practice and James benefitted from being able to observe everything from surgery to making up his own medicines. Furthermore, Costerton had trained at St Barts, as indeed had James’s elder brother, George.
The cost of James’s apprenticeship was 100 Guineas (£105) and it must have stretched the family’s weakening budget a bit – his school fees had been just £8.40 in modern currency.
When James was due to leave school, his father had him marked down for a career in the navy.
Mrs Paget was not at all keen on the idea, and James himself had ambitions to be a surgeon, hence his apprenticeship.
The family’s financial situation continued to deteriorate and when James eventually, in 1834, with the influence both of Costerton and his brother, George, gained admission to Barts, his fees were met by George.
Lack of sufficient finance was going to be a problem for some years, though eventually James became a wealthy man in his own right.
Medical training in those days was reputedly briefer and less formal than today, but James proved an exceptional student and was admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons after less than two years.
But lack of funds hampered him again and, unable to pay the relevant fees, he never became a house surgeon.
To keep body and soul together he became a sub-editor of The Medical Gazette – he had always had a literary bent, publishing, in 1834, a book on the natural history of the Yarmouth area – and also taught at Barts.
These additional activities were necessary to supplement the income he initially derived from his own practice, which apparently averaged just £8 p.a. for the first two years.
He could have gone back to practice in Yarmouth, as his father wished him to, but his determination to build a career for himself in London was strong enough to resist the temptation.
By 1837 he had become curator of the museum at Barts, and his teaching post there dated from 1839.
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He needed a considerably larger income – as far back as 1836 he had become engaged to Lydia North, an accomplished musician.
But he didn’t have enough money to marry, and his father’s debts were growing fast.
In fact, it was nearly eight years after their engagement that James and Lydia finally married.
It was reported that, at the time of the original engagement, his father had been so furious that he had written to Lydia’s father asking him to discourage the understanding.
In 1841 he was appointed surgeon to Finsbury Dispensary, but to progress as he wished in his career, he needed a more prestigious appointment, at one of the great teaching hospitals.
Eventually his patience was rewarded and he was elected as Assistant Surgeon at Barts in 1847. This was no mean achievement, since some objected to his selection because his lack of experience as a house surgeon was widely regarded as a bar to the appointment.
He continued to lecture and his income began slowly to grow, as did his prestige. He was widely recognised as having especially acute diagnostic skills, he became highly respected within the profession and was rewarded with a succession of roles within the Royal College of Surgeons, in due course becoming its president.
His reputation outside the profession was growing too, and in 1851 he set up in private practice so successfully that he was appointed surgeon extraordinary to Queen Victoria in 1858, at a time when he was still only assistant surgeon at his hospital.
And the Queen was not his only royal patient. The Princess of Wales, later Queen Alexandra, was another of his patients, and he was made surgeon to Edward VII as Prince of Wales, treating him during his attack of typhoid in 1871.
This illness was a real moment of drama in the country. The Prince of Wales became unwell at Sandringham, following a house party in Yorkshire where the state of the drains was to cause the death of two other guests.
The Queen, who had slightly lowered the height of her dudgeon with Edward, raced from Balmoral to be with him, her anxiety probably heightened by the memory of the death of her husband from the same disease just a decade earlier.
And it wasn’t just the Queen – the Prince’s health was a concern to the nation; bulletin followed bulletin. Alfred Austin, a future Poet Laureate, penned the only two of his lines still widely remembered today, if with some wry amusement:
Across the wires the electric message came
He is no better; he is much the same.
The Prince, of course, did recover.
It was in the same year that James Paget was created a baronet, though the creation preceded the illness of the Prince so had clearly been earned by earlier services.
In view of that history, it is not surprising that James became fashionable as well as being recognised for his exceptional abilities.
The Royal College of Surgeons, in its online appraisal of him, describes how through his consulting rooms ‘passed nearly all the interesting cases and many of the nobility of England’.
Having spent his childhood in a family of diminishing wealth, having struggled financially in his early working life, having had to wait through an eight-year engagement before he could afford to marry, he ended his career sufficiently rich to deal with the debts of his birth family, and to live in some comfort.
In researching James Paget, I have read a number of online biographies of him.
What in such cases is quite rare is the consistency of the views of his character. Without exception he is described as modest, honest and fair-minded.
A man with deep religious conviction, an eloquent speaker, a gifted teacher – the superlatives roll out every time. Even allowing for the Victorian tendency to eulogy in contemporary accounts he was clearly a man of great distinction.
I have to confess to being somewhat addicted to the Spy cartoons, which appeared in the magazine Vanity Fair in those days. Sir James Paget was one of the subjects, delightfully posed in mid lecture, leaning slightly forward, spectacles in hand, and in teaching mode. The (February 1876) edition featuring the cartoon describes him as ‘being universally accepted as one of the very eminent men of his profession. Shy and retiring, but well known to be much admired’.
It seems as good a summary as any of this remarkable man who achieved so much despite both financial difficulties and intermittent poor health.
He died at the age of 85 and was honoured by a funeral at Westminster Abbey..
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