TREEBY, John Wright (1809-1882), of 121 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London; High Cliff, Lyme Regis, Dorset and Tormoham, Devon

Branded one of Parliament’s ‘Skinner’s Alley lot’, on account of his lowly origins and supposed ultra-Protestantism, Treeby was a ‘well organised and reliable builder’ who made a fortune developing ‘villa’ properties in west London prior to working on the city’s first underground railway.1Freeman’s Journal, 6 Nov. 1868; M. Galinou, Cottages and Villas: the birth of the garden suburb (2010), 480. The last MP to sit for the notoriously corrupt borough of Lyme Regis, 1865-8, ‘bricks and mortar’ Treeby, as he became known, was a surprisingly effective Tory backbencher, who occasionally sided with the radicals over the details of parliamentary reform.2Dorset County Chronicle, 5 May 1859.

Treeby’s father James Treby (c. 1786-1855) was an itinerant builder.3His son appears to have adopted the new spelling. His origins are obscure but by 1808 he was recorded as a ‘sojourner’ in Chudleigh, where he married Treeby’s mother.4Chudleigh Parish Registers. He was probably employed in the reconstruction of the town following the ‘great fire’ of the previous year, which destroyed 180 of its 300 houses.5http://trees.ancestry.co.uk/tree/9822845/person/-737901932

Treeby, who was born in the same town in 1809, followed his father into the building trade.6Birthplace from 1881 census. In the late 1830s he began acquiring plots for the construction of homes on the St. John’s Wood estate in north-west London, owned by the Eyre family, and soon established himself as a pioneer of the new style of low-density dwellings (as opposed to terraces) that became known as ‘villas’.7Galinou, Cottages and Villas, 146, 150-1, 416. His more memorable developments included ‘Devonshire Villa’ at 26-28 Finchley Road, which was the last home of the English poet Thomas Hood, and a splendid ‘Gothic Villa’ at 44 Finchley Road, later renamed ‘Elizabethan Villa’, where he lived with his family until moving to Paddington in the mid-1850s.8Ibid., 480; Morning Post, 21 Mar. 1856, birth announcement. By then he had overseen the much larger development of Queen’s Grove, running from Finchley Road to Avenue Road, for which he had ‘overall responsibility’.9Galinou, Cottages and Villas, 411. He had also started to build in Paddington, where he established the Westbourne Waterworks.10The Jurist (1853), viii. 711-12. In 1852 he applied for a patent to improve the flow of liquids, which presumably included sewage, an issue that appears to have landed him in frequent disputes with Marylebone vestry.11Manchester Times, 18 Sept. 1852; Marylebone Mercury, 21 Dec. 1861.

As well as building houses and speculating in land, Treeby was also involved with the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first public underground railway from Paddington to Farringdon, which opened in 1863. In 1856 he was part of the original deputation to the metropolitan board of works pressing for a subway with chambers to ‘hold gas and water mains and telegraphic wires’. He probably played a part in the subsequent construction of its brickwork archways and sewers, structures in which he evidently excelled, although his precise role is unclear.12Morning Chronicle, 5 May 1856.

By 1859 Treeby had accumulated sufficient wealth to consider entering Parliament. Armed with a letter of support from the Tory chancellor of the exchequer Benjamin Disraeli, whose reform bill had just been defeated in the Commons, Treeby offered for the notoriously corrupt single-member borough of Lyme Regis at the 1859 election as a staunch supporter of the bill, noting how it had preserved Lyme’s ‘political rights’ rather than abolishing the borough, as the Liberals intended.13London Standard, 12 Apr.; Dorset County Chronicle, 28 Apr. 1859. His campaign cry that his Liberal opponent ‘constantly votes for the disfranchisement of this borough’, however, was extremely provocative, since no Liberal scheme had yet gone to a vote, and an extremely ill-tempered contest ensued, in which Treeby was pilloried for his ‘bricks and mortar’ background and ‘taunted’ for having ‘risen from the people’. Responding to these remarks on the hustings, he countered that rather than ‘disqualifying’ him, his origins meant he knew most people’s ‘wants and could sympathise with them’.14Sherborne Mercury, 19 Apr., Dorset County Chronicle, 5 May 1859.

Defeated by just one vote, which the Liberal mayor ‘illegally’ recorded after the close of polling, Treeby took the unusual course of bringing both a criminal action against the mayor and contesting the result on petition.15Morning Chronicle, 5, 30 May 1859; The Times, 22 June 1859. The potential conflicts of jurisdiction this created appeared to tax even Lord Campbell, who in one of his last sittings as chief justice of queen’s bench adjourned the case until after the election inquiry.16Morning Chronicle, 30 May 1859. Whether or not Treeby came to some form of agreement with his opponent, the sitting Liberal MP, is unclear, but by early 1860 both suits had been dropped and he had started to invest heavily in the borough, buying a ‘summer residence’ and making generous donations to charity.17Dorset County Chronicle, 8 Mar. 1860. In 1863 he purchased the town’s premier estate of Highcliff House, the former residence of Lady Lucan, and began to play the part of local squire, hosting fêtes and charitable events, although he could not resist also turning some of the garden into building plots.18Dorset County Chronicle, 3 Sept. 1863, 21 July 1864, 12 Jan. 1865.

Standing again for Lyme at the 1865 election, when the sitting Liberal MP retired, Treeby could legitimately claim that he was ‘no longer a stranger’ in the borough. Reiterating his support for Lord Derby, and his opposition to ‘meddling and tampering’ with ‘our glorious constitution’, Treeby also made much of his endeavours to solve water supply and sewage problems in the ‘east end’ of Lyme at his ‘own expense’.19Dorset County Chronicle, 4 May, 30 May, 22 June 1865. After another extraordinarily venal contest, in which the price of votes was said to have reached £100, he was returned with a slim majority.20The Collected Works of Ann Hawkshaw ed. D. Bark (2014), p. xxxiv.

A frequent attender and occasional speaker, who served regularly on railway bill committees, Treeby voted steadily against the secret ballot, the abolition of church rates, and admission of Dissenters to the ancient universities.21He served on 15 in 1866: PP 1866 (0.108), lvi. 10. He loyally backed the Conservatives on most major issues, but was not beyond adopting an independent line on some matters, most notably over the details of parliamentary reform. A participant in 138 known divisions, he cast 104 votes alongside Disraeli, rebelling on just seven occasions. The MPs he entered the opposite lobby with, however, were far removed from the ‘No Popery’ brigade of ‘fanatics’ with whom he was alleged to side in one contemporary account.22Freeman’s Journal, 6 Nov. 1865. He was in the minorities with the radical J. S. Mill for the enfranchisement of Queen’s University Belfast, 18 June 1868, and for the removal of voting restrictions on revenue and customs officers, 30 June 1868, a group which he had earlier championed in a question to ministers.23Hansard, 16 Mar. 1866, vol. 182, cc. 420-1. The following month he also voted and spoke briefly in support of Mill’s unsuccessful motion for municipal elections to be included in the election petitions and corrupt practices bill.24Hansard, 14 July 1868, vol. 193, c. 1168.

Treeby also broke party ranks on behalf of his constituency. Unlike the Liberal reform bill, against which he had presented a petition from Lyme, 28 May 1866, the Conservative measure of 1867 had not disfranchised his borough or grouped it with another town, much to Treeby’s relief.25The Times, 23, 29 May 1866. The 1868 Scottish Reform Act, however, redistributed its seat to Scotland, prompting Treeby to cast another opposition vote, 18 June 1868. His other constituency related activities included trying to secure improvement works to the Cobb, Lyme’s artificial harbour, which had been neglected by the local council.26See PP 1866 (451), lxvi. 1

One of Treeby’s more notable achievements was the insertion of a clause in the Conservative reform bill making overseers publish lists of electors who were in arrears with their rates, and therefore unable to vote.27Hansard, 12 July 1867, vol. 188, cc. 1452-3. This provided much-needed clarity to what had previously been a murky area. His attempt to make the private arrangements agreed between railway companies and landowners more transparent, however, was less successful and earned him an unpleasant rebuke from Sir Lawrence Palk, who took exception to Treeby’s suggestion that ‘resident county gentlemen’ had given ‘the sanction of their names’ to questionable railway schemes. ‘Perhaps, when the honourable member has been as long a resident county gentleman as I have been’, Palk declared, ‘he will speak more charitably of his neighbours’.28Hansard, 19 Mar. 1868, vol. 190, cc. 1884-6. Treeby had recently purchased an estate at Tormoham, Devon, where Palk was lord of the manor.

Deprived of his seat at the 1868 general election Treeby, who was by now often referred to as a ‘Liberal Conservative’, evidently made no attempt to find another constituency.29Edinburgh Evening Courant, 1 Oct. 1868. Assuming inaccurately that he was one of the ultra-Protestant Tory rebels who followed Charles Newdegate MP, the Irish Freeman’s Journal rejoiced that he would be among the fanatics ‘left out in the cold’, who were well known for their ‘lowest type of ignorance’ and inability ‘to make a decent speech, much less influence a single vote’.30Freeman’s Journal, 6 Nov. 1868. This report probably stemmed from his earlier membership of the staunchly Protestant National Club, which in Treeby’s case, may have been more about convenience than conviction, given the well-charted difficulties of joining the Carlton, where he was finally admitted in 1866.31S. Thévoz, ‘The political impact of London clubs, 1832-68’, University of Warwick PhD thesis (2014), passim; A. Corio and S. Thévoz, ‘Defending the Protestant principles of the constitution; the National Club in the nineteeth century’, unpublished paper (2011).

Treeby, who spent the last 21 years of his life a widower following the death of two successive wives in childbirth, died at St. Leonards-on-Sea in 1882. He left properties in Westbourne Terrace, London and Tormoham, Devon, where the previous year he was listed as living with two unmarried daughters, a six-year old grand-daughter and three servants.321881 census. His estate, valued at £45,504, was divided between his eight surviving children. These included the eldest son from his first marriage John Wright Treeby (1839-1910) and his youngest son from his second, the Rev. Alfred Treeby (1861-1934).33National Probate Calendar (1882).