William Gilbertson Blue Plaque

William Gilbertson’s day job was as a chemist or as the plaque says, "druggist". This profession would have also been known as an apothecary at the time, and it is recorded as this on parish records related to his family. The plaque, on the corner of Manchester Road and Church Street, is set near where he had his chemist’s shop. This was probably in a building that stood on the opposite corner, and he would have lived over the shop.

Gilbertson was a member of several learned societies, including the Geological Society of France, and in his spare time he would be out collecting fossils in Bowland, amassing a collection that is now held at the Natural History Museum in London. A Yorkshire geologist, John Phillips, used specimens from Gilbertson’s collection to illustrate his book.

William Gilbertson, member of the Geological Society of France

This material proved crucial to Phillips’ research, but one collection, ‘unrivalled’ and ‘magnificent’, belonging to William Gilbertson of Preston provided virtually all the material needed for the plates. Gilbertson’s connoisseurship had produced a collection of quality cabinet specimens perfectly developed and all collected from a fairly restricted area.

His palaeontology was also referenced in a book about Lancashire that was written by Leo Hartley Grindon. A section of this entitled "THE FOSSILS" is included below. The Chapters were originally written for the Portfolio of 1881, in which they appeared month by month.

Gilbertson is listed in three of the early Preston trade directories, where he is described as both a druggist and a tea dealer, with another shop on Cheapside. His brother John was a Preston surgeon, whose surgery was also on Church Street.

William Gilbertson was living on Church Street at the time of the 1841 census with his daughter, Jane. The route the census enumerator took suggests the house they occupied was on the opposite corner of Manchester Road to his blue plaque.

Baptism: 13 Oct 1820 St John, Preston, Lancashire
Jane Gilbertson - [Child] of William Gilbertson & Ellen
Abode: Church St. Preston
Occupation: Druggist
Baptised By: M. Mark, Curate
Register: Baptisms 1820 - 1822, Page 36, Entry 513
Source: LDS Film 1278741

Gilbertson was born in Yorkshire in 1788, moving to Preston sometime before 1818 to set up in business. The following year he married Ellen Parkinson at St Mary’s in Goosnargh. At his death in 1845, he was living near Kirkby Lonsdale. He is buried in St Mary’s in Goosnargh.

This was his brief obituary in the Preston Chronicle:

‘On Monday last, at Caw Inn Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale, Mr William Gilbertson, formerly of this town, druggist. The deceased was well known in the scientific world as a naturalist and geologist of high acquirements; and was a member of the Geological Society of France, corresponding member of the Natural History Society of Manchester, honorary member of the Philosophical Institution of York, &c., &c. He formed the best collection of mountain limestone fossils ever arranged, which he sold some years ago to the British Museum.’

THE FOSSILS

Although the new red sandstone, so general in the southern parts, offers scarcely any attractions to the palæontologist, Lancashire is still a rich locality in regard to fossils. The coal-fields and the mountain limestone, the latter so abundant near Clitheroe, make amends. The organic remains found in the mountain limestone almost invariably have their forms preserved perfectly as regards clearness and sharpness of outline. The history of this rock begins in that of primeval sea; the quantity of remains which it entombs is beyond the power of fancy to conceive, large masses owing their existence to the myriads, once alive, of a single species of creature. A third characteristic is that, notwithstanding the general hardness, the surface wears away under the influence of the carbonic acid brought down by the rain, so that the fossils become liberated, and may often be gathered up as easily as shells from the wet wrinkles of the sands. Access to the mountain limestone is thus peculiarly favourable to the pursuits of the student who makes researches into the history of the life of the globe on which we dwell. How much can be done towards it was shown forty or fifty years ago by the Preston apothecary, William Gilbertson, whose collection—transferred after his death to the British Museum—was pronounced by Professor Phillips in the Geology of Yorkshire at that moment "unrivalled." Gilbertson's specimens were chiefly collected in the small district of Bolland, upon Longridge, where also at considerable heights marine shells of the same species as those which lie upon our existing shores may be found, showing that the elevation of the land has taken place since their first appearance upon the face of the earth.

The quarries near Clitheroe and Chatburn supply specimens quite as abundantly as those of Longridge. Innumerable terebratulæ, the beautiful broad-hinged and deeply-striated spirifers, and the euomphalos, reward a very slight amount of labour. Here, too, are countless specimens of the petrified relics of the lovely creatures called, from their resemblance to an expanded lily-blossom and its long peduncle, the crinoidea, a race now nearly extinct. A very curious circumstance connected with these at Clitheroe is that of some of the species, as of the Platycrinus triacontadactylos, or the "thirty-rayed," there are myriads of fossilised heads but no bodies. The presumed explanation of this singular fact is, that at the time when the creatures were in the quiet enjoyment of their innocent lives, great floods swept the shores upon which they were seated, breaking off, washing away, and piling up the tender and flowerlike upper portions, just as at the present day the petals of the pear-tree exposed to the tempest are torn down and heaped like a snowdrift by the wayside, the pillar-like stems remaining fast to the ground. There is no need to conjecture where the bodies of the creatures may be. At Castleton, in Derbyshire, where the encrinital limestone is also well exhibited, there are innumerable specimens of these, and few or no examples of heads. The bodies of other species are plentiful at Clitheroe, where the actinocrinus is also extremely abundant, and may be detected, like the generality of these beautiful fossils, in nearly every one of the great flat stones set up edgeways in place of stiles between the fields that lie adjacent to the quarries.

The organic remains found in the coal strata rival those of the mountain limestone both in abundance and exquisite lineaments. In some parts there are incalculable quantities of relics of fossil fishes, scales of fishes, and shells resembling mussels. The glory of these wonderful subterranean museums consists, however, in the infinite numbers and the inexpressible beauty of the impressions of fern-leaves, and of fragments of the stems—well known under the names of calamites, sigillaria, and lepidodendra—of the great plants which in the pre-Adamite times composed the woods and groves. In some of the mines—the Robin Hood, for instance, at Clifton, five miles from Manchester—the roof declares, in its flattened sculptures, the ancient existence hereabouts of a vast forest of these plants. At Dixonfold, close by, when the railway was in course of construction, there were found the lower portions of the fossilised trunks of half a dozen noble trees, one of the stone pillars eleven feet high, with a circumference at the base of over fifteen feet, and at the top, where the trunk was snapped when the tree was destroyed, of more than seven feet. These marvellous Dixonfold relics have been carefully preserved by roofing over, and are shown to any one passing that way who cares to inquire for them. Beneath the coal which lies in the plane of the roots, enclosed in nodules of clay, there are countless lepidostrobi, the fossilised fruits, it is supposed, of one or other of the coal-strata trees. Two miles beyond, at Halliwell, they occur in equal profusion; and here, too, unflattened trunks occur, by the miners aptly designated "fossil reeds." Leaves of palms are also met with. The locality which in wealth of this class of fossils excels all others in South Lancashire would appear to be Peel Delph. In it are found calamites varying from the thickness of a straw to a diameter of two or three feet, and as round as when swayed by the wind of untold ages ago. The markings upon the lepidodendra are as clear as the impress of an engraver's seal. In another part there is a stratum of some four feet in depth, consisting apparently of nothing besides the fossil fruits called trigonocarpa and the sandy material in which they are lodged. With these curious triangular nuts, no stems, or leaves, or plant-remains of any description have as yet been found associated. All that can be said of them is that they resemble the fruits of the many-sided Japanese tree called the salisburia.

At Peel Delph again a stratum of argillaceous shale, five or six feet in thickness, contains innumerable impressions of the primeval ferns, the dark tint thrown forward most elegantly by the yellow of the surface upon which they repose. The neighbourhood of Bolton in general is rich in fossil ferns, though Ashton-under-Lyne claims perhaps an equal place, and in diversity of species is possibly superior.

Taken from:

LANCASHIRE - BRIEF HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE NOTES BY LEO H. GRINDON

Further reading and sources of information

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lancashire, by Leo H. (Leo Hartley) Grindon

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40584/40584-h/40584-h.htm

William Gilbertson Blue Plaque on Open Plaques

https://openplaques.org/plaques/72508

Will this blue plaque survive planned development? By Peter Smith - Preston History

https://www.facebook.com/groups/historyofpreston/permalink/457045190245195/

Societe Geologique de France Membership Certificate - AbeBooks Inc.

https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Societe-Geologique-France-Membership-Certificate-Geological/31164876033/bd

First find your fossils - The Geological Society