Remarkable Residents 2: John Merriman

To get a room in the Charterhouse in the 19th century it certainly helped to have the right political connections.  One who did was John Merriman.
He was born in Durham on 17 August 1804.  Nothing is known of his early years, but by 1836 he was in Hull and in partnership with a man whose surname was Hansell*.  Together they set up a business at 13 Silver St as high class drapers.  The Charterhouse owned much of Silver St, but this may well be a coincidence.

Silver St, Hull

Hull Packet, April 1837

It is well worth googling the unfamiliar fabrics, and the accessories are fascinating.  They were clearly aiming at a fairly affluent clientele.  In 1846 John married Hannah and they appear to have lived above the shop.

Ten years later fashions had changed and furs were added to the stock.  This is from April 1847.

But by 1853 they had decided to get out of the drapery business.

It's interesting that the firm to which they sold their stock, Edwin Davis & Co, were still in business in Hull up to the 1960s.

Merriman & Hansell now went into ship-owning and insurance (the two often went together in this period), with offices at 11 Parliament St.  By 1876 Hansell was out of the picture and John had an office at 33 Pemberton St. in East Hull - a distinct step down from Parliament St.  But by then the couple were living at 6 Hornsea Parade, Holderness Rd.

We know of two ships owned by the partnership.  One was the barque Guiding Star, built in Sunderland in 1853 and registered to Merriman & Hansell from 1865 to 1872.  This was abandoned while carrying coal in 1872.  The second was the Kathleen, a German-built barque which was six years old when John acquired it in 1870.  This was detained after an inspection in 1875 in Hull and found to be rotten and unseaworthy.  It was broken up.  It appears that ship-owning had not been a success.

After leaving the drapery business John also entered into civic life.  In 1858 he was elected as a commissioner in the Humber Pilot office.  In 1860 he was a church warden at St Peter's, Drypool.  And in August 1861 he became a City Councillor.

It's interesting that he beat a Reckitt.  By 1866 he was a member of the Board of Health.

By 1881 John and Hannah were living in Argyle Terrace; we are uncertain which of two possible streets this was, but neither suggest that the elderly couple had much money, and they may well have been in poor health.  On 15 January 1885 they were awarded a room in the Charterhouse but died within a month of each other in October and November of the same year.

* This may have been Thomas T Hansell, who was a Hull merchant but this is a guess.