The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.49 No.2 | September 2022

Member’s article

Sir Isaac Wilson MD FRS (1757-1844)

I was born at Portsmouth in 1940 and prominent amongst my earliest memories was the London Boot Repairing Factory Ltd at North End. The firm had been established by my maternal grandparents, Thomas and Ada Stoneham, and I soon learnt that Thomas, who had sadly died in 1930, was part of a dynasty that had been pursuing the gentle craft for over a century. My mother, Vera Atwood née Stoneham, told me many stories about them, the most notable of which was that we were originally descended from an eminent Royal Navy doctor who had been in charge of Haslar Royal Naval Hospital. In 1948 work demands took my parents and me away from Hampshire and it was not until some 60 years later that I set

out to investigate this intriguing but unlikely figure. Isaac Wilson and Eliza Stoneham The task was undertaken with some scepticism. Was it likely, I asked, that a line of 19th century tradesmen shoemakers would really have stemmed from a famous professional medical man? Yet my cynical incredulity was confounded when I got the 1846 marriage certificate of my great great grandfather, John Isaac STONEHAM . This revealed that he was a “Cordwainer” and

Royal Hospital, Haslar: 1799. View southwards from Gosport across Haslar Lake

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