Dr Benjamin Heath

Benjamin was born in Exeter in 1739 the eldest of 13 children. His father, also Dr Benjamin Heath (1703-1766), was the Town Clerk of Exeter and an avid and well-known collector of rare books. Although originally destined for the Bar, Benjamin Snr inherited a vast fortune of £30,000 and launched on a grand tour of Europe. During this tour he met his future wife, Rose Marie Michelet, the daughter of a Geneva merchant and of Huguenot stock. She was just 14 when they married, he was 28. She bore him 7 sons and 6 daughters and lived to the grand age of 92.

Their eldest son, our Benjamin, was educated at Eton and in 1759 went to Cambridge, becoming a Fellow of King’s College 3 years later. At about the same time he become assistant Master at Eton until his election in 1771 as Headmaster of Harrow, a post he held for 14 years. After leaving Harrow he retired, and lived chiefly in Walkern. King’s College had presented him with the Advowson of the Rectory at Walkern in 1781. He also held the living at Farnham Buckinghamshire, presented to him by Eton College in about 1807 – the two livings provided an income of about £2000 a year.

He never married but looked after his sisters at various times and his mother lived with him until her death in 1808. Two nieces, Henrietta and Elizabeth the twin daughters of his brother John, were born in Walkern in 1798.

Upon the death of his father, Benjamin inherited most of the Heath book collection, to which he made considerable additions. In fact he spent most of his life collecting rare editions, and set about building a library at the Old Rectory in Walkern especially to house them.

He built the Walkern library in the style adopted by Sir Thomas Bodley (of Bodleian Library fame, and also an Exeter man) as a T-shaped room, 71 feet in length with a traverse of 50 feet, 15 feet in width and about 12 feet in height. His nephew, Rev Henry Drury (sister Louise’s son) described it as forming “a very handsome gallery, the whole being as full of books as it could hold”. Dibdin in his Bibliographical Decameron wrote:

“Here lived and here revelled the bibliomaniacal scholar… Here he entertained and caressed his friends with Alduses* in the forenoon and with a cheerful glass toward evening: hospitable, temperate, kind-hearted, with a well-furnished mind and purse, and with a larder and cellar which might have supplied materials for a new edition of Pynson’s “Royal boke of Cookery and Kervinge”**. Dr Heath was anxious that his mansion should be the residence for all that was distinguished for talent and respectable in character.”

[* Books by a celebrated 16th century family of Venetian printers]
[** Kervinge = carving. Pynson’s “Royal boke of Cookery and Kervinge was published around 1500]

It seems that in his later years, old age and infirmity overtook him and although his eyesight remained sharp: “…he grew comparatively indifferent to those tomes in which formerly his pride and his pleasure consisted…as his residence was but a rectory he thought it best to anticipate all trouble upon his decease respecting the disposal of his library, and resolved upon sending his ‘dear bokes’ to town.”

He did offer to sell the collection to King’s College Cambridge for a fixed sum, and they did decline in the mistaken view that they would obtain it as a bequest. In the end he was persuaded to sell a good part of the collection to the booksellers Messrs Cuthell and Martin for £6000, under a verbal agreement that they wouldn’t sell it in his lifetime This agreement was broken when they instructed the auctioneer Mr Jeffery of 11 Pall Mall to auction the books. The sale started on Thursday the 5th of April 1810, continuing for 12 days, and resumed on Wednesday May 2nd for 19 days.

The title page of the sale catalogue described the collection as containing “rare, useful and valuable publications in every department of literature, from the first invention of printing to the present time, all of which are in the most perfect condition.” Dibdin, who attended the sale, wrote in his book Bibliomania:

“Dr Heath is reported to have been the owner of this truly select and sumptuous classical library… Never did the Bibliomaniacs eye alight upon ‘sweeter copies’ – as the phrase is – and never did the bibliomaniacal barometer rise higher than at the sale. The most marked phrensy characterized it”

In all the sale consisted of 4786 lots, which realised a total of £8899.

Heath actually retained a large proportion of his collection, especially the history and divinity books, plus all of those with margin notes made by his father. The “Bodlean-T” library-room at Walkern rectory, however, was transformed into a dining room – a parallelogram of about 40 feet in length, Benjamin Heath died at the rectory in Walkern on 31 May 1817 aged 78, and his burial took place at St Leonard’s, Exeter. His nephew, Henry Drury, who was chief mourner at the funeral, considered that he had been “among the best men living. Learned, affable, high-spirited, and charitable to a degree which nobody could believe who had not witnessed it.”