Colonel Augustus Horace Strongitharm
The picture is from bbc.co.uk and is in the Barrow Dock Museum collection. It was painted in 1902 by Frank Thomas Copnall.
3 March 2014
More is to be found about Colonel Strongitharm at The Dock Museum.
A well-known local dignitary, Col. Strongitharm is included in the WW1 graves because
‘he was one of the originators of the Volunteer movement in Barrow. He joined the Barrow Corps on December 23rd, 1871, and in 1878 he was placed in command of the Barrow detachment, and for many years took a keen interest in fostering that movement.’
Barrow News 13 Sept. 1919
His grave records that he was ‘Colonel 1st V.B.K.O.Royal Lancaster Reg. (1st Volunteer Battalion King’s Own R.L.R – the local regiment)’.
Part of the group that successfully developed Barrow in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Augustus Horace Strongitharm was born in Walsall, Staffs., in 1843. He came to Barrow in his 20s, with the firm of McLean and Stileman, who were building the docks and the Lakeside branch of the Furness Railway. He later became part of the civil and mining engineering firm of Wadham, Turner and Strongitharm, and later joined the Yarlside Mining Company.
He was elected to the Town Council in 1875 as a Conservative, being Mayor from 1889 – 1892, being first proposed by Sir James Ramsden himself. He left the Council to become engineer for the Corporation Duddon Waterworks about 1900. He was at various times a Director of the Pulp Works, a pioneer of the salt industry on Walney, and a member of a mining syndicate trying to discover coal in the Greengate area.
His wife was the daughter of agent on the Duke of Devonshire’s Holker Hall estate, Miss E. Drewry. They had four sons. They lived at Prior’s Lea on Abbey Road, where there is now a small housing estate.
