Grieve family correspondence

Letters from Charles Kean to Thomas Grieve senior, 1850s; marriage certificates for Thomas Grieve senior to Livinia Ann Bailey, 1827, and to Elizabeth Goatley, 1835; marriage certificate of Thomas Walford Grieve to Hester Chalk, 1884; photograph of Elizabeth Grieve; passport of Thomas Walford Grieve, 1870; bills regarding the grave of Thomas Walford Grieve and the burial of Graham Walford Grieve, 1920.

Thomas Grieve (1799-1882), the elder son of John Henderson Grieve, was trained by his father and worked with him at Covent Garden and elsewhere from 1817. From 1846 to 1859, he worked at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and at Her Majesty's Theatre, but is perhaps most notable for his leading role he played among the team of scene-painters who supplied Charles Keen's regime at the Princess' Theatre, Oxford Street, from 1850 to 1859, particularly in the Shakespearean revivals of that period. Thomas Grieve also painted famous exhibition hall panoramas with William Telbin and others, including The Overland Mail (to India) from 1852, which is perhaps his most renowned. He died in Lambeth in April 1882.

Thomas Walford Grieve, the son of Thomas Grieve and the grandson of John Henderson Grieve, was born in 1841 and trained and worked with his father from around 1862. He worked at Covent Garden with him and also at the Lyceum. He never achieved the acclaim received by his father or his older contemporary William Roxby Beverley, and died (apparently of cancer) after a long illness which for some years previously had forced him to give up work.

Open for research.

A pdf of the hard copy of an item-level catalogue is attached:
- http://archives.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/resources/MS1165.pdf.

Compiled by Stacey Anderson (09/02/22).

The Grieve theatre designs are also held at Senate House Library, reference MS1007.