Ii2 
A few thoughts must be given to these stories. First an estate 
like Badminton would hardly require a carpenter from Wells, such 
mechanics being usually regularly employed. Then a carpenter 
to be sent out on day work would be at least twenty-one years old, 
hardly a time to throw up an already acquired trade skill to begin 
a new and difficult study. Further if he came from Wells, a 
place where he cou'd every day hear 
Godless boys God’s glory squall— 
neither singing nor the organ could have been new to him. The 
writer of the first notice evidently writing without considering his 
words, from some tradition but without personal or local know- 
ledge, seems to have had no idea of the relative positions of Bath, 
Wells and Badminton. Yet had he known enough to have 
avoided confusing the father, who was a carpenter, with the son 
Thomas who never was so, there is, as will be seen, just a sub- 
stratum of truth in the story. Another form of the story, modern, 
but not new, says that Chilcot noticed a little boy of musical 
taste and took him as a pupil. Te came from Wells, &c.* From 
the omission of a few necessary words this reads as if little boys 
easily wandered alone from Wells to Bath to be casually noticed 
and picked up. 
Whilst the above accounts make the birthplace Wells, another 
makes it Gloucester,t and yet another, a very recent one, gives 
the rather wide guess that he came from Yorkshire. He had at 
least in the last county plenty of room for a start. This statement 
should not have been written, it simply helps to confound con- 
fusion. If the writer did not know he could not tell and should 
have acknowledged that position or have said nothing. The last 
account makes him born at Bath in 1725, but repeats that he 
became a pupil of Chilcot, &c.t 
* « Witzgerald’s Lives of the Sheridans,” 1886. 
+ Zinsley’s Magazine, Vol. xxxix. p. 134, 1886. 
+ © Biographical Dict. of Musicians.” By Thos. Baker, 1900. 
