Richard Taylor was the second son of John Taylor, F.R.S., who was one of the original Vice-Presidents of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society at its foundation in 1833. An account of the latter and of his ancestry has already appeared in the Report of the Society for 1915, so it is unnecessary to repeat what is said there. Richard Taylor’s mother was Anne Rowe, daughter of Daniel Pringle of Iveden, near Honiton. He was born at Holwell, near Tavistock, on March 4th, 1810. He and his elder brother, John, were both educated at Charterhouse School and at the Manchester College at York, and, after studying practical mining in the mines under their father’s management in England, they went to Germany in 1828 and visited the principal mines in the Rhineland and the Hartz Mountains, at Freiberg in Saxony, and in Hungary, South Austria and Bavaria. After his return from Germany Richard Taylor settled in Cornwall, where, under his father, he took the management of the Consolidated Mines, the United Mines, and others. He was also appointed mineral agent to the Duchy of Cornwall. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Cornwall in 1846, at the special request of the latter he acted as their guide, and personally conducted them over the Restormel Royal Iron Mines. He is mentioned in Leaves from My Diary in the Highlands, which contains an account of the Royal Tour in Cornwall. In it Queen Victoria says:—
“September 6th. We have on board with us, since we left [94] Falmouth, Mr. Taylor, mineral agent to the Duchy of Cornwall, a very intelligent young man, married to a niece of Sir Charles Lemon’s.”
“September 8th. We visited the Restormel Mine belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. It is an iron mine, and you go in on a level. Albert and I got into one of the trucks, and were dragged in by miners, Mr. Taylor walking behind us. [Then follows a description of the mine at some length.] Mr. Taylor deserves the greatest credit for all the arrangements. He and his father are what are called ‘Adventurers’ of the mine.”
In 1851 Richard Taylor left Cornwall and went to London, where he became a partner with his father and brother in the firm of John Taylor and Sons, mining engineers. He took an active part in the various companies with which the firm was connected, and his greatest success was with the Pontgibaud Mining and Smelting Company in the south of France, of which he was engineer-in-chief at the time of his death. He rescued this company from a very precarious position and transformed it into a paying concern. He also had at large share in the formation of the Coueron Smelting Works and Rolling Mills on the Loire, which were later taken over by the Pontgibaud Company.
When the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society was founded in 1833. Richard Taylor was appointed first Honorary Secretary and he continued to hold that office, at first alone and later in conjunction with Lieut. J.S. Jago, R.N., Dr. H.C. Vigurs and others, for no less than thirty-seven years, resigning it in 1870. He does not appear to have contributed any papers, except his Presidential Addresses, to the Reports, and there is only one suggestion of his (that the mining interest of the county should be invited to furnish copies of plans, sections and underground workings, etc.) recorded in Mr. Wilson Fox’s Historical Synopsis of the Society. Indeed, his only literary effort appears to have been at very short [95] paper on ‘The Relative position of the Yellow and Vitreous Sulphurets of Copper in the Lode of Pembroke Mine’, printed in the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, Vol. VI., pp.99, 100. But the work of an Honorary Secretary is not of a sort which appears prominently under his own name, and he certainly took a very large part during those thirty-seven years in the organisation and active work of the Society, especially in matters connected with mining, for which he was very highly qualified.
He was elected a Vice-President in 1849 and President in 1877. He took an important part in the founding of the Miners’ Association of Cornwall, of which he was at one time President.
He died from an attack of bronchitis, after a few days’ illness, at his house, 6 Gledhow Gardens, Brompton, on December 28th, 1883, and was buried in the Brompton Cemetery.
