Horatio Bland

Bland was born in about 1802 at Bonavista, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, Canada.[3][4] His parents were John (1760-1826) and Sarah Bland (1726-1836).[4] John Bland was born in Devon and had arrived in Newfoundland and married Sarah Bland by 1789.[5] He was probably a merchant’s agent, first becoming a magistrate and in 1809 he was appointed High Sheriff of Newfoundland.[5] He took a special interest in the welfare of the indigenous people, the Beothuk, particularly condemning fisherman and furriers for their treatment and alienation of the Beothuks.[5]

Bland left Newfoundland in about 1823, spending time in New York and Liverpool.[1][6] By 1838 he was in South America where he went into business with William Joseph Myers, a Liverpool merchant.[1] They set up a merchant house at the port of Valparaiso in Chile, trading as Myers, Bland and Company.[1] In the 1830s Bland was speculating on a new agricultural fertilizer, guano, the accumulated droppings of sea birds over many centuries.[1] In July 1839 through the Myers, Bland and Company he sent thirty bags of guano to Liverpool from Valparaiso on board the ship Heroine.[7]

In 1838 in Valparasio, Chile, Bland had a son Horatio Bland Guerra.[1] By the 1840s a wealthy Bland moved to England,[3] where on 3 August 1847 he married Emily Alicia Cherry (1826–1868),[8][1] the oldest daughter of the Rector of Burghfield Rev Henry Curtis Cherry[9] and his first wife Anne Alicia Cameron. The Bland's lived in a large Georgian house called Culverlands at Burghfield Hill.[1] Bland also owned adjoining land at Burghfield Common and in 1855 he bought Hartley Grange at Hartley Witney, Hampshire.[10]

Bland's wife Emily Bland died on a trip to Jerusalem in March 1868[11] where she is buried in the Protestant Cemetery.[1] Bland founded Mrs Bland’s School[12] at Burghfield Common in memory of his wife.[13] The school bell was a large Japanese temple bell dating to 1746[12] that Bland had collected on his travels. In 1953 it was given to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.[14]

Family scandal in the courts made the newspapers in 1850s.[15] Emily Bland’s father, Rev Henry Cherry[9] attempted kidnapping his second wife Emily Mary Sutherland.[16] She wanted to leave the marriage and applied to the court of Queen's bench to protect her, while Cherry applied in 1858 a suit for restitution of conjugal rights.[15][1]

In 1861 Bland commissioned the architect Walter Scott[17] of Liverpool to design a new red and blue brick gabled house with a slate roof on his land at Burghfield Common called Hillfields.[17] Hillfields was constructed at a cost of £2961.[17] Today it is the headquarters for Guide Dogs for the Blind.[17] He had a "detached Brick and Slated Building erected for a Museum" according to the 1892 Hillfields house sale catalogue.[18]

In 1874 Bland built a new museum in Burghfield for his growing museum collection, replacing the smaller museum building at Hillfields.[19] The eclectic collection and museum was described by Dr Joseph Stevens, the first curator of Reading Museum. It contained a stuffed lion, kangaroo and platypus, marine shells from Australia, Papua and Philippines, pottery from ancient Egypt, Greece and Peru, and weapons and implements from Africa and the Pacific.[19]

Bland died on 31 March 1876, aged 73,[20] and was buried at St Mary’s churchyard, Burghfield.[1] He gave Hillfields house to his nephew Thomas Bland Garland, another property to nephew Marcus Horatio Bland[21] and the residue of his estate to his son Horatio Bland Guerra.[1][20][22] Bland Garland offered the Bland Collection to Reading Corporation in 1877.[23] New museum galleries were built at Reading Town Hall[23] and the collection was permanently transferred to Reading Museum in September 1882.[24][19]