Author: Blewitt, Reginald James
Biography:
BLEWITT, Reginald James (1799-1878: ancestry.co.uk)
He was the second son of Major Edward Blewitt of Llanternam Abbey, Monmouthshire, and his wife Amelia Duberly. His parents were married at St. George the Martyr church, Queen Sq., London, on 21 May 1796, and he was baptised at St. Marylebone on 23 June 1799. His elder brother, Edward Francis, was born in Jan. 1798 but he was later declared insane and Reginald took charge of the estate when their father died in 1832; this led to a long and complicated legal case and Reginald became the legal owner only on his brother’s death in 1868. He entered Rugby School in 1811. On 30 Apr. 1821 he married Matilda Medex; they had one son, Alfred Francis. He practised as a solicitor and entered Lincoln’s Inn in about 1827 but was never called to the bar. In 1829 he established a liberal newspaper, the Monmouthshire Merlin. In 1837-52 he served as MP for the Monmouthshire boroughs, voting on the liberal side in support of Lord Melbourne. He restored Llanthernam Abbey, a former Cistercian house, at great expense. He also owned the nearby ironworks at Cwambran and in 1847 he registered a patent for an improved method of creating malleable iron using air furnaces. The 1851 Census shows him living at Llanternam Abbey with his elder brother but Matilda is not recorded although she was still alive. On 11 Nov. 1876 he was admitted to The Priory, a lunatic asylum, where he died on 11 Sept. 1878. His poem, The Court of Chancery, was reprinted in 2006. (ancestry.co.uk 6 June 2023; Repertory of Patent Inventions [1847], 354; Law Times 1880; Rugby School Archives; GM 224 [1868], 543) SR