The Oratory

• The Oratory and St James's Cemetery
• The Greek Revival
• The architect, John Foster Jnr
• The architecture of the Oratory
• 'The Nicholson family'
• 'John Foster'
• 'Rev Ralph Nicholson and his wife Catherine'
• 'Henry Park'
• 'William Earle'
• 'John Gore'
• 'Dr William Stevenson'
• 'John Thomson'
• 'Agnes Elizabeth Jones'
• 'John Rhodes'
• 'William and George Hetherington'
• 'William Hammerton'
• 'William Ewart'
• 'Mrs Emily Robinson'
• 'William White'
• 'Rt Rev Thomas Penswick'
• 'Henry Faithwaite Leigh, George Leigh and Catherine Pulford'
• Further reading

Text taken from 'The Oratory', a guide to the building and its monuments, Joseph Sharples, 1991

'Rev Ralph Nicholson and his wife Catherine'

Sir Francis Chantrey

Accession number WAG9845

This plaque to the parents of William Nicholson was commissioned and executed at the same time as Chantrey’s larger Nicholson monument which stands nearby. It consists of a medallion with overlapping profile portraits of husband and wife, carved to appear as if suspended by a ribbon from the tablet bearing the inscription. Chantrey charged £1000 for carving the two Nicholson monuments, and a further £24 10s for transporting them to Liverpool and fixing them in place.

Ralph Nicholson owned lands at Chadkirk near Stockport, but he never lived there and passed much of his life at Didcot in Berkshire, where he was rector between 1768 and 1793. Shortly before his death he moved to Liverpool.

Catherine Nicholson was one of the ten children of Charles Roe of Macclesfield (1715-81), a prominent industrialist in the fields of silk spinning and copper smelting who developed strong links with Liverpool when he built a smelting plant by the dockside in 1767. Roe’s company also ran a Liverpool warehouse supplying metal trade goods to West African slavers.