West Tilbury - Notable People

Notable People

• Emily Mary Osborn (1828–1925), or Osborne, was an English painter of the Victorian era. She was born in Essex, the eldest of nine children of a clergyman. She was educated at Dickinson's Academy in London. In 1851, at the age of seventeen, Osborn began showing her work in the annual Royal Academy exhibits, and continued to do so over a span of four decades (to 1893). She was best known for her pictures of children and her genre paintings, especially on themes of women in distress.
• Ernest Achey Loftus has claim to be the world’s most durable diarist, having kept a detailed journal, with brief periods of omission, over 91 years, between 1896 and 1987.
• Gervase of Tilbury. Born in the 1150s, author of the ‘Otia Imperialia’, a medieval work which enjoyed a wide currency in the later Middle Ages and was twice translated into French. Some thirty manuscripts of his writing survive, one of which (in the Vatican library), has corrections and additions in Gervase’s own hand. It was intended as a volume of instruction and entertainment for the Roman Emperor Otto IV (c.1182-1218), the son of Queen Matilda and grandson to Henry II of England.
• John Nevison also known as William Nevison, was one of Britain's most notorious highwaymen, a gentleman-rogue supposedly nicknamed Swift Nick by King Charles II after a renowned 200-mile (320 km) dash from Kent to York to establish an alibi for a robbery he had committed earlier that day. The story inspired William Harrison Ainsworth to include a modified version in his novel Rookwood, in which he attributed the feat to Dick Turpin.