Edmund Sharpe - Other Interests

Other Interests

Throughout his life, Sharpe took an interest in sport, as an active participant and as an organiser. At Cambridge, he was a member of the Lady Margaret Boat Club, and coxed the college boat. Back in Lancaster, he took up archery, joined the John O'Gaunt Bowmen, played cricket and coxed. In June 1841 he helped to found the Lancaster Lunesdale Cricket Club and the Lancaster Rowing Club. Sharpe was also an accomplished musician, and a member of the committee that organised the Lancaster Choral Society's first concert in September 1836. The society thrived for a number of years, and for a time Sharpe was its conductor. By the beginning of 1837 he was a member of the Lancaster Literary, Scientific, and Natural History Society, giving a number of talks to the society, and eventually becoming a committee member. That same year he became the secretary and treasurer of the Lancaster Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts, and in April 1840 he joined the committee of Lancaster's Protestant Association. In 1842 he was part of a committee promoting congregational singing, and he gave an illustrated series of lectures on its history and merits. His love of music continued throughout his life, and included training choirs, composing hymn tunes, and manufacturing musical instruments similar to small harmoniums.

In early 1843 Sharpe bought Lancaster's Theatre Royal (now the Grand Theatre), the third-oldest extant provincial theatre in Britain, which had opened in 1782. He spent £680 (£60,000 as of 2013) on converting it into the Music Hall and Museum. It was the only place in Lancaster, other than the churches, able to accommodate 400 or more people, and so was used for a variety of purposes, including concerts, lectures, and religious meetings. In 1848 Sharpe founded the Lancaster Athenaeum, a private society for "the promotion of public entertainment and instruction", to which end it organised lectures on literary and scientific subjects, concerts and exhibitions. It held its meetings in the Music Hall, which was at one period renamed the Athenaeum. In 1852 Sharpe became the proprietor of the Phoenix Foundry on Germany Street, which among other things supplied cast iron pipes for the Lancaster waterworks, sewers and drains, and shells for the Crimean War.