Randolph Caldecott - Early Life

Early Life

Caldecott was born at 150 Bridge Street (now No 16), Chester, where his father, John Caldecott, was a Chester accountant, twice married with 13 children. Caldecott was his third child by his first wife Mary Dinah (née Brookes). In 1848 the family moved to Challoner House, Crook Street and in 1860 to 23 Richmond Place at Boughton just outside Chester. He spent the last five years of his schooling at The King's School which, in those days, was in the cathedral precinct in the centre of the city. In his early childhood Caldecott drew and modelled, mostly animals, and he continued drawing for the rest of his life.

On leaving school at the age of fifteen, Caldecott went to work at the Whitchurch branch of the Whitchurch & Ellesmere Bank and took lodgings at Wirswall, a village near the town. In his spare time and when he was out visiting clients he was often to be seen walking and riding around the countryside; many of his later illustrations incorporate buildings and scenery of that part of Cheshire and Shropshire. His love of riding led him to take up hunting and his experiences in the hunting field and his love of animals bore fruit over the years in the masses of drawings and sketches of hunting scenes, many of them humorous. In the year that he left school, 1861, he first had a drawing published: it was a sketch of a disastrous fire at the Queens Railway Hotel in Chester and it appeared in the Illustrated London News together with his account of the blaze.