Thomas Honywood

1819 – 1888

Captain Thomas Honywood was one of Horsham’s most well-known residents during the 19^th century. Some of his achievements include:

• He set up the town’s volunteer fire brigade which served Horsham until 1911
• He was an early photographer, producing an album of prints dating from 1851. Daguerreotypes, the first publicly available photographs were publicly announced in 1939, so in the 1850s photography was not widely practised.
• Honywood invented a photo-chemical printing technique which transferred images of natural objects onto various surfaces which he exhibited in 1885 at The International Inventions Exhibition in London. Honywood created his own museum of various artefacts and when his son sold off the contents of his museum, Horsham Museum Society acquired many examples of his nature prints which remain in the collection today.
• He was an amateur artist and made detailed sketches of Horsham’s County Gaol before its demolition in 1845.
• He had an interest in archaeology, arranging digs in Sussex. He discovered the ‘Horsham Hoard’ of medieval pottery in West Street.

Following Honywood’s death in 1888 his funeral service took place in Denne Road Chapel and a ‘very large concourse of people’ followed the coffin to its burial place   in the cemetery.