How the Crown Jewels Built Chippenham Town Hall

Philip Rundell, apparently, was a tyrannical miser with a violent temper, a thoroughly unpleasant man. So what has he to do with Queen Camilla, and with Chippenham town hall. Royalty must take precedence in this story. In July 2024 the Queen wore a crown, the Diamond Diadem, at the opening of Parliament. It had been a favourite of the late Queen, Elizabeth II, but it was made originally for George IV’s coronation in 1821. It had been created by a firm of jewellers, Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, whose principle, until he retired in 1823, was rag-to-riches goldsmith Philip Rundell. His company supplied gentry, nobility and royalty, and seems also to have made a killing by buying up at bargain prices the jewellery of the French aristocracy fleeing the revolution.

               When he died in 1827 Rundell left the bulk of his fortune, well over a million pounds (billions, perhaps, in modern equivalent) to his grand-nephew, Joseph Neeld, a young lawyer who had ‘taken care of him’ for the last 14 years. It is unclear what Neeld’s caretaking involved, since Rundell hardly needed financial support, and was apparently living with a female relative by whom he had two illegitimate sons. Be that as it may, Joseph Neeld became fabulously wealthy overnight, and invested some of his fortune in buying Chippenham burgages, so as to embark on a political career by becoming one of the town’s two MPs. In this he was successful, and he represented the borough in Parliament until his death in 1856, though he never spoke in the House and was hardly therefore a significant politician. As his country seat he purchased Grittleton House from a friend, and embarked on a troubled mish-mash of a rebuilding, overseen by two conflicting architects. His personal life, too, was less than successful. By marrying Lord Shaftesbury’s daughter in 1831 he hoped to enter the aristocracy, but the marriage lasted a few weeks, followed by years of acrimony. ‘Like everything else that he touched, it went wrong’, wrote his biographer, June Badeni, about Grittleton – but she might just as well have been referring to his marriage, which she dissected in salacious detail.

               And yet, in Chippenham he was regarded with deference verging on reverence. With the money he derived from Rundell he paid for the town hall and the cheese market, which regenerated the town’s marketing and trade generally, at a time, in the 1830s, of fundamental change. His munificence remains, for all to see, commemorated in the inscription above the town hall. The Neeld Hall is named after him, and his family remained prominent in local affairs for several generations. And at least Chippenham, unlike so many similar towns, may take comfort in knowing that its grand and civic buildings were built not on the slave trade – but on the crown jewels.

John Chandler