Thomas William Cubbon

Born on 15 December 1860, Thomas William Cubbon was the son of Thomas Cubbon, a Douglas flour and provision merchant and leading Island entrepreneur and his wife Charlotte of The Priory Douglas Isle of Man. He was educated at King Williams College Isle of Man before being articled to C O Ellison of Liverpool. By 1881 he was employed as an architectural draftsman in Birkenhead.

Thomas William Cubbon commenced on his own account at Birkenhead and established an extensive private practice over the following decades, providing designs for several schools, banks, public buildings and churches on the Isle of Man and in Cheshire and Lancashire. These included Park Road, Kewaigue and Castletown Board Schools, Port St Mary Wesleyan Church and the Douglas Abattoir. He became architect to School Boards of Birkenhead, Bootle, Newchurch, Douglas, Castletown, and to Corporations of Birkenhead and Hoylake. In 1885 Thomas Cubbon went into partnership with Alexander Bleakley, a fellow pupil, to form the Birkenhead and Douglas (Isle of Man) architectural firm of Bleakley & Cubbon. Within a few years their commission for the new Nobles Hospital & Dispensary, Douglas, Isle of Man was complete and in 1888 the partnership was dissolved.

Following the early and sudden death of the Manchester architect J Gibbons Sankey in December 1898, his practice was entirely assigned to the brothers John and Thomas W Cubbon, the latter an architect already in practice in Birkenhead. The Manchester practice was continued under the name of Sankey, Cubbon and Cubbon. Thomas W Cubbon continued to maintain his own office in Birkenhead and he would appear to have entered this partnership solely to provide his younger brother with initial management expertise and Sankey’s clients with some degree of reassurance.  The partnership was dissolved in 1901, after which John Cubbon worked alone under the style of Sankey and Cubbon.

Thomas William Cubbon died on 17 July 1942 at “The Bungalow,” Almere Ferry, near Rossett, Denbighshire. He was survived by his widow, Fanny Edith Cubbon whom he married in 1894 at Skipton.

Address
1894    Thomas W Cubbon, architect, 54 Hamilton Street, Birkenhead
1900    Thomas W Cubbon, architect, 54 Hamilton Street, Birkenhead (Gore L'pl & Birkenhead)

Residence
1894    37 Woodchurch Lane Prenton Birkenhead
1896    162 Church Road, Higher Tranmere
1900    Thomas W Cubbon, architect, 5 Highfield South, Rockferry