Throughout the years, many notable people have either been born in Rickmansworth, or have made the town their home.
From Henry VIII’s first wife to the man who designed the RMS Titanic, here is a look at some of the famous faces Rickmansworth has seen over the decades.
Catherine of Aragon
The first wife of the Tudor tyrant King Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon spent 34 years of her life married to the monarch before he divorced her in favour of her maid of honour, Anne Boleyn.
Following the split, which saw the King create the Church of England in order for the divorce to go ahead, Catherine spent one year at the More, a 16th-century palace in Rickmansworth which had been owned by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, another of Henry’s former allies who had fallen out of favour in the wake of the divorce.
Catherine would eventually move to several other palaces throughout the country before dying in 1536 at the age of 50. Even her fiercest enemy, Thomas Cromwell, stated of her: “If not for her sex, she could have defied all the heroes of history.”
Thomas Andrews
A former resident of Moneyhill House, Mr Andrews was the managing director of Irish shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff. It was while working in this position that he designed three new ocean liners for the White Star Line, including the RMS Titanic.
Having gone on the ship’s doomed maiden voyage, he was one of the first to figure out that it was going to sink upon surveying the damage from its collision with an iceberg. He spent the next hour or so warning people of the danger, before he himself went down with the ship, at the age of 39. He is remembered as a hero of the maritime disaster.
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, known to many by her pen name George Eliot, was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. The author of popular works such as Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Evans resided for a while in the Elms House in 1875, which is now part of St Joan of Arc Catholic School.
Praised both in her time and our own, her works focused on social outsiders, countryside settings and political issues. Middlemarch remains a particularly beloved work, with international critics declaring it the greatest British novel of all time in 2015.
Val Doonican
An Irish crooner who found great success in the UK, Val lived in The Drive in Rickmansworth for a while during his illustrious career.
With five successive top 10 albums in the 1960s, he was also the star of The Val Doonican Show, which ran on BBC television from 1965 to 1986 and at its height saw 20 million viewers tuning in. He later moved to Beaconsfield, and passed away in a nursing home in Buckinghamshire in 2015.
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