Captain Thomas Honywood
English archaeologist and photographer

Thomas Honywood (7 October 1819 – 5 October 1888) was an English archaeologist and photographer.
Biography
Honywood was born at Horsham on 7 October 1819, the son of Mary Anne Morth and John Honywood (1790–1866), a carpenter, builder and surveyor. He was Horsham's most eminent Victorian.
He is said to have brought photography to Horsham and invented a new photographic process for nature printing.
He drew detailed sketches of Horsham Gaol before it was pulled down.
He is credited with identifying the Mesolithic or middle Stone age period.
He discovered and preserved the Horsham Hoard of medieval pottery.
He was an entrepreneur who set up his own museum.
Honywood was Captain of the Horsham Volunteer Fire Brigade for which he received a handsome oil painting. This oil on canvas painting by British painter Robert Wallace Martin (1843–1923), painted in 1869, can be seen in the library of Horsham Museum in Horsham, West Sussex.
“Captain Thomas Honywood” enters the record as english archaeologist and photographer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Captain, Thomas and Honywood can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Captain Thomas Honywood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.