ABSTRACT
His name was George W. Childs.1 He was an American: from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was rich: a self-made millionaire, a newspaper proprietor and (if that’s not an oxymoron) a philanthropist. And on 17 October 1887, in the Jubilee year of the reign of Queen Victoria, he was responsible for a curious ceremony which took place in England, in Stratford-upon-Avon. It marked the formal opening of a facility which Mr Childs had recently donated to the town: a large, ornate drinking fountain. He had allowed himself to be persuaded that the provision of pure water for the people of Stratford, their horses, their sheep and their cattle would serve, not only as a ‘useful gift to both man and beast’, but also as a fitting monument to the genius of their fellow-citizen, William Shakespeare (Davis 1890: 5).
