Stonemason, the younger son of Charles Frederic Bridgman (1857–1930), stonemason and head of the family firm, C.F. Bridgman (formerly Parson’s), of Eastgate Wharf, Lewes. The firm, which has its origins in the eighteenth century, carried out general building and repair work, as well as erecting and maintaining tombstones in churchyards throughout East and West Sussex. Percival Bridgman was apprenticed to his father’s firm in 1899. In the 1901 census he gives his occupation as ‘engraver (stone)’, but by the 1921 census he is a ‘stonemason’, and in 1939 a ‘Master Mason’. In 1947, the sculptor John Skelton studied stone carving with him. Bridgman carved the Meridian Marker, unveiled in Chailey, East Sussex, on 10 October 1953.
Archival sources: Ancestry: (i) East Sussex … Church of England Births and Baptisms … Lewes St Michael 1844–1886, (ii) 1911 Census … Lewes All Saints, (iii) 1921 Census … Lewes, (iv) 1939 England and Wales Register … Lewes, (v) Civil Registration Death Index … 1954.
Bibliography: C. Bailey, ‘Obituary: John Skelton’, The Guardian (online edn), 3 December 1999; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, p. 43; South-East History Boards: ‘Lewes Stonemasons’.
Terry Cavanagh, February 2025