Arthur Bryant Triggs

AB Triggs was born and educated in England before coming to Sydney at the age of nineteen. Having joined the Bank of New South Wales, he found himself at the Yass branch as an accountant in late 1888. Settling in the town, in 1896 he bought his first eight thousand wethers. The next year, having sold them at a profit, he resigned from the bank. From that time on, Triggs bought and leased properties from Bourke to Kiandra, establishing a pattern of running between 250 000 and 500 000 sheep as well as some cattle at any one time. Triggs masterminded his operations from Yass until 1915, and it became a truism that when Triggs prospered, so did Yass. In 1915 Triggs moved his office to Sydney. That year, through the combination of drought and war, he went bankrupt, but by 1921 he had paid off all his creditors with interest, cementing his reputation for professional integrity.

Triggs travelled frequently to London, and there he indulged his serious passions for prints and drawings, old books and manuscripts and coins. Walter Spencer, a London book dealer who catered to wealthy international customers such as the pickle magnate Henry Heinz, stated in his memoir Forty Years in My Bookshop that he had known ‘no more enthusiastic collector than Mr Triggs.’ According to Spencer, Triggs’s great ambition was to establish a museum at Yass of his material relating to Charles Dickens. Although his dream of a museum of Dickensiana came to naught, Triggs was a generous contributor to the development of Yass’s more conventional public institutions. After he died at his home, Linton, in Yass in 1936 a distinctive gateway, funded by public subscription, was erected in his honour at the entrance to Victoria Park. In 1945, the contents of Linton were auctioned the catalogue of which indicates the dazzling scope of Triggs’s collections. He had drawings by Watteau, Dürer, Rubens, Vandyk, Rembrandt, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tiepolo, Velasquez, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable and Whistler. He had letters and documents signed by Henry viii, Edward vi, Mary i, Elizabeth I and later English monarchs; by Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and various French kings. He had items signed by Cromwell, Charles Darwin and James Cook as well as Charles Dickens; he had Nelson’s penultimate signature, on a note to Henry Blackwood written on the night before the Battle of Trafalgar.