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Government Contractors: The Role of London’s Merchant

Community, 1750 -1815.

My paper which is basically in three parts, set in the timeframe and context of the Sustaining

the Empire project, will firstly consider the considerable contribution of 18th century London

merchants in providing finance and shipping for war. I will speak about London shipping

networks and financial entrepreneurs who were critical for the success of Britain’s ambitions

for a British Empire, identifying just one or two of a relatively small group of influential men

and their networks who provided such services to the state. In my conclusion I will sum up

and then give my opinion as to the true value of the GMI team’s victualling project and

suggest some areas which could offer potential for future research.

SLIDE1:

Quote:

“All modern wars are a contention of purse”, Henry Dundas to William Pitt at the

outset of the Revolutionary Wars with France.

Studies on merchants such as those by S.R. Cope on Walter Boyd, David Hancock on the

Richard Oswald ‘circle’ and Herbert Kaplan and Niall Ferguson on the Rothschild’s have

produced some invaluable insights into the international world of the British government loan

contractor. One must also not forget the impressive doctoral thesis of Anthony Twist on John

Julius Angerstein, a founder of Lloyds’s, which provides us with some useful insights into the

‘book’s’ of loan subscribers kept by these men in their capacity as loan ‘fixers’ for the British

government.

SLIDE 2: Sir Laurence Dundas

More recently Dr. Gordon Bannerman has enlightened us further with his study of the

Military contractor Sir Laurence Dundas. Other important government loan subscribers such

as Sir Francis Baring, whose loan providing activities which have not as yet been fully

explored must not however be forgotten for their financial dealings with eighteenth century

State borrowing requirements .

With perhaps the exception of Anthony Twist’s study I personally feel what has not been

fully explored are the connections between these men of finance and London’s relatively

small but important localised shipping community, then mostly based in the London maritime

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suburb of Wapping, close to the City. One which as the Sustaining the Empire project has

now shown was of immense importance in keeping Britain’s navy supplied and fully

provisioned both at home and at sea.

It is my aim today to briefly look at one or two of the perhaps less well-known merchant

networks; that of Sir William Curtis, Peter Thellusson, Abraham Robarts; and another

perhaps better known individual, David Ricardo, one who is not always considered in the

context of loan provider, to illustrate some of their involvement in providing finance for what

John Brewer identified and described in his important book the Sinews of Power, as the

‘fiscal military state’. All the men I shall speak of were men of some distinction, but perhaps

less well-known for their part in government loan contracting and importantly their

connections to East London’s merchant shipping networks. By speaking of these merchant

networks and providers of state finance I hope to be able to illustrate just how important

public financing really was and remind us all that wars are not won at sea. But battles to

control sea routes which can provide the necessary logistical and strategic support for land

forces and their success in war relied heavily upon the efficiency of the navy and the

merchant fleet’s joint services co-operation was.

SLIDE 3: Henry Dundas quote.

John Brewer comments that the ‘fiscal-military state’, came about through the centralization

of government administration and the rise of the civil service. Indeed it was the ‘melding’

together of the private and public sectors that resulted in a dramatic increase in ‘professional’

civil servants whose relationships and co-operation with the private sector providing services

for the State. Admiralty departments such as the Transport Department provided additional

hired shipping from the private merchant sector, particularly at times of war. Another

example that springs to mind was the Thames shipbuilders that built ships for the Royal Navy

under private contract in the Thames Yards.

The long period of war with revolutionary France and then with Napoleon (1793–1802,

1803–15) generated unprecedented government borrowing, both to pay for the British armed

forces and to subsidize Britain's continental allies.

Here I feel that is necessary to place government finances into the context of this period.

Perhaps the simplest way of doing this is to give you just one or two facts which will

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hopefully explain why government loan contractors were crucial to British politics at this

time.

SLIDE 4: Ferguson quotes

SLIDE 5:

SLIDE 6:

So who were these men who helped British government fund war?

SLIDE 7: John Julius Angerstein

Anthony Twist enlightens us much on Loan Subscribers and comments that: ‘The chief

significance of John Julius Angerstein's notebook is that it gives details of his subscribers

More than 250 names are included, many of whom formed a loyal core and appeared on four

or even all five of the lists.. The bulk of the subscribers were businessmen, either those who

were simply merchants, insurance brokers and the like, or those with wider responsibilities

such as directorships. There were stockbrokers and bankers, bankers, acting no doubt for their

clients as well as themselves, and there were other subscribers, some being less obvious ones

with whom Angerstein probably had a personal, rather than a purely business, relationship’.

So let’s know take a closer look at some of these merchants with close links to shipping

circles in East London (Wapping).

SLIDE 8: Sir William Curtis

Sir William Curtis (1752-1829), first baronet, City Alderman and M.P. of Wapping, had

continued on with the successful family business founded by his father Joseph centred on the

manufacture and supply of ‘sea-biscuits’ for the navy.

Norman Gash in his DNB entry informs us that ‘Curtis's popularity in Wapping led, in 1783,

to his membership of the Drapers' Company, and subsequently to his election as alderman for

Tower ward’. After making some ‘successful ventures in the Greenland whale fishery, he

established the bank known as Robarts, Curtis, Were & Co. He served both as Sheriff (1788–

9) and Lord Mayor (1795–6). During the French wars he commanded the 9th regiment of

London Volunteers and was later president of the Honourable Artillery Company’. Among

his civic duties, he was ‘Director of the West and East India Dock companies and President

of Christ's Hospital’. ‘Curtis was prominent as a supporter both of Pitt's financial and war

policies and of those of his successor, Addington, by whom he was rewarded with a

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baronetcy in 1802’. Gash also comments that ‘Curtis tenaciously defended the privileges of

the corporation of London and the interests of the mercantile community’, which was perhaps

important for his association with the East London (Wapping) shipping sub-contractor’s

Camden, Calvert & King.

SLIDE 9: WAPPING MAP

The Curtis family owned a number of local businesses, commercial properties and

warehouses some of which were leased from Anthony Calvert and his associates in the firm

Camden, Calvert & King, which were mostly used for the ‘core’ business of victualling the

ships, and dockyards of the Royal Navy. In some way this partly explains why Curtis had

connections with this group, especially in respect of the large amounts of sugar used in the

brewing and baking processes he was engaged in, plus the large quantities of rum required for

the navy, some of which he was required to supply as a major government provisioning

contractor, which this group could provide through their West India shipping expertise.

SLIDE 10: WAPPING SUGAR REFINERIES

Sir William’s brother, EICo Captain and later ship-owner George Curtis, was a member of

Trinity House, and Captain of one of the Trinity House Volunteer ‘Blockships’ which were

used during the French Revolutionary War as a Civil Defence measure for guarding London

across the Thames. Anthony Calvert and Thomas King, (who were both members of the

Trinity House fraternity also commanded Thames Blockships). Sir William Curtis the first

baronet (1752-1829), also acted as a banker and financial ‘fixer’ for the Pitt Administration,

was a Freemason, and member of the Dundee Arms Freemasonry Lodge in Wapping, as was

his other brother and business partner Timothy.

SLIDE 11: Peter Isaac Thellusson

Peter Isaac Thellusson (1761-1808) was the eldest son of the merchant Peter Thellusson

(d.1797), a scion of a Swiss-Huguenot banking house who had become a British subject in

1763 and quickly prospered as a merchant, agent and owner of plantations in Grenada and

Montserrat. Peter Isaac was educated at Harrow School, was a director of the Bank of

England (1787-1806) and sat in parliament for a number of boroughs from 1795 until 1806,

when he was ennobled as Baron Rendlesham in the peerage of Ireland (Thorne, 1986, V, pp.

362-364).

SLIDE 12: Bromley Estate of Peter Thellusson

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His wife was the daughter of John Cornwall who was a Russia merchant, banker and an

initiator of the Marine Society and loan subscriptions. ADD Stephen Wood citation.

SLIDE 13: Isaac Thellusson

Peter’s father, Isaac Thellusson was one of the foremost financiers in France. He was also a

merchant and the chief supplier of grain in France from the 1730s, operating a vast

international victualling network, buying in England, Ireland, America, Germany, Holland,

Italy, and Russia, with contacts and agents in all of the major commercial centres.

Isaac was a business partner in various other ventures, including the Nantes slave trade,

through his relationship with the Huguenot family Michel. Thellusson was also a friend of the

Fromaget family, who were sometimes Directors of the French Indies Company, and another

family variously involved in the slave trade. The connection with the French Indies Company

is significant, and one that was continued by the Thellussons in England through their

merchant associations, with the group Camden, Calvert & King, who held somewhat of a

privileged position in some respects to the British East India Company (Thomas Morton,

Secretary of the EICo was a nephew of Anthony Calvert).

With Peter Isaac Thellusson, Peter’s son, becoming an MP and Director of the Bank of

England (Source: 1788 Lowndes 1789) it afforded excellent connections and continuing

access to government departments, potential new naval contracts, and possibly valuable

‘inside’ information for the group after the death of Thellusson senior1.

Both Peter Thellusson senior and Peter Isaac Thellusson became partners in various sugar

refinery businesses in the London area. Although this may well have come about through

their continuing contact with the London Huguenot community, it may too have resulted

from their important connection with George Lear, a Director of the New Fire Office, already

a co-partner of William & John Camden (of Camden, Calvert & King) sugar refiners, a

family long established in this field, thereby cementing a business relationship which

encompassed plantation owners (Thellusson and later Thomas King), sugar refining

1 The Thellusson’s were very much part of the banking ‘establishment’, and in this context and I would venture

to suggest that the Trinity House membership of the 18th century was perhaps more instrumental than we realize in arranging and meeting government policy demands for shipping and finance through their members networks

as it was often to their own advantage. For example Thellusson and Camden, Calvert & King had plantation

interests in the West Indies in Montserrat and St Domingo and the slave revolution and British foreign policy

decisions in the Caribbean did affect their business interests.

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(Thellusson and William & John Camden via George Lear), and shipping (Anthony Calvert

& Thomas King) through their joint enterprises. This particular group were very closely

connected to Sir William Curtis of Wapping and Southgate, Lord Mayor, Alderman, MP.

When looking at Thellusson’s merchant associations in London, one must also take into

consideration that Sir William Curtis, MP, was acting as a banker and financial ‘fixer’ for the

Pitt Administration and was involved in arranging loans for Grenada . Thellusson would

almost certainly have been involved this too, considering his personal interest there. It is not

known at this time if any of the Thellusson family were Freemasons as was Curtis. But

merchants were the facilitators of the British state, and perhaps Thellusson and his associates

should be viewed in the context of their times, acting in symbiotic way with the state, by

providing essential public services and finance, but at the same time operating very much as

entrepreneurs when new opportunities in an expanding global maritime empire presented

themselves.

SLIDE 14: BRODSWORTH HOUSE

An example of how closely the private and public sector worked together can be gathered

from the appreciation shown to naval officers for gallantry through private sector charitable

subscriptions. Here is just one example:

A meeting was held at the Royal Exchange in the City of London on 7th June 1797 and well-

attended by ‘Merchants, Ship-Owners, Insurers, and other Inhabitants, of London, concerned

in Commerce and Navigation’. Resolutions were endorsed by some of the most powerful

merchants and financiers of the City of London. Of the original signatories to the resolutions

of 7th June 1797 forty-nine were Members of Parliament at the time, three were Aldermen of

the City of London and 17 two of the Aldermen were also MPs; of the forty-nine, nine

(Angerstein, Aubert, Cotton, Curtis, Hibbert, Manning, Thornton, Vaughan and Wigram)

merit entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. During the life of the

committee, new members joined periodically but the committee’s Minute Book shows that

real power was vested in six individuals comprising a ‘Committee of Treasury empowered to

draw for money’, which included the Cutis associate Thomas King, of Camden, Calvert &

King. ‘Bank of England records suggest that on occasion Angerstein was part of the Robarts

Curtis partnership’, (Page 164 Twist Angerstein Thesis).

SLIDE 15: CALVERT & KING

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SLIDE 16: CALVERT & KING

SLIDE 17: CC&K’s BUSINESS INTERESTS.

Camden, Calvert & King, London were slave-traders and merchants, with whom Peter Isaac

Thellusson and Alderman William Curtis had close connections. One of the partners, Thomas

King like Baring and Angerstein, King was a member of the Masonic Blackheath Golf Club.

His firm is estimated to have provided one-fifth of the slave-ships that were based in London

and had the contract for the transportation of convicts to Australia in the Second Fleet of

1790 and the Third Fleet of 1791’. Stephen Wood Citation.

SLIDE 18: WAPPING DOCKYARD

Wapping, London, at this time was the centre for maritime merchant activity centred on the

provisioning of the Royal Navy. It was also well situated for maintaining close contact with

other Thellusson family interests in the City of London, just a short distance away. Based

here too were the sugar refineries that Thellusson was a partner in, and close by were the

wharfs were most of the sugar was unloaded from his partners ships. It was an ideal location

in many ways, allowing close contact with both city folk and the ethnic communities, both of

which resided here at the time.

The Thellusson family owed several commercial properties in this area. With their business

interests covering diverse areas including victualling, sugar refining, shipping, and latterly

banking and insurance. Professor Joseph Inikori has recently suggested in his book (Africans

and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Economic Development,

Rochester, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002) that London’s marine insurance

market grew exponentially in response to the shipping demands of the West India trade.

SLIDE 19: TRINITY HOUSE

Both Captain’s Anthony Calvert and Thomas King were Elder Brethren of the Trinity House,

an important maritime institution responsible for coastal navigation aids and traffic along the

river Thames, where the Rt. Hon. William Pitt was Master. Henry Dundas, Treasurer of the

Navy, was another of the senior members. In fact the thirty-one members who made up this

committee represented the most prominent merchants and politicians of the day. Here too was

a strong East India Company presence.

SLIDE 20: EAST INDIA SHIPS

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William Devaynes, Deputy Chairman of the East India Co, another of Huguenot extraction,

(and a fellow Director of the London Merchants Trading to Africa Committee with Calvert),

and Thomas Morton, East India Company Secretary, nephew and business partner of

Anthony Calvert, provided Peter Thellusson senior and his son Peter Isaac, access to many

valuable personal local contacts. Devaynes also appears in Kent’s London Directory for 1779

listed as a partner in Crofts, Devaynes, Roberts & Dawes, Bankers and Financial Brokers

of 39, Pall Mall, London. Abraham Roberts (Robarts) was a partner of Sir William Curtis.

SLIDE 21: EAST INDIA HOUSE

SLIDE 22: ABRAHAM WILDEY ROBARTS

Abraham Robarts was a Banker and an East India Company director and partner of Curtis,

who incidentally also had West India interests. Another member of the Robarts family was

Abraham Wildey Robarts (died 1858), Esq., Writer for the EICo for seven years at Canton

from 1794, a member of the NZCo. He married Charlotte Anne Wilkinson and inherited the

banking business in 1816. (See Christie, non-elite MPs.) Robarts was in India at a time when

Sir Wm Curtis was sending regular ships to China2. He joined his father's bank in 1801. And

was a partner in Watney Combe & Reid3.

SLIDE 23: ARARON GOLDSMID

Jewish merchants formed a distinct group in the City of London, and Jewish investors in

British stocks in Amsterdam tended to deal with Jewish correspondents in London. But

British Jews had for many years been involved in the raising of Government loans: and

Sampson Gideon, who was of Portuguese Jewish extraction, was the leading loan contractor

of the 1740s and 1750s, and had such influence that he was able to secure a baronetcy for his

son aged thirteen, in I759's. Later the Goldsmid’s and David Ricardo were Angerstein's rivals

in loan contracting {as half a century before Gideon had been the rival of the van Necks and 2 Calvert & Co were operating ‘country ships’ from Indian ports. The firm certainly had the necessary contacts

on the sub-continent. They were already trading in China, shipping furs from Nootka to be sold on at Canton, through their contact Abraham Wildey Robarts, the son of William Curtis’s partner Abraham Robarts, a ‘writer’

there. Also their association with the Curtis family would have most certainly required them to ship tea on

behalf of Curtis and his associates, Alderman George Macaulay being one of them. Interestingly, before May

1787, Macaulay had chartered the Lady Penrhyn from Curtis to be sent on a Nootka Sound voyage after she had

first landed convicts at Port Jackson, (later to become Sydney). 3 ‘He had been for many years at the head of one of the oldest and most respectable banking firms in the

kingdom, and held a high position for integrity and sound judgment in the financial world, while, in private life

he was universally esteemed by those who knew him. In several former Parliaments he represented the borough

of Maidstone, to which he was first introduced in the year 1818, when he was returned at the head of the poll’.

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the Muilman’s) and as Anthony Twist informs us ‘there was a handful of Jewish names in

Angerstein's 1812-15 subscription lists, though the amounts allocated were small’.

SLIDE 24: NATHAN ROTHSCHILD

Niall Ferguson argues that Rothschild’s ‘rise to prominence came from three principal

factors; an absence of competition,, a close association with John Charles Herries who was

appointed Commissary-in-Chief in October 1811 and an ability to move money across

borders thanks to his brothers on the Continent’. An essential factor during times of war.

Although Anthony Twist’s Angerstein thesis cites that ‘Angerstein seems certain to have

made more money out of Waterloo than Rothschild’4.

Abraham Goldsmid was a financier and philanthropist who, as an associate of the British

Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, provided primary financial support to British

military campaigns against France during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-9). With his

brother Benjamin Goldsmid he set up as a financial broker in 1777. They negotiated several

important government loans, breaking a monopoly on public loans enjoyed by England's

leading banking firms. The brothers eventually became the largest loan contractors of their

day. Opposition of British bankers to a proposed £14,000,000 Goldsmid loan to the

government, followed by a lapse of the firm's solvency, resulted in the collapse of the firm

and Goldsmid’s suicide.

SLIDE 25: EAST INDIA SHIPS

Before continuing I would like to make a brief mention the marriage connections of the

Robarts, Thellusson, Lear & Curtis circles because all these were interlinked and in turn were

connected to the Camden, Calvert & King’s, shipping business and their EICo partners. I

mention this in the context of Jewish merchant network because Benjamin Goldsmid married

Jessie, the daughter of Israel Salomons, a wealthy East India merchant, who brought a dowry

of £100,000. The Goldsmid’s would have been well known to David Ricardo, another

prominent member of the Bevis Marks Synagogue and the Mocatta’s (Goldsmid’s bullion

4 Niall Ferguson commenting on Nathan Rothschild has this to say: ‘Historians have never adequately explained

how an obscure Jewish merchant banker - who only a few years before had been a smuggler, and a few years

before that a minor textile exporter - was to become the principal conduit of money from the British government

to the continental battlefields’.

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dealing partners) who were also closely identified with London's Jewish community and the

Portuguese synagogue at Bevis Marks.

SLIDE 26: DAVID RICARDO

Much has been written about the famous Economist David Ricardo, so I will focus entirely

on his loan providing activities which will be illustrated in a few moments via a SLIDE

illustration. But suffice to say that Ricardo with his partners was successful in obtaining the

Loan of 1811, and from that date he was contractor for every Loan that was negotiated until

the end of the war with France.

During the Napoleonic Wars the Stock Exchange played a dominant role in the financing of

Government expenditure. The normal method was for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to

invite competitive bids from would-be contractors. The number of competitors for a Loan

was inevitably limited by the difficulty of forming a list of substantial subscribers, and by the

necessity for the contractors to be able to satisfy the Minister of their own financial standing.

In the eighteenth century, before the system of competitive bidding had been introduced, the

Loans had been raised directly from the public by subscription. This system lent itself to

abuse; for the interval between subscription and allotment made it possible for the friends of

the Minister to take advantage of the situation. Thus, when a Loan was issued in 1778 by this

method, there was much delay in allotment, meanwhile the Funds fell, the new Loan went to

a discount and the public received all that they had applied for. When, however, in 1781 a

new Loan went to a premium, it was divided with regard to political influence and those who

had suffered from the previous Loan had no opportunity of making good their loss.2 When

subsequently the competitive system was introduced, the contractors of the Loan were mainly

bankers and merchants. The members of the Stock Exchange sought to retrieve their position

by organising a list of their own to compete for the Loan, but seem at first to have met with

little success. The Table illustrated in the following SLIDE shows the Curtis group’s

involvement in Loans from 1805 to 1820 shown in BOLD type.

Conclusion:

What allowed Britain to succeed in the ‘long eighteenth century’, a time of almost constant

war for this country, was the symbiotic relationship created by merchants between public and

private sectors, and the tax revenue provided by these men through their endeavours in

international trade. Moreover it was there exception ability to be able to ‘tap into’ and utilize

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their extensive networks of ethnic, religious, and social contacts that not only assisted their

own personal entrepreneurial ambitions, but resulted in Britain’s unique 18th century

position, to create a powerful available system of credit and public state funding, maintained

and re-enforced by its maritime supremacy. Much of this was bought about through

eighteenth century entrepreneurs such as Curtis, Robarts, Ricardo et al who were literally

creating new markets and breaking new ground in the global world of international trade and

finance.

The value of the Sustaining the Empire project for me has been its achievement in compiling

for the first time a database of valuable information on the victualling of the British navy both

at home and at sea. Roger’s team are to be congratulated on attempting to unravel the

complex research material that has been required to gain an appreciation of the relationship

between the private and public sectors and the multi-faceted world of the 18th century

merchant. The project has in my opinion also opened up the way for continuing research and

further collaboration to be undertaken by other scholars working in this field. Here name’s

that immediately spring to mind are those of Janet Macdonald and her recent study of the

Victualling Office and Gareth Cole on the British Ordnance Board, which both cover

interrelated aspects of naval provisioning. Both studies will help complete the bigger picture

as to how Britain obtained its maritime supremacy through the effective marriage of private

and public sectors.

The GMI project has also highlighted how challenging and difficult it can be to effectively

piece together the complex operations of merchants operating in the private sector owing to

the lack of archive material and satisfactory records, often fragmentary at best.

My personal hope is that one lasting legacy of the Sustaining the Empire project will be for it

to act as an impetus for this data to be used and added to in creative ways to advance our

knowledge further still. A suggestion would be to design and utilize the planned project

NMM data website to receive further information and outside contributions (perhaps via an

initial dedicated and separate webpage) which could process and receive information from

other researchers, to help broaden the scope and add ‘more meat to the bones’ on the

contractors that Roger and his team have already identified. Another suggestion would be for

the GMI/NMM team to place a list of ‘names’ on such a webpage page that it has not been

able to investigate more full, in the hope that this will stimulate a positive response from

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those sections of the public interested in supporting and maintaining this country’s maritime

heritage.

Such an impetus would I feel would encourage both local and family historians to perhaps

share quality information for future academic and maritime history purposes. It has been my

personal experience that often such sources hold the key for a better all round understanding.

Only by compiling more databases and making them freely available can we begin to hope to

understand the complex relationships of private and public sectors in maritime history more

fully. Perhaps we should therefore all embrace digital technology and promote the scanning

of more primary sources for future educational purposes. I think that is important to keep

Britain’s important maritime heritage alive by advocating the compilation of a future UK

‘master’ shipping based database (one that would detail ship-owners, ships, voyages and

merchants) freely accessible to the international community of scholars and serious

researcher alike. The Sustaining the Empire project has in my opinion not only shown us the

way but also that far more work has to be done in this field. It is now our responsibility as

historians to take up these challenges and find ways to stimulate younger generations to

become interested in the diverse multi-disciplined world that maritime history research can

provide and add to the legacy that the GMI Project team has already given us.

SLIDE 27: FINIS