06/06/2024
For history buffs - I was watching a History Hit programme with Dan Snow as he ventured to various landmark antiquities around England. During his journey he visited, and described, the vast accumulated wealth and ghastly Victorian opulence of the Brodsworth Hall estate in Yorkshire and the number of overworked and under paid servants required to maintain the new money ‘nobility’ in the accustomed grandeur of their expectations. As Dan waded through magnificent stately rooms we learnt that the self important and pompous man responsible for this edifice and huge wealth had inherited the estate and the fortune through direct descent of the Swiss banker Peter Thellusson. I recognised that name immediately as it was he who had had Plaistow Lodge mansion (Quernmore) built in Bromley as his first substantial London residence in 1797. Up until this programme aired all I knew of Peter Thelluson was that he had had an interestingly lucky and adventurous life in banking. However it appears much of the less palatable activities of his life had been tactfully airbrushed from history by his descendants. He had been largely portrayed as making his fortune as a conservatively philanthropic banker, mostly renowned for the Thelluson act which he devised as a will to keep his wealth within his yet unborn family. The shocking and uncomfortable truth Dan Snow highlighted is that much of the wealth Peter Thelluson and his descendants accumulated derived predominantly from the profits of ownership, loans and investments gained from the sugar and to***co plantations of the slave trade industry.
I have to disagree with the statement of his own will in which Peter Thelluson cites his wealth as being ‘earned in industry’ and ‘honestly’. This newly uncovered information certainly changes one’s perspective on the character of Peter Thelluson and the ability, power and influence he had in shaping the lives of so many unfortunate souls at home and around the globe.
For anyone interested I’ve pasted an article found on Wikipedia below and there is more information about Brodsworth Hall, Plaistow Lodge and Peter Thelluson available via English Heritage and the Bromley Local Studies library.
THE THELLUSSONS’ WEALTH
It is difficult to determine how much of Peter Thellusson’s wealth was derived from the transatlantic slave economy, but it was certainly a substantial part.
His involvement was wide-ranging. He lent money to slave traders and plantation owners; insured slaving ships and their cargoes; traded in beads used as currency in West Africa; and traded in goods such as sugar, coffee, to***co and rum produced by enslaved workers on plantations in the Caribbean. In 1765 he invested with partners in the ship the Lottery, which transported enslaved Africans to Grenada, and in 1768 became temporary part-owner of several other slaving ships and their trafficked human cargoes, as payment for debt from slave traders who had borrowed from him. He also had a financial stake in several plantations in Grenada and Montserrat, acquired when creditors defaulted on their loans.
From the 1780s Thellusson consolidated his interest in sugar, the most valuable Caribbean commodity, by investing in several sugar refineries in London. His refinery investments alone were valued at £49,000 in 1796 (over £5 million in today’s money).[6]
The enslavement of Africans financially benefited British society on many levels, and Brodsworth is not unusual in having strong connections with the slave trade. Other Yorkshire houses such as Harewood also benefited from income generated through the slave economy.
Peter Thellusson’s own conclusion on his accumulated wealth, cited in his will of 1796, was that he had ‘earned the Fortune which I now possess with Industry and Honesty’.[7]
