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THE MORRISON ARCHIVES1
CAROLINE DAKERS
Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts
London
The first stage of cataloguing the archives of the nineteenth century merchant James Morrison has been completed by John D’Arcy (formerly of the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre) for Alastair, 3rd Baron Margadale. When the database is finished it will be possible to access a very important private collection of relevance to historians of nineteenth and twentieth century business and economics, collecting, parliament, agriculture and land management. The archives have been organised by D’Arcy in 300 large boxes each containing up to 10 kilograms of papers. The catalogue has 3,000 entries, some of which cover hundreds of letters or papers. When completed the database will have thousands of subjects. When the archives are accessible (probably mid-2012) visits will probably be organised via John D’Arcy and the Fonthill Estate and there will be a
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small charge.
Part of the Morrison archive in the original nineteenth century tin boxes (Caroline
Dakers)
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I have been using the archives for a study of the Morrisons, A genius for
money, business, art and the Morrisons, published by Yale University Press
in November 2011. Here, for those who are unfamiliar with the remarkable family, I introduce James Morrison and his achievements, describe how such an extensive collection was formed, and highlight some of the most important parts. Without the support of the late James Morrison, Baron Margadale and his son Alastair (3rd Baron Margadale), neither this research nor the catalogue compiled by D’Arcy, would have been possible.
Introduction
Some of the finest qualities of human nature are intimately related to the right use of money, such as generosity, honesty, justice, and self-sacrifice; as well as the practical virtues of economy and
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providence.
James Morrison (1789-1857) is one of the least known but most extraordinary of nineteenth century merchant millionaires. The son of a village innkeeper, he was sent to London as apprentice to a haberdasher. There, he proved to be a genius at making money, dubbed the Napoleon of shopkeepers, creating a business with a turnover in 1830 of nearly £2 million, the equivalent of £200 million today. He invested almost £1 million (c.£100 million) in North American railways, he was involved in global trade from Canton to Valparaiso, and acquired land, houses and works of art to rival the grandest of aristocrats. He turned down the opportunity to buy a title (he considered it a poor investment) so remained a commoner; the richest commoner in the whole of the nineteenth century. Like a character in Samuel Smiles’s Victorian best-seller Self-Help, Morrison rose to the top ‘by his own unaided efforts and through selfimprovement, self-help, abstinence, thrift, hard work, acquisitive drive,
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innovative flair, and grasp of market opportunities’. On the way he created
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hundreds of jobs and ‘flooded the world’ with his goods. He relished the
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intellectual pleasure in what he called ‘the science of business’. At his death, his wife and all of his surviving children were left fortunes, four of his sons also inherited their own country estates. While none of Morrison’s children were able to match the formidable range of his achievements, three of his sons did add substantially to the family wealth. The eldest, Charles (1817-1909), though a shy reclusive bachelor, was a brilliant financier, investing heavily in South America. By his death in 1909 he had turned his inheritance of £1 million into £14 million to become the richest commoner of his own generation. Alfred (1821-97), the second son, was a
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connoisseur. Dubbed the ‘Victorian Maecenas’, he commissioned the architect-designer Owen Jones and a team of talented craftsmen to turn his town and country houses into palaces of art where he displayed the greatest private collections of Imperial Chinese porcelain and autograph letters of the day. Walter (1836-1921) also made a small fortune in Argentina, giving much of it away to hospitals, schools, churches, universities and museums, including £50,000 to the Bodleian Library in 1920.
The archive, its content, how it started, how it survived.
The archive is extensive, in part through the approach adopted by James Morrison. Though he refused to ‘invest’ in a baronetcy, he was sufficiently proud of his achievements to begin ordering his papers in preparation for writing his memoirs: black tin trunks stuffed with correspondence, deeds, ledgers, invoices and bills, share certificates, inventories and diaries. He paid a clerk to copy all the correspondence relating to his take-over of his father-in-law’s haberdashery business in Fore Street, Cripplegate, London, and kept his own list of art purchases, including details of how much was paid at which sale. He also kept detailed lists, every six months, of his assets, so that he (and we) could track the steady accumulation of his fortune. Letters from architects, his land agents, parliamentary colleagues, partners in Fore Street, merchants and bankers in London and the United States, were preserved alphabetically, year by year. There are also documents relating to his purchase of estates which eventually totalled 100,000 acres: including Fonthill Park in Wiltshire; Basildon Park in Berkshire; Hole Park in Kent; Malham in Yorkshire; the island of Islay; and London properties, including his own homes in Balham and Harley Street.
However there is not much personal data. There are virtually no letters between him and his wife Mary Ann or their children. Mary Ann’s presence was essential to Morrison’s success. Already well-read when they married, she was his travelling companion, she provided constant encouragement and support, security and stability, she was his ‘helpmeet’ in all aspects of his life. But it was probably she, together with Charles, who inherited his father’s papers, who destroyed personal material. Only odd exceptions have survived, accidentally or deliberately misplaced; Morrison’s declaration of love for Mary Ann is such an example, tucked into a Fore Street account book. It may have been Charles who organised the removal of his father’s papers from their London town house (57 Harley Street) and country house (Basildon Park) to the family’s estate office in the City of London.
When Charles himself decided what of his own to preserve he left details
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of his extensive investments but, frustratingly, little evidence as to how or when he built up his portfolio. Personal material was, once again, rigorously pruned so that his private life remains an enigma. Scrapbooks in which he recorded his favourite reading do reveal how much he enjoyed studying the lives of his contemporary millionaires.
Alfred, as the second son, inherited the Fonthill Park estate. Following his death in 1897, it appears more than likely his widow Mabel then proceeded to destroy both personal letters and much material relating to the collections and interior decorations of Fonthill House and 16 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1. For historians of collecting, architecture and interior design, the loss of details concerning Owen Jones’ extraordinary commissions is to be regretted. However, historians of land management and estates fare better as Mabel ignored more mundane estate papers, including material dating from William Beckford’s ownership of the whole estate. They remained safe and dry in the Old Creamery at Berwick St Leonard for the best part of a hundred years.
James and Mary Ann Morrison had only nine grand-children, six girls and three boys. The two who bore the Morrison name, Hugh and Archie, not only benefited from the collecting addiction of their father Alfred but also acquired most of their grandfather’s remaining properties via their bachelor uncles Charles and Walter. Hugh, as the eldest, got Fonthill, then Uncle Charles left him Islay. Archie inherited Basildon Park from Uncle Charles and Malham from Uncle Walter.
Neither Hugh nor Archie were remotely interested in making money, either through trade or finance; quite the opposite. Both chose to spend their fortunes with a recklessness that would have horrified their grandfather. Hugh built a new house on the Fonthill estate, Little Ridge, designed by Detmar Blow. He also engaged Blow to build a house in Belgravia and to add an enormous wing to Islay House. There was a fire at the old Fonthill House (which was demolished in 1921) which may explain the loss of almost all records tracing Blow’s commissions. A visitor’s book does survive, and, rather oddly, letters between Hugh and his wife Mary describing the embarrassing, sometimes painful medical treatment they received over a decade for their apparent infertility. There is no sense Hugh inherited his grandfather’s interest in the preservation of family papers, but at least he chose to leave well alone.
Archie’s career began well enough. He survived the Sudan campaign and the Boer War with distinction, and in 1900 was elected the Conservative Unionist MP for Wilton, Wiltshire, and married an aristocrat; it looked as
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though he would make Basildon Park his family home. He lost his Wilton seat in 1906, and became MP for Nottingham East in 1910. However, his political campaign in Nottingham was marred by accusations of bribery (he resigned in 1912), he was divorced by his wife and named as the corespondent in the divorce of his mistress. He thought of settling in Kenya, purchasing agricultural land and providing £60,000 towards the creation of the Muthaiga Club, outside Nairobi. However he returned to active service at the outbreak of war in 1914, and Basildon Park was turned into a military hospital. He was married again in 1920, inherited, then almost immediately sold Malham, sold the Basildon estate and all of its contents apart from the paintings, and was again divorced. He finally established himself in London with his third wife, thirty years his junior. When he died in 1934 his estate was valued at a mere £5,459.
His archive apparently disappeared. No accounts appear to survive charting his reckless spending, no personal material relating to his complicated love-life apart from a few despairing letters kept in the Morrison archives. There are fragments from descendants, newspaper cuttings and a few letters. There are also some estate papers relating to Basildon in the Berkshire County Record Office, while the Royal Institute of British Architects has the designs by Edwin Lutyens for work at Basildon (only a few cottages were built). But James Morrison’s collection of painting, which Archie had inherited, passed safely to descendants at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire.
It was Hugh and Mary’s only son, John Granville (the fertility
‘treatment’ worked), who had to deal with the next threat to the family properties, and of course the archives. Born in 1906 he continued to live a lavish lifestyle at Fonthill and on Islay until well after the Second World War. He served as an MP for Salisbury and chairman of the Conservative 1922 Committee, confirming the family’s political shift towards the right, and was rewarded with a hereditary peerage by Sir Alec Douglas-Home in 1964. However, the economic climate was no longer supportive of the life of a landed gentleman: agricultural rents were falling, but labour costs and taxes were rising. Blow’s house in Belgravia had been sold before the Second World War (it is now the Caledonian Club). The nadir was reached at the end of the 1960s with ‘rampant inflation, falling production, collapsing land prices, rising unemployment; tax on investment income at 98 per cent; a sliding stock market; Capital Gains Tax, Capital Transfer Tax, Value Added Tax, and to crown everything the threat of a Wealth
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Tax.’ The decision was taken to sell much of the contents of Little Ridge
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(the largest sale was in 1971) and, to the horror of architectural historians and conservationists, in 1972, to demolish Blow’s ‘masterpiece of the Arts and Crafts tradition’, building a much more convenient neo-Georgian box within the footprint. John Granville also sold Islay House and part of the Scottish estate and closed down the family’s estate office in London. However, he did not get rid of the archives. All the tin boxes that had accumulated in London were brought down to Fonthill, to remain dry and secure in the Old Kitchen, the surviving service wing of Little Ridge, conveniently positioned to receive his own parliamentary and business papers before and at his death in 1996.
Early interest in the Morrisons
At the same time that Little Ridge was being demolished, a descendant Richard Gatty persuaded John Granville to lend him some of the tin boxes and to write a biography of James Morrison. Portrait of a merchant prince was published in 1976, but only 200 copies were privately printed so it never reached a wide readership. However, Gatty carefully listed the contents of his boxes, opening up rolls of letters, deciding for his purposes what was important or of no interest. He discarded nothing, returning the boxes to Fonthill where his notes proved invaluable to both myself and D’Arcy.
Otherwise access was limited. However a few historians took up Gatty’s biography and focused on the business activities of James Morrison and his son Charles, relying in most cases on material in the public domain. The business papers of Morrison, Cryder & Co., were at the Guildhall, London (now in the London Metropolitan Archive). The archives of University College London have the papers of the River Plate Trust and Agency Company Ltd. There is some material at the Bank of England, and also in the Barclays Bank PLC Archive (Gurney & Co). The activities of James and Charles as merchant bankers and their involvement with the Bank of the United States (BUS) in the 1830s and 1840s has been examined by
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Stanley Chapman. Charles A. Jones focused on the second generation, and the effect in Argentina of the investments of Charles and Walter, supported
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by the family solicitors, Ashurst Morris and Crisp. Martin Daunton has highlighted the significance of their textile warehouse:
The greatest fortune in the textile trades was not made by Richard Arkwright in the production of yarn; it was accumulated by James Morrison … whose textile warehouse in the City of London supplied the inland trade with its handkerchiefs, ribbons, braids,
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and fabrics.’
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W.D. Rubinstein, who has undertaken detailed research into wealth, was the first to place the Morrisons firmly within the ‘rich list’, proposing James as the richest commoner of the nineteenth century and one of the 250 richest
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Britons ever.
Highlights of the Morrison archives
Textiles
David Kynaston described James Morrison as simply ‘the kingpin’ of
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textiles. He joined the house of Joseph Todd & Co. at 105 Fore Street, Cripplegate, London, in 1809. Turnover was £18,000 but within three years Morrison had increased it to over £40,000, in part through increasing the quantity and range of stock but also by adopting small profits and quick returns. He was made a partner and in 1814 married Todd’s daughter Mary Ann. The business was renamed Todd, Morrison & Co., and by 1816 the turnover was close to £500,000. Morrison became sole owner in 1824 and by 1830 turnover reached almost £2 million. From this base he was able to embark on the purchase of estates, to invest in North American railways, and to become a moneylender to the aristocracy.
In 1941 the warehouses in Fore Street, Cripplegate, and Milton Street
(formerly Grub Street), EC2 took a direct hit the first night of the Blitz, however the Morrison and Todd papers had been removed to the family’s estate office in 1863 (and hence to Fonthill) when Morrison, Dillon & Co. was transformed into a limited company, the Fore Street Warehouse Company. The collection is remarkable. It consists of a series of warehouse books, listing wholesale purchases and sales by sections of the warehouse, debtors and staff salaries covering the period 1809-63. They include warehouse ledgers, a record of customers 1826-7, an example of a warehouse day book 1813-5, and partnership accounts and agreements. In some of the books individual biographies of staff are included: William Whiteley, the founder of Whiteley’s Department Store, was briefly an employee. There are also details of Morrison’s loans from Samuel Gurney. The turnover can be analysed in detail, month by month, year by year. In 1824, for example, the warehouse sold more than £390,000 of cut ribbons and trimmings. Morrison also had copied into a document the lengthy correspondence covering his takeover of the business from his father-in-law and his dispute with his brother-in-law John Edward Todd.
Properties
James Morrison acquired a very large number of properties, from artisans’
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dwellings and shops to country mansions, he also commissioned warehouses in Fore Street and Milton Street from his favourite architect John Papworth. As his wealth increased he moved his family from the City of London across the Thames to Balham, then to grander houses in more prestigious locations, all the time adding to his portfolio. He was constantly being offered properties to buy, so the archive has a considerable number of brochures, descriptions of estates for sale. But the papers relating to the period when he owned Fonthill Park, Basildon Park, and 57 Harley Street are the most complete and interesting.
They include letters from James Morrison’s agent at Fonthill, James
Combes (with a few from Combes’ son), covering the period 1832-51. These overlap with letters from Papworth, Morrison’s architect and adviser on interiors and collecting (1820-46), and the architect David Brandon (1846-54), who both worked on Fonthill and Basildon. Morrison’s diaries survive for 1833, 1834, 1835, 1836, 1837, 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841 and 1843, a memo book for 1848-55 and a diary kept by his secretary for 1855. They are supplemented by correspondence from the agents Rawlence and Squarey from 1854 to Morrison’s death in 1857, from Morrison’s life-long solicitor and friend W.H. Ashurst and, W. Graham, his solicitor in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. There are also packets of estate materials, rent audits and letters relating to farms on the Basildon estate, the Cholsey estate and Rolvenden in Kent.
Merchant Banking: the ‘American venture’
Banks served the Americans as a lever ... to cover the country with roads, canals, factories ... with everything that goes to make up a
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civilization.
Morrison’s ‘American venture’ began straightforwardly enough as he bought North American stock, in Pennsylvania, New Orleans, and New Jersey. However in 1836 he established a small merchant bank with an American banker John Cryder, called Morrison, Cryder & Co., trading in particular in tea from Canton and cotton from the southern states. They were also dealing in American state securities and found themselves caught up in the disastrous loss of confidence in the market which brought down a number of established Anglo-American houses in 1838. Morrison was forced to apply to the Bank of England for a loan of £325,000. He recovered but ended the relationship with Cryder. With a new company, Morrison, Sons & Co., he turned to another even riskier venture, the agency of the BUS in Philadelphia and signed an agreement in 1841 to provide
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credit of £700,000. When the bank collapsed shortly after, Morrison’s portfolio was valued at £1 million; Charles and Alfred spent the next couple of years in North America during the lengthy liquidation of the BUS trying to recover a small fortune in investments.
The ‘American venture’ is well documented in the archives with extensive correspondence back and forth across the Atlantic from bankers including George Peabody, Richard Alsop, Samuel Jaudon and W.S. Wetmore. Morrison’s diaries evidence his increasing alarm during the 1836-7 crisis – ‘news from US horrible’. The letters from his sons in North America total some quarter of a million words and are consistently of interest. They describe in detail their financial observations and actions, but also document the state of the nation before the Civil War. At Niagara Falls, Alfred stayed at the same hotel as Charles Dickens, who was taking the
tour which would result in both his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.
‘If he does [write a book]’ Alfred commented ‘it will be worth nothing as he can have seen nothing of the country or people.’
Parliament, free trade and railways
James Morrison was respected in Parliament as a ‘practising’ political economist and free-trader. His knowledge of textiles, railways and investment in North America was second-to-none. The archive reflects his interest in facts, and his constant thirst for information, so there are documents, for example, relating to trade with New South Wales and Leghorn, the manufacture of gloves, the state of the silk industry, Irish famine, drainage and the opium trade. The correspondence from business partners, parliamentary colleagues and political economists is extensive, including letters from Joseph Hume, Edwin Chadwick, Sir John Easthope, Sir John Bowring and Nassau Senior. Morrison’s personal involvement with Select Committees is represented, there are copies of his speeches on the regulation of railways, and material from his Parliamentary campaigns, both successful and unsuccessful, before and after Reform (Dover 1825, Marlow 1826 and 1830, St Ives 1830, Ipswich 1832-7, the Inverness Burghs 1840-4).
Collecting
James Morrison’s artistic taste was aristocratic and cosmopolitan: along with collectors such as King George IV and the Rothschilds, he shared a passion for luxury and decoration. He bought Old Masters but also paintings by his contemporaries including Constable and Turner. He kept a
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careful account of his purchases, an inventory of objects 1832-52, using his own diary entries. There are also letters from his dealers, in particular the colourful William Buchanan, who negotiated his purchase of the Harringay picture collection from the late Edward Gray in 1838. After his death, Morrison’s paintings, furniture and books at Basildon and Harley Street were valued by Christies and Farrers and the inventories are in the archive.
The documentation of Alfred’s collection is much more patchy, suffering from some reckless ‘weeding’, presumably by his widow. He did keep an aide memoire with the names and addresses of artists, architects, designers and dealers, also an inventory survives listing his most important pieces.
Travel and business combined
The most interesting documents in this section are James Morrison’s travel diary around England and Scotland for 1823; his letters to Fore Street from the continent during his Grand Tour 1826-7; the letters to James and Mary Ann Morrison, also the family’s merchant bank Morrison, Sons & Co, from Alfred and Charles in North America 1842-5.
Criss-crossing England and Scotland, Morrison was always on the lookout for new customers, and for evidence of the affluence of communities. He discovered in Margate, for example, ‘a very large class of money spending people’. In Liverpool he was impressed by the docks ‘very grand full of ships’ and the ‘Corporation very Rich & use their riches in docks, magnificent buildings & in markets – improving streets – private charities equally grand.’ He called on manufacturers and inspected their factories, mixing these business trips with visits to grand country houses, cathedrals and castles. In Europe he applied the same approach, combining sightseeing (he called it visiting lions) with business. His letters provided commercial information to be acted upon (in particular the trade in skins for gloves, also urging Fore Street to cash in on the death of the Duke of York) but he also included commentary on the state of Europe, its culture and politics.
The archive also contains one travel diary of Mary Ann Morrison, 1828; the travel diaries of James Morrison’s daughter Ellen in Europe 1859, 1860, 1861, 1868, 1871; the travel diaries of his son Allan in Europe 1869, 1870, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1879; and letters from his son George Morrison on his tour to Japan 1878.
