Richard ‘Rum’ Atkinson 1739–1785

‘Rum’ Atkinson’s hugely successful career won him a great deal of fame and money in the second half of the 18th century – but the legacy he left behind was tainted

Born in 1739, the third son of a Westmorland tanner, Richard ‘Rum’ Atkinson rose from obscurity to become one of the most famous figures in the City of London. An entrepreneurial and logistical genius, ‘Rum’ gained his big break in 1775 when he was the junior partner of a merchant house with shipping and other major interests in Jamaica, and the prime minister Lord

North awarded him the first of many contracts to provision the British troops fighting the American rebels.

He never wed – the society beauty Lady Anne Lindsay having turned down his marriage proposal – but may have had a secret family with an enslaved woman called Betty.

The last few years of his life were consumed by politics, and he played a key role in the

coup that led to the installation of William Pitt the Younger as prime minister and himself as an MP. ‘Rum’ Atkinson died in Brighton in 1785, aged 46, probably from tuberculosis, leaving a fortune estimated at £300,000. His legacy would cast a long shadow over subsequent generations of the Atkinson family. The two Jamaican sugar estates which he had intended would generate (slave-produced) income for his many heirs failed to do so, and only the lawyers emerged as winners in the decades of litigation that ensued. ‘Rum’ Atkinson’s legacy continues to be a troubling one, for as both a director of the East India Company and a powerful West India merchant, he was accomplice to grave injustices that still reverberate to this day.