FARMER, FATHER, FINANCIER
Robert Thomas Riley was born in Yorkshire, England, on July 1, 1851, the son of Lavinia Riley (née Bell) and Thomas Riley, a ship owner and publisher. After being educated in England, he immigrated to Canada in 1873 at the age of twenty-two and married Harriet Murgatroyd.
Riley first settled in Hamilton, where he established himself as a farmer. While there, he met the businessman William Eli Sanford, who hired him to help manage a vast wetland-drainage project in rural Manitoba.
In Sanford’s employ, Riley moved to Winnipeg with his growing family in 1881. A few years later, he became the chief manager of Sanford’s Westbourne Cattle Company, a ten-thousand-hectare ranch some 120 kilometres west of Winnipeg.
In 1891 Riley became one of the founding directors of the Great-West Life Assurance Company under the principal founder and managing director, Jeffrey Hall Brock. Riley served on the Great-West board of directors for more than fifty years before retiring in 1943.
In 1896 Riley started the first of the Riley group of companies, the Canadian Fire Insurance Company, which eventually became Canadian Indemnity.
Riley served as a Winnipeg city alderman in 1887–88 and 1907–8, president of the Winnipeg Board of Trade in 1895, and chairman of the Winnipeg Hospital Commission for six years. He was president for some fifteen years of the Winnipeg Boys Club, which operated a drop-in centre and organized sports teams. He was a member of the Manitoba Club and the St. Charles Country Club.
R.T. and Harriet Riley raised a large family. Together they had two daughters, Lavinia and Harriet Murgatroyd (known as Maud); three sons who died of croup in infancy, William, Thomas, and George; and four more sons who lived to adulthood, Robert Sanford, Conrad Stephenson, John Herbert, and Harold James.
Riley died at his home in Winnipeg on July 29, 1944, at the age of ninety-three. He is buried in the St. John’s Anglican Cathedral Cemetery in Winnipeg.