Just a rum lot – or something worse?

An epic family history about an 18th-century merchant uncovers unsavoury secrets, finds Dominic Cavendish

OMR ATKINSON’S RUM CONTRACT by Richard Atkinson 512pp, Fourth Estate, £20, ebook £12.99

n September 8 1775, the British government found itself in a tight spot. A month earlier, George III, mad-keenly determined to keep hold of the American colonies, had issued a proclamation to suppress his far-off subjects’ growing rebellion. Practicalities became paramount. How would soldiers, cooped up in Boston, be fed with fresh grub over the winter?

Enter Richard Atkinson, a canny Cumbrian-born merchant (the son of a tanner) with business connections in the West Indies. Eager to help, he was swept into a meeting with Lord North, the fraught PM, in Downing Street. So rushed was the encounter, notes another Richard Atkinson, his descendant and the author of this massy 400-page family history, that there was no written record of their agreement.

But four vessels were provided, and a vast array of essentials procured – among them 2,000 hogs, 2,000 sheep and 100,000 gallons of rum (to be sent from Jamaica). The ships had an appallingly rough crossing – crushing much of the livestock to death – yet it was the rum (and subsequent supplies of it) that would have the stickiest consequences. Had Atkinson profiteered during the War of Independence by overcharging for this essential soldierly fuel?

Atkinson’s ascendancy was attended by sniping controversy. A savage 1785 caricature by James Gillray pictures Atkinson as a naughty schoolboy, bottom bared, his “rum contract” poking out of a pocket, awaiting a thrashing from the 25-year-old PM, William Pitt the Younger. The rumpus had supposedly been settled in 1781 after 27 Treasury Board meetings on the subject, but Atkinson’s 1784 election to parliament had reopened the wound: “The Rum Mr Atkinson” bellowed the Morning Herald.

Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is the author’s first major foray into setting pen to paper himself, having tended to hundreds of books in his time as an editor at Bloomsbury, among them Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage series. Too much information? Well, that’s a charge that might fairly be levelled at his own book, which – prompted by the 1806 cookery book of his four-times great-grandmother – leaves few avenues of genealogical interest unexplored, and few items of tangential historical interest unincluded in its bid to map the fortunes of the Atkinson family over the centuries.

The first (and better) half (“The Temperate Zone”) wings from the mid-16th century, and Atkinson’s nine-times great-grandfather, to the death of the “The Rum Mr A” in 1785. The second half (“The Torrid Zone”), fleshing out the book’s subtitle “A Tangled Inheritance”, distils the quasi-Dickensian disputes that attended his bequeathed wealth (including two Jamaican sugar estates) and other difficulties encountered by his lineage in the Victorian age and beyond. With neat symbolism, in the first half, the ancestral home in the Edenic Cumbrian village of Temple Sowerby is acquired, and gains extensions. By the second half, it’s remembered as a leakyroofed pile; an eerie place that the author explored as a child before it was sold off to become a hotel in 1977, which it remains (combining “old world history with modern day luxury”, to quote its website).

The dizzying wealth of detail may test the reader’s patience – a labour of love for Atkinson, laborious going for us. We might find amusing, say, the passing evocation of the 18th-century Richard Atkinson’s festivities on being elected an alderman of the City of London: one drunk celebrant was carried home in a baker’s basket, attended by choristers. Do we need his exhumed sniffy verdict on the taste of a Madeira melon? Probably not.

Atkinson realises that one of his relations in Jamaica was a serial rapist of slave women