MR ATKINSON’S RUM CONTRACT

THE STORY OF A TANGLED INHERITANCE

RICHARD ATKINSON

Fourth Estate, 496pp, £20

When Richard Atkinson understood that he and his wife could not have children, he turned to the past, to discovering his ancestors. A cache of family letters opened a Pandora’s box.

Bridget Atkinson’s book of recipes conveyed a familiarity with exotic ingredients – cinnamon, ginger, curry powder – leading Atkinson to Jamaica, and, inevitably, to the slave trade. It led to Richard Atkinson, the famous rum-contractor, conveyor of millions of gallons of the stuff to British troops during the American Revolutionary War.

The tale is ‘full of drama, surprises, twists and turns’

Matthew Parker in the Literary

Review found this tale ‘enthralling ... full of drama, surprises, twists and turns. There are wars, sudden bankruptcies, doomed love affairs, tragic early deaths and bitter family feuds, all involving a cast of Atkinsons brilliantly brought to life thanks to nearly a decade of painstaking research.’ Dominic Cavendish in the

Telegraph was less effusive: ‘The dizzying wealth of detail may test the reader’s patience – a labour of love for Atkinson, laborious going for us.’ Yet ‘his evidence-sifting tenacity is impressive and the way he combines thumbnail nuggets with grand narratives shows how his story benefits from being written from the ground up’.

‘Personal agonies make great reading,’ opined Gerard Degroot in

the Times. Atkinson ‘is at his best when he candidly confesses the joys and apprehensions of ancestral research... there’s just not enough of that’. Clive Aslet concluded in the

Spectator: ‘Family history can become an obsession and often a bore. But in this case it has produced gold. Love, adventure, skulduggery, moral outrage – what a story.’