SEVEN
Jamaica Imperilled
FRANCE’S ENTRY INTO the war forced a rethink of Britain’s military strategy. Suddenly, due to the produce of the mainland contributing so much less to the national purse than that of the sugar islands, saving the American colonies was a lower priority than defending the West Indian ones. Lord North and his cabinet immediately ordered the evacuation of Philadelphia, to free up a large force for redeployment in the West Indies. On 18 June 1778, after nine months’ occupation, General Sir Henry Clinton – Howe’s successor as commander-in-chief in America – led his army out of the city, marching overland to New York to avoid a confrontation with the French fleet.
One of the most serious provisioning crises of the war would unfold over the following months. The efficiency of the transport fleet that Richard ran on behalf of the Treasury was greatly dependent on its ships being swiftly unloaded in America, then released immediately to return to the main depot at Cork, to pick up another batch of supplies. But the process had been hindered right from the start by difficulties at New York. During the first year of the war, after a fire destroyed much of the town, thirty-nine vessels chartered by Mure, Son & Atkinson were pressed into service as floating warehouses. Following this episode, General Howe had recruited David Laird, erstwhile captain of the Thames, to act as agent and supervisor for the transport ships arriving in America; but their slow turnaround was a problem Richard continued to grapple with.
A few weeks after the British withdrawal from Philadelphia, a French naval squadron appeared on the horizon outside New York harbour. ‘Captain Laird is now and has been so bussie since his return from Philadelphia that he has no time to write,’ Thomas Skelton, Laird’s deputy, wrote to Richard on 14 July. ‘The Count De Estaing has been these three days past at Anchor off Sandy Hook with 15 Sail of men of war, 11 of them line of battle Ships.’ Now that New York was under blockade, Skelton cautioned, there was ‘no saying’ when ships might be able to depart for Ireland.[1]
The panic presently subsided, for the French fleet sailed away after eleven days. Already that summer, however, with so many vessels having failed to return, the Treasury Board had directed Mure, Son & Atkinson to take up ‘3,000 Tons of the stoutest & strongest ships they can meet with, & send them to Cork, & arm them immediately’.[2] When Richard received Skelton’s letter, on 24 August, he passed it to John Robinson; the Lords of the Treasury were sufficiently rattled to order a further 5,000 tons of shipping. Six weeks later, Richard had managed to charter the ships, although finding crews for them was proving more of a challenge. ‘The difficulty of this part of the Service increases with the Scarcity of Seamen,’ he told Robinson, ‘and we fear admits of no remedy, as the Men cannot be kept on board against their Consent.’[3] By the end of October, however, twenty-two vessels with a capacity of 7,965 tons, crewed by 1,608 sailors, were ready for loading at Cork.
General Clinton, meanwhile, warned that stores in New York were running low. The hold-up of ships in America was undoubtedly the nub of the problem; yet poor communications were also to blame, for the baffling reports of the commissary in New York meant that John Robinson could barely work out whether the troops were eating 46,000 rations a day, as allowed for, or considerably more than that. (Somehow, in seven months, they had managed to consume an extra three and a half million pounds of bread and flour, and an extra two million pounds of meat.) In November, Robinson penned a blistering eleven-page reprimand to the commissary – such was the gravity of the situation that he ran the letter past George III himself. ‘The Drafts seem highly proper but oblige me again to repeat that the inaccuracy in stating the Rations in N. America is most extraordinary and encourages the opinion of fraud or great negligence,’ wrote the king. ‘Nothing can be more proper than the part taken by Mr. Robinson in the whole of this transaction.’[4]
By mid-December, the warehouses in New York were near empty. Clinton told the Colonial Secretary, Lord George Germain:
Your Lordship will be startled when I inform you that this Army has now but a fortnight’s Flour left. I hear no accounts that can give me hopes that Supplies are on the Coasts, and the North West Winds which blow violently and almost invariably at this Season make the arrival of any Fleet in this Port very precarious indeed. Our Meat with the assistance of Cattle purchased here will last about forty days beyond Xmas, and a Bread composed of Pease, Indian Corn and Oatmeal can be furnished for about the same time. After that I know not how We shall Subsist.[5]
This episode was a striking reminder of the extent to which the redcoat army relied upon the exertions of the Treasury Board, and Mure, Son & Atkinson, and many more links in the extended supply chain. Fortunately for General Clinton, the first of the previous autumn’s intake of shipping sailed into New York harbour on 4 January 1779, and the crisis was averted.
Now, more than ever, John Robinson wished that the Treasury could be shot of its responsibility for shipping the army’s supplies to America, and he reopened talks on the subject with the Admiralty; in February, the Navy Board agreed to take on the role. It was settled that the Navy Board would start shipping the army’s provisions from May 1779, and would replace the Treasury Board’s policy of sending individual armed vessels with their own system of dispatching large convoys of merchant ships under naval protection. Richard received instructions to discharge from service the 130-odd ships under his management; these new arrangements terminated a large portion of his government business, and he was clearly annoyed to be presented with a fait accompli. ‘Having heard of no Imputation of Misconduct on our part or dissatisfaction on that of the Board,’ he wrote to Robinson, ‘it was not without some Degree of surprize that we thus received Information of a treaty so far advanced.’[6]
Meanwhile the fog surrounding Richard’s rum contracts was no closer to lifting. Stephen Fuller, the agent of the Jamaican Assembly in London, had failed to come up with a formula for pricing the additional 350,000 gallons ordered by General Howe back in April 1777; now the Lords of the Treasury proposed passing the matter to two new referees, who would themselves have the power ‘to name an umpire, If they shall see occasion’.[7] Richard consented to the plan, choosing his old friend Francis Baring to act on his behalf; the Treasury Board nominated the merchant John Purrier. But the arbitration process once again stalled in May 1779, when Baring and Purrier wrote to the Treasury stating ‘their Inability to proceed to the award’, and requesting further directions.[8]
On 20 July, Lord North chaired a special meeting about the rum contracts; it was attended by all five Lords of the Treasury, as well as the Attorney General, Alexander Wedderburn, a notorious bully. The terse language of the minutes – ‘Mr. Atkinson is called in & heard and Mr. Attorney General states to him some Ideas for the settling of this Business for his Consideration’ – masks what Richard would later recall as one of the most bruising encounters of his life.[9] As for the Treasury Board’s proposed solution, which was to lump all three of his rum contracts together and judge them on criteria that he regarded as ‘feigned’ – it offended his sense of justice. The following day, Richard reiterated his position: ‘I beg leave to repeat that I consider the three Contracts as things perfectly distinct and unconnected with each other.’ He could hardly believe, having ‘invested his Fortune in a most arduous & essential Service to the Army’, that the Treasury was now attempting to browbeat him into submission.[10]
DURING HIS PREMIERSHIP, Lord North suffered from debilitating bouts of what would nowadays be diagnosed as depression, and he made repeated failed attempts to quit his office. ‘Lord North cannot conceive what can induce his Majesty, after so many proofs of Lord North’s unfitness for his situation, to determine at all events to keep him at the head of the Administration,’ the prime minister had written in March 1778, in the third person as was customary for letters to the monarch.[11] He again tried to break free in June 1779, but Spain was by now on the point of entering the war, and the king responded that his resignation ‘would be highly unbecoming at this hour’.[12]
The French and Spanish allies planned a naval assault on the British Isles that summer, to be followed up with a land invasion by an army of more than thirty thousand men. In the event, the Spanish navy arrived six weeks late at the agreed rendezvous off the coast of north-west Spain, and as the French fleet sweltered in the heat, many sailors fell sick. The Bourbon allies at last headed north on 25 July, but their bad luck continued; as adverse winds slowed their progress, they missed out on the plunder from two British merchant convoys returning from the Leeward Islands and Jamaica. On 16 August the combined fleet, numbering sixty-six ships of the line, was spotted off Plymouth; two days later a great easterly gale scattered them into the Atlantic. Like its predecessor of 1588, the Armada of 1779 ended in failure.
Still, the mood in Britain remained sombre. ‘Never did a deeper political Gloom over-spread England, than in the Autumn of 1779,’ Nathaniel Wraxall would later recall in his Historical Memoirs.[13] And few men were gloomier than Lord North. In November, John Robinson told Charles Jenkinson about a harrowing conversation in which the prime minister had confessed that he could not bear to be thought ‘the Cause of the destruction of His Majesty’s Power’ and perhaps the collapse of his country: ‘He then My Dear Sir fell into such a Scene of Distress, I assure you as made my Heart bleed for him, & drew Tears from my Eyes.’[14]
Even as Britain’s own shores were threatened, its gravest concern remained the West Indies. ‘Our Islands must be defended even at the risk of an invasion of this Island,’ the king wrote in September 1779. ‘If we lose our Sugar Islands it will be impossible to raise Money to continue the War.’[15] These colonies, unfortunately, were highly vulnerable to attack; most of them were dotted among the Lesser Antilles, a chain of islands enclosing the Caribbean Sea, and surrounded by enemy possessions, while Jamaica, the largest and most valuable, lay a thousand miles to the west.
Dominica had been the first island to fall prey to the French, and its capture horrified all those who held an interest in the West Indies. On 3 December 1778, at a packed meeting of merchants and planters held at the London Tavern, a vote was carried to petition the king to cease the ‘predatory war’ in America. Richard led the minority who opposed the petition, claiming that many of its assertions were ‘absolutely false’.[16] The news soon afterwards that Saint Lucia had been wrested away from the French temporarily calmed the merchants’ nerves. In June 1779, however, Admiral d’Estaing took Saint Vincent without a shot being fired, followed days later by Grenada, and reportedly swore that by the time he was finished, the King of England would not have enough sugar ‘to sweeten his tea’.[17]
On 25 September, word reached London that d’Estaing had sailed his fleet to Saint Domingue, the French colony to the east of Jamaica. Four days later, twelve of Jamaica’s most prominent merchants and planters – including Richard – met to prepare a statement to be placed before Lord George Germain. They reminded the minister that there were fewer than two thousand regular soldiers stationed in Jamaica, and suggested that its militia, a corps made up of all able-bodied white males, was quite unequal to the task of its defence. Not only were these men ‘unused to discipline’ and ‘unfit to undergo fatigue’, but their absence from the workplace left ‘all the Women & Children, all the boiling Houses, & Distillerys, and all the Plantations desolate, & abandoned to the Mercy of the Slaves; a grievance in some respects but little inferior to that of being left to the Mercy of the Enemy’.[18]
Ten days later came news that six thousand French troops were headed for the Caribbean. While ministers vacillated, the merchants took command of the situation. On 15 October, a fund was established to provide a bounty of five guineas to each man enlisting for a new Jamaican regiment, payable on ‘his being approved by the commanding officer’.[19] Richard subscribed £100, as did each of his partners, and donations soon flooded in from many prominent Jamaican proprietors.
As it happened, a regiment of eight hundred infantry, the 88th Foot, had been ready to embark for Jamaica since the summer, but the Navy Board had not yet found vessels to carry them in. On Saturday 23 October, Richard and his fellow merchant Samuel Long called upon Germain and offered to provide transport ships for the regiment. They found a sympathetic audience in the Colonial Secretary – indeed, he had personal reason to be concerned for Jamaica’s safety, having three years earlier appointed his six-year-old son to the lucrative office of Receiver General of the island. Germain agreed to find an extra 750 recruits, and informed the Admiralty that transport would be required; the Admiralty ordered the Navy Board to provide the necessary vessels; the Navy Board found merchants willing to undertake the service; and the merchants told the captains to cease loading commercial goods and instead take on board provisions for the troops.
All was in hand, it seemed, until the commander-in-chief, General Amherst, declared himself unwilling to commit so many men to the defence of Jamaica. ‘What think you of Lord Amherst disavowing the directions given last Saturday concerning the recruits,’ Richard asked his friend William Knox, who was Germain’s deputy at the colonial office. ‘The ships are all engaged, the provisions laid in, and the whole expence incurred; nothing will move him.’ As Richard was finishing his letter to Knox, another arrived, prompting the following postscript: ‘Since writing what precedes I have (near midnight) received Lord Amherst’s letter in answer to one we wrote him to-day as a last effort, in which he maintains his character, and all the recruits we are to get are a hundred and twenty-five. A thought strikes me by which I think the shame of this transaction may be hid. I will see Lord North upon it in the morning if he is not gone (as Lord George is) into the country.’[20]
In the end, through determined lobbying, Richard managed to have the number of recruits raised to 350 – two hundred of whom were immediately press-ganged at Chatham. Samuel Long, Richard’s collaborator during these operations, rode down to Gravesend on 5 November to see them all embarked.
The merchants’ forwardness soon became public knowledge. ‘The following extraordinary notice of the sailing of the Jamaica fleet, was stuck up at Lloyd’s coffee house yesterday evening,’ the Evening Post reported, in droll mode:
Admiralty, Nov. 12, twelve o’clock. Mr. Atkinson presents compliments to Mr. Long, and acquaints him, that the fleet will sail from Portsmouth in the first fair wind after Sir Geo. Rodney’s ship is ready, without waiting for any thing that is not then got round; Sir George goes down tomorrow. Mr. A. submits to Mr. Long, whether notice should not be sent to both coffee houses.[21]
The threat to Jamaica appeared to lift when the news came soon afterwards that the French fleet had been sighted off Georgia. Even so, on 8 December 1779, the Jamaica agent Stephen Fuller presented a petition to Lord George Germain, complaining that too little was being done for the island’s defence. The Colonial Secretary replied that although the king and his ministers appreciated the ‘very great value & importance of Jamaica’, they were not prepared to disclose the ‘amount or the nature’ of measures adopted for its safety.[22] Germain’s lofty response caused a rift in the Jamaica lobby between those inclined to condemn the ministry and those who favoured a more collaborative approach. On 17 December, at a meeting from which Richard was conspicuously absent, the planters and merchants appointed a sub-committee to campaign for greater naval and military protection for their island. ‘I see the Proprietors of Jamaica after all the attention shewn to them shew still a disposition to give trouble,’ the king observed to John Robinson.[23]
Before Christmas, news came of a great victory at Savannah, the capital of Georgia, where the occupying British had repelled a much larger besieging force supported by the French navy; subsequently Admiral d’Estaing had limped back to France with his fleet. On Christmas Eve, the cabinet resolved to send three thousand more troops to Jamaica, in addition to five thousand men who were about to embark for the Leeward Islands. Only Lord Amherst objected, maintaining that the loss of men would leave the kingdom ‘in too defenceless a State’ – but the king overruled his commander-in-chief, and four regiments were ordered to ready themselves.[24]
Although more troops would be dispatched to the West Indies over the winter of 1779–80 than had been sent to America since 1776, many of the Jamaica lobby continued to harp on about the previous autumn’s invasion scare. ‘The safety of such a possession as Jamaica ought not to have been left to chance,’ they moaned in a petition placed before the Commons on 10 February. During the parliamentary debate that followed, the absentee planter Richard Pennant accused the prime minister of caring so little about Jamaica that he never bothered to read its governor’s reports, an act of negligence for which he ‘deserved to be impeached’. (At which point North was said to have bellowed across the chamber: ‘Impeach me – impeach me now.’) Germain questioned the legitimacy of the lobbyists’ petition, given that the ‘meeting at which it had been resolved upon, had never been advertised’ – a claim denied by Pennant, who said he ‘had the advertisements in his pocket, and he was very sure, that Mr. Atkinson was the only one present, who had any objection at all’.[25] (This was a lie, for the minutes of the meeting on 17 December prove that Richard was not there.)[26] Thomas Townshend, a vocal opponent of the war, suggested that Richard’s censure of the petition was quite meaningless, given his manifold connections with the ministry: ‘He held the greatest number of contracts, and was to be heard of at the Admiralty Office, the Navy Office, the Victualling Office, the War Office, and, in short, at every place where money was to be gotten. In fact, he appeared to be the principal Minister, and perhaps he was the most active Minister we had.’[27]
THE POLITICAL CAMPAIGNER John Horne Tooke, released from prison after serving a short sentence for seditious libel, chose to channel his anger into a polemical investigation of the public finances. Facts Addressed to the Landholders, which Horne Tooke co-wrote with the radical economist Dr Richard Price, came out in January 1780; it soon ran to eight editions. The activities of Mure, Son & Atkinson had come to epitomize the profligacy of the ministry, and Richard’s rum contracts received the dubious honour of their own chapter. They were an easy target, a throwaway line – ‘as cheap as Mr. Atkinson’s rum’, Horace Walpole would write, describing something that wasn’t cheap at all.[28] On 8 February, the freeholders of Yorkshire, hobbled by heavy taxes and the low value of grain, presented parliament with a petition demanding ‘economical’ reforms – this would soon be followed by similar petitions from twenty-eight counties and eleven boroughs. Three days later, in an epic speech that Lord North admitted was ‘one of the most able he had ever heard’, the Irish statesman Edmund Burke demanded a root-and-branch reform of every category of national expenditure.[29]
The press, as ever, greatly enjoyed the prime minister’s discomfiture. The London Courant waggishly proposed that he should set up a ‘new Board’ to restore parliament ‘to its proper purity’, whose first task would be to dispose of the largest vermin. ‘The Duke of Richmond and Lord Shelburne,’ the journalist suggested, ‘will take a great deal of killing; so will Barré and Fox (the latter already judged, like Shelburne, pistol-proof). As for the inferior class, including all the apostate country gentlemen, they had better be executed by contract. Mure and Atkinson will of course offer proposals to the Board; and as in their extensive undertakings they must necessarily have many expert cut-throats under them, they will probably do the business per head as reasonably as they do any other.’[30]
Fenchurch Street, looking west. The Ironmongers’ Hall dominates the foreground; Richard’s house was set back behind gates on the left-hand side.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
The mood of pent-up public fury spilled over in London on 2 June 1780, when a march against Catholic emancipation led by Lord George Gordon disintegrated into a five-day orgy of looting and arson. Richard had recently moved to 32 Fenchurch Street, a mansion set back behind a gateway and courtyard on one of the City’s main thoroughfares – as was usual at this time, it acted as both his home and place of business. Its location was midway between flashpoints at the Bank of England and the Tower of London, and I wondered whether he was caught up in the violence. I was excited to find a report in the Morning Chronicle of a bishop whose carriage had been surrounded and had its wheels taken off; this prelate had found refuge in ‘Mr. Atkinson’s house’, but thirty men had subsequently broken down the door, forcing him to escape from a rear window.[31] Disappointingly, after further digging, I learnt that the ‘Mr. Atkinson’ in this story was not Richard, but a lawyer in Westminster – such are the minor hiccups of historical research.
On 15 June, as the capital was clearing up after the riots – some put the number of dead and wounded at seven hundred – a measure of good news arrived from South Carolina. After a siege lasting six weeks, the American garrison at Charleston had surrendered to General Clinton, who had taken five thousand prisoners. Reports from the West Indies, however, were less cheering. An outbreak of fever in Saint Lucia had killed hundreds of soldiers and left many too feeble for duty. The best medicine was believed to be claret – but dispensing it to the men would involve a thicket of red tape. William Knox, under-secretary at the colonial office, asked Richard for his ideas about the best way to supply it. ‘By the Act of Navigation, no Wine can be imported into our Colonies from Europe, unless from Great Britain, Madeira or the Azores,’ Richard advised. ‘Guernsey, Jersey & Ireland are equally prohibited to send Wines directly to the Colonies. A neutral Ship might be sent to Bourdeaux or any other Port in France, to clear out for Holland & stop in Great Britain, & might tranship the Wine by License as abovementioned.’[32]
On 9 August, in a major setback for the merchant community, the Spanish fleet intercepted a convoy recently departed from Portsmouth, seizing fifty-five ships mostly headed for the West Indies; their cargo was valued at £1,500,000. The plunder also included five East Indiaman ships – a loss from which Richard managed, in a letter to Knox dated 12 September, to spin a silver lining of sorts:
You desired Information some time ago about the means of supplying Wine to the Army in the West Indies, which leads me to communicate to you an Offer that has just been made me of the Refusal of about four thousand Dozen of Claret in Bottles at Madeira which had been sent thither to meet the outward bound India Ships which are taken. The only Objection there can be to the Quality is that it is too good, but I am confident that no such speedy Supply can be sent by any other Mode.[33]
When the Treasury Board next met, Mure, Son & Atkinson were ordered to send a ship to Madeira to pick up the claret and ‘proceed with it to Saint Lucia with the utmost expedition’.[34]
SPAIN HAD PLACED the Rock of Gibraltar under siege from both land and sea within a week of declaring war on Britain in June 1779. The following spring, Admiral Sir George Rodney had managed to sidestep the blockade to deliver provisions to the eight thousand men trapped there; but letters since smuggled from Gibraltar reported dwindling stores of beef, butter, oats, pease and wheat, as well as coal, candles, lamp oil, rum and vinegar. In September 1780 John Robinson received instructions from Lord George Germain to procure two years’ worth of every necessity while maintaining the strictest secrecy, to prevent whispers of the mission from reaching Spain. Naturally, the Treasury Board awarded the contract to Mure, Son & Atkinson.
But a complication with the coal supply threatened to expose the operation. At the start of the siege, the Treasury had cancelled various standing contracts for the supply of the garrison; it had not, however, revoked the contract held by the powerful Fox family to provide coal, since this fell within the remit of Charles Jenkinson, the Secretary at War. The Foxes’ agent, anticipating an expedition to Gibraltar, had already filled a number of collier vessels which were now ready to leave. Robinson asked Jenkinson to lay them off immediately. ‘To put in Motion the Ships avowedly taken up by your Contractor for carrying Coals to Gibraltar,’ he explained, ‘loaden as such, & known to be so by every Man on board – would I fear at once make the discovery.’[35] It was Richard who came up with a solution; so as to ‘preserve the secret, and avoid giving offence to the contractors’, he offered to procure the coals himself, while passing on the benefit of any mark-up and commission to ‘the Mr. Foxes’. (William Knox would tell this story years later, in his memoirs, ‘in justice to the memory of a man who possessed the best talents for executive business that I ever was acquainted with’.)[36]
Admiral George Darby received orders to sail for Gibraltar on 1 January 1781, but repairs prevented his fleet from leaving until mid-March. Fortunately, as Darby rounded Cape St Vincent with twenty-nine ships of the line and almost a hundred store ships, the Spanish navy was nowhere to be seen. The British fleet swept into the Bay of Gibraltar on 12 April, swiftly unloaded its cargo, and departed nine days later.
Because the expedition was so hush-hush, the paper trail was minimal, which is why it barely appears in the official records; but it was clearly a mammoth undertaking. Mure, Son & Atkinson billed the Treasury £266,858, which John Robinson tucked away in the public accounts under the heading ‘Provisions and Stores shipped for Special Service’.[37] By way of comparison, Richard had invoiced £108,487 for the supplies sent out to Boston in the autumn of 1775.[38] Unlike the earlier mission, however, the relief of Gibraltar was a resounding success – not least because it provided the fuel for a conflagration, eighteen months later, that would help bring the war to a close.
GENERAL WASHINGTON’S MOOD was sombre during the latter months of 1780; with the Continental dollar almost worthless, deemed ‘fit for nothing But Bum Fodder’, his troops were restless.[39] ‘We have been half our time without provision & are likely to remain so,’ he wrote on 5 October. ‘We have no Magazines, nor money to form them. And in a little time we shall have no men, if we had money to pay them.’[40] The national finances of the French were also fast unravelling; from a British perspective, a strategy of attrition offered the best odds of winning the war.
In December, Richard and his fellow contractors agreed terms with the Treasury to provision the army in America over the following year; they would supply rations for a total of 86,000 soldiers at 527/32d per day. Richard’s Canada syndicate would feed fifteen thousand men.[41] But beasts even more voracious than humans also relied upon the Treasury for their rations – the army’s four thousand-odd horses, each of which daily chomped through about nine pounds of oats or twenty pounds of hay. During the war, Mure, Son & Atkinson would invoice £219,271 for oats alone. This species of grass grows best in a cool, damp climate; so it was fitting that Richard should turn to sub-contractors from such a region – namely, his brothers at Temple Sowerby.
Evidence of George and Matthew Atkinson’s involvement in the enterprise lies in a scuffed leatherbound book that I inherited, which appears to be their main business ledger, under an account headed ‘Oats, Meal, Sacks, Casks’. No letters exist on the subject, or at least none that I have seen, so it is left to the numbers to do the talking – and they are large numbers. In March 1781, for example, the Treasury ordered Mure, Son & Atkinson to supply General Clinton with 50,000 quarters of oats. The Navy Board was unable to provide transport on this occasion, so Mure, Son & Atkinson also chartered 10,000 tons of shipping (around thirty vessels) to carry the load to New York. Richard invoiced the Treasury £36,956 for the oats and £43,181 for the shipping; his brothers, meanwhile, having settled with the suppliers of the grain, made a profit of £9,800, as is revealed by the transfer of this sum from the ‘Oats, Meal, Sacks, Casks’ account into their profit and loss account.[42]
The high price of the oats did not go unremarked. In the House of Commons, Sir Philip Jennings Clerke – a sworn scourge of contractors – commented that an ‘ingenious gentleman had calculated what the real cost of oats was to government on their arrival in America, and it had been found to be exactly three oats for a half-penny’.[43] Edmund Burke ‘shuddered’ at the expense, pointing out that the money spent on buying and shipping the oats would have purchased two new frigates for the navy.[44]
I was exhilarated to uncover the Temple Sowerby connection to the oat supply – even if it looked suspiciously like profiteering. When I started writing the story of the Atkinson family, I had hoped to connect them to the big events of the time. Here, in miniature, was exactly what I’d wanted to achieve, for in tracing a route through the various documents – from General Clinton’s letter from New York to the colonial office in London, via the Treasury Board minutes and Mure, Son & Atkinson’s invoices, finally to the handwritten ledger on the desk in front of me – I was able to follow the trail from the British headquarters in America, via Westminster, all the way back to Westmorland. And I knew exactly where nearly £10,000 of public money had gone – straight into my ancestors’ pockets.