Henry Wildman

London merchant and slave-owner, father of Frances Wildman (q.v.). Henry Wildman had married Frances Walker in 1772 at Gestingthorpe, Essex. In 1791 they settled at a small estate, bought by Henry Wildman, at Leyton in Essex, called The Knotts. He had been an exporter to Jamaica in the 1770s, in a partnership known as Wildman and Smith. In Kent's 1794 Directory he is listed at 6 Fen Court, Fenchurch Street as a merchant, but he was later also a shipowner in the Jamaica trade and as late as 1813 can be found in correspondence with Boulton and Watt over at least one steam engine order for Jamaica. He was an investor in the West India Docks. His wife Frances died in February 1811, and Henry Wildman himself at Leyton in January 1816. Henry Wildman was also among the 79 original subscribers to New Lloyd's in 1771.

1. Henry Wildman's will makes over his main assets to his elder son Thomas, but there are specific legacies of £15,000 capital and his interest in £600 of government stock (held by a partnership, Chapman, Wildman and Hayes), to Frances, and £20,000 to his younger son James, with a codicil adding to James's legacy a named plantation, or an interest in it, copied near-illegibly by the PCC which could possibly be Pindar's Valley, in Clarendon, (not owned by Wildman, according to the Almanacs, but its listed owners the Iredells, brought an action against the Mitchells during James's bankruptcy). These sums are made chargeable on Henry's plantations in St Mary's, which implied the ownership of Esher was to be effectively shared. It would seem that James continued his father's business at the same address in Fen Court.

F. Martin, History of Lloyd's and of Marine Insurance in Britain p. 149.

1. Will of Henry Wildman, PROB 11/1576/433 of 1816.