George Grote

'George Grote' appears as one of the trustees of Sir John Boyd for slave-property in St Kitts and elsewhere. Although there is room for ambiguity it appears that this was George Grote the elder rather than his more famous son. This is reinforced by the existence of a deed of 1807 relating to the Boyds' Danson estate in Bexley in which George Grote appears alongside J. Drummond and William Manning, later the co-trustees of estates and enslaved people for the Boyd family. The bank in which both George Grote the elder and the younger were partners, the RBS predecessor firm Prescott, Grote & Prescott, in 1816 lent £10,000 against a coffee estate identified by LBS as the Gomier estate of Thomas Pagan.

1. George Grote was referred to as a banker based on Threadneedle Street in London in an agreement concerning the property in St Vincent of Nathaniel Smith in 1812, in which he appeared alongside Drummond and Manning as trustees under a deed of 1805 for the creditors of Sir John Boyd deceased. This latter could not have been the historian and radical politician born in 1794, although given that he was placed by his father (also George Grote, 1762-1830) in the family bank at the age of 15 (and was a partner by the age of 21), in theory the younger George Grote could have assumed this role in the mid-1810s; however, it far is more likely to have been his father throughout.

2. George Grote the younger is best known as an historian and Benthamite radical politician who, among other things, agitated for Parliamentary Reform in 1832. He became a member of parliament for the City of London after the passing of the Reform Act in 1832.

http://www.bexleyarchives.org.uk/Calmview/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=PEDAN%2F1%2F241 [accessed 19/03/2018]; RBS/Citizens Financial Group, Inc. Historical Research Report: Predecessor Institutions Research Regarding Slavery and the Slave Trade (first published May 25, 2006; updated May 29, 2009), p. 6 and 22.

1. An Agreement dated 7 November 1812 and entered 24 January 1814, Grenada Registers of Records, Item 2 of the microfilm FHL [1563379]; viewed online Grenada Register of Records: Smith-Robertson genealogy, accessed 2 March 2015.

2. Joseph Hamburger, ‘Grote, George (1794–1871)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.