Anthony Morris Storer

Slave-owner in Jamaica, MP for Carlisle and then Morpeth. Son of Thomas Storer (q.v.) and uncle of Anthony Gilbert Storer (q.v), who inherited Anthony Morris Storer's Jamaica estates.

1. Will of Anthony Morris Storer of Purley Berkshire proved 30/07/1799. Under the will he left his two [unnamed] plantations in Westmoreland with the enslaved people on them, and his estate at Purley in Berkshire, in trust for his nephew Anthony Gilbert Storer and failing him to his niece Julia Storer, both children of Anthony Morris Storer's brother Thomas James Storer [given as 'my late brother Thomas' in the will]. In a codicil he instructed his trustees to retain James Wyatt and build a mansion house at Purley for £12-15,000.

2. His ODNB entry as 'politician and collector' describes him as the son of 'Thomas S. Storer (1717-1793), West Indies Planter' and says: 'Storer's Jamaican source of income all but dried up with the economic distress caused by a hurricane [in 1780] compounded by government's American policies. Horace Walpole reported ‘the Storers are totally undone’ and Anthony was forced to call upon Carlisle's influence, and North's favour, to apply for a place at the Board of Trade (Walpole, Corr., 33.266)..... For a while Storer's financial position restricted his passion for collecting. In 1781 he reassured Carlisle that he had ‘not had a book bound, nor spent a guinea in prints, the whole year’, and that ‘the lion you dread, and are afraid of awakening is perfectly at rest’ (Carlisle MSS, 488–9). After his father's death in 1793, his fortune was assured, and he could fully indulge his enthusiasm.

Entry by Mary M. Drummond in History of Parliament online.

1. PROB 11/1327/281.

2. Ian K. R. Archer, ‘Storer, Anthony Morris (1746–1799)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 19 Aug 2016.