Thomas Phillips

Thomas Phillips (given as Philips) was awarded the compensation for Camden Park estate on St Vincent: he first appeared in the Slave Registers in 1822, when he was shown to have added 85 enslaved people from Cariacou bought in December 1821 (the Camden Park estate itself with 164 enslaved people on it had previously been registered in 1817 to the heirs of Sir John Boyd and John Trevanion).

1. Benefactor of St David's College Lampeter (now University of Wales Trinity St David), to which he gave 20,000 books ('the Phillips Collection'), endowed 6 scholarships and left London & Westminster shares worth £7000, and founder of Llandovery College (as the Welsh Educational Institution) for which he gave £4666 and 7000 books and endowed 20 scholarships. Thomas Phillips had been in the East Indies before purchasing the estate in St Vincent some time after the 1817 Slave Registration, reportedly for £40,000.

2. Will of Thomas Phillips of No. 5 Brunswick Square proved 15/07/1851. Under the will he left Camden Park to John Whirrall of Pipton Radnorshire and Richard Whirrall of the Bengal Medical Service.

3. Phillips has an entry in the ODNB as 'philanthropist and surgeon': the entry makes no mention of his slave-ownership.

1. John Morgan-Guy, 'A cultivated and well-stocked mind'. Thomas Phillips MRCS benefactor of St David's College Lampeter, http://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/rbla/online-exhibitions/thomas-phillips-exhibition/biography-of-thomas-phillips/ [accessed 09/09/2015]; http://www.llandoverycollege.com/foundation/thomas-phillips-foundation/ [accessed 09/09/2015].

2. PROB 11/2136/288.

3. D. T. W. Price, ‘Phillips, Thomas (1760–1851)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22175, accessed 9 Sept 2015]