Timothy Abraham Curtis

London merchant and director of the Bank of England (bankrupt in 1840), awarded the compensation for the enslaved people on Cane Grove in St Vincent as one of the trustees of James Wilson, MP for York.

1. Son of Sir William Curtis 1st bart. Genealogical sites show him as b. 30/01/1786 and dying 13/05/1857 aged 71, having married (1) Margaret Harriet Green 25/04/1809 and (2) Frances Pitt Constable 17/05/1851. Four children of Timothy Abraham Curtis and Harriet Margaret Curtis [sic] were certainly baptised at Weld Chapel in Enfield between 1820 and 1825. However, the Timothy Abraham Curtis who died 13/05/1857 at Woodstock was described as a flaxspinner of Aberdeen, who left £4000, resworn at under £20 (a flax-spinning business of Timothy Abraham Curtis and a partner at Grandholm Works in Aberdeen had been sequestered in 1854). The marriage of Timothy Abraham Curtis in 1851 is indexed to Q2 1851 at Lancaster Lancashire: a Timothy Abraham Curtis was a partner in the Liverpool locomotive-manufactures ('iron-founders and engineers') Bury, Curtis & Kennedy until his retirement 22/02/1850.  Whether all three of these are the same man is not yet demonstrated.     

2. Timothy Abraham Curtis of Southgate, London appears in the 1834 Poll Book/Electoral Register for Sneaton in Yorkshire, presumably in his capacity as trustee of James Wilson, whose seat was Sneaton Castle.

3. Timothy Abraham Curtis makes a cameo appearance in Das Kapital, in which Marx cites the commentary from The City or the Physiology of London Business; with sketches on Change, and the coffee houses (London, 1845) on the details in Curtis' 'private balance sheet' of his income of between £800 and £900 a year from directorships, presented to the Court of Bankruptcy after his failure, which Marx cited as evidence of 'a new swindle' by boards of numerous managers and directors being placed above the actual director 'for whom supervision and management serve only as a pretext to plunder the stockholders and amass wealth.'

T71/892 St Vincent claim no. 568.

1. E.g. http://thepeerage.com, accessed 17/07/2012 and sourced in part from Burke's Peerage (2003); Ancestry.com, London, England, Births and Baptisms, 1813-1906 [database online]; National Probate Calendar 1858; London Gazette, Issue 21578, 04/08/1854, p. 2422; FreeUKGen, England and Wales Free BMD Database, Marriages, 1837-1983 [database online]; London Gazette, Issue 21079, 22/03/1850, p. 887.   

2. Ancestry.com, UK Poll Books and Electoral Registers, 1538-1893 [database online], entry for Timothy Abraham Curtis Esq.: Sneaton, Yorkshire.

3. Karl Marx, Capital (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974) Vol. 3 Chapter 23 p. 389-390.