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Richard Thornton (September 20, 1776 – June 20, 1865) is probably the richest man you’ve never heard of. On his death he left a fortune worth £2.8m (nearly £4bn in today’s money). His wealth, amassed through trading and insurance, represented 0.36 per cent of the national net income of the day. He was a great local benefactor financing local almshouses.Thornton was born in Burton-in-Lonsdale, he was the son of a Yorkshire yeoman farmer. He was educated in London and then apprenticed to his uncle, a hop merchant, before branching out on his own in 1798. He was hugely successful and became a Liveryman of the Leathersellers’ Company rising to Master. In 1837 Barnet was still a rural village, and a much healthier location than the overcrowded City with its poor sanitation and frequent epidemics, for the elderly, making it an ideal location for such housing. They were built by Ward & Sons in the Gothic style, by then considered the most appropriate architectural style for buildings of a morally-uplifting nature. They were “for the residence of poor persons of good character” who were over 60 and had a connection with the Company as Freemen, Liverymen, or their widows. The first stone was laid on July 25, 1837 by Thornton. The buildings cost £1,208 and Thornton immediately announced that he would fund this entirely himself. Consequently the Court passed a resolution that “to perpetuate a grateful sense of Mr Thornton’s liberality, these Almshouses be called the Thornton Almshouses”. He could well afford it. He was already a rich man before the Napoleonic Wars began. War however, took his fortunes to new levels of excess. During Napoleon’s ill-feted attack on Russia, the French army was stationed at Danzig (in today’s Poland) from where it guarded every Baltic port. The Danish were strong supporters of Napoleon and their hostility to English trade was considerable: captains of Danish ships were threatened with death should they engage in any form of commerce with England. This increased the value of Baltic goods in particular Baltic hemp used by the Royal Navy. In 1810 response, Thornton armed one of his own merchant ships, fought off a hostile Danish gunboat, and landed in the Baltic under an assumed German name. They secured the goods and returned to England. Such blockade-breaking actions repeated over the course of the war made him huge profits and earned the lasting sobriquet, the Duke of Danzig. But such trades described as “the most lucrative in the world” were as of nothing, compared to his next audacious business deal. In 1812, his brother who had been based in Danzig, learned that Napoleon had been defeated at Moscow and was on the retreat, remarkably he was able to get the news to Richard back in London before anyone else had heard. In. the four days before it became public the businessman secured a large contract for the delivery of Russian imports to Britain at peak wartime prices. After the war ended, Thornton redirected his trading efforts to the East Indies, and became a financier supporting Spanish loans. By the 1840s, he was the leading merchant, financier, ship owner and marine insurance broker in the City. He retired from active trading in the 1850s, and retired to Merton In his private life, he had no legitimate heirs, although he had a son – whom he named after the man who had helped secure his fortune. Richard Napoleon Lee, born sometime around 1833, was the result of an affair between Thornton and his housekeeper Alice Lee. The young man did very well for himself, studying law at Oxford and becoming a barrister. On his father’s death he changed his name to Thornton as a condition laid down in his father’s will.
