Tea broker and politician.
George Moffatt
This person is the subject of ongoing research. We have started by researching their relationship to the enslavement of people.
Biographical notes
Slavery connections
There is no evidence that George Moffatt was directly connected with slavery; however, he held shares in the Llynvi Coal and Iron Company (of which he became chairman), which included slave-owners among its major investors. By 1867 he was the largest shareholder, the second largest, with 32% of the shares, being Philip Charles Cavan, son of the slave-owner and West India merchant James Cavan, who had invested £15,000 in the company, increasing his shareholding to £18,750 in the mid-1850s (UCL Department of History, ‘James Cavan’, in UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership [online], London 2020, <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/5700> accessed 4 January 2023.) Another major investor, Charles McGarel, was a slave-owner in British Guiana (UCL Department of History, ‘James Cavan’, in UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership [online], London 2020, <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/6914> accessed 4 January 2023.)
Moffatt’s eldest daughter, Alice Lucy, married Alphonzo Elkin Cumberbatch (1847-1929), who had been born in Bridgetown, Barbados, and was the second son of John Belgrave Cumberbatch, whose father, John Edward Cumberbatch was the son of a multi-racial enslaved person, Elizabeth, once the property of Lawrence Trent Cumberbatch (John Martin, A History of Landford in Wiltshire [online], January 2019, <https://landfordhistory.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/A-History-of-Landford-Part-11-Hamptworth-Lodge.pdf> accessed 2 August 2021, 27.)
Abolition connections
It has been suggested that Sir John Bowring (1792-1872), political economist and diplomatist, may have known Moffatt and persuaded him to invest in the Llynvi Coal and Iron Company in the mid-1840s. In 1846, while company chairman, Bowring composed an abolitionist poem ‘To Our American Brethren’ (private communication, 2022). Bowring is depicted in Benjamin Robert Haydon’s The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840 (National Portrait Gallery).
National Gallery painting connections
Donor: presented in 1853: NG233 (now at Tate, N00233); on loan to National Portrait Gallery (NPG 697).
Bibliography
T. Bean, 'Moffatt, George', in C. Matthew et al. (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 1992-, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/38901
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Item on publisher's website
History of Parliament Trust (ed.), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social & Local History, London 1964-, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/
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Item on publisher's website
J. Turner et al. (eds), Grove Art Online, Oxford 1998-, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/
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UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership, London 2020, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Checked and not found
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Item on publisher's website