John_Wakefield_(banker)
John Wakefield I (1738–1811) was an English Quaker merchant and entrepreneur, financier and banker, based in Kendal, at that time in Westmorland. His business interests grew to include brewing, cotton textile manufacture, and gunpowder.[1]
He was the son of Roger Wakefield III and Mary Wilson. Wakefield began life as a shearman-dyer, apprenticed to his father, in the mid-1750s.[2] His father however died young, in 1756; Mary Wakefield carried on what was a substantial business that included finance as well as dyeing. John was taken into partnership by the end of the decade.[1] His mother's second husband was William Dilworth, a Quaker banker from Lancaster.[2]
Wakefield had an interest in the Gatebeck gunpowder mill, operating from 1764 in an existing family property set on the River Bela. As the result of a tontine he became the sole owner.[2][3] The company traded as Wakefield, Strickland & Co.[4] In 1790 he obtained a licence for another gunpowder mill, in Sedgwick, Cumbria.[5] In 1806 the Kendal Monthly Meeting of Quakers censured Wakefield because of his continuing involvement in the gunpowder trade.[6]
With a reputation for financial soundness, Wakefield's name was good over a wide area of northern England. He took on investments in a local turnpike, and in shipping from Liverpool.[7] He had five ships active in trade with the West Indies, exporting Kendal cotton and importing sugar. Wakefield had his own cotton mill, at Burneside. He set up a brewery, Wilson & Noble, in Kendal.[8]
On 1 January 1788 Wakefield set up a bank in Kendal. This establishment was simultaneous with the other initial bank in Kendal, set up by Joseph Maude, Thomas Crewdson and Christopher Wilson. The two banks merged in 1840.[9]
Wakefield married Margaret Hodgson of Carlisle. Their son John II (1761–1829) married Mary Beakbane in 1787.[10][11] In all there were five sons and one daughter.[12]
- George Chandler (1968). Four Centuries of Banking. Vol. 2. B. T. Batsford.
- Jehanne Wake (1997). Kleinwort, Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking. Oxford University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-19-828299-0.
- Chandler, pp. 28–32.
- Brian Evans (2012). Walks in Silverdale and Arnside: An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Cicerone Press Limited. p. 163. ISBN 978-1-84965-543-9.
- John F. Curwen, ed. (1926). "Supplementary Records: Hincaster and Sedgwick". Records relating to the Barony of Kendale: volume 3. Institute of Historical Research. Retrieved 23 April 2013.
- Rosemary Mingins (2004). The Beacon Controversy and Challenges to British Quaker Tradition in the Early Nineteenth Century. Edwin Mellen Press. pp. 147–8. ISBN 0-7734-6383-6.
- Chandler, pp. 32–3.
- Chandler, pp. 41–2.
- Cornelius Nicholson (1861). The annals of Kendal. p. 152.
- Chandler, p. 42.
- Joseph Foster, The descendants of John Backhouse, yeoman, of Moss Side, near Yealand Redman, Lancashire vol. 1 (1894), p. 64; archive.org.
- Joseph Foster (1871). The pedigree of Wilson of High Wray & Kendal, and the families connected with them. p. 119.