Samuel Sandbach

Samuel Sandbach (1769-26 April 1851) was successively Bailiff, Coroner and Mayor of Liverpool, as well as High Sheriff of Denbighshire and a Justice of the Peace for Lancashire. He made his fortune as a merchant trading with the West Indies.

Samuel Sandbach, whose father, Adam, was an innkeeper and farmer, had been born in 1769 at Tarporley in Cheshire. In 1788, he left England to join his uncle, also called Samuel Sandbach, who had for many years been living and trading in Grenada. Around 1792, after working for some time as a clerk in firm that had been trading since around 1782 in one form or another, the partners were so impressed with the younger Samuel that they invited him to join their ranks.

When trade and thus the income from it went into a downturn, two of the partners — George Robertson, an older, long-established merchant, and Charles Stuart Parker — decided to concentrate on development of existing plantations in Demerara. Parker, who was a nephew of Robertson, returned to Britain after two years. Sandbach and the remaining partner, McInroy, were left to look after the merchanting aspect of the partnership and in 1801 established the Demerara-based firm of McInroy, Sandbach & Co.

Robertson died in 1799, by which time Parker was back in Demerara. He, Sandbach and McInroy all returned to Britain in the same year as McInroy, Sandbach & Co. was founded. They then set up McInroy, Parker & Co. in Glasgow before Sandbach moved to Liverpool to establish another branch of the enterprise. Parker had married a niece of Robertson's in 1797 and Sandbach's move to Liverpool coincided with his own marriage on 15 December 1802 to another niece, Elizabeth Robertson, who was the daughter of a clergyman. In 1813, the prosperous and well-connected Phillip Frederick Tinne, a Dutchman of Huguenot descent, joined the Liverpool firm, which became known as the "Rothchilds of Demerara", as a full partner.

Until he formally left the firms in November 1833, when two of his sons took over his interest, Sandbach was a partner in the related businesses of Sandbach, Tinne & Co. (Liverpool), McInroy, Parker & Co. (Glasgow) and McInroy, Sandbach & Co. (Demerara). The enterprise grew to become owners of both ships and plantations and also exporters of coffee, molasses, rum and sugar from the West Indies to the British ports of Liverpool and Glasgow. They were significant slave owners until that practice was abolished, and from the 1830s until the 1920s were major transporters of indentured labour.

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