George Moffatt

Tea broker and politician.

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.)

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).

Donor: presented in 1853: NG233 (now at Tate, N00233); on loan to National Portrait Gallery (NPG 697).

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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History of Parliament Trust (ed.), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social & Local History, London 1964-, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/
Checked and not found — Item on publisher's website

J. Turner et al. (eds), Grove Art Online, Oxford 1998-, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/
Checked and not found — Item on publisher's website

UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership, London 2020, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Checked and not found — Item on publisher's website