Stephenson Clarke and his gamekeeper

A carte-de-visite portrait of the coal magnate and art collector Stephenson Clarke. According to an inscription verso, he is seen here with his gamekeeper.

The shipping company Stephenson Clarke was established in 1730 by brothers Ralph and Robert Clarke. When it finally ceased trading in 2012, the company was Britain’s oldest shipowner. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, its senior partner was Stephenson Clarke. Born in 1824, he inherited the business from his father in 1849, building it up into the largest shipping and haulage business in the country and diversifying into many other commodities.

Stephenson Clarke died, aged 66 at Croydon Lodge in West Croydon on 3 April 1891. According to his obituary in a local paper, the cause of his death was Bright’s disease (Croydon Advertiser and East Surrey Reporter, 4 April 1891). His estate was valued at £945,319, a truly vast sum by the standard of the day (the modern equivalent would be in excess of a hundred million pounds).

According to the same obituary, ‘Up to the time of his death Mr Stephenson Clarke was the head of the well-known firm of Messrs Stephenson Clarke & Co., one of the largest coal-dealing concerns in the country, and the owners of extensive colliers in South Wales. The firm also have the reputation of being the largest in the world in connection with coal contracts for gas making, and in common with a dozen other concerns, they were the sole suppliers of the Croydon Commercial Gas and Coke Company.’

Elsewhere in the obituary, the journal assured its readers that ‘in all probability there was no other man in Croydon and the surrounding district whose charities were so extensive or whose purse was so constantly at the disposal of any and every good cause. From the time when he first came to reside in Croydon, now about 20 years since, Mr Stephenson Clarke has been proverbial for his open-handed and entirely disinterested generosity to all worthy objects in connection with the borough of Croydon and the surrounding district and […] in the most unostentatious manner possible, was constantly engaged in the distribution of private benefactions, the vast extent of which was only known to himself.’

Photographed by John Mayall of London and Brighton.