The Owners
It's not the intention here to chronicle the lives and times of the Bolton family, as that has been better researched and published elsewhere. But it's on such resources I'm going to draw to gain insight into the broader character of the Bolton dynasty .
Sir Frederic Bolton 1851 - 1920
Taken out of school at 14+ after a short education which was, according to his daughter Gladys, compensated by a formidable memory: 'he read a great deal and so educated himself and he remembered what he had read - also he had a great flair for figures' she later wrote.
Starting work as an office boy with a firm of shipowners (Smiths) for 18 months he then joined a firm of insurance brokers (Dumas & Wylie) at Lloyd's in 1868 or 1869. Within 4 years he had risen to be deputy underwriter to one Edmund Saunders.
However, within 6 months the firm went bankrupt and Fred was unemployed for the next 6 months.
During this time, in 1873, Fred suggested setting up an underwriting business with a man he'd met called John Glover.
Glover, was from South Shields and they'd met in Islington at nonconformist gatherings at Union Chapel in Upper Street. John together with his elder brother Robert having set up their own ship-broking business in 1853 at 9 Eastcheap.
So Fred and the Glovers, plus their brother in-law John Moser formed, in March 1874, the Bolton underwriting business.
They had a successful 10 years but in 1884 Fred decided he wanted to manage his own ships and together with an old friend, Louis T. Bartholomew, set up F.Bolton and Co., their first steamer being the 2600 dwt. iron ship Raphael.
This was also the year that he moved his family to a more substantial property built in the 1870s at 31, Highbury Hill, Islington
A wife, three children with another to follow all moving to a large, fairly new house and ordering your first steamer doesn't sound like a man struggling for survival. Each of these three activities on its own is not for the faint hearted and combined sounds like the actions of a man with supreme confidence in his own abilities.
In 1887 he wrote to a prospective shareholder called Goodman: 'For some years I have been interested as shareholder in steamers, but carefully kept back during the inflated year 1883 and for some little time after. In 1885 I built the first steamer for my account and paid for her nearly £10,000 less than the prices that had lately been current....'
He goes on to decry the then common practice of single ship companies which was a popular form of ownership in the 1880s.
And so it was that more vessels were added to the fleet, but sold none, so that by 1906 there was a fleet of 10, albeit some getting a bit elderly. In fact 1906 was the year that the original 4 pre-1890 steamers were sold off to a Chilean company in order to pay for more new-builds.
It would seem that Fred had hit on the perfect formula of underwriting and brokering his own ships, thereby cutting out the middlemen.
Fred, having been chairman of Lloyd's in 1906, was knighted in 1908 for his valuable advice imparted to the Admiralty concerning the naval manoeuvres of 1906, the first in which merchant vessels had partaken.
In 1917 the senior partner Louis T. Hamilton wanted to retire, and Sir Frederic, who'd been in ill health for some years decided to put F.Bolton & Co into voluntary liquidation.
While the company had always been in profit and had seen shares increase fourfold and more during the war the decision to wind up the company was regretted 'largely on sentimental grounds'.
In February 1920, Sir Frederic Bolton died leaving the firm to his only surviving son Louis Hamilton, aged 36, who'd been actively employed in the business since 1903 when he was 19.
It was said of Fred that he had been a somewhat aloof employer, always concious that 'a master's a master, and a man's a man'. But he was always respected as being fair, if forbidding in manner.
So, here we have a man who, while not exactly coming from an under privileged background, didn't get much in the way of an education and was sent out to work as a clerk at 14 or 15. He learned, hands on, the ways of the underwriter and ship broker, the skills of which he brought to his own companies, firstly in underwriting at the age of 23 (albeit partnered with two experienced brothers) and then at the age of 33 starting to build a fleet of his own ships.
The term 'Self Made' aptly describes this remarkable man of those exciting times.
Louis Hamilton Bolton (LHB) 1884 - 1953