PHILANTHROPY

Alleyn's College of God's Gift

Edward Alleyn was a leading actor-manager of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. He was an associate of the playwright Christopher Marlowe. In 1605 he bought the Manor of Dulwich. He was childless and decided to establish an educational body called the College of God's Gift. This was established under letters patent in 1619. He endowed it with his property. The College oversees James Allen's Girls School, Alleyn's School, and Dulwich College.

In 1995 the College underwent a major reorganisation. As a result, Dulwich Picture Gallery became an independent body.

Website: www.thedulwichestate.org.uk

The Charterhouse

The original Charterhouse was a Cistercian abbey in the City of London.¹ During the Reformation its property passed into secular ownership. In 1611 Thomas Sutton bought the estate. He was reputed to be the wealthiest commoner in England . He had made his initial fortune as Queen Elizabeth's Master-General of the Ordnance and had then enlarged it by investing in the Durham coalfield, which supplied London with coal by sea.

Sutton founded a hospital for 80 brethren and a school for 40 boys. The school developed into Charterhouse, a public school that moved to Sussex in 1872. The hospital's brethren are restricted to professional Anglican men who are either bachelors or widowers and who are over the age of 60. The definition of professional is somewhat broad. It has been taken to include artists and military officers. With the centuries the hospital's revenues have diminished. As a consequence, the number of brethren has been reduced.

Location: Sutton House,² 2 Homerton High Street, Hackney, E9 6JQ

Charterhouse Square, EC1M 6AU (red, yellow)

See Also: COAL Seacoal

Website: https://thecharterhouse.org (www.charterhouse.org.uk The school)

¹. Charterhouse was a corruption of the French word Chartreuse.

². Thomas Sutton is buried in the Charterhouse. His wife, Elizabeth (d.1602), is buried in St Mary's Stoke Newington with her first husband John Dudley (d.1580). Sutton House in Hackney was part of Dudley s estate, Sutton's association with it was derived from their mutual spouse.

John Passmore Edwards

John Passmore Edwards was a newspaper editor and proprietor. He became a generous philanthropist, who gave large sums towards library building and educational causes.

In 1900 the London School of Economics became a college of the University of London. Two years later it moved to a site in Clare Market. Passmore Edwards gave money towards the cost of constructing the college's buildings there.

Location: The London School of Economics, Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE (blue, brown)

51 Netherhall Gardens, NW3 5RJ. Edwards's home.

Esmée Fairbairn Foundation

Ian Fairbairn (1896-1968) founded Municipal & General Securities in 1931. Thirty years later he set up the Esm e Fairbairn Charitable Trust. The body was named after his late wife who had been killed in an air raid in 1944. He endowed it with 70,000 worth of M&G shares. Under David Hopkinson's (d.2019) leadership, the business underwent major growth. In 1999 Prudential bought M&G. At the time, the 70,000 had grown to be worth 280m.

Website: http://esmeefairbairn.org.uk

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955) was born into an affluent Armenian family that lived in Constantinople. He attended King s College London. He broke with his brothers and moved to London where he was involved in financing mining syndicates. He had no particular interest in the oil industry but appreciated that it was growing quickly and therefore ensured that he made himself useful to Henri Deterding, the dominant figure within Royal Dutch Shell. A visit to the oilfields of Baku led him to observe how poorly exploited a field was if it was being operated by numerous small operators.

The shipping broker Frederick Lane became concerned that Standard Oil of New Jersey might dominate the global oil industry. Therefore, he set about encouraging the sizable non-American oil companies to co-operate with one another through cartels. Gulbenkian persuaded the Western oil companies to remove competition from their activities in the Middle East by pooling their efforts in the Turkish Petroleum Company, a vehicle that he had set up and which on the day of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination in 1914 was granted a concession that covered most of the Ottoman Empire.

The deal was constructed so that Gulbenkian received a permanent 5% commission. As a result, he became one of the wealthiest people in the world. He acquired magnificent homes but preferred to live in hotels and maintain a low-profile. He adored art and acquired a sophisticated knowledge of it through study. In the late 1920s he concluded that if the Soviet Union became an active participant in the global oil industry there would be great competition. The regime proved to be receptive to his ideas and he was allowed to become one of the leading purchasers of art works that the Soviets sold during the late 1920s.

With time the businessman became cynical about his children. He declared that the moment after they learned of his death they would be found wedged together in the doorway of the Jack Barclay car dealership. He sought to perpetuate his impact by setting up a foundation that he based in Portugal. Following his death the country's Salazar dictatorship effectively nationalised it

Gulbenkian had been invited to contribute towards the costing of constructing an Armenian church to the south of Kensington High Street. He paid for all of it. Following his death a memorial service was held in it. So few people attended that the newspapers opted not to print their names.

Location: Jack Barclay, 18 Berkeley Square, W1J 6AE (red, turquoise)

Armenian Church, Iverna Gardens, W8 6TP (blue, red)

See Also: THE OIL INDUSTRY BP

Website: https://gulbenkian.pt

The Leverhulme Trust

The Leverhulme Trust supplied the marine biologist Richard Thompson with a grant that enabled him to research his seminal paper Lost At Sea: Where Is All The Plastic? (2004) which raised the issue of the impact that micro-plastics were having upon the environment.

Website: www.leverhulme.ac.uk

John Lyon's Charity

John Lyon's Charity makes grants that are intended to benefit children and young people. The charity derives its funds from its endowment.

Location: 45a Cadogan Gardens, SW3 2TB (orange, purple)

Website: www.jlc.london

The Nuffield Foundation

Lord Nuffield created the car manufacturing company British Motor Corporation. The peer used his vast wealth to make public benefactions. He established the Nuffield Trust in 1943 to continue this programme after his death. Three years later the Foundation financed the institute financed the setting up of the Institute of Child Health.

Unfortunately, much of the body's wealth was tied up in shares in the company. As the British motor industry slipped into crisis during the 1960s and 1970s so the Trust's income was reduced substantially.

The British Motor Corporation became known as Rover, which in 1994 became a subsidiary of BMW of Germany. The Cowley car plant that Nuffield created in his native city of Oxford is now the home of BMW Mini.

Location: The Nuffield Foundation, 28 Bedford Square, WC1B 3JS (blue, brown)

The Nuffield College of Surgical Sciences, Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3PP. (In 2017 it was announced that the Royal College of Surgeons was going to sell the Nuffield Building to the London School of Economics.) (purple, blue)

See Also: CARS Wolseley Motors

Website: www.nuffieldfoundation.org

The Portal Trust

Sir John Cass M.P. (1661-1718) was a prosperous merchant. He served as the master of two separate livery companies and served as Lord Mayor of London. In 1710 he founded a school.

While preparing to sign an endowment for the school, Cass suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage, which stained with the quill with blood. He had only initialled three pages of his will. As a result, his will was contested. It took three decades for the Court of Chancery to settle the matter. The Foundation was formally set up in 1748. Each February St Botolph's hosts a service known as Red Feather Day.

In 2021 the Foundation changed its name to The Portal Trust.

Location: 31 Jewry Street, EC3N 2EY (red, blue)

Website: www.portaltrust.org

The Rausing Family

The Rausing family's wealth came from the Tetra Pak cartons business.

In 1944 Ruben Rausing (né Andersson) (d.1983) was watching his wife making sausages in their kitchen. He noticed how the sausage skins were pinched at each end to close them. He successfully adapted the technique to sealing cardboard milk cartons. The design was developed using a tetrahedron. In 1952 the TetraPak was launched in Sweden.

In 1992 Hans Rausing (1926-2019) sold his interest in the company.

Website: www.juliahansrausingtrust.org www.sigrid-rausing-trust.org

The Royal Foundation of St Katharine

Queen Matilda established the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in 1148 for the maintenance of thirteen poor persons . The Foundation was established on a site that was just to the east of the Tower of London. The land had been made available by the Augustinian Priory of Aldgate. At the start of the 13^thC the Foundation became independent of the religious house. It existed under the personal protection of the Queens of England.

In 1442 the precincts of St Katharine's were granted a charter of privileges. This removed its residents from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the City of London. It became a royal peculiar with its own ecclesiastical court, while its judicial matters became the exclusive concern of its Master and the Lord Chancellor.

King Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon in 1533. He allowed her to continue to be the patroness of the Foundation. It was this association that probably enabled it to survive the dissolution of the monasteries, which began two years later. With time, its grounds developed into a small township that was comprised of people who were unable to practice their trades within the City, e.g. through being foreign.

In 1825 the Foundation moved to Regent's Park, its Tower-side site having been taken over to enable St Katharine's Dock to be constructed. After the Second World War the Foundation moved back to the East End, occupying the site of the bombed St James's church.

Location: 2 Butcher Row, E14 8DS

4 St Katharine s Precinct, The Regent's Park, NW1 4HH (orange, red)

Website: www.rfsk.org.uk

The Sacklers

The brothers Arthur (d.1987), Mortimer (d.2010), and Raymond Sackler (1920-2017) were New Yorkers who all qualified as psychiatrists but who also had entrepreneurial natures. New York University Medical School operated an informal limit on Jews of 10%. As a result, Raymond and Mortimer spent part of their medical education studying at Anderson College of Medicine in Glasgow. Arthur appears to have been the dominant sib. He appears to have developed a belief that depression was the result of a chemical in the brain and that it could most effectively be treated by means of drugs. The brothers acquired control Purdue Frederick Co. a small Greenwich Village-based pharmaceutical company. During Prohibition the business s sherry-based pick-me-up Gary's Glycerine Tonic Compound had sold well.

In the 1970s staff at St Christopher's Hospice in South London asked Napp Pharmaceuticals if it could produce a pill that released morphine slowly. The company had already made an asthma treatment that acted in such a manner and therefore was able to develop MS Contin, which was launched in 1984. Napp was a subsidiary of Purdue Pharma. The drug's reasonable success prompted Purdue to start developing a second generation one for when its patents expired. OxyContin was launched in 1995. It proved to be a blockbuster. The money it generated made the Sacklers multi-billionaires. They were able to increase their philanthropy many times over. Mortimer settled in Britain.

In 1995 Mortimer and Raymond Sackler were awarded honorary knighthoods.

The subjects that the American art photographer had addressed had included heroin addiction. She developed tendonitis. For this, she was prescribed OxyContin. She became addicted to it. That everyday pharmaceutical could do so horrified her. Inpsired the Act Up A.I.D.S. activists of the late 1980s she up Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (Pain) to draw public attention to how the Sacklers had generated the wealth that enabled them to make philanthropic gestures.

In 2019 the National Portrait Galleyt became the first British cultural institution to decline money from the Sackler Trust. At the end of 2021 the Metropolitan Museum in New York City removed the Sackler name from seven of its galleries. In early 2022 the family's name was removing from plauqes in both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. The Royal Botanic Gardens was doing likewise. At the time,the British Museum, the National Gallery, and the Victoria & Albert Museum had not dissociated themselves from the Sacklers. At the time, it was estimated that over the previous thirteen years the trust had given about 170m to British institutions.

Location: St Christopher's Hospice, 51-59 Lawrie Park Road, Sydenham, SE26 6DZ

Henry Smith's Charity

Henry Smith was born in humble circumstances in Wandsworth. During his adult life he made a large fortune in the City of London as a salter. In 1620 he vested his property to a number of trustees (earmarking 500 p.a. for himself) to provide for a wide variety of charitable purposes. He was particularly generous to his native county community. He also gave money to found a Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (to be held by his kin).

Smith s Charity was set up both to provide money for the purpose of buying the freedom of Christians who had been enslaved by the Turks¹ and to provide for those of Smith's relations who were unable to work. By the late 18^thC the Turkish aspect of the charity was waived by Act of Parliament and by the late 19^thC the poor relations were no longer in financial need. Since 1875 the charity has been geared principally on areas other than those for which it was originally devised.

An early trustee of the charity sold it a slice of Kensington that subsequently became highly fashionable. The names of the streets that were built upon the charity's property were thoroughly aristocratic, since the body drew its trustees from the top drawer.

In 1995 the Wellcome Trust paid Smiths Charity 280m for the 54-acre Kensington Estate. The property consisted of 2300 properties between Cranley Gardens, Fulham Road, Old Brompton Road, and Walton Place.

Website: www.henrysmithcharity.org.uk

¹. This was in a period before the British naval tradition had been revived.

Toynbee Hall

In 1884 Canon Samuel Barnett founded Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel's Commercial Street. He named it after Arnold Toynbee, an economist and social reformer who had drawn his interest to the area. The Hall was the first of the East End's university settlements. The people who lectured there included George Bernard Shaw and Sydney Webb. It played an important part in the education of many young working-class Londoners.

Following John Profumo's political disgrace in 1963, the Conservative politician devoted much of the rest of his life to working at Toynbee Hall. In 1975 he was awarded a C.B.E. for his charitable work.

Location: 28 Commercial Street, E1 6LS (purple, orange)

Website: www.toynbeehall.org.uk (www.hgstrust.org - Hampstead Garden Suburb was a very different project of the Barnetts)

The Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust's principal activity is funding biomedical research. It also underwrites medically-related arts projects, encourages the history of medicine and investigations into biomedical ethics, and finances The Wellcome Collection, which is a museum of medicine.

Sir Henry Wellcome was an American-born, British-based pharmaceuticals tycoon who developed an interest in collecting medical related items. In 1924 he set up The Wellcome Foundation to hold both the artefacts that he had amassed and his pharmaceutical Interests.

The Wellcome Trust charity was established under Wellcome's will. Following Wellcome's death the Foundation was set up with a portfolio that was worth about 2m.

It was the City financier Sir Roger Gibbs (1934-2018) who pushed for Wellcome Foundation to diversify its assets away from Wellcome. His father, Sir Geoffrey, had chaired the Nuffield Foundation and therefore knew well how it had suffered from Lord Nuffield's insistence that it assets should always be shares in the Morris Motor Company.

In 1982 Sir David Steel concurred that the Trust needed to diversify its financial interests. Therefore, it floated Wellcome the drugs company on the Stock Exchange. This made the Trust rich. In 1995 Glaxo bought Wellcome. The Trust became Croesus-like.

At the time of Gibbs's death in 2018 the Foundation had about 25bn in assets.

Location: 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. (The Collection) (red, yellow)

215 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. (The Trust) (red, blue)

Website: www.wellcome.org

David Backhouse 2024