Cornish-born Ralph Allen (1693-1764), postmaster, businessman and philanthropist who, together with the dandy Richard 'Beau' Nash and the architect John Wood the Elder, were instrumental in the huge Georgian expansion of the city of Bath as a spa resort for the wealthy.
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A postmaster noticed the young Ralph Allen while sheltering in a hut in Cornwall during a storm. He found the bright young Allen a position in the post office at Bath.
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Allen moved to Bath from Cornwall in 1710 as assisstant to the postmistress, becomming the youngest postmaster in the kingdom himself after only two years with an annual salary of £25 p.a.
In 1715, he disclosed the details of a Jacobite plot in the West Country to General Wade, winning his patronage. With Wade's financial support, Allen instituted a system of 'cross posts' which revolutionised the inadequate postal system, saving the Post Office £1,500,000 over 40 years and allowing him to amass a large personal fortune in the process.
He bought the stone quarries at Combe Hill above Bath in 1726 and built an railway to carry the huge blocks blocks of Bathstone into the city where the building boom inspired by John Wood the Elder was just beginning. This quarrying business earned Allen another fortune.
In 1735, Allen commissioned Wood to build Prior Park, a Palladian mansion overlooking the Widcombe valley, the city, and worthy of his huge wealth.
Philip Thicknesse described Allen's house, with some justification as . . . |
. . . a noble seat which sees all Bath, and which was built, probably for all Bath to see. |
The wealthy Allen many of his famous contemporaries at Prior Park including poets, politicians, artists and men of letters. His guests at the mansion included Pope, Gainsborough, David Garrick, Henry Fielding and Pitt the Elder.
Fielding is reputed to have modelled Squire Allworthy in his Tom Jones on Allen while Pope complimented him in the epilogue to his Satires with the couplet; |
Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,
Do good by stealth, and blush to find fame. |
As a philanthropist, Allen contributed generously to many worthy causes in Bath such as his contribution of £1,000 and the necessary stone from his quarries to build Bath Hospital.
. . . a munificent patron, a warm and firm friend . . . hospitable to his neighbours, charitable to the poor, and benevolent to all mankind |
| - Henry Fielding |
Despite his undoubted influence on the rapidly expanding Bath, Allen was only mayor of the city once, in 1742. He represented Bath as a member of parliament from 1757 to 1764.
Ralph Allen died in 1764, aged seventy-one.
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| William Pitt the Younger |
| It was Ralph Allen who invited Pitt to stand as Member of Parliament for Bath. |
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| Bath & North Somerset |
| Bath |
| | Prior Park |
| | | The east front of Allen's Palladian mansion can be seen from the end of Lilliput Alley, close to the Abbey. |
| | Sham Castle |
| | | The fa�ade with nothing behind which Allen had erected on the slopes of Claverton Down is nothing more than a folly designed to romanticise the view from the windows his mansion, Prior Park. |
| Cornwall |
| Allen's birthplace |
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