Ralph Allen(1693–1764)

Ralph Allen was born at the inn at St Blazey in mid-Cornwall on 24 July 1693, son of Philip Allen, a small innkeeper, and Hester Allen. The household was lower-middle-class Cornish-Anglican of the late seventeenth century: the family ran the St Blazey inn on the Plymouth-to-Truro post-road, the father had inherited the inn from his father, and the boys were schooled at the local Cornish parish school. The Cornish postal-trade connection through the family inn (the St Blazey post-office stage was run from a back room of the inn under the post-office contract of the West Country post-route) was the foundational professional opening for the boy's adult career.

He left St Blazey at sixteen in 1709 on the Bath Post Office offer of a junior assistant's post under his maternal uncle who was the Bath postmaster of the Bath-and-Bristol West-Country post-office route. The Bath Post Office connection was, in 1709, a junior position in a provincial post-office network that the General Post Office in London had been running on a inefficient farmed-out-contract basis since the Restoration-period Post Office Act of 1660. He worked the Bath Post Office across the 1709 to 1715 period, was promoted to the deputy postmastership of Bath in 1712, and at twenty-two in 1715 had the Bath promotion to the postmastership itself on the death of his uncle. The early career as the Bath Postmaster from 1715 was the institutional platform from which the larger career came.

The senior reform of the Cross-Post system was the foundation of his fortune. The Cross-Post system of the early eighteenth century (the postal network that ran the mail-routes connecting the provincial market towns of England to each other across the overland post-routes, as distinct from the London-radiating post-routes that the General Post Office had been running since the Restoration) had been farmed out on a inefficient contract basis to the provincial postmasters of the period at a small annual rent. The cross-post-revenue across the system through the 1700s and 1710s had been chronically below the estimated annual potential receipt, on the contractor-skimming-the-revenue problem of the small farmed-out system. Allen, at twenty-six in 1719, took the small annual contract for the West-Country-and-Midland cross-posts on a bid of £6,000 a year against the previous incumbent's £4,000 a year (a 50 per cent uplift on the previous-year payment), on the calculated working principle that he could increase the small annual receipt by more than the additional payment by tightening the operational management of the post-route. He took the contract, increased the small annual receipts by about 30 per cent in the first year, and held the contract for the remaining forty-five years of his life.

The Bath stone-quarrying enterprise was the second register of his commercial career. He bought the Combe Down stone-quarry estate on the hillside above the City of Bath in 1726 at thirty-three, and across the next thirty-five years ran the commercial-stone-production operation that supplied the Bath-and-Bristol architectural building boom of the early-to-mid eighteenth-century period. The small Combe Down oolitic limestone (a honey-yellow building stone of unusual workability and weathering quality) was, by the mid-eighteenth century, the architectural building-stone of the south-west English market; the Bath Georgian-architecture boom under the architects John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger (the Queen Square 1729, the Circus 1754-68, the Royal Crescent 1767-75, the Bath Assembly Rooms 1769-71) was, on the commercial-supply side, run on Allen's small Combe Down Bath stone. He built the Prior Park country house above the Combe Down quarry between 1734 and 1764 as the small private demonstration of the architectural-capacity of the Bath stone product; the Prior Park house, designed by John Wood the Elder, was the small private Georgian country house of the West Country and remains preserved as a National Trust property.

The senior literary connection of his career was through Henry Fielding. Allen had been a patron of the Restoration-and-Augustan literary establishment from the 1720s onwards: he was a friend and correspondent of Alexander Pope (the Pope satirical-poetry circle of the 1720s and 1730s ran through small periodic visits to the Prior Park country house), of Bishop George Berkeley, of David Garrick, and of Henry Fielding. Fielding's senior novel *Tom Jones* (Andrew Millar, London, 28 February 1749), the foundational English picaresque novel of the post-Richardson generation, was dedicated to Allen and used him explicitly as the literary model for the Squire Allworthy character of the Somerset country gentleman who runs the Tom-Jones-foundling-foundation narrative. The small dedicatory letter of *Tom Jones* (the *Sir, notwithstanding your constant refusal* preface that Fielding had attached to the first edition) was the foundational public-literary tribute to Allen's small philanthropic-and-patron register of the period. He married Elizabeth Holder in 1721; the marriage was childless. He died at the Prior Park house on 29 June 1764, seventy years old, and is buried at the Anglican parish church of Claverton outside Bath under a small marble monument carved by Peter Scheemakers. The Allen name in the English-side catalogue is the patronymic of Alan (the Old Breton name carried into post-Conquest English baptismal naming through the Anglo-Norman aristocracy of the Conquest period); he carried the St-Blazey-Cornish-innkeeper's-family variant of it into the reform of the General Post Office cross-post system and the Bath-and-Combe-Down architectural-stone-supply tradition.