Ralph Allen(1693–1764)

Ralph Allen was born at the inn at St Blazey in mid-Cornwall on 24 July 1693, son of a small innkeeper whose family ran the St Blazey inn on the Plymouth-to-Truro post-road. The postal-trade connection through the family inn, which ran the local post-office stage, was the opening for his career.

He left St Blazey at sixteen for a junior post at the Bath Post Office under his uncle the Bath postmaster, was promoted deputy postmaster in 1712, and on his uncle's death in 1715 became Postmaster of Bath at twenty-two, the platform from which the larger career came.

The reform of the Cross-Post system was the foundation of his fortune. The cross-posts, the overland routes connecting the provincial market towns to each other, had been farmed out inefficiently and ran chronically below their revenue potential. In 1719, at twenty-six, Allen took the West-Country-and-Midland cross-post contract at a fifty per cent uplift on the previous payment, on the calculation that tighter operational management would raise the receipts by more than the increase. He raised them about thirty per cent in the first year and held the contract for the remaining forty-five years of his life, making the cross-post network financially viable for the General Post Office.

The Bath stone-quarrying enterprise was the second register of his commercial career. He bought the Combe Down quarry estate above Bath in 1726 and ran the operation that supplied the honey-coloured Bath stone for the Georgian building boom under John Wood the Elder and the Younger, Queen Square, the Circus, the Royal Crescent and the Assembly Rooms. He built Prior Park, designed by John Wood the Elder, between 1734 and 1764 as the demonstration of the stone, now a National Trust property.

He was a patron of the Augustan literary establishment, a friend and correspondent of Alexander Pope, Bishop Berkeley, David Garrick and Henry Fielding. Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), the foundational English picaresque novel, was dedicated to him and used him as the model for the Somerset country gentleman Squire Allworthy. He was Mayor of Bath in 1742 and MP for Bath in 1757, and died at Prior Park on 29 June 1764, seventy years old, buried at Claverton outside Bath. The Allen name, the patronymic of the Old Breton Alan, he carried from a St Blazey innkeeper's family into the reform of the General Post Office and the Bath architectural-stone tradition.