Sir William Curtis(1752–1829)

William Curtis was born at Wapping on the north bank of the Thames below the Tower, on 25 January 1752, eldest son of Joseph Curtis, the proprietor of a small ship's-biscuit bakery off Wapping Wall that supplied the Royal Navy victualling office at Deptford. Wapping in the 1750s was the waterfront of the London river: ropewalks, ship's-chandlers, sail-makers, biscuit-bakeries, and the public houses that catered to merchant seamen waiting for the press-gang or for a berth. He left the parish school at twelve and went into the family business. He took it over at his father's death in 1771 at the age of nineteen, married Mary Ellis the daughter of a Wapping shipowner the same year, and through the next twenty years built the biscuit operation from a single bakehouse on Wapping Wall to the largest Royal Navy victualling contractor on the river.

The contract that made the firm was the second Naval Provisioning Act of 1782, which standardised the Navy's purchase of *hardtack* sea-biscuit by tender and which the Wapping bakeries were geographically positioned to win. Curtis's bakehouses supplied the Channel Fleet through the 1780s, expanded into the Mediterranean Fleet contracts during the First Coalition wars from 1793, and through the long Napoleonic War years from 1803 to 1815 baked something approaching half of the ship's biscuit consumed by the Royal Navy in the entire course of the conflict. The arithmetic was vast. A line-of-battle ship's company of about eight hundred men consumed about a pound and a quarter of biscuit per man per day; a six-month Mediterranean cruise required forty thousand pounds of biscuit aboard one ship at sailing; the wartime Navy of 1810 carried about a hundred and forty thousand seamen and was eating, by Curtis-firm contract, about eighty tons of biscuit a day from the Wapping ovens. He was a fabulously wealthy man by 1800 and was one of the dozen most consequential City merchants of the Pitt and Liverpool ministries.

He stood for the City of London at the general election of 1790 and was returned as one of the four City MPs at a fourteen-thousand-pound personal-expense bill (the standard City contest of the period). He held the seat through six successive elections to 1818, with the single break of 1812-1818 when he was unseated on a Whig petition and re-elected next time. He served as Sheriff of London in 1788, was elected Lord Mayor in 1795, and across the mayoral year ran the City's emergency-relief committee through the food-shortage winter of 1795 to 1796 when bread riots in the East End threatened to spread west into the financial city. He was a personal favourite of George III, who created him a baronet of Cullands Grove (Southgate) in 1802 in recognition of his Navy victualling work. The political register was the country-Tory back-bench loyalist: he voted with Pitt and Liverpool through every confidence division of his career, opposed Catholic emancipation, opposed parliamentary reform, opposed the abolition of the slave trade (a vote that has, in modern historical accounts, qualified the otherwise mostly admiring biographical paragraph), and supported every Navy supply estimate that came before the Commons.

His friendship with the Prince Regent, the future George IV, was the second axis of his post-1810 public life. The Prince Regent's circle valued Curtis as the City voice who would back the Carlton House establishment's spending bills against the Tory Treasury's economy votes; Curtis valued the access. He sat at the Brighton Pavilion dinners through the long years of the Regency, sailed on the royal yacht to Cherbourg in 1814 at the peace, and accompanied George IV on the royal visit to Edinburgh in August 1822, the first reigning monarch's visit to Scotland since Charles II in 1651. The Edinburgh visit, choreographed by Sir Walter Scott on the new principle that Lowland-Scottish establishment Edinburgh could be re-presented in the visual language of Highland Jacobitism, required the king to wear a kilt in public at the Holyroodhouse levée. The kilt was ordered. George IV wore it. So, on the morning of the levée, did the seventy-year-old Curtis, in the same Royal Stewart tartan as the king. The pair-of-kilts dinner at Holyroodhouse on 17 August 1822 is, by the political-history record of the visit, the foundation event of what Sir Walter Scott had been working on through the visit: the public-cultural rehabilitation of the kilt and of Highland-Scottish identity into the official register of the post-Union British state. The contemporary caricature print *A Pair o' Kilts* by William Heath ran across the London print-shops the following week and entered the Regency satirical canon.

He lost his Commons seat for the last time in 1818 (a Whig contest in the City carried the day), retired to Ramsgate on the Kent coast, ran the firm at arm's length, and died at his Ramsgate house on 18 January 1829, six days short of his seventy-seventh birthday. He is buried at the family vault in the parish church of Wanstead in Essex. The Wapping bakery passed to his son Sir William Curtis the second baronet and ran on as a Navy victualling business through the 1830s before reorganisation as Carr & Co. The Curtis name in the English-side catalogue is the Norman-French nickname for the courteous one, the *curteis* applied half in praise and half in teasing across the late-medieval registers; he carried it from a Wapping ship's-biscuit bakery to the Lord Mayoralty and a baronetcy, and to the kilt-and-tartan choreography of the 1822 royal visit that put Highland Scottish identity back into the British constitutional repertoire.