Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract

It was soon revealed that Richard had managed, almost by accident, to make an excellent bargain for himself. As it turned out, the price paid by the Royal Navy for its rum in Jamaica, which was the basis for his deal with the prime minister, was surprisingly high. John Robinson had only later worked out why this should be so, when he discovered that rum was just one component of a much more extensive naval provisioning contract. Whereas the Treasury Board treated rum as a separate item, in the navy ‘grog’ was part of the standard daily ration. Three merchants in Jamaica had bid for the navy’s provisioning contract, quoting individual prices for each item – bread, beef, pork, pease, oatmeal, butter, vinegar, rum – from which a total cost per man, per day had been calculated. While the winning tender had been the cheapest overall, for rum it had been on the high side.

THE LONG-DREADED ALLIANCE between America and France finally materialized in a treaty signed on 6 February 1778. No longer was the war at arm’s length, on the other side of a wide ocean; now it threatened British shores. On the night of 23 April, Captain John Paul Jones of the Ranger, an American naval vessel sailing out of Brest, raided Whitehaven, the Cumberland port where he had once served his apprenticeship, disembarking thirty men who spiked the town’s cannons and set fire to ships in its harbour. Meanwhile, down south, where the threat of invasion was all too real – French troops were reportedly massing in Brittany and Normandy – a series of tented cities sprang up to accommodate the newly mobilized county militia.

The Treasury Board invited tenders for supplying the camps with bread, wood, forage and straw; the winning bid came from Simon Fraser, one of Richard’s close friends. In its contract with Fraser, the Treasury specified that the army’s ‘ammunition bread’ should be baked from whole wheat into loaves of six pounds. But many of the soldiers refused to eat this coarse bread; Colonel Henry Herbert of the Wiltshire Regiment, camped at Winchester, complained to John Robinson that it contained ‘Bran capable of purging a Horse’.[50]

When the tradesman sub-contracted to supply the bread unilaterally took it upon himself to provide bran-free loaves for the troops, Richard, who was Fraser’s hitherto silent partner in the contract, reluctantly intervened. He wrote to the baker:

I understand that you have agreed to deliver Bread of Better Quality than the Contract specifies without increase of Price or diminution of Weight. This I am confident Mr. Fraser will have put a stop to, but lest he should have missed you, or by any other accident this letter should find you still undecided, I am to desire, and Expressly to direct that on no account whatsoever you deliver any other Bread than is described in the Contract.[51]

A few days later Richard visited Coxheath camp, near Maidstone, to smooth over the matter with its commander, General William Keppel. ‘I have this morning seen Mr. Atkinson, and If he is as Honest as he appears Sensible; & is Clear – The Camps will be very well furnished with Every Article he is Contractor for,’ Keppel told General Amherst, the British commander-in-chief, on 18 June. ‘We parted very Good friends as he may tell you; and perfectly satisfied with each other.’[52] But Keppel, after going without bread for two days, soon downgraded his opinion of Richard and his ilk. ‘The Contractors deserve to be hanged,’ he wrote to Amherst on 23 June. ‘It is Mr. Atkinson or Mr. Frazar that is to supply Bread, and good Bread, every delivery in Camp, and they must be made answerable notwithstanding they are under the Protection of Mr. Robinson altho’ he perhaps deserves hanging as much as either of them.’ Keppel, whose political allegiances lay with his cousin, the Duke of Richmond, added a telling postscript: ‘I beg this Letter may be considered as a publick one.’[53]

As was bound to happen, the press picked up the story and mangled the facts. ‘The contracts for serving all the camps with bread,’ reported the Evening Post, ‘are executed by Mr. Atkinson, partner with Lord Bute’s agent, and brother-in-law to Mr. Robinson, of the Treasury. The bread has been scandalously bad, but how should it be otherwise. Every thing is now an arrant job. Mr. Atkinson is a Scotchman.’[54]

All this time, of course, Richard was making a fortune. Of the £1,406,923 expended by the Paymaster of the Forces for the twelve months up to February 1778, some £495,020 had been billed by Mure, Son & Atkinson, and £133,772 by Richard on behalf of the Canada contractors – although how much of this was profit is impossible to say.[55] But he was also under constant pressure; in particular, the burden of managing the transport fleet that shipped the army’s supplies across the ocean lay heavy upon his shoulders. His partners, the Mures, offered negligible support, for they rarely came to town. Clearly Richard was unable, or unwilling, to delegate the fine details of the government contracts to his clerks, for the hundreds of letters, reports and bills from Mure, Son & Atkinson which are scattered throughout the public archives are mostly in his handwriting. He made himself so indispensable to Lord North and the Treasury Board that he became their first port of call for any business requiring special speed or discretion. He had a heroic capacity for work, often writing, writing, writing late into the night, and his letters generally convey boundless energy and optimism. The issue of the rum contracts, still unresolved, enveloped his activities in a cloud of opprobrium – and yet here he was, pulling off astonishing logistical feats in the service of king and empire. At times he must have felt close to buckling beneath the intolerable weight of it all.

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