Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract by Richard Atkinson, review: meet the skeletons of our imperial past

In September 8 1775, the British government found itself in a tight spot. A month earlier, George III, mad-keenly determined to keep hold of the American colonies, had issued a proclamation to suppress his far-off subjects’ growing rebellion. Practicalities became paramount. How would soldiers, cooped up in Boston, be fed with fresh grub over the winter?

Enter Richard Atkinson, a canny Cumbrian-born merchant (the son of a tanner) with business connections in the West Indies. Eager to help, he was swept into a meeting with Lord North, the fraught PM, in Downing Street. So rushed was the encounter, notes another Richard Atkinson, his descendant and the author of this massy 400-page family history, that there was no written record of their agreement.

But four vessels were provided, and a vast array of essentials procured – among them 2,000 hogs, 2,000 sheep and 100,000 gallons of rum (to be sent from Jamaica). The ships had an appallingly rough crossing – crushing much of the livestock to death – yet it was the rum (and subsequent supplies of it) that would have the stickiest consequences. Had Atkinson profiteered during the War of Independence by overcharging for this essential soldierly fuel?

Atkinson’s ascendancy was attended by sniping controversy. A savage 1785 caricature by James Gillray pictures Atkinson as a naughty schoolboy, bottom bared, his “rum contract” poking out of a pocket, awaiting a thrashing from the 25-year-old PM, William Pitt the Younger. The rumpus had supposedly been settled in 1781 after 27 Treasury Board meetings on the subject, but Atkinson’s 1784 election to parliament had reopened the wound: “The Rum Mr Atkinson” bellowed the Morning Herald.

Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is the author’s first major foray into setting pen to paper himself, having tended to hundreds of books in his time as an editor at Bloomsbury, among them Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage series. Too much information? Well, that’s a charge that might fairly be levelled at his own book, which – prompted by the 1806 cookery book of his four-times great-grandmother – leaves few avenues of genealogical interest unexplored, and few items of tangential historical interest unincluded in its bid to map the fortunes of the Atkinson family over the centuries.

The first (and better) half (“The Temperate Zone”) wings from the mid-16th century, and Atkinson’s nine-times great-grandfather, to the death of the “The Rum Mr A” in 1785. The second half (“The Torrid Zone”), fleshing out the book’s subtitle “A Tangled Inheritance”, distils the quasi-Dickensian disputes that attended his bequeathed wealth (including two Jamaican sugar estates) and other difficulties encountered by his lineage in the Victorian age and beyond. With neat symbolism, in the first half, the ancestral home in the Edenic Cumbrian village of Temple Sowerby is acquired, and gains extensions. By the second half, it’s remembered as a leaky-roofed pile; an eerie place that the author explored as a child before it was sold off to become a hotel in 1977, which it remains (combining “old world history with modern day luxury”, to quote its website).

The dizzying wealth of detail may test the reader’s patience – a labour of love for Atkinson, laborious going for us. We might find amusing, say, the passing evocation of the 18th-century Richard Atkinson’s festivities on being elected an alderman of the City of London: one drunk celebrant was carried home in a baker’s basket, attended by choristers. Do we need his exhumed sniffy verdict on the taste of a Madeira melon? Probably not.

Yet it in a roundabout way, the devil is in that detail. Were it not for the author’s forensic fastidiousness, his marshalling of piles of correspondence and arid minutiae, the most disquieting elements of his family saga might have remained dormant.

What do those interests in Jamaica – and what flowed from them – entail? Something sobering, and unpalatable: deep-seated complicity in the slave-trade. What makes this much-documented viciousness hit home in Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is – well, the way it’s so close to home for Atkinson. The more he probes his roots, the bloodier the business.

He lays hands on a document, dated 1801, listing, by name, age, employment and value, 196 enslaved workers. In Jamaica, Richard Atkinson’s nephew Matt was a serial rapist of slave women, begetting several children – conduct “quite ordinary on an island where white men viewed enslaved women as sexual prey”. And what of the Rum Mr A himself?

“The greatest mystery” lies in a document dated 1785 that transferred to his ownership a slave called Betty and her three children – the price £120. Was Betty his mistress, those children his children? In the midst of a typically flowery and ardent letter to the unrequited love of his life (Anne Lindsay) sent a few years earlier, there’s a reference to “the black Family”. Atkinson captures his own confusion at his forebear’s contradictions: the near heroic go-getting, and evident tenderness, coupled with his age’s ruthless mercantilism.

If Atkinson lacks a novelist’s capacity to bring his populous array of characters fully to life, his evidence-sifting tenacity is impressive and the way he combines thumbnail nuggets with grand narratives shows how history benefits from being written from the ground up. Are we so very far removed from those long-done deeds? The fragility of 18th-century banking systems and the sudden blighting onset of malady feel very familiar. More broadly, the question of what is known and not known, what can be omitted and what gets ignored, goes to the heart of our vexed relation with our imperial past.

Visiting Jamaica and its colonial ruins, Atkinson finally reveals that a DNA test connects him to distant cousins of West African ancestry. Isn’t his many-stranded family tale part and parcel of Britain’s story, in all its buccaneering vitality and gruesome death-dealing? There are no easy answers as to how to process this, and this isn’t an easy read, a penance as much as a pleasure. Maybe that’s apt.

Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract by Richard Atkinson, £20, ebook £12.99