Ralph Allen
Ralph Allen (
1693 -
June 29,
1764) was baptised at
St Columb Major,
Cornwall on
July 24 1693. As a teenager he worked at the
Post Office. He moved to
Bath in
1710 where he became a clerk in the Bath Post Office, and at the age of 19, in
1712, he became the Post Master of
Bath.
He acquired the stone quarries at
Combe Down and Bathampton Down Mines just as the building boom started in
Bath, and from his quarries came the distinctive "
Bath stone" used to build the
Georgian city, making Allen a second fortune.
He had the
Palladian mansion
Prior Park built for himself (
1742) on a hill overlooking the city, "To see all
Bath, and for all
Bath to see". He gave money and the stone for the building of the
Mineral Water Hospital in
1738, and even built cottages for his masons working in his quarries.
In
1725 he was elected to the town council, and in
1742 was elected Mayor. He was the
Member of Parliament for
Bath between
1757 and
1764.
Alexander Pope somewhat patronisingly referred to him in a poem of
1738 as "low-born".
Ralph Allen died at the age of seventy-one and is buried in a pyramid-topped tomb in
Claverton churchyard, on the outskirts of
Bath.
His name is commemorated in
Bath in Ralph Allen Drive and
Ralph Allen School, one of the city's secondary schools.
*Boyce, B. (1967)
The benevolent man: a life of Ralph Allen of Bath*Peach, R.E.M. (1895)
The life and times of Ralph Allen*Hopkins, A.E. (ed.) (1960)
Ralph Allen's own narrative, 1720â€"1761, *Davis, S. (1985)
Ralph Allen: benefactor and postal reformer [Bath Postal Museum booklet]
