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 post office clerk in Bath, and at the age of 19, in 1712, became the Post Master of Bath.
At the age of 27 Allen took control of the Cross and Bye Posts under a seven year contract to the General Post Office. Although he had no official title, at the end of this period, had not made a profit, he only broke even but he had the courage to continue. He reformed the postal service, creating a network of postal roads that did not pass through London. It is estimated that he saved the Post Office £1,500,000 over a 40 year period. Ralph Allen continued to sign contracts every 7 years until his death. He won the patronage of General Wade in 1715, when he disclosed details of a Jacobite uprising in Cornwall.
He used his wealth gained from the postal reforms to acquire 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 Member of Parliament for the Bath constituency between 1757 and 1764.
Alexander Pope somewhat patronisingly referred to him in a poem of 1738 as "low-born", though later amending the epithet to "humble", treating him as a type of old-fashioned hospitality and social responsibility.
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.

Contents

Trivia

Reference

Bibliography

Trivia

His name is commemorated in Bath in Ralph Allen Drive and Ralph Allen School, one of the city's secondary schools.
Henry Fielding used Allen as the model for Squire Allworthy in the novel 'Tom Jones'.^[1]

Reference

1. Bath Postal Museum Biographies: Ralph Allen (retrieved 1 April 2007)

Bibliography

★ 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, 1720–1761''

★ Davis, S. (1985) ''Ralph Allen: benefactor and postal reformer'' [Bath Postal Museum booklet]