George Herbert Strutt

A carte-de-visite portrait of George Herbert Strutt (1854-1928), the youngest child and only son of the cotton manufacturer and philanthropist George Henry Strutt. Born at Belper on 21 April 1854, he was educated at Harrow and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He married firstly Edith Adele Balguy on 2 April 1876 at Dartford in Kent. The marriage produced five daughters and two sons. In 1898 he married secondly Mary Emily Charlotte Hind, daughter of Robert Hind of the Royal Navy. This marriage produced four daughters and one son. In 1902 he bought the Glensanda and Kingairloch estates on the Morvern Peninsula in Scotland. He died of pneumonia, aged 74, at Ballater in Scotland on 17 May 1928.

The Strutt family were wealthy cotton manufacturers based at Belper in Derbyshire. Their cotton empire was established by Jedediah Strutt (1785–1854), a towering figure in the history of the Industrial Revolution. He patented the Derby Rib machine and, together with Richard Arkwright, he built the first cotton mill driven by water power. Eventually there were eight Strutt mills at Belper and by the mid-nineteenth century the town’s population had grown to ten thousand.

Jedediah’s great-great-grandson George Henry Strutt was born in 1826. On 15 September 1846 he married Agnes Ann Ashton, daughter of Edward Ashton of Prescot, Lancashire. The couple had four children: Susan Agnes Strutt (1847-1894), Lucy Frances Strutt (1850-1914), George Herbert Strutt (1854-1928) and Clara Strutt (1861-1863). The family lived at Bridge Hill House in Belper.

George’s philanthropic undertakings included the construction of Christ Church, Belper (completed in 1850) and a substantial stone vicarage; the conversion of a building in Belper into a cottage hospital for convalescent mill workers (1870); the paving of the town’s market place (1880); and the donation of a fire engine to the town (1889).

Photographed in 1861 by an unknown photographer. The date is written on the back of the mount in a period hand. The backplate is that of the Belper photographer Thomas Barker Mellor but since he would only have been 12 years old in 1861, this series of portraits must have been taken by someone else and copied some years later by Mellor at the behest of a member of the Strutt family.