Crisp Road runs parallel to the river on the north side, one block away, on the site of the original Brandenburgh House.
If you read on please promise not to disclose today’s blog to anyone connected to Hammersmith and Fulham Council. The reason will become clear.
The road is named after Sir Nicholas Crispe (1599 – 1666). He was born Nicholas Crisp and added the “e” to sound less like a common tater. He needn’t have been so chippy, his father was Sheriff of London. If you have read 1066 and All That you will know he lived through a turbulent period. Like so many of us he wasn’t overly interested in politics and concentrated on speculation with a view to accumulation; in this he succeeded admirably in diverse fields.
Talking of fields, he was a farmer, a customs farmer. An agreeable occupation in which he didn’t get muddy gumboots. The “farmer” pays to collect tax revenue from a specific source and, if he knows his onions, collects more than he has paid. His first commercial breakthrough was making bricks in Hammersmith – a pretty dull occupation. However, like his father, he owned shares in the East India Company and saw an opportunity to replicate its business model, with a significant add-on, in Africa. He invested in the Guinea Company, or the Company of Adventurers of London, and by 1628 had a controlling shareholding. The Company exported commodities from Africa to Britain but the resourceful Crispe diversified, buying shells and manufacturing glass beads. They were the Bitcoin of the day, at least in 17th century West Africa; as nebulous a currency as it is today.
There is no way to gloss over this. The denizens of West Africa with an excess work force accepted Crispe’s currency as readily as the most gullible crypto currency speculator today and the Guinea Company began a brisk trade exporting slaves to the West Indies.
History always repeats itself. Recently there was a brouhaha about a Saudi businessman contributing to the Prince of Wales’ charities. Why feed the monkey when you can feed the organ grinder, Nicholas Crispe reasoned; accordingly he funded Charles I. The Saudi businessman had to get by with a CBE, Crispe got a knighthood in 1640 and a Baronetcy in 1665. Gosh, was I wise to apply for associate membership of the Standing Council of the Baronetcy? Are they venal vipers or merry mambas? I went to their Christmas party a few years ago and formed the latter impression. As I have digressed may I continue? Sir Nicholas Crispe’s brother, Tobias, was an antinomian, if you know skip, not literally as us old folk take time to recover from falling over. An antinomiam is a person who believes that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law. Has that sunk in? Are Catholic priests convicted of child abuse antinomians?
Sir Nicholas built The Great House that became Brandenburgh House and was a local philanthropist. He paid substantially and provided the bricks for an earlier St Paul’s Church on what is now Hammersmith Broadway where you can still see his chest tomb. He was briefly an MP, in the Long Parliament, and a pragmatic financier to the Protectorate. However, if he’d been a stick of rock Royalist would have been written through him. He left The Great House to Prince Rupert, Charles I’s nephew.
When the site of Brandenburgh House was excavated in 2005 glass beads were found; evidence of the source of his money. I hope H&F Council don’t cancel such an interesting and generous resident of the borough.
I’m going to have a lazy Sunday afternoon.