Alfred Dent

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Sir Alfred Dent

Sir Alfred Dent , KCMG , JP , Maharajah of Sabah and Rajah of Gaya (born December 12, 1844 in London , † November 23, 1927 ibid) was a British merchant and the founder of the North Borneo Chartered Company .

Life

Alfred Dent was born on December 12, 1844 in the London borough of Paddington . His parents were the wealthy businessman Thomas Dent (1796–1872) and Sabine Ellen Robarts (1815–1881). Of the twelve children in the family - three daughters and nine sons - he was the fourth oldest.

It is known that Alfred Dent, as a young man, enjoyed hunting and rowing and shooting.

Alfred Dent entered Eton College in 1858 . He lived in the house of Rev JE Yonge, where his older brother Lancelot had spent his student days. Alfred Dent left Eton in 1862 and began his professional career as a businessman.

Together with his brother Alfred he founded Dent Brothers Ltd. based in London and Shanghai. To this end, he took over Dent & Co. , which his father had founded and which had become insolvent in 1876 .

In addition to his duties as head of Dent Brothers , he was also temporarily chairman of the boards of directors of Caledonian (Ceylon) Tea Estates and the Shanghai Electric Construction Company , director of the London County and Westminster Bank and the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation . He was a director of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China for 37 years, until his retirement in 1925.

In 1896 Dent married Margaret, daughter of Charles Aird. The two had a son, Leslie Alfred Dent.

In 1898 he was appointed to the Indian Silver Currency Commission by Sir Henry Fowler .

As Justice of the Peace for Sussex, he served as High Sheriff for Sussex in 1908 .

He died on November 23, 1927 at the age of 82. His final resting place is in Ocklynge Cemetery.

North Borneo Chartered Company

From today's perspective, Dent's main merit was to be the founder of the North Borneo Chartered Company, which de facto determined the fate of today's Sabah for a period of 60 years .

When the United States signaled in 1875 that it had no further interests in the ten-year ten-year lease in North Borneo from Consul Charles Lee Moses in 1865, the legal successor to the lease, an American merchant named Joseph William Torrey , tried to invest in the to win the upcoming extension of the lease. Together with Baron Gustav von Overbeck , the Austrian consul general in Hong Kong, he traveled to Brunei to renew the lease. The negotiations failed because of the stubbornness of the old sultan, who flatly refused to extend the lease. The two then entered into negotiations with the sultan's son, Prince Tumonggong , who arbitrarily extended the lease for a further ten years for the sum of 1,000 Straits dollars. Overbeck was now in possession of a contract that had not been countersigned by the Sultan and was therefore worthless according to the expertise of Sir Hugh Low , the governor of Labuan. The intended resale of his rights failed and in 1876 Overbeck had almost used up his capital. In this situation, he turned to Alfred and Edward Dent, the young managing directors of Dent Brothers, the successor company of Dent & Co. , for help .

In 1877 Alfred Dent founded the Dent & Overbeck Company (also described as Overbeck & CO. ) Together with Gustav Overbeck .

The two brothers gave Overbeck the desired financial support. Nevertheless, Overbeck still failed to find buyers for the rights to North Borneo. So he retired from the business in 1880. The rights - including the associated titles Maharajah of Sabah and Rajah of Gaya - went to Alfred Dent.

Dent was still looking for ways to make a profit on the rights to North Borneo. He was assisted by Sir Rutherford Alcock , Admiral Sir Henry Keppel and RB Martin. In July 1881, Alfred Dent and his brother founded the British North Borneo Provisional Association Ltd , which in the same year became the North Borneo Chartered Company through a royal charter agreement . The company started work in May 1882. Sir Rutherford Alcock became its first president and Alfred Dent became executive director. North Borneo was divided into nine districts; one of the districts named after Dent.

In the 1890s, Alfred Dent was increasingly attacked on the supervisory board for his cautious corporate policy. William Clarke Cowie in particular countered his wait-and-see attitude, hoping for the country's slow development, with demands for a quick development of Borneo. Although the poorly thought out and hasty investments result in financial losses for the company, Cowie benefited from a leap of faith that the shareholders base on his many years of experience in North Borneo. At the 28th semi-annual meeting of the Society on December 15, 1896, Dent was publicly ridiculed for "knowing as little about Borneo as a cow about a side pocket". Alfred Dent was replaced as director. It was only after Cowie's death in 1910 that his pioneering work was put back into perspective.

In recognition of his services to the expansion of the British Empire, he was accepted into the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1898 , which gave him the right to put the title "Sir" in front of his name.

literature

  • KG Tregonning: "A History Of Modern Sabah (North Borneo 1881-1963)", 2nd edition, University of Malaya Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1965, reprint 1967

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Census 1861
  2. ↑ a b c Genealogical page of the Parsons family ( Memento from July 8, 2011 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ↑ a b The Times, November 24, 1927
  4. ↑ http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=singfreepressb19101015.2.10.5 (link not available)
  5. ↑ http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=straitstimes19240626.2.96 (link not available)
  6. ↑ http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=straitstimes19250505.2.43 (link not available)
  7. ↑ Edward Walford. The county families of the United Kingdom ; or, Royal manual of the titled and untitled aristocracy of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (Volume 59, 1919), page 101, accessed June 30, 2011
  8. ↑ Tregonning, Chapter 1
  9. ^ Biography of Baron Overbeck , accessed June 30, 2011
  10. ↑ Tregonning, page 54
  11. ↑ THE ORDER OF SAINT MICHAEL AND SAINT GEORGE. Retrieved January 18, 2019 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ The name Claude Lee Moses is also found in the literature, but in the contract with the Sultan Abdul Mumin , notarized by Moses , he uses the first name Charles .
personal data
SURNAME Dent, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British merchant
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1844
PLACE OF BIRTH London , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1927
Place of death London , UK