SANDARS, George (1805-1879), of Alverthorpe Hall, Wakefield, Yorks. and 27 Sussex Square, Hyde Park, London.

A leading corn merchant, Sandars was ‘a man of business habits, moderate in his politics, cautious in his movements and slow and deliberate in his resolves’, who took an equivocal position on free trade while serving as Conservative MP for Wakefield.1Wakefield Journal, May 1850, cited in J.E. Sandars, The Sandars centuries (1971), 94. Descended from an old Derbyshire family, his great-grandfather, John (d. 1786), had changed the family name from Sanders.2Burke’s landed gentry (1863), ii. 1324-5. His father, Samuel, moved from Derbyshire to Gainsborough, and entered the malting trade, becoming ‘one of the largest corn-factors in the kingdom’ and undertaking large government contracts during the Peninsular Wars.3N. Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family (unpublished ms., n.d.), 1 [www.sandars.org.uk/SandarsCenturies/N_Lawes.pdf]. The size of his operations was shown by the fact that he once had fifty vessels confined at Hull due to bad weather. Born at Gainsborough, Sandars was sent to learn the trade at Manchester, where he prospered, amassing capital to add to the share of his father’s estate which he inherited in 1835.4Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family, 1, 4. He was first cousin to Joseph Sandars, Liverpool merchant and railway promoter (whose son served as MP for Yarmouth, 1848-52), and possessed extensive railway interests, with £16,000 invested in 1837. In 1845, by which time he had moved to Alverthorpe Hall in Wakefield, a leading centre for the corn trade, he had extended his railway holdings to £21,400 (and £33,840 in 1846).5Sandars, Sandars centuries, 45, 61; PP 1837 (95), xlviii. 160, 163, 208; PP 1845 (317), xl. 117; PP 1846 (473), xxxviii. 254. Sandars’ granddaughter puts the date of his move to Wakefield between 1843 and 1845: Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family, 4. He served as a director of the Manchester and Birmingham railway, 1838-45, and the Trent Valley railway.6The Times, 11 Sept. 1838; Manchester Times and Gazette, 6 Mar. 1841, 6 Sept. 1845; C. Clark, The British malting industry since 1830 (1998), 101. He was also a director of the Manchester and Liverpool District Banking Company.7Report of the general board of directors… of the Manchester and Liverpool District Banking Company (1841).

Sandars took a prominent part in Manchester’s commercial life, serving as treasurer of the Manchester Corn Exchange in 1837.8Deed of settlement of the company of proprietors of the Manchester Corn Exchange (1837). A director of the Manchester chamber of commerce, he argued at its meeting on the corn laws in 1838 that the directors largely opposed total repeal, and dissented from Cobden’s proposal to petition for total repeal of all protective duties.9A. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League (1853), i. 78; The corn laws: an authentic report of the late important discussions in the Manchester Chamber of Commerce on the destructive effects of the corn laws... (1839), 47. Reiterating his opposition in 1840, he described repeal as ‘one of the wildest and maddest schemes that ever entered the mind of man’, preferring a 5s. fixed duty combined with a fluctuating duty (the latter to operate when prices fell below 60s. a quarter).10Manchester Times and Gazette, 14 Mar. 1840. He was no longer a director of the chamber of commerce by this point. Alongside his commercial pursuits, Sandars subscribed to Anglican church-building in Manchester, and donated £100 towards a public park.11B. Love, The hand-book of Manchester (1842), 88; Manchester Times and Gazette, 28 Sept. 1844.

Having moved to Wakefield, where he was a partner in one of the country’s largest corn-dealing firms, Sandars was soon appearing on local platforms, speaking on proposed railway developments in 1845.12The Times, 22 May 1847; Leeds Mercury, 5 Apr. 1845. At a tumultuous meeting in March 1847 he seconded a resolution supporting parliamentary grants for education, declaring that the voluntary principle had proved ‘entirely defective’.13Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 25 Mar. 1847; The Times, 26 Mar. 1847. Sandars chaired a subsequent ticketed meeting on the question: Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 1 Apr. 1847. Liberal disunity on the government’s education proposals and the thorny issue of state aid facilitated Sandars’ return for Wakefield in 1847. Accepting a ‘numerously signed’ requisition, he advocated civil and religious liberty, the ‘absence of all restrictions’ on commerce, extensive amendment of the poor laws, and direct rather than indirect taxation, and asserted that he would be ‘free from the trammels of a Party’.14The Times, 22 May 1847; Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 27 May 1847. He defended his earlier opposition to corn law repeal and reiterated his approval of Russell’s education plans, saying that he would support the present ministry provided that they continued on the same course. An opponent of the endowment of the Catholic church, he promised to resist the separation of church and state, although he wished to see church rates replaced with some other form of support. He favoured extending the franchise as people ‘became more enlightened’.15Leeds Mercury, 22 May 1847. On the hustings, he emphasised his close connections with the borough’s commercial interests and reaffirmed his independent stance, declaring that he would vote for a good measure ‘whether it came from Tory, Radical, or Chartist’.16Leeds Mercury, 31 July 1847.­ Having failed to agree on a candidate, a Liberal faction hostile to the government’s education scheme fielded George Alexander, a London bill-broker, whom Sandars comprehensively outpolled and outspent.17Sandars was said to have spent £4,000 or £5,000, while Alexander spent only £400: Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 27 May 1847. His ‘not very decided’ views – one report described him as ‘a Liberal Tory or Conservative Whig’18Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 27 May 1847. – enabled him ‘to obtain support from men of various sides’.19Daily News, 16 Apr. 1849.

Jones and Erickson have identified Sandars as a Peelite, but Conacher has found that his voting patterns were neither consistently Peelite nor Derbyite, classifying him as ‘uncertain’ in the 1847-52 Parliament.20W.D. Jones & A.B. Erickson, The Peelites 1846-1857 (1972), 136; J. Conacher, The Peelites and the party system (1972), 232. He backed the removal of Jewish disabilities and the ecclesiastical titles bill but divided against further electoral reforms such as Locke King’s county franchise bill, 2 Apr. 1851. On commercial and fiscal questions, however, he displayed greater political fluidity. He was in the minorities for repeal of the window tax, 9 Apr. 1850, and, reflecting his own interests, repeal of stamp duty on shipping documents, 26 Apr. 1850. While he divided against ministers on the sugar duties, 29 June and 10 July 1848, he supported them on repeal of the navigation laws, and the amendment to the address, 1 Feb. 1850. However, he voted for Disraeli’s motion on agricultural distress, 13 Feb. 1851. Having opposed Palmerston in the confidence vote on the Don Pacifico affair, 28 June 1850, he backed him in the crucial vote on the militia bill which brought down Russell’s ministry, 20 Feb. 1852.

Sandars’ speeches were ‘always... upon some question with which he was fully acquainted, and [he] consequently was listened to and his views and opinions respected’.21Wakefield Journal, May 1850, cited in Sandars, Sandars centuries, 94. He spoke mainly on economic and commercial questions, the theme of his maiden speech, a debut tinged with personal sadness, ‘having just passed through the fiery furnace of affliction from a severe domestic bereavement’, 2 Dec. 1847. (His wife had died in childbirth less than two weeks earlier.22Gent. Mag. (1848), i. 78, 110. Sandars remarried in 1849; his second wife was unpopular with his family, with his granddaughter remembering her grandfather as ‘a kindly busy man of good attainments, [who] was more and more hen-pecked by a bad-tempered wife’: Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family, 5.) Disagreeing with those who attributed commercial distress to railway expenditure or free trade (which despite his earlier opposition he believed must receive a fair trial), he instead blamed defective harvests and the restrictions imposed by the 1844 Bank Charter Act, and defended corn merchants against allegations that they were ‘gambling speculators, regrators, and forestallers’. Although this speech was censured by The Manchester Times and Gazette for its ‘pompous incompetency’, Sandars was not discouraged.23Manchester Times and Gazette, 4 Dec. 1847. He attacked the ‘unjust, unequal, and inquisitorial income tax’, 13 Mar. 1848, and reluctantly consented to its renewal, 30 Apr. 1852, when he suggested that if the £150 threshold were lowered, those paying income tax might be included within the franchise.24See also his attacks on the income tax, 17 Feb. 1851, 5 May 1851. He opposed repeal of the malt tax, fearing it would harm domestic growers, 8 May 1851.25Sandars also opposed partial repeal, 17 June 1851. Speaking against the navigation laws, 26 Mar. 1849, he noted ‘the inconvenience which I, as a mercantile man, trading to all parts of the globe, have experienced from [their] operation’, but did not press to a division his proposal obliging the government to retaliate against countries which did not reciprocate in lifting restrictions. His concern for mercantile interests was shown by questions regarding the effects of the Danish blockade of the Elbe on British shipping in 1849 and 1850.26See his questions of 13 Mar. 1849, 1 June 1849 and 18 Feb. 1850. He also wrote to Palmerston on the subject of the Danish blockade: Hull Packet, 11 May 1849. On several occasions he pressed the need for a proper system of collecting agricultural statistics.27See his questions and speeches of 14 Mar. 1848, 20 July 1849, 14 May 1850 and 18 Feb. 1851.

Although his belief that free trade needed a fair trial was a constant refrain, Sandars coupled this with advocacy of a 5s. fixed duty on corn, a potential source of revenue which he argued ‘would, except in years of scarcity, come out of the pocket of the foreign grower, and would not enhance the price of corn’ to consumers, 22 June 1849. This earned him a rebuke from Cobden, who declared that Wakefield’s electors had not returned him ‘to propose a tax upon bread’, and local opponents subsequently attacked him for being ‘a professing Free Trader in Wakefield – a Protectionist in Parliament’.28Leeds Mercury, 26 June 1852. He again suggested it, 20 July 1849 and 15 Mar. 1850, arguing in the latter speech that under free trade, European imports would depress prices for domestic produce. While the Hull Packet praised the ‘frank and manly style’ of this speech, which ‘produced an immense impression in the House’, and the Morning Herald deemed it ‘a harpoon in the side of Free Trade’, it embroiled Sandars in a dispute with The Times over his claim to have purchased Baltic wheat at what it regarded as an impossibly low price.29Hull Packet, 5 Apr. 1850; Morning Herald, cited in Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family, 6; The Times, 26 Mar. 1850, 29 Mar. 1850. The Times claimed that Sandars said that he had purchased the ‘finest quality of wheat from Stettin and Rostock for 33s. a quarter’, whereas Sandars countered that he had been misreported and had actually referred to red Pomeranian wheat at 33­s. to 34s. a quarter. Sandars subsequently submitted the relevant invoice for publication: The Times, 1 Apr. 1850. The Times contended that there was

‘a species of impropriety, approaching to indecency, in a corn merchant who is daily transmitting large orders to the Baltic, the markets of which depend on the British, standing up in the House of Commons to make what would be called in the Stock-Exchange a very “bearing” speech, and trying to convince the British public that he can import any quantity from the Baltic at almost any price he pleases’.30The Times, 29 Mar. 1850. Reports differed as to whether his comments had had any effect on the market: The Times, 26 Mar. 1850, cf. The Times, 6 June 1850.

He was forced to defend himself in the House against charges that he had ‘frighten[ed] the English farmers into selling their wheat at a sacrifice’, 14 May 1850, and was further embarrassed when correspondence with John Villiers Shelley (MP Westminster, 1852-65) revealed that his firm was unable to execute anorder at the disputed price.31The Times, 6 June 1850, and see Sandars’ defence of why Shelley’s order could not be fulfilled, The Times, 8 June 1850.

Having cultivated the constituency through attendance at events such as the annual soirees of the Church Institution and the Mechanics’ Institute, Sandars sought re-election in 1852.32Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 30 Sept. 1847; Leeds Mercury, 4 Oct. 1851. Sandars was a benefactor to local causes, giving £50 towards a new burial ground and the same sum to a fund to promote local success at the Great Exhibition: Bradford Observer, 27 Sept. 1849, 11 Apr. 1850. He was a director of the West Riding Proprietary School, and a freemason: Leeds Mercury, 20 July 1850, 28 Dec. 1850. He stated that he held the same position on free trade as in 1847, believing that it would now be unwise to reverse the policy, and despite his advocacy of the issue in Parliament, he promised to vote against re-imposition of a duty on corn.33The Times, 8 Mar. 1852; Leeds Mercury, 10 July 1852. Attacked for his support for a division of the West Riding constituency, he also had to defend his failure to withdraw the Wakefield borough market bill, an issue on which there had been local divisions, and to refute allegations of lax attendance. He backed the disfranchisement of small boroughs to give extra seats to large towns such as Doncaster, but would not support Russell’s franchise measure. He did, however, favour equalisation of the borough and county franchise, and a taxpayer franchise. Declaring that ‘I always was and always will be a Conservative’, he nonetheless denied that he was a regular Derbyite, describing himself as ‘strictly independent’.34Leeds Mercury, 10 July 1852. Rumours after his election victory that he would be appointed as a whip came to nothing.35Leeds Mercury, 24 July 1852.

Sandars made fewer contributions to debate thereafter, but maintained his interest in commercial and fiscal policy. He spoke on Disraeli’s budget, 10 Dec. 1852, praising the distinction it made between income from property and from trades and professions, but objecting to the doubling of the house tax in order to reduce the malt tax. He nevertheless divided in its support, 16 Dec. 1852. The following year, showing his disregard for party ties – Conacher classifies him as an ‘independent Conservative’ in this Parliament36Conacher, Peelites and the party system, 234. – he backed Gladstone’s budget as ‘a bold, comprehensive, and statesmanlike measure’, 28 Apr. 1853, despite his misgivings about renewing income tax. Sandars divided for removal of Jewish disabilities, but opposed abolition of church rates. He continued to press the importance of collecting agricultural statistics, submitting evidence to a Lords committee.37PP 1854-55 (101), viii. 214. He spoke on this question in the House, 19 May 1853. He protested on behalf of the mercantile community against the ‘novel and vexatious tax’ on foreign bills of exchange proposed in the stamp duties bill, 12 June 1854. Arguing that Cobden’s views did not reflect those of the West Riding generally, he promised to back ministers in voting supplies for the war, 27 Feb. 1854, and spoke in support of increasing the malt tax, 15 May 1854, a subject on which he differed from many Conservatives. However, he divided against ministers for Roebuck’s motion for an inquiry into army management, 29 Jan. 1855. Sandars was appointed to the Clonmel election petition committee, but his committee service was otherwise limited to one day on the Wakefield soke mills bill.38Belfast News-Letter, 29 Apr. 1853; PP 1852-53 (944), lxxxiii. 80. He remained a reasonably assiduous attender, present for 111 out of 257 divisions in 1853, and 102 out of 240 in 1854.39Daily News, 21 Sept. 1853; Bradford Observer, 24 Aug. 1854. In the 1849 session, he had been less assiduous, attending 78 out of 227 divisions: Leeds Mercury, 20 Oct. 1849. He was, however, spending less time in Wakefield, having purchased Little Chesterford Park, Essex in 1852, and given up Alverthorpe Hall some time before July 1855.40Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family, 5; Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 6 July 1855. Alverthorpe Hall was being advertised as a boys’ school in July 1855. Sandars’ last-known Commons speech, on the bills of exchange bill, 28 Mar. 1855, was followed by prolonged ill-health, necessitating a lengthy absence from Parliament.41Leeds Mercury, 28 Apr. 1855; Daily News, 25 June 1855. That December, he and his wife had ‘a very narrow escape’ from a house fire in Wakefield.42Leeds Mercury, 13 Dec. 1855. In the 1856 session, he attended only 27 out of 198 divisions, although he was present to divide with Cobden on the Canton question, 3 Mar. 1857.43J.P. Gassiot, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck: with a full analysis of the divisions in the House of Commons during the last session of Parliament (1857), 24. He retired on health grounds at the 1857 election, although it was rumoured that, as his ten years as MP had allegedly cost him £30,000, ‘the great expense to which the borough had put him’ was also a consideration.44The Times, 18 Oct. 1859.

Sandars wound up his Wakefield commercial interests with the dissolution of the partnership of Sandars and Dunn, corn merchants, in October 1857.45Morning Chronicle, 10 Oct. 1857. He declined a Conservative request to offer for an anticipated vacancy at Wakefield in 1861, ‘still unable to bear the wear and tear of an election’.46Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 21 June 1861. In the event, the by-election did not take place until February 1862. He expanded his Essex properties, purchasing Little Walden Park in 1858, but sold them in 1868 to move to Beechwood, Tunbridge Wells, spending ‘a domestic, but not very comfortable retirement’ there and in London.47Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family, 5; Sandars, Sandars centuries, 95. He died in May 1879; his personal estate sworn under £90,000, was divided between his wife and children.48The Times, 4 July 1879. His only son, Samuel, who had wanted to become an architect, instead obeyed his father’s wishes and trained for the bar.49Lawes, Some notes on the Sandars family, 7. He married the daughter of Francis William Russell (MP Limerick city, 1852-71), but did not enter politics himself.50J.A. Venn, Alum. Cantab., v. 411. Samuel Sandars is best remembered as a generous benefactor to Cambridge University Library: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/sandars/ Sandars is commemorated with memorial plaques in Gainsborough parish church and Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge.51Sandars, Sandars centuries, 98; http://www.sandars.org.uk/Geneology/showmedia.php?&mediaID=177&medialinkID=119&albumlinkID=&page=3 The diaries of his nephew, John Edward Sandars, who resided with his uncle at Alverthorpe, 1849-52, are held by the Lincolnshire archives.52http://www.c4yp.co.uk/upload/public/attachments/551/REPORT16.pdf