Thomas Guy

English bookseller, printer, and speculator

• Born: 1644/1645
• Birthplace: Southwark, London, England
• Died: December 27, 1724
• Place of death: London, England

Guy was a successful bookseller, specializing in Bibles, but earned even greater wealth by speculating in the stock of the South Sea Company. Although regarded as a miser in his lifetime, he nevertheless founded one of London’s most prestigious teaching hospitals, endowing it as a charity for the incurable.

Sources of wealth: Sale of products; investments

Bequeathal of wealth: Relatives; friends; charity; medical institution

Early Life

Thomas Guy was the eldest of three children born to Thomas Guy, a coal merchant, carpenter, and barge operator, and Anne Vaughton. The elder Thomas was a Baptist at a time when Baptists were known as “dissenters” and were a small and despised group. He worked out of a small wharf in Southwark, near London Bridge. Young Thomas, his brother, and sister were born and lived nearby the wharf in a relatively poor part of London. The elder Thomas died when young Thomas was only eight, and Anne returned to her birthplace, Tamworth, in the Midlands, where her family had good standing.

It is generally believed that Guy attended Tamworth Free Grammar (high) School during the Commonwealth period (1650-1660), where he would have been taught Latin and Greek and probably math. In 1660, the year of the restoration of King Charles II, Guy returned to London to be apprenticed to John Clarke, a bookseller in Cheapside, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1668, Guy bought a bookstore in Cornhill and its stock of £200 worth of books. The store was situated in the financial heart of London, near Mansion House. That year he was admitted as a freeman of the Stationers’ Company, becoming a liveryman five years later. These positions gave him the credentials to sell and print books. In 1670, he was made a freeman of the city of London, and he also served the city as an alderman.

First Ventures

One of Guy’s main concerns as a bookseller was to sell Bibles. He saw the market for cheap but well-produced Bibles. However, the Stationers’ Company, along with the Oxford University Press, had a virtual monopoly on printing Bibles. The Bibles the Stationers’ Company produced were either very poorly printed or very expensive. The university press was not interested in the Bible market, and so did nothing with its printing permit.

At first, Guy tried importing Bibles from Holland, but this was technically illegal, as it broke the monopoly agreement. However, Guy’s efforts attracted the attention of two clergymen who shared his concern. They negotiated with the university press to allow Guy to print Bibles for them. This venture succeeded, and Guy was soon making a good profit of some £15,000.

Guy began to show the characteristics of his life that marked him for future fame. He remained unmarried and lived very frugally. He was accused by a rival bookseller of paying low wages and not giving money to charity. However, Guy did engage in philanthropic ventures with his new wealth. The first such venture was providing for the extension of the grammar school at Tamworth. He next bought land in Tamworth in order to establish an almshouse for six poor women. This building was completed in 1678 at the cost of £200. The structure was enlarged in 1693 in order to provide six places for men. Guy also paid to build a workhouse for the destitute of Tamworth and a spinning school, a sort of early industrial school for women.

Mature Wealth

Selling Bibles continued to be Guy’s main trade and source of income. He used the wealth derived from it in a number of ways. He started to loan out money at a time when there was not a permanently established banking system in London. He tried to enter politics, running as a candidate from Tamworth in the 1690parliamentary elections. His election came at a time when being a member of Parliament was an unpaid position. Guy was unsuccessful in 1690, but in 1695 he was elected as a member of the Whig (liberal) Party, remaining as one of Tamworth’s two members of Parliament until 1708. In 1694, he was elected against his will as sheriff of London, and he preferred to pay a £400 fine rather than accept the office. He was defeated in the 1708 elections, and he became so embittered against Tamworth that he withdrew from performing any further philanthropy for the town.

Guy supplemented his mature wealth by engaging in two ventures, both of which used his bookselling profits as his capital. The first venture was trading in seamen’s pay tickets during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which Great Britain waged against France and Spain. This activity was a type of speculation in futures.

The second venture was his investment in the South Sea Company. The company had been founded in 1711 by Robert Harley, first earl of Oxford, as a way of managing the national debt incurred by the War of the Spanish Succession. The company was given a monopoly to trade with the Spanish colonies of South America, in return for which the company would give the British government £10 million. The government would then pay the company a 6 percent return on this sum. The South Sea Company raised the £10 million by selling shares at £100 each. However, what trading the company did was mainly in slaves; in fact, it did very little trading, and rather gradually took on more government debt. By 1720, the value of the company’s shares skyrocketed, climbing from £128 per share in January to more than £1,000 by the end of August. At this time, companies and stock transactions were unregulated, and the general public had little experience of the stock market. Guy perhaps intuitively was able to read the market, and he sold his shares at an enormous profit before the “South Sea bubble” burst, the first major collapse of a publicly traded company. The parliamentary report on the collapse implicated many politicians in a generally corrupt scheme, and a number of people were prosecuted. The profits Guy earned by selling his South Sea Company stock dwarfed the fortune he obtained by selling Bibles. It is variously estimated that he bought his shares in the company for between £42,000 and £54,000, and he sold them in 1720 for about £234,000.

By 1704, Guy had retired from active trade, and he began to take an interest in St. Thomas’s Hospital, one of the main hospitals in London, located near his birthplace. That year he became one of the hospital’s governors, and he looked for ways to donate some of his wealth to the facility. He gave £1,000 to build three new wards and £100 per year to fund them. A few years later, he donated an additional £3,000.

While Guy was seeking ways to benefit St. Thomas’s Hospital, a leading London physician, Richard Mead, persuaded Guy to build a new hospital to care for those patients at St. Thomas’s who were pronounced incurable. In 1721, Guy leased land from St. Thomas’s in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames River, near London Bridge. The lease was for a period of 999 years. At first, Guy saw the new hospital as remaining a part of St. Thomas’s, but he eventually decided to found an entirely new facility, which would be called Guy’s Hospital. Construction work started in 1722, and the new buildings were roofed just before his death in 1724. The facility’s first matron, Ann Rainey, was from Tamworth, and Guy had known her from boyhood.

Guy was buried at St. Thomas’s Parish Church, Southwark. At the funeral, there were more than forty carriages and a large number of poor people who saw Guy as their benefactor. About fifty years later, his body was reburied in the crypt of Guy’s Hospital Chapel, which continued to stand in the twenty-first century. A portrait of Guy, painted in 1706 by John Vanderbank, hangs inside the crypt.

Legacy

Thomas Guy was worth about £300,000 at his death. More than two-thirds of this sum went to the foundation of Guy’s Hospital in order to maintain the upkeep of four hundred beds. A ward for twenty insane patients was also included in this bequest. To mark his benevolence, a statue of Guy was erected in front of the hospital alongside statues of Christ and the Good Samaritan.

The rest of his fortune was dispersed in a number of other ways. Friends and relatives received bequests of £1,000 each. Christ’s Hospital, a school for poor children in London, received funds to provide £400 worth of scholarships each year for four students. In addition, a fund was established to help release poor debtors from prison.

Guy’s primary legacy is the establishment of the hospital that bears his name. He is perhaps the first person from a humble background to single-handedly found such a prestigious institution, setting an example of philanthropy for self-made men for the next two centuries. His insight into handling stocks showed how others could amass personal fortunes in the stock market. He also demonstrated that self-made men do not have to live ostentatiously in order to gain social respect and honor.

Bibliography

Bowden-Dan, Jane. “Mr Guy’s Hospital and the Caribbean.” History Today 56, no. 6 (June, 2006): 50-56. Investigates the South Sea Company’s slave trade, the main origin of Guy’s fortune.

Cameron, Hector C. Guy’s Hospital, 1726-1948. London: Longmans, Green, 1984. An account of the hospital’s development, including biographical material on Guy.

Guy’s Hospital Nurses League. Guy’s Hospital: History of Nursing, 1725-1968. London: Guy’s Hospital, 1968. A significant account of the history of nursing, with Guy’s Hospital being one of the leading institutions for training nurses in Great Britain.

Lawrence, Susan C. Charitable Knowledge: Hospital People and Practitioners in Eighteenth Century London. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sets the foundation of Guy’s Hospital in the wider context of England medicine, discussing the evolution of medical practice in Georgian London.

Wilks, Samuel, and George Thomas Bethany. A Biographical History of Guy’s Hospital. London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1892. The first of the very few published histories of the hospital. Part of a series of biographies of the well-known people connected to the hospital.