The chemical conquistador

It was in Chile, where I was working for the British Council, that my interest in John Thomas North began. Living there I became aware just how much British immigrants – naturalists, soldiers, sailors and pirates had impacted on the country. There was even an English Queen of Chile, Mary Tudor.

John Thomas North was born in Holbeck, Leeds, and started his working life as a mechanic. Although largely forgotten in Britain today, North still arouses passions in Chile where he is vilified as the archetypal predatory capitalist. He was known as the Nitrate King.

North, whose father was a coal merchant, left school in 1857 at 15 and was apprenticed for eight years to the millwrights and shipwrights firm of Shaw, North, and Watson in Hunslet.

Hunslet in those days was known as the workshop of Leeds and in 1865 he joined another local firm, Fowler and Company at their Steam Plough and Locomotive Works. This was also the year that he married Jane Woodhead, the daughter of a senior Conservative and Leeds town councillor.

There’s some confusion over exactly when he travelled to Chile for Fowler’s, and what exactly he was engaged in when he got there. It was probably in 1869 and almost certainly he was sent to install steam-driven machinery in the Carrizal Bajo copper-mining region.

In 1871, he left Fowler’s and headed for Iquique, the main port for nitrate exports which at that time lay in the Peruvian province of Tarapacá. This desert region is the only commercially viable source of sodium nitrate in the world. Nitrate was used in explosives, and as fertiliser to underpin the agricultural revolution in Europe and North America.

A war broke out in 1879, the War of the Pacific, between Chile on one side and a combined Bolivia and Peru on the other. It is widely believed that North engineered the war for his own ends.

After two years of fighting, North set off to Lima in 1881 with an associate to purchase nitrate certificates that, in the turmoil of war, were being sold for as little as 11 per cent of their face value. It’s claimed North had received insider information that Chile would honour the certificates.

With the nitrate bonds in his pocket, North quickly returned to Britain in 1882 to set up the first of many companies focused on the nitrate industry. This caused a frenzied nitrate boom that peaked in 1889.

Over time, he grew to have a near monopoly on business activity in the now Chilean region of Tarapacá, with investments in nitrates, railways, provisions, and water. He even established the Bank of Tarapacá.

Now a very rich man, North craved social acceptance back in England. He reinvented himself as the munificent country gentleman, buying Avery Hill Mansion in Eltham, Middlesex.

North returned for a brief visit to Chile in 1889 when his business interests were threatened by the country’s president who was opposed to foreign monopolies, especially North’s Nitrate Railways Company.

This was one of the flashpoints that set off Chile’s civil war in 1891. North stands accused of helping instigate the conflict and of actively supporting the opposition. It is still arguable if this was the case, but it’s still a sore point. Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Laureate, in his magnificent poem Canto General (1950), devotes 74 lines to a blistering attack on North.

North preferred to rule his business world from London. He diversified into coal in South Wales, gold in Australia, and rubber in the Congo. But he never forgot his roots in Leeds.

In December 1888, North met two delegates from the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute, who intended to invite him to the opening of their new boys’ school. They also mentioned to him that Kirkstall Abbey was to be sold.

North, always impulsively generous, decided on the spot to buy it and present it to the borough of Leeds. The cheque he wrote for £10,000 survives and can be seen at the headquarters of the local history group, the Thoresby Society.

In recognition of this donation, North became the first Freeman of Leeds in a ceremony held on January 25, 1889. He went on to make other grants to the city of his birth, including cash for the engineering department of the Yorkshire College (forerunner of Leeds University) and for a new wing for Leeds General Infirmary.

Six years later, North was back in Leeds running what turned out to be an often bizarre election campaign as the Conservative candidate for West Leeds standing against the Liberal incumbent, Herbert Gladstone.

It is said that North had all the dogs that could be rounded up dipped in laundry blue (his party’s colour) and turned out onto the streets. That he lost by only 96 votes shows how popular Colonel North was in Leeds. North died suddenly the following year of heart failure on May 5. On the day of his funeral, The Leeds Mercury wrote that: “It is to his credit that he never turned his back on his early comrades, nor did he seek to put any manner of gloss on his humble origin.”

He was not a social crusader or philanthropist like some of his contemporaries. But Colonel North was charismatic, generous, flamboyant, and he remained genuinely loyal to his roots in Leeds.

Today there is a Yorkshire Society plaque at Kirkstall Abbey, unveiled in 1988, and moved to the Visitors’ Centre in October 2008, but little else to remind us of the man.

A short biography published in the year he died quoted him as saying: “The one pleasure, I may tell you, that I have in life, is to be born a Yorkshireman; the other, is to read about Yorkshire.”

William Edmundson is the author of The Nitrate King: A biography of ‘Colonel’ John Thomas North, and A History of the British Presence in Chile, both published by Palgrave-Macmillan. He is giving a talk open to the public on The Nitrate King for the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, in the School of Music of Leeds University on Thursday, February 16 at 7:30pm.