Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/171

 cemetery there. By his wife Anne Eliza, daughter of Captain Spender Cosby Price, formerly of the 77th Highlanders, whom he married on 8 June 1869, he had issue a son and six daughters. The son, Anthony Hormuzd, born on 31 Dec. 1883, joined the British army, and is now captain in the New Zealand staff corps at Wellington.



RATHBONE, WILLIAM (1819–1902), philanthropist, born in Liverpool on 11 Feb. 1819, was eldest of six sons of William Rathbone (1787–1868) [see under (1757–1809)] by his wife Elizabeth Greg, and was the sixth William Rathbone in direct succession, merchants in Liverpool from 1730. After passing through schools at Gateacre, Cheam, and Everton, he was apprenticed (1835–8) to Nicol, Duckworth & Co., Bombay merchants in Liverpool. In October 1838 he went with Thomas Ashton (father of Baron Ashton of Hyde) for a semester at the University of Heidelberg, where he 'gained habits of steady work and study,' and acquired a knowledge of foreign politics. His high ideals of public duty were formed under the teaching of [q. v.], who had married in 1838 his sister Hannah. From Heidelberg he made (in 1839) an Italian tour, and on his return obtained a clerkship in the London firm of Baring Brothers. In April 1841 the senior partner, [q. v.], took him on a business tour to the United States; the impression of this visit, confirmed by two subsequent ones (his third visit, 1848, was with his first wife, whose parents were American by birth), made him an 'uncompromising free-trader.' At the end of 1841 he became a partner in his father's firm, Rathbone Brothers & Co. His philanthropic work began in 1849, when he acted as a visitor for the District Provident Society; in later life he said that in the House of Commons he was 'often far more tempted to take a low and sordid view of human nature than he had ever been in the slums.' His first experiment in district nursing was made in 1859, by the engagement for this work of Mary Robinson, who had attended his first wife in her fatal illness. He consulted [q. v. Suppl. II] about a supply of nurses, who suggested that Liverpool should form a school to train nurses for itself. Hence the establishment by Rathbone of the Liverpool Training School and Home for Nurses, which began work on 1 July 1862. By the end of 1865 Liverpool had been divided into eighteen districts, each provided with nursing under the superintendence of ladies, who made themselves responsible for the costs entailed; for about a year Rathbone himself took the place of one of the lady superintendents during her absence. Long after, a colleague remarked the Rathbone was 'the one male member of the committee who knew what the homes of the poor were actually like.' The reform of sick nursing in the workhouses was also achieved by Rathbone, who secured for this in 1865 the invaluable services of Agnes Elizabeth Jones (1832-68). For three years he bore the whole expenses. His nursing reforms were extended to Birmingham and Manchester, and to London in 1874, when the National Association for providing Trained Nurses was formed, with Rathbone as chairman of its sub-committee for organising district nursing. In 1888-9 he was honorary secretary and subsequently vice-president of Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute for Nurses, to which the Queen had devoted 70,000l. out of the Women's Offering. Meanwhile, during the cotton famine of 1862-3, caused by the civil war in the United States, he did much, in conjunction with his cousin, Charles Melly, to raise to 100,000l. the Liverpool contribution to the relief fund, and brought wise counsel to its distribution.

His political action began locally in 1852, on the liberal side. He took a leading part in 1857 in procuring the Liverpool address upholding the findings of the commissariat commissions appointed after the Crimean war. Gladstone's election in 1865 for South Lancashire owed much to his energy. In November 1868 he was elected as one of the three members for Liverpool. Among other matters he took part in shaping the bankruptcy bill (1869). He was especially interested in measures for local government and in the licensing laws, opposing 'prohibition,' and demanding not more legislation but stricter administration. He commissioned in 1892 Mrs. Evelyn Leighton Fanshawe to report on temperance legislation in the United States and Canada (published 1893). For Liverpool he sat till 1880, when he contested south-west Lancashire, and was defeated, but was returned in the following November at a bye-election for Carnarvonshire, sitting for