William TURQUAND (1818 – 1894) – Reading Old Cemetery

Life story researched and written by John Bark

Every time you buy from a company you are protected by an important legal principle called the Turquand Rule, after the accountant William TURQUAND, who was buried in Reading Old Cemetery in 1894. The rule has been superseded by the Companies Act in the UK, but you can still see lively videos on the internet describing it to an international audience. It is however far from the most important legacy of a man regarded in his time as the very model of his profession.

Migrating to England

William’s ancestors were Huguenots, French Protestants who crossed the English channel to escape persecution for their religion. People-smugglers, separation, torture and joyful re-union drive a timeless tale handed down to his descendants by Paul Turquand (1667-1748). Dispossessed of lands in Chatellerault in western France following the Revocation of the Treaty of Nantes in 1685, Paul never regained his lost inheritance. But his family prospered in England.

The Huguenots were warmly welcomed for their Protestantism, wealth and skills (such as silk weaving) and assimilated relatively easily into British society. Many were supported by a ‘Royal Bounty’ to which better-off Huguenots and the Government contributed. Paul’s great-grandson Leonard (William’s grandfather) was appointed a fund commissioner by George III in 1777 and was clearly proud of it.

Sugar man

Leonard TURQUAND was a sugar refiner in Great Garden Street, Whitechapel, where beefy, beery German immigrants poured raw sugar down long chutes into heated vats called ‘blow-ups’. It was a lucrative industry, notorious for fire and explosion risk, where swift action might be needed at any time to save lives and property. This is probably why Leonard lived close to the refinery when he married Elizabeth van SOMMER in 1771. Elizabeth belonged to an important Huguenot family. Their son, who would be William’s father, was recorded as “Guillaume” at his christening in the French Protestant Chapel in Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields in 1781. It’s doubtful though whether he ever used the French version of his birth name.

Welcome to suburbia

Leonard and Elizabeth did not remain in the East End. They moved out to Kennington in Surrey where they lived for over a decade before she died in 1807 followed by Leonard in 1813.

Twenty-eight years later their son, now in his fifties, lived with his wife Henrietta Ellen (née Dalley) and children at Thurlow Place, Norwood, in spacious grounds set well back from the road. They probably still enjoyed the countrified air that had tempted wealthy people to the area. The rapid expansion of housing and the incursion of the railway following the re-building of the Crystal Palace at nearby Sydenham still lay in the future.

“Guillaume” had not followed his father into the sugar industry: he appears to have been a stockbroker in the City in the early decades of the century. In 1841 he was employed as “Official Assignee in the Court of Bankruptcy” part of a public organisation set up by Act of Parliament in 1832 to bring greater professionalism to the handling of the affairs of bankrupts. He died suddenly in the City in 1849, leaving behind his wife and seven children: William, the oldest, aged 31, Catherine, Rosa, Leonard, Frances, Henrietta and Louisa the youngest, at 18. Both Catherine and Frances married while their sisters remained independent women for the rest of their lives, living “on funds”. Leonard died two years after his father in India aged 25.

Good neighbours in Reading

William went into practice as an accountant, specialising in insolvency. By 1861, his business had grown through merger into the firm of Coleman, Turquand, Youngs and Co, soon to become Turquand, Youngs, Weise, Bishop & Clarke, later described by The Accountant journal as ‘one of the largest firms of its kind on London, indeed the world.’

It was about this time that William’s link to Reading becomes apparent, although he never lived there. His mother and three sisters – Rosa, Louisa and Henrietta – had moved to Reading where they rented 1 Southern Hill, near the top of Redlands Road (a property William later owned for three years, before selling it to George Palmer in 1868).

The sisters got to know the Waterhouse family who were temporarily living at nearby Redlands House, where young Edwin Waterhouse came to stay with his parents after his University finals. Like many another graduate, Edwin was unsure of his future career, so his father made up his mind up for him.

Edwin’s parents had learned from the “Misses Turquand” of their brother “The Accountant” and sent him off for an interview. This took place at 4 Mansfield Street, Marylebone, William’s “private house” which he shared with the father of John Galsworthy, author of the Forsyte Saga. Edwin was accepted as an intern on payment of £210, thus starting the illustrious career of one of the founders of Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) now one of the ‘Big 4’ accountancy forms that audit the world’s largest companies and public organisations.

William was also closely involved in the finances of his sister Frances who came to Reading with her young family after her husband died in 1863.

Ignorant Men

William was “a courteous gentleman, always well dressed, an ideal professional man,” according to Ernest Cooper. But William’s courtesy did not extend to one of the unfortunates who gave him his living. When one bankrupt made a complaint to “Mr Turquand,” Cooper reported that the man was told to “take his affairs to the Devil”.* (Bankruptcy was a way of avoiding the shame of debtors’ prison until 1869).

As the popularity of the limited liability company grew, so did the number of insolvencies. William’s firm’s fee income rose from £19,627 in 1859 to £90,287 in 1868. He personally liquidated 62 companies in 1877. Not everyone approved of what the accountants were doing, including members of the legal profession such as Justice Quain, for whom the Bankruptcy Act was obviously a sore point: “The whole affairs in bankruptcy have been handed over to an ignorant set of men called accountants, which is one of the greatest abuses introduced into law.”

President

William took it as his mission to improve the standing of his profession. He was one of the prime movers in the setting up of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, an amalgamation of six pre-existing societies, including the Institute of Accountants of which he was President. The institute received its Charter from Queen Victoria in 1880 and he became its first President. Its aim as set out in its charter of incorporation was:

“…the elevation of the profession of public accountants as a whole and the promotion of their efficiency and usefulness by compelling the observance of strict rules of conduct as a condition of membership and by setting up a high standard of professional and general education and knowledge and otherwise.”

Anyone wanting to join the Institute had to pass an exam in general education, serve five years articles with an Institute member and sit further examinations in book-keeping and accounts, auditing and liquidation, bankruptcy, company, mercantile and arbitration law – all in addition to membership and exam fees. By the beginning of February the next year the Institute had 1,025 members. It later tried to increase its hold on the profession by introducing a bill into parliament “restraining all persons from practising who were not registered as Chartered Accountants” but this was withdrawn. It now has 159,000 members in 149 countries.

Late flowering love?

With all this hard work, William married late. At 52 he took as his bride twenty-year old Ada BRUNTON at All Saints, Margaret Street, Marylebone in 1872. Ada was the daughter of a stock broker and art collector who had been involved in the flotation of The Opera Company Ltd in 1864. Just before they married he was living at 26 Norfolk St, St George Hanover Square with five servants. This was a highly desirable address: at no. 24 lived Thomas Hare (Bart) 2^nd Baronet of Stow Hall in Norfolk and at no. 21 was Edward Levy, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, whose circulation was audited by William’s firm in 1877 “…by far the largest daily average we have hitherto certified from the books of the Daily Telegraph.”

A man of wealth

Five years later William and Ada moved to no. 20 Norfolk Street, a seven-bedroom mid-Georgian property that was one of the original houses in the street. It still exists. At the front, the property looks into Mayfair; at the rear, a wrought-iron balcony overlooks Park Lane and Hyde Park. He was substantially wealthy when he died there in 1894 with an estate of £45,319. A special funeral train took his body out to Reading, where his sisters Henrietta, Louisa and Frances still lived and his mother, sister Rosa and niece Constance were already buried. At his request, the funeral was to be simple.

Legacy

Merger after merger, accountancy firms grew ever larger from the seeds planted in William’s time. Turquand, Youngs & Co eventually became Turquand, Barton, Mayhew & Co in 1972 before the Turquand name disappeared in amalgamations with Ernst & Ernst and Whinney, Murray & Co. to become Ernst & Whinney in 1979. Ernst & Young (EY) a ‘multinational professional services partnership’ is the latest descendent. Like PcW it is one of the ‘Big 4’ which dominate the market.

The Rule

The legal ruling that preserved the Turquand name for posterity was ironically established by a case which went against him in his role as liquidator for an insolvent railway company in 1856. The company in question had issued a bond to the Royal British Bank against which it had taken a loan. When the company defaulted, the Bank sued. In its defence the company argued the bond had been issued improperly by two of its directors, rendering the bank’s claim invalid. The judges disagreed: an outsider was entitled to assume that a transaction with a company was in accordance with its Memorandum of Agreement, a publicly available document. As the Bank had no way of knowing that the directors had exceeded their authority, they could sue. So important was this judgement that it was not settled until it had gone to the House of Lords. It has remained a vital principle of company law ever since.

PS: Mrs Biancardi remembers

In July 1901, not yet fifty, William’s widow, Ada married the ADC to the Governor of Malta, Major N Grech Biancardi, at the Church of Santa Caterina. Three years later keen traveller and exuberant letter-writer Joan Kennard met Ada for tea. “She is vulgar but kind and amusing and as Lady Augusta B says a very useful person to know here,” she wrote from the Villa Guarda Mungia, Pieta, Malta to her mother at Brading. “She talks at the top of her voice at the speed of an express train,” she told her father, “and frequently to her deceased husband No. 1 as Turkey.”

*Quoted in True and Fair: A History of Price Waterhouse by Edgar Jones, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1995 p35

Sources

William Turquand’s professional life is reasonably well documented elsewhere. I have supplemented these accounts with searches in birth, marriage, death, census, city directory, newspaper and archival records

Visitation of England ed F A Crisp, 1902 vol 10 (available via Genealogist web site)
Paul and Madelaine Turquand: Extract from an account of the Turquand family from the tenth or eleventh century to the year 1814 Norfolk Record Office ref FC 13/91 (online: https://gallery.nen.gov.uk/gallery13577-.html)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
A History of Accounting and Accountants R Brown (originally published 1905) 1968
The Dictionary of Business Biography vol 5 ed DJ Jeremy 1986
Royal Berkshire Archives ref D/EX1281/3/1-11 Deeds of 1-6 Southern Hill and land in Whitley, Reading
Transcript of Letter from Joan Kennard to her father (Original: Isle of Wight Record Office ref OG/CC/2174E)
Transcript of Letter from Joan Kennard to her mother (Original: Isle of Wight Record Office ref OG/CC/2174I)

Links (as of 01/09/2022)

Division 44, Row E, Plot 32