Notes: Philip Cazenove
Stockbroker, Philanthropist, and Church-Builder of Battersea Rise

Family and Huguenot origins Confirmed

The Cazenoves were Huguenots who left France for Geneva in the late 17th century and later moved to London. Philip was born in Clapton (then in the parish of Hackney, Middlesex), a son of James (Jacques) Cazenove (1744–1827) and Marie Anne Sophie Houssemayne Du Boulay (1761–1840). His elder brother John Cazenove (1788–1879) was a merchant and political economist, a friend of Malthus. Gemini calls Philip “the fourth son”; this hasn’t been checked.

Birth year: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry is titled “Cazenove, Philip (1798–1880)”, but thepeerage.com, citing Burke’s Peerage (2003), gives 16 January 1799 at Upper Clapton, and the Cazenove company history also says 1799. He was 81 at his death in 1880. The ODNB’s 1798 is worth checking against the entry itself.

Education: Charterhouse Confirmed

Educated at Charterhouse, then still on its original site in the City of London (Huguenots of Spitalfields).

The stockbroking firm Confirmed

The firm grew in four steps:

— 1819: he joined the stockbroking business of his brother-in-law, John Francis Menet, a fellow Huguenot.

— 1823: he became Menet’s partner; the firm dates its foundation from this year.

— 1835: Menet died, and Cazenove went into partnership with Joseph Laurence and Charles Pearce.

— 1854: he formed P. Cazenove & Co. with his son and a nephew.

The firm rose on the railway boom and on a close relationship with the Rothschilds. It acted for, among others, the San Paulo Railway (1859), the Bank of Hindustan (1862), Indian railways, the Atlantic Telegraph Company (1863), the Great Eastern Railway and the Metropolitan District Railway. One source says the firm later became stockbroker to the Queen.

Thepeerage.com calls him a “partner of Cazenove Akroyd & Greenwood”. That looks like a later name of the firm, after mergers, rather than any partnership in his own lifetime.

Gemini’s phrase “one of the UK’s premier blue-blood investment banks” describes the firm in the 20th century, not in Philip’s lifetime, when it was a stockbroking partnership.

Marriage and children Confirmed

He married Emma Knapp on 4 September 1822 at Tottenham (thepeerage.com, citing Burke’s Peerage 2003). Thepeerage lists these children with their birth years:

— the Rev. Arthur Cazenove, born 12 February 1823, died 10 August 1893

— Susan, 1824

— Mary H[arley], 1827

— Henry, 1830

— Emily F[rances], 1835

— Louisa, 1837

— Laura Susan, 1840, died about 26 August 1861

— Helen Emma, 1843, died 19 November 1917

The Cobbold family-history site adds Emma, Philip and Charles (eleven in all), and calls Arthur “Arthur Philip”. Several children were born in Hackney between 1830 and 1840, so the family was still living in the Clapton/Hackney area then.

Home on Battersea Rise, 1846–1880 Corrected

Gemini says Cazenove lived at “Auckland House on Clapham Common West Side”, and that he “resided in Clapham and later Wandsworth”. Neither claim has been found in any reliable source. The draft Survey of London volume on Battersea is much more precise. Describing the houses built on Lovelace’s land on the south side of Battersea Rise in the 1760s, it says:

“To its east, next to the future site of Glenelg, was the first of Lovelace’s two speculative houses on this side of the road. It had no name, but formed with its grounds an estate later known as the Chatto estate … Later occupants included Thomas Astle, antiquary, archivist and collector (c.1776–1803), and Philip Cazenove, stockbroker and philanthropist (1846–80). Following Cazenove’s death, Chatto’s estate was sold for redevelopment.”

Thepeerage.com says simply that he “lived at Clapham”. That fits: Victorian addresses on Battersea Rise, at the Clapham Common end, were very often given as “Clapham Common” or “Clapham”, whatever the parish.

So Cazenove’s home for the last 34 years of his life was an unnamed Georgian house on the south side of Battersea Rise, near Clapham Common, in the parish of Battersea. It had earlier been the home of Thomas Astle, Keeper of the Records in the Tower. The estate was redeveloped after his death. The order of his homes was Clapton/Hackney first, then Battersea Rise; there is no evidence for an earlier move to Clapham.

“Died at Wandsworth”: Gemini says he died “at his home in Wandsworth”. Battersea Rise was in Battersea parish, but Battersea was in the Wandsworth registration district, so his death would have been registered at Wandsworth. That probably explains the wording.

Church-building in Battersea: St Mark’s and St Michael’s Confirmed

From the 1860s the vicar of Battersea, Canon John Erskine Clarke, raised money for a string of new churches for the parish’s fast-growing population. His backers were, in the Survey of London’s words, “largely merchants or businessmen living near the commons”, among them Henry Sykes Thornton and the starch manufacturer William Evill, “and pre-eminently Philip Cazenove”. The Survey adds:

“This philanthropic stockbroker became Clarke’s main supporter, probably paid for most of St Mark’s and had embarked with him on St Michael’s before he died.”

St Mark’s, Battersea Rise (by William White, 1872–74) stands a short walk from Cazenove’s house.

St Michael’s, Wandsworth Common (now in Cobham Close, off Bolingbroke Grove) began as a temporary mission church in 1872. The present building, also by William White, was dedicated in 1881. The church’s own history says it was built:

“in memory of two people – Philip Cazenove, a major benefactor of work in the parish; and the Revd H.B. Verdon, the first Vicar of the church.”

Gemini adds that St Michael’s was “financed entirely by donations from their friends”, and that it had an associated school on Cobham Close. Neither has been confirmed. Clarke certainly raised the money by subscription, and Cazenove himself had begun funding it before his death.

Other charities Partly confirmed

The Huguenots of Spitalfields describes his philanthropy as covering “church, education, and medicine”. Henry Simmonds’s All About Battersea (1882) indexes Cazenove among the area’s eminent residents, under a heading that includes supporters of the anti-slavery movement; that passage has not yet been read in full.

Gemini’s more specific claims have not been found in any source:

— that he was treasurer of the Church Pastoral-Aid Society

— that he was a governor or “financial auditor” of teaching hospitals

— that he funded nonconformist chapels

— that he was “a major subscriber to Jewish domestic charities”

The last two sit oddly with a committed evangelical Anglican, and look like the kind of plausible-sounding filler AI summaries sometimes produce. A possible source of confusion: evangelicals of his circle often supported the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, a missionary body, not a Jewish charity. Treat all four as unconfirmed until a primary source turns up. Subscription lists in annual reports, and his obituaries, are the place to look.

Death, 1880 Partly confirmed

He died in 1880 at Wandsworth (i.e. in the Wandsworth registration district), aged 81 (thepeerage.com). Gemini gives the date as 20 January 1880; that has not yet been checked against the probate calendar or an obituary. The firm, and the family’s involvement in it, continued for well over a century: a great-great-great-grandson, Bernard Cazenove, retired from it in 2004.