Alexander Willock

London merchant, failing in 1793, connected to two awards in Antigua, three in Montserrat and one in Tobago, in all of which Frank Gore Willock (his grandson) was claimant, although the capacity of Alexander Willock is not yet clear in all cases. In some he had been the executor and trustee of Michael White of St Vincent.

1. He frequently appears in the records as Alexander Willcock. For example, the Cumbria Records Office has a watercolour of Great Courland from the Orange Valley estate in Tobago 'belonging to Alexander Willcock and William Crosier.' Again, Sandy Bay (St Patrick parish) Lots nos. 3 and 5, which became Orange Valley, are shown as 'Willcock and Crosier' in Fowler.

2. The will of Alexander Willock of the Island of Antigua but now merchant of the City of London, proved 31/07/1802, is 40 pages long and in places illegible. It opens with a recitation of his debt of £8000 to Henry Benskin Lightfoot of Antigua and describes apparently related arrangements whereby his wife rented enslaved people to him on Antigua, with no full accounts kept of their dealings together. He left his estate in entail to his son Francis and failing his issue to his sons Arthur Morson Willock and William Willock.

3. The firm of Alexander and Francis Willock appears to have originated in Liverpool but was of Broad Street in the City of London when it failed in 1793. If the association with Liverpool is correct, as seems probable, then Alexander Willock was a slave-trader. William Willock and Alexander Willock, whose partnership as William Willock and Co. was dissolved in 1783 had over a dozen slave voyages between them: William's were concentrated in the mid 1750s and Alexander's (three to Antigua and one to Grenada) between 1787 and 1791 (with one outlier in 1771, tied to Alexander Willock by the presence of Arthur Morson as a co-owner: as noted above, Alexander Willock the Antigua and London merchant had a son named Arthur Morson Willock).

4. Witness to the 1789-1790 Committee on the Slave Trade, when he said that he had spent 36 years on Antigua (except 18 months in England) , where he owned two estates, one in Body Division of 450 acres bought in 1768, and one in Pope's Head division bought in 1777.

1. Cumbria Records Office, D. Ing, 'Robinson and Crosier (later Inglis) families of Green Lane (Dalston) and Catherine Court (London)', http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=023-ding&cid=3-45#3-45 [accessed 05/12/2013]; John Fowler, A summary account of the present flourishing state of the respectable colony of Tobago in the British West Indies illustrated with a map of the island and a plan of its settlement, agreeably to the sales by his Majesty’s Commissioners (London: A Grant, 1774), pp. 58-59.

2. PROB 11/1378/277.

3. London Gazette 13172 02/02/1790 p. 76 for Alexander and Francis Willock in Liverpool in 1790; London Gazette 13514 26/03/1793 p. 256 for the bankruptcy (which alludes to the property of Alexander Willock in the West Indies). There were still suits in Chancery in the 1810s and 1820s (Francis Willock v Sir William Curtis, London Gazette 16731 18/05/1813 p. 975; four related suits in Barnes v Willock London Gazette 17906 22/05/1823 p. 460); London Gazette 12475 13/09/1783 p. 3; www.slavevoyages.org.

4. Abridgement of the Minutes of the Evidence: Taken Before a Committee of the Whole House..to Consider the Slave Trade Vol. II part 2 (1790) pp.128 et seq.