Elisha Smith Robinson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elisha Smith Robinson (1817–1885) was an English businessman and politician.
Robinson was born in 1817 in Overbury, on the Worcestershire-Gloucestershire borders where his father Edward Robinson, a paper maker, lived in Silver Rill House. He was apprenticed to his maternal grandfather, Rev. Elisha Smith, a grocer and Baptist Minister in Blockley and Chipping Camden.
In 1840, his father was threatening to replace him within the family business with a Londoner, so he moved to Bristol with the help of a small loan. He founded his own printing and packaging business, E. S. & A. Robinson, in 1844.[1] Within 20 years, his firm was the largest buyer of paper in the British Empire.
Family
In 1845 he married Elizabeth Ring, with whom he had eight children; she died in 1871. Soon afterwards, he married Louisa Thomas, who died in 1875.[2]
Political career
Robinson became mayor of Bristol in 1866.[3] He was elected as a Liberal Member of Parliament for Bristol (UK Parliament constituency) in 1870, but was unseated on a technicality. He stood again as an independent in 1880. He had a belligerent attitude to politics; he published his pledges in his own broadsheet, The Redcliffe Review, and was satirized in local cartoons.[4][5]
He served as a Justice of the Peace, as well as chairman of the Bristol Port Railway and Pier (now Severn Beach Line), and president of the Grateful Society [6] in 1880.
He was also the president of the Anchor Society in Bristol in 1859.
