George William Robinson

George William Robinson was born in 1815 in Wakefield in Yorkshire, England. His family business in nearby Halifax, called Robinson Brothers Cork Growers, imported and processed cork from Portugal. In the 1840s he travelled to Portugal to meet with cork suppliers and, after extensive travels through the cork-growing areas, arrived in Portalegre in the north of the Alentejo region. This was the site of a small cork-processing factory that had been set up by another Briton, Thomas Reynolds, in a Franciscan convent left empty after the dissolution of the monasteries in Portugal in 1834.^[1]

Robinson settled in Portalegre in 1848, eventually buying the small factory, which Reynolds had to sell to meet business debts incurred by his son, also called Thomas. With a ready-made factory at his disposal and a family business in England to sell to, Robinson also benefitted from rapidly rising export prices for cork products.^[2] The United Kingdom accounted for more than 50% of Portuguese sales of products such as pressed plank cork, corks for bottles, notice boards and cork buoys. By the mid-1850s he had around 260 employees, including those who stripped the bark from the trees.^[1]

Robinson married Sarah Anne Wheelhouse from England and they set up home in Boavista, to the south of the factory. The couple had six or seven children but only two would outlive them. George Wheelhouse Robinson, who would eventually take over the business was born on 17 September 1857. He was sent to England as a young boy to avoid the illnesses from which his siblings had died. He studied in Doncaster and did not return permanently to Portugal until he was 24. He died in 1932; his sister Mary died in 1918.^[1][3]

In 1868 Robinson purchased at public auction part of the land of the dissolved Convent, which had until then belonged to the Portuguese Exchequer. In the same year, the three woollen textile factories in Portalegre went bankrupt and Robinson's factory became the major employer. It purchased its first steam engine in 1872. A few years later Robinson began to purchase land for cork production in nearby Spain. In 1880 he was to inform the Portuguese Parliament that his factory employed 680 workers, of whom 420 were women.^[1]