During his time with the firm, Alfred Jones who later managed a shipping business with trade routes to West Africa was also working there.

[2] In 1862, with £27 in his pocket, he sailed from Liverpool to take up an appointment as a shop assistant in a grocery store in Fernando Pó (now part of Equatorial Guinea) owned by the former British Consul on the Island,[3] James Lynslager and formerly of John Beecroft, who had previously been a governor under the Spanish authorities.

Initially, Holt stayed in West Africa and appointed an agent in Liverpool to sell produce and purchase consumer goods.

[4] The brothers very quickly came to dominate commercial trade in Cameroon, Gabon and the Spanish possessions on the mainland as well as Fernando Pó where he had begun his career.

A resident of Birkenhead (then part of the County of Cheshire) ever since he arrived there as an apprentice in his late teens, he was still living there with his family in the affluent suburb of Oxton in 1911.