Randolph Isham Routh

Sir Randolph Isham Routh KCB (21 December 1782 – 29 November 1858[1]) was a British Army officer reaching the rank of Commissary-General.

During the War of Independence, he took the Loyalist side and his refugee family itinerancy resulted in children being born in Salem, Boston, Long Island, New York, and Halifax.

A replacement position of Chief Customs Collector of Newfoundland was obtained eventually, and he went there to take up that post with his Brother-in-Law William Isham Eppes.

At this time, the huge undertaking of the construction of the fortress Citadel of Quebec was being built as a defense against a further American invasion attempt, and there had to be a large British military establishment present among a French civilian population.

One of his persistent initiatives was to persuade the House of Assembly of Lower Canada to adopt Sterling as the medium of exchange thus simplifying and eliminating the troublesome use of multiple currencies.

Routh was more effective in his vigorous protest against the proposal in the early 1830s to turn all the financial business of the military over to local banks.

Routh's service in British North America included the years of the rebellions of 1837–38, when his department was suddenly faced with wartime conditions and criticized by regimental officers in the field.

Lieutenant-Colonel George Cathcart commented that Routh had no notion of organizing a field Commissariat and that nothing could have been more complicated or less efficient than his arrangements.

Cathcart admitted that part of the confusion arose from Sir John Colborne's initial orders at the outbreak of the second rebellion in 1838 to have the troops live at free quarters, which led to plunder by them in the disturbed areas.

[3] Routh was not idle during the next two year interval on half pay, he wrote Observations on the Commissariat Field Service and Home Defences (1845, and 2nd ed.

After two years on half pay, Routh was selected to be Chairman of the Irish Famine Relief Commission in November 1845, presiding until October 1848.

[3] Routh married, first, on 26 December 1815, in Paris, Adèle Joséphine Laminière (Lamy), daughter of one of Napoleon Bonaparte's civil officers; who died of childbirth complications 1827 in Quebec.

Jules Isham Routh of the Royal Welch Fusiliers who died of typhus in Ireland 1848 working with his Father on famine relief.