Robert Needham Philips DL (1815 – 28 February 1890)[1] was an English merchant and manufacturer in the Lancashire textiles business,[2] a Liberal Party politician, and the grandfather of the Whig historian G. M. Trevelyan.
He lived in Manchester and in Warwickshire,[2] and after holding at least three ceremonial appointments he was the Member of Parliament (MP) for the borough of Bury, a mill town which was then in Lancashire, for a total of 22 years between 1857 and 1885.
[4] The family's extensive estate on the boundary of Whitefield and Prestwich, in Greater Manchester (now within the Metropolitan Borough of Bury), is now Philips Park.
[10] He was a partner in a partnership of smallware manufacturers, with interests in Staffordshire, Lancashire, Westmorland and London, which was dissolved in 1855.
[12] After his death in 1890 at the age of 75,[1] a further partnership was dissolved, which had involved a bleaching and dyeing enterprise at Bagley in Lancashire, and bobbin manufacturing at Staveley in Westmorland.