Felix Booth
Sir Felix Booth, 1st Baronet, FRS (16 July 1780 Clerkenwell – 24 January 1850 Brighton, Sussex) was a wealthy British gin distiller, and promoter of Arctic exploration, with various places in Nunavut, Canada, being named after him.
[1] Sir Felix Booth's ancestry traces back beyond the 13th century when his family were lords of the manor of Barton, Lancashire.
Their eldest son Sir Thomas Booth (1395–1482) married Isabel Carrington, in 1431, before settling on family estates in Lincolnshire.
The second son, Sir Robert Booth made a particularly advantageous marriage in 1409 to Dulcia Venables, thereby inheriting de jure uxoris the vast Massey estates in North-West England and whose descendants were ennobled in the 17th century as Barons Delamer then Earls of Warrington.
John and Mary produced at least four offspring including their son Philip Booth who was born during 1745 (substantiated by his obituary saying he died on 5 May 1818 aged 73).
Together they had – to a great extent – rebuilt the Turnmill Street premises and it would be Felix who subsequently obtained sole control of the business.
By establishing a distillery at Edinburgh in Scotland, Felix Booth could then boast that he was the owner of the biggest distilling business in Great Britain.
Whilst Captain Ross had failed to open up a North-West passage, he had dramatically narrowed the field for future expeditions by mapping an area of over half-million square miles.
For Felix Booth's financial contribution to such an effort, he was knighted by the King and created a baronet "as a reward for his patriotism in fitting out at his sole cost an expedition in the endeavour to discover a North-West Passage".
William Bradley (1801–1857), one of England's leading painters / engravers of the era painted a portrait of Sir Felix Booth around 1850, coloured in a mezzo-tint style which hung in the Court Room of the Coopers' Company until its destruction in an air raid over London during World War II.
Sir Felix Booth died unexpectedly of heart failure whilst staying in a seaside hotel at Brighton in 1850, aged 69.
His funeral procession was staged with all the solemn pageantry of the Victorian period, and passed respectful bare-headed villagers lining the roadside in Edmonton and Hoddesdon.
Six horses, preceded by outriders, drew the hearse, six coaches of mourners followed it and Sir Felix's private carriage, empty of passengers, brought up the rear.
He provided £17,000 for the expenses of the expedition, to which Captain (later Sir John) Ross had added £3,000, and the result was an immense stride in the progress of geographical science.
[7] In recognition of his funding the successful Arctic expedition, he was created a baronet as Booth of Portland Place, co. Middlesex and Great Catwood, co. Huntingdon on 27 March 1835,[8] with special remainder, in default of his own legitimate male issue, to the heirs male of his eldest brother, William Booth, of Roydon Hall, Essex.
