Lot 2999

Description

Bank of New South Wales, share certificate for one hundred pounds printed on vellum, Type 3, issued to Prosper de Mestre, 31st May 1832, No. 760 written, signed by Richard Jones (President), and Directors James Bettington and William Hutchinson, entered by J.H. Potts. Transferred on the back to John Paty on the 7th October 1834. Nearly extremely fine and very scarce.

Prosper de Mestre was born at sea on a British ship on the way to the West Indies in 1793. the son of a French Officer fleeing from France during the revolution. He was sent to school at Philadelphia U.S.A., where he remained until 1812. He then went to China, Mauritius, and India before arriving in the Colony in 1818. In Sydney he began business as a tea importer and became an intermittent director of the Bank from 1822, he was naturalised in 1825 in circumstances not without irony for he claimed he was a grandson of George III. James Brindley Bettington came to the Colony from a London firm of general merchants and importers of wool to become a woolbuyer and landowner. He was William Lawson's son-in-law.