T. (Thomas) Hamilton

T. (Thomas) Hamilton is the trading name of a tobacconist and pipe seller that operated in Cambridge during the last quarter of the 19th century. Thomas Bonynge Hamilton, after whom the shop was named, was only able to run it himself for a short time, and after his death the business stayed open for twenty more years under another family member.

In this respect, Hamilton is a small but well-documented example of how tobacconism could become a family trade in Victorian England.

The Founder and the Founding of the Shop

Thomas Bonynge Hamilton was born in Wantage in January 1863. He spent his youth moving between several towns in southeast England; at eighteen he was working as an assistant in the drapery trade in Maidstone. He married Margaret Ann Mercer in London in December 1883, and toward the end of that decade settled with his family in Cambridge, where he opened a tobacconist's shop on Petty Cury. Sources do not fully agree on the opening date: some records push the business back to 1886, while others point to 1889. The same uncertainty applies to the street number; the shop appears as 23 Petty Cury in some records and 24 in others.

No one else in Hamilton's family was involved in the tobacco trade; for him, it was a start from scratch. An 1889 apprenticeship indenture shows that the shop's first assistant was Walter Thomas Littlechild. The business grew slowly but steadily, and by early 1895 a second location was running at 18 Trinity Street, elsewhere in Cambridge. In July of that same year, Hamilton bought the freehold of the Petty Cury building, of which he had until then been a tenant, at auction.