Alfred Harris
(1801-1880)
17 June 1862

Volume 7, page 145, sitting number 1862.

Alfred Harris was born on 14 April 1801 at York Place, Walworth, in the parish of St Mary Newington, Surrey. He was the youngest son of Richard Harris (1751-1815) and his wife Jane née Peckover. He came from a long line of Quakers.

On 2 April 1835 he married Anna Elizabeth Dearman, daughter of John Dearman of Peckham (later of Champion Hill, Camberwell). They were married at the Friend’s meeting house at Peckham in Surrey. The marriage produced three daughters.

Alfred Harris was the youngest of three brothers. His elder brother Charles Harris had been connected with the management of the Bradford Old Bank, established in 1804 by Edmund Peckover, presumably a relation of their mother’s. Eventually, Charles, along with his brothers Henry and Alfred, took over the management of the bank, at which point it became known as Messrs Harris’s Bank. Like many of the Quaker banks, it was eventually subsumed into Barclay's Bank.

He appears on the 1861 census living with his wife, two unmarried daughters and seven servants at Ryshworth Hall, Bingley, near Bradford. He gave as his profession ‘Deputy Lieut. and Magistrate [and] Banker of W.R. [West Riding] Yorkshire.'

He appears on the 1871 census living with his wife and an unmarried daughter at New Slenningford in North Stainley, Yorkshire. Mrs Harris had ten servants to run her household, including a butler and a footman, with a coachman and his family living nearby and a farm bailiff and his family living in the Lodge. Alfred gave as his profession ‘Magistrate of the W.R. [of] Yorkshire.'

In 1867 he was one of the founders of the Bradford Fever Hospital, later the Bradford Infections Diseases Hospital, today the Leeds Road Hospital.

Alfred Harris died on 11 Apr 1880 at Oxton Hall near Tadcaster in Yorkshire. He was buried at Bolton Percy, Yorkshire. His estate was valued at  £300,000.