NO DEATH DUTIES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 143, 19 June 1931, Page 8

NO DEATH DUTIES

LORD TRENT’S VAST ESTATE FURTHER GIFTS TO CHARITY [By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright] Received June 18, 9.40 p.m. LONDON, June 18. Lord Trent’s will, proved at Jersey, does not disclose the amount of the estate, but £350,000 has been left to charity and the residue to his widow. A codical announces that he had abandoned his British domicile and had taken up his domicile in Jersey. His fortune is estimated at between £2,000,000 and £3,000,000, and no death duties are payable in Jersey. The death occurred on June 13 last of Lord Trent, formerly Sir Jesse Boot. He was created a baron in March, 1929. Jesse Boot was born at Nottingham in June, 1850. As a little boy he helped his widowed mother to run a small shop in Goose Gate. His experience there proved invaluable to him when, still young and without resources, he turned to tho drug trade and set to work to cheapen articles in everyday demand at chemists’ shops by buying and selling on a large scale and eliminating the middle-man as far as possible. Starting in Nottingham, he made rapid progress, adding shop after shop and including one branch of trade after another. Later he began to manufacture drugs and in addition to these his shops sold fancy goods and stationery and included lending libraries. Today the business consists of Boot’s Pure Drug Company and four subsidiary companies which own the shops. Its total capital is £5,000,000 and it has a staff of 13,000 including 1000 fully qualified chemists. There are huge factories and distributing warehouses and 770 retail shops all over the country. The firm does its own shop-fitting and printing —in fact everything that can be done in the way of making it self-contained. It produces chemicals and preparations which formerly had to be got from Germany, such as lysol, aspirin and formalin. Mr Boot was knighted in 1900. He married in 1886 the daughter of Mr W. Rowe, of Jersey, where he eventually went to live. Having sold a portion of his shares he was able to retire with a fortune of £2,000,000. But he had the misfortune to be attacked by arthritis when he was middle-aged and ho was compelled to spend the rest of his days on a couch. This, however, did not diminish his mental activity or lesson his interest in the welfare of Nottingham and Jersey. To his native city he gave sums totalling nearly £1,000,000, and his generosity alono made the new university possible. Among his benefactions was a gift of £35,000 in 1928 for its great hall, while Lady Boot gave £45,000 for the erection of a women’s hostel. A few years ago he presented Nottingham with a park at a cost of £250,000, to say nothing of a huge open-air swimming bath and a boulevard.

The corporation voted £lO,OOO for the embellishment of the university library as a memorial to him. The university buildings were opened by the King in July, 1928. They stand on a wooded hill in 49 acres of grounds presented by Lord Trent, who had set his mind on making Nottingham a centre for industrial and agricultural research. In Jersey he built schools and workmen’s houses, and in 1926 he initiated a scheme for co-operative marketing by Jersey farmers who had been hard hit by bad crops, plant disease and middlemen’s profits. The Jersey Farmers’ Union was formed and direct sales arranged, steamers being chartered to take potatoes to England. Lord Trent placed a large building at the disposal of the farmers to house a grading machine imported from Holland and to act as a collecting centre. He also sent parties of farmers to Denmark and Alsace-Lorraine to study the co-opera-tive methods employed there. The heir to the title is his son, Captain John Campbell Boot.