Family and Education

1st s. of Philip Dicker of Exeter by Sarah, da. of John Reynell of North Tawton, Devon. m. Elizabeth, s.p. suc. fa. 1753.

Offices Held

Comptroller of customs at Jamaica 1740.

Biography

Dicker’s family was connected with the Devon wool trade. He himself went to Jamaica as a young man; became an influential merchant, and acquired ‘a very large estate there’.1 In 1739 he was nominated to the Jamaica council, but, back in England, in 1747 resigned because he did ‘not intend to return to the island’.2 He bought an estate at Walton-on-Thames, and obtained a grant of arms, but continued in trade at Bristol, and in 1750 was chosen a Bristol representative on the committee of the Africa Company.

In 1754 he was returned at Plymouth with Government support. No vote or speech by him is reported.

Dicker maintained his connexion with the West Indies, and in 1757, together with William Beckford and Rose Fuller, was consulted by the Board of Trade about West Indian affairs.

Dicker spent large sums in building bridges over the Thames—according to Grosley’s A Tour to London3‘by that means [he] became Pontifex Maximus. Among these bridges that ... at Walton makes a conspicuous figure: the building cost £10,000.’  He died 1 Jan. 1760.

Ref Volumes: 1754-1790

Author: Mary M. Drummond

Notes

• 1. Gent. Mag. 1824, ii. 223-4.
• 2. APC Col. App. II, 786.
• 3. Pub. as Londres at Lausanne, 1770. Trans. by Thomas Nugent, 1772.