Robert Kennard
British politician (1800–1870)
Robert William Kennard JP DL (1800–1870) was a London-born merchant, financier, entrepreneur, JP and later Member of Parliament.
The son of jeweller turn banker John Kennard (Heywood, Kennards & Co, merged into Consolidated Bank Ltd), and Harriet Elizabeth Peirse, he trained as a merchant in London. Having invested in the Falkirk Iron Company in 1830, Kennard's consortia formed the Blaenavon Coal and Iron Company in 1836, which subsequently bought the Blaenavon Ironworks. There he employed his son, the noted civil engineer Thomas Kennard, and his cousin and the later photographer George Swan Nottage.
Through his connections with the iron and steel industries, and access to large sums of money through his families banking connections, he became a significant financier during the railway boom of the 1830s, and also financed some of the government requirements during the Crimea War. Leveraging this, Kennard made his fortune as a director of several UK railway companies, and as a director of one of the largest groups promoting railroads in France and Belgium.
He held the office of Justice of the Peace for: Stirlingshire; Middlesex; and later Hertfordshire. Having held the office of Deputy Lieutenant of Monmouthshire, he was appointed Sheriff of London and Middlesex between 1846 and 1847. He was elected as an associate member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, seconded by Robert Stephenson and Sir William Cubitt. He was decorated with the award of Chevalier, Order of Leopold of Belgium.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Robert Kennard” as british politician (1800–1870). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7346312. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1800, 1870, 1830 and 1836.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Kennard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.