Thomas Bates

Thomas Bates (1775–1849) was an English stockbreeder.

Biography Thomas Bates was descended from a family long settled in Northumberland. He was born at Matfen, Northumberland, on 21 June 1775, the younger of the two sons of George Bates of Aydon Castle and his wife Diana , daughter of Thomas Moore of Bishop's Castle, Shropshire.

Bates was educated at the grammar school at Haydon Bridge, and afterwards at Witton-le-Wear school, where "he never joined in his schoolfellows' games, but would sit for hours in the churchyard with a book." At the age of fifteen he was called home to assist in the management of his father's farms. Before he was eighteen he became tenant of his father's patrimony at Aydon White House. In 1795 his mother's first cousin, Arthur Blayney of Gregynog, Montgomeryshire, who had always been expected to leave his property to Thomas (his godson), died, bequeathing all his heritage to Lord Tracy, a stranger in blood; and this was a great disappointment to Bates and his family.

He now threw himself with "quadrupled energy into an agricultural career," and on attaining his majority became tenant of his father's small estate of Wark Eals, on North Tyne. Becoming intimate with Matthew and George Culley, through a family marriage. Bates was introduced to a large circle of agricultural acquaintances on the Tees, including Charles and Robert Colling. In 1800, at the age of twenty-five. Bates took a twenty-one years' lease of two large farms at Halton Castle, at a high rent, and with a view to stocking them "purchased his first shorthorn cows from Charles Colling, giving him for one of them the first one hundred guineas the Collings ever sold a cow for." Bates was a man of remarkable force of character, but his love of argument, his combativeness, and his plain speaking did not make him a universal favourite. Bates continued showing and winning prizes at subsequent meetings of the Royal Agricultural Society of England (under which name the English Agricultural Society was incorporated by charter in 1840) and had a great epistolary conflict with the executive after the York show of 1848, the last he attended.

The dispersal of Bates's herd of shorthorns on 9 May 1850 caused great excitement at the time, sixty-eight animals selling for £4,558 1s.

Bates was never married. A portrait of him at the age of about fifty-five by Sir William Ross, R.A., was engraved for the Farmers' Magazine in 1850, and a reproduction of it appears as the frontispiece of the elaborate biography of 513 pages written by Cadwallader John Bates (his great-nephew), and published at Newcastle in 1897 under the title Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns. From this work most of the above facts have been drawn.