Sir Benjamin Hawes (1797 – 15 May 1862) was a British Whig politician.
Early life
Hawes was a grandson of William Hawes, founder of the Royal Humane Society, and son of Benjamin Hawes of New Barge House, Lambeth, who was a businessman and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London; his mother was Ann Feltham, sister of John Feltham. He had a younger brother, who also was called William. There was another brother, Thomas, and a sister, Caroline who married John Donkin, and a second sister Sarah, married name Curtis. Barge House, where Hawes lived in the 1830s, was in the Christ Church area of Lambeth, at the corner of Commercial Road and Broad Wall.
Hawes was educated at William Carmalt's school at Putney, and when of age in 1818 entered into partnership with his father and uncle, in the business of soap-boiling. He spent relatively little of his life in the industry, but was later known in parliament as "Hawes the Soap-Boiler".
Hawes Soap Works
The Hawes Soap Works stood on the site of the royal barge house of the 16th century, later used as a glassworks; it is also described as being on Upper Ground Street, Blackfriars. To the west of Blackfriars Bridge, it was the largest soap factory in London in its time, during a period in the 19th century. The Topographical History of Surrey of the 1840s, by Edward Wedlake Brayley, stated that the works had been in existence for 75 years. In the 1820s manufacturers on Merseyside were beginning to compete seriously with those of London, and issues of process and duty on raw materials (such as kelp, barilla for alkali, and common salt) were affecting business decisions. The Hawes family were engaged in lobbying Parliament. Benjamin Hawes as MP spoke for the reduction of soap duties.
In 1820 Josias Parkes gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee that his firm had supplied steam power to the boiler of the Hawes Works. The works then installed its own gas oil plant. In 1824 Benjamin Hawes the elder gave parliament evidence of the company's use of gas lighting. He went on to be chairman of the Gas Light & Coke Company. His younger son William innovated with "Hawes' soap", the product of the "cold process" for soap manufacture, and was granted a patent in 1839.
The works closed down in 1849. Soap was taxed at that time in the United Kingdom, and an article in the Freeman's Journal made the case that the demands of the exciseman had put the Hawes factory out of business. In 1856, at the Royal Society of Arts, the industrial history of soap-making in the United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was debated by William Hawes and Warren De la Rue.
Member of Parliament
Hawes became a magistrate for Surrey in 1828 and was elected as a Member of Parliament for Lambeth at the 1832 general election. As a member of parliament he proposed radical changes in several areas, promoted technical advances, and was the instigator in 1841, and an initial member of, the Royal Fine Art Commission. Though not a member of the Anti-Corn Law League, he was an advocate of the repeal of the Corn Laws. He worked on behalf of the penny postage system; he was a supporter of the Thames tunnel scheme; and interested himself in the battle of the gauges. He was a proponent of the electric telegraph, and made the first arrangement for the partnership between Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1837. When Robert Peel announced in parliament the removal of support for the difference engine, in 1842, Hawes was the only MP to speak in its support.
Having engineered an inquiry in 1835 into the running of the British Museum, Hawes put the case for scientists having a voice among its trustees, a line supported by witnesses Robert Edmond Grant and Nicholas Vigors. Opposition came from Robert Harry Inglis. The zoologists Grant and Vigors were concerned that the museum should become a research institution, with systematic across the field of natural history, and should implement current views on taxonomy; they had support from James Scott Bowerbank, but they were resisted successfully by Philip Grey Egerton and John George Children, who backed the more conservative views of Richard Owen. There were other issues, such as public access, and Edward Edwards addressed proposals about that to Hawes in 1836.