Jonathan Backhouse

Sir Jonathan Edmund Backhouse, 1st Baronet, JP (15 November 1849 – 27 July 1918) was a British banker.

Backhouse was a director of Backhouse's Bank the family bank in Darlington, County Durham, which merged with Barclays Bank, of which he became a director. He was created a baronet in 1901 [1][2]

He served as a Justice of the Peace (J.P.) for Durham and the North Riding of Yorkshire. He was for many years an active Liberal Unionist.[3] In 1881 he was resident at The Rookery, Middleton Tyas, North Yorkshire.

He was the son of Edmund Backhouse, Member of Parliament for Darlington, and his wife, Juliet (born Fox). He married in 1871 Florence Salusbury-Trelawny, daughter of Sir John Salusbury-Trelawny, 9th Baronet. Lady Backhouse was for some years a member of the Darlington Board of Guardians, and took a lively interest in the Liberal Unionist cause. She died at Uplands, Darlington on 11 October 1902.[4] They had six children (five sons and a daughter), most of whom distinguished themselves, though in different ways. Of these, the most famous was the fourth son, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Backhouse who was First Sea Lord from 1938–39.

Their eldest son, Edmund, garnered posthumous notoriety following the publication in 1976 of his biography by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, in which Edmund was exposed as a serial forger and confidence trickster.