Rowland Richard Robbins

Rowland Richard Robbins (1872–1960) was an English farmer, known for market gardening on a large scale, and also for involvement in farming affairs at a national level. Life He was the son of Rowland Robbins of "Willersey", Hounslow, "a little house in what was then the verge of the countryside at Hounslow", he having named his house after his birthplace, Willersey, in the Cotswolds. His father, of "humble parentage", left his birthplace for London, first to work as confidential clerk to the banker Sir John Lubbock, but finding this insufficiently well-paid became a "fashionable greengrocer" based at Knightsbridge and Kensington, and with his wife Caroline (née Ebbs) had nine children. He was educated at Taunton School. "The youngest son of a lower-middle-class family of seven", and thus lacking prospects in his father's business because of his elder brothers, Robbins went into farming at Sipson west of London, with Thomas Wild (1848–1932), who was ailing, as senior partner. Robbins had worked with his brother in the family business based just off Chiswick High Street, and the farm concentrated on market gardening, send fruit and vegetables by rail to Covent Garden and further. It was a sustained commercial success. The company of Wild & Robbins invested in tractors from Wallis & Steevens in 1902, which at that time were limited to by the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896. In 1914 Robbins described the farm as of , and employing 148 people. He was on Middlesex County Council from 1913 to 1928, and was awarded the CBE in 1920.