Timothy Yeats Brown

Timothy Yeats Brown (14 July 1789 – 3 February 1858) was an English banker and head of his family firm Brown, Cobb & Co. He became the British consul to Genoa from 1840 to 1857. Life Born on 14 July 1789, the youngest and only surviving son of successful brewer and banker Timothy Brown and his second wife Sarah Huxham ( Lowndes). He had an older half-sister Frances Elizabeth Brown, and three older sisters Sarah Elizabeth, Harriet, and Maria. His father apprenticed him to Whitbread in 1803, in which he had acquired a one-third stake four years earlier. In 1812 Yeats Brown married Mary Ann (or Anna Maria) Goldsmid, a Jewish convert to Anglicanism, and eldest daughter of prominent bill broker Benjamin Goldsmid. Evelyn Wrench wrote that Yeats Brown "was always amused by the banter of his friends who observed that he might very easily have had a Jewish grandmother". In 1814 he met Swiss metallurgist Johann Conrad Fischer, who was visiting England to see how iron and steel were manufactured there, and Yeats Brown showed him the "treasures of his valuable library". Mary Ann died in 1817, aged 27 and without issue, at Torno near Lake Como.