Mark Hanbury Beaufoy

Mark Hanbury Beaufoy JP (21 September 1854 – 10 November 1922) was an English vinegar manufacturer and Liberal member of parliament. He wrote A Father's Advice, a famous piece of verse about gun safety.

The son of Lieutenant Commander George Beaufoy RN (1796–1864), and the grandson of Colonel Mark Beaufoy FRS (1764–1827), Beaufoy, born in South Lambeth, London was educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The Beaufoys had been vinegar makers since the 1740s, when Colonel Mark Beaufoy's father, another Mark Beaufoy (1718–1782) who was originally from Evesham, established a vinegar plant at Cuper's Gardens, on a site which later formed part of Waterloo Bridge. Despite being his father's youngest son, George Beaufoy succeeded to the vinegar works in 1851, when he retired from the Navy. The next year he married Anne Harvey, with whom he had three children. George Beaufoy died in 1864, leaving his business in trust for Beaufoy, his only son, who was then ten. By the time the business came into Beaufoy's hands, it was at number 87, South Lambeth Road, South Lambeth, having moved there in 1810.

The name Hanbury came into the Beaufoy family in 1743, when the Mark Beaufoy who founded the family firm married Elizabeth Hanbury, daughter of Capel Hanbury (died 1740) of Bristol and Pontymoile and of his wife Elizabeth Newton, an heiress.

In 1930, Gwendolyn Beaufoy published Leaves from a Beech Tree, a history of the Beaufoy family.

Beaufoy supported the introduction of the eight-hour day for all employees and introduced it in his own vinegar works at Lambeth. In 1881, he chaired a meeting which founded the Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays, later renamed the Church of England Children's Society, and now known as The Children's Society. The object of the new organisation was "to rescue and care for children who are orphaned, homeless, cruelly treated or in moral danger, and to relieve over-burdened homes".

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