Richard Robinson (Municipal Reform politician)

Sir Richard Atkinson Robinson
Portrait of Richard Atkinson Robinson by William Quiller Orchardson
Born	(1849-10-16)16 October 1849 Whitby
Died	28 April 1928(1928-04-28) (aged 78)

Sir Richard Atkinson Robinson, DL, (16 October 1849 – 28 April 1928) was a retail chemist and druggist, who later became a local politician and was the first member of the Municipal Reform Party (linked to the Conservatives) to lead the London County Council (1907–1908).

He was the eldest son of a Whitby family engaged in the owning and operating of sailing ships. His father died when he was 18, and with four sisters and four younger brothers, there was no money for expensive higher education.

He apprenticed himself to a chemist and druggist in Bootle, migrating to a Kensington firm in 1870 and qualifying for registration in 1872. The firm's owner died and he bought it, going on to acquire also a shop in Tunbridge Wells and later a fashionable pharmacy near St. James's Palace. As a chemist and druggist, he could not become a full member of the Pharmaceutical Society, but in 1898 he and others in the same position became able to do so under an amending Act of Parliament which he had actively promoted. He subsequently became a member of the society's council and served as president in 1904–1907. He was instrumental in securing the drafting and adoption of compulsory poison regulations in 1899.

He was always active in local affairs. He became chairman of the Tunbridge Wells Tradesmen's Association and was a Town Councillor there; an Alderman in Kensington; a Deputy Lieutenant in the County of London and a Justice of the Peace both there and in the North Riding of Yorkshire; a Governor of the Imperial College of Science; a member of the board of the Thames Conservancy; an Income Tax Commissioner, and a cofounder and first chairman of the Society of Yorkshiremen in London. He turned down the mayoralties of both Tunbridge Wells and Kensington.