William Vestey, 1st Baron Vestey
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The Right Honourable The Lord Vestey |
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|---|---|
| Born | 21 January 1859 |
| Died | 10 December 1940 (aged 81) |
| Resting place | Liverpool Cathedral |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Businessman |
| Title | 1st Baron Vestey |
| Successor | Samuel Vestey, 2nd Baron |
William Vestey, 1st Baron Vestey (21 January 1859 – 10 December 1940) was an English shipping magnate.
William Vestey was born on 21 January 1859. He came from an old Liverpool family of traders. In 1876, at the age of seventeen, he was sent to Chicago by his father Samuel Vestey, a provisioner of Liverpool.
He first managed a meat canning factory that was financed by his father. Together with his younger brother Edmund, he established Vestey Brothers (which later became the Vestey Group) in 1897 from a family butchery business in Liverpool. They were pioneers of refrigeration, opening a cold store in London in 1895.
The Vestey brothers then went to South America in an attempt to make a fortune because the economy there was booming. They started by buying game birds and storing them in the cold stores of American companies before shipping them to Liverpool. These early activities soon developed into importing beef and beef products into the UK, which in turn led to them owning cattle ranches in Brazil, Venezuela and Australia, and their own meat processing factories in Argentina, Uruguay (Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay), New Zealand and Australia. In 1914, they built a meat processing works at Bullocky Point, Darwin, Australia, but closed its operations in 1920 after the Darwin Rebellion. The Vestey Group's cattle station in Australia was the focus of a landmark strike in the 1960s, the Gurindji strike, which was instrumental in Indigenous Australians regaining rights to their land.
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