Thomas Rogers (1735–1793) was an English merchant and banker. He served as Member of Parliament for Coventry from late 1780 to early 1781.
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Early life
He was the son of Thomas Rogers of Amblecote, Staffordshire, and his wife Martha Knight, daughter of the ironmaster Richard Knight of Downton Hall in Shropshire. He went into commerce working in Cheapside, London, for Daniel Radford of Stoke Newington, in a warehouse of which his father was joint owner with Radford.
Amblecote, not far north of Stourbridge, was then a hamlet. Thomas Rogers the elder, who died in 1775, lived there at "The Hill". It was a "spacious brick mansion", "approached by a long and lofty avenue of sycamores". He was in business as a manufacturer of glass. "Glass houses" had been introduced to the Stourbridge area at the beginning of the 17th century by Huguenot families, and Amblecote was an important source of clay suitable for "glass pots" (crucibles). The elder Thomas Rogers was the son of Paul Rogers, a glassmaker at Amblecote, as his father and grandfather had been. He left his son Thomas land at Kingswinford.
Rogers went into business with the Cornhill bankers George and Thomas Welch, with Welch & Rogers trading in 1765 or 1766. The bank traded from 1785 as Welch, Rogers, Olding & Rogers. Olding, the principal clerk, was a salaried partner from 1771, and a named partner from 1778. Two sons of Rogers, Thomas Jr. and Samuel, were brought in from 1784. His major partner George Welch (died 1796) was an nonconformist activist with connections to Poole, and Harbour Grace in Newfoundland, who supported the dissenting academy run by David Bogue at Gosport.