House Thornycroft

A family that, London gossip claims, made its first hard fortune financing independent descents for seals, plates and machine fragments during the Stairs Wars; Sir Julian Thornycroft came from the paper, bonded-storage and maritime-commercial world.

A line founded by Master Gerard Thornycroft, who is rumoured to have made its first hard wealth financing independent descents into the ruin during the Stairs Wars. One of the great houses with a heavier urban seat near the sovereign tier, identified with law and registry culture.

Named with it

• Sir Julian Thornycroft · Foreign Secretary
• Port-Reeve Tobias Thornycroft (bears the house name
• tariff warnings and basin discipline)
• Sir Julian Thornycroft (bears the house name
• carries the Crown's foreign business)
• Master Henley Thornycroft (bears the house name
• memoranda on delay and bonded storage)
• Gerard Thornycroft (bears the house name
• remembered uncomfortably in financial folklore)
• Master Gerard Thornycroft · founder
• Master Henley Thornycroft
• James Thornycroft
• Port-Reeve Tobias Thornycroft

At the table

Several prominent Londoners bear the Thornycroft name across port, foreign office and money city; Gerard Thornycroft is recalled whenever profit and salvage look too eager for legitimacy. Respectable Thornycrofts deny the story in public and repeat it more carefully in private; Gerard survives as a warning that London's black economies are seldom separate from its respectable ones.