Thomas Holloway

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Thomas Holloway (September 22, 1800 - December 26, 1883) was a patent medicine vendor and philanthropist from England.

Holloway was born in Devonport, Devon, in 1800. He was the elder son of Thomas and Mary Holloway, who at the time of their son's birth had a bakery business in Devenport. They later moved to Penzance, Cornwall, where they ran the Turk's Head Inn. In the late 1820s, Holloway went to live in Roubaix, France, for a few years. He returned to England in 1831 and worked in London as a secretary and interpreter for a firm of importers and exporters. In 1836, he set himself up as a foreign and commercial agent in London.

Holloway had business connections with an Italian, Felix Albinolo, who manufactured and sold a general purpose ointment. This gave Holloway the idea to set up a similar business himself in 1937. He began by using his mother's pots and pans to manufacture his ointment in the family kitchen. Seeing the potential in patent medicines, Holloway soon added pills to his range of products. Holloway's business was extremely succesful. A key factor in his enormous success in business was advertising, in which Holloway had great faith. Holloway's first newspaper announcements appeared in 1837, and by 1842 his yearly expenses for publicity had reached over £5,000 (GBP). By the time of his death, he was spending over £50,000 a year on advertising his products. The sales of his products made Holloway a multi-millionaire, and one of the richest men in Britain at the time. Holloway's products were said to be able to cure a whole host of ailments, though scientific evaluation of them after his death showed that none of them contained any ingredients which would be considered to be of significant medicinal value.

Holloway is best remembered for the institutions which he built in England. Firstly the Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey. And secondly Royal Holloway College, a college of the University of London located a short distance away from the Sanatorium in Egham, Surrey. Both were designed by the architect William Henry Crossland, and were inspired by the Cloth Hall in Ypres, Belgium, and the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, France. They were founded by Holloway as "Gifts to the Nation". Holloway claimed that it was his wife, Jane, who died in 1875, who inspired him to found the college, which was a women-only college until 1965. Holloway also paid over £80,000 to acquire 77 Victorian era paintings which he donated to the College at the time of its founding. Most of these pieces of art still belong to the college, and remain on display today in the college's Picture Gallery.

A philanthropic and somewhat eccentric donor (he had an unconcealed prejudice against doctors, lawyers and parsons), Holloway died of congestion of the lungs at Sunninghill in 1883.