Walter Spencer Stanhope

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Walter Spencer Stanhope (1749 – 1822), of Horsforth and Leeds, Yorkshire, was a politician and industrialist whose family fortune had been made through the iron trade.

in 1775 Stanhope inherited Cannon Hall from his uncle, John Spencer, and changed his name from Stanhope to Spencer-Stanhope.

Stanhope was educated at Bradford Grammar School and went up to University College, Oxford, and later studied law at the Middle Temple, London. He was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Hull, Yorkshire in 1784, and for Carlisle, Cumberland in 1802. He was a close supporter of William Pitt the Younger and friend of William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner, after meeting whom he became a religious philanthropist.

As well as their interests in establishing the cotton industry in the late seventeenth century the Spencer family were largely responsible for establishing the charcoal iron industry in the area between Leeds and Sheffield for the next 120 years.