Biography
Born in La Forêt in Guernsey, Thomas de la Rue was apprenticed to a master-printer at St Peter Port in 1803.
He went into business with Tom Greenslade and together they launched the newspaper, Le Publiciste. Shortly thereafter Thomas de la Rue launched his own publication, Le Miroir politique.
In 1816 he left Guernsey for London where he initially established a business making straw hats. Then in 1830 together with Samuel Cornish and William Rock he founded a business of cardmakers, hot pressers and enamellers. De la Rue was the first company who began printing of playing cards, and it received the right to do that in 1831; 1832 was the year when the first deck of cards had been printed out by this company. Soon afterwards, Thomas hired Owen Jones, a well-known designer and architect of that time. By 1837 his wife, both his sons and his eldest daughter were involved in the business. In 1855 Thomas was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1858 he retired from De La Rue handing over the management of the business to his sons William Frederick and Warren.
Thomas de la Rue died in London in 1866.
Read more about this topic: Thomas De La Rue
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)