page_title: Richard Twining (tea merchant)
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Twining (tea merchant) / Life
caption_attribution_description: Twinings shop at 216 Strand, London. Thomas Twining (1675-1741) founded the House of Twining by purchasing the original "Tom's Coffee House" at the back of the site at the Strand in 1706, where he introduced tea. In 1717, he opened the "Golden Lyon" there as a shop to sell tea and coffee. In 1787 his grandson Richard Twining (1719-1824) built the handsome doorway incorporating his grandfather's "Golden Lyon" symbols with two Chinese figures. Twinings is believed to be the oldest company to have traded continuously at the same site with the same family since its foundation.
context_page_description: Richard Twining was an English merchant, a director of the East India Company, and the head of Twinings the tea merchants in the Strand, London.
context_section_description: Richard Twining was one of three sons of Daniel Twining; his mother was Mary Twining, née Little, Daniel's second wife. Richard was born at Devereux Court in 1749, and educated at Eton College. He entered the Twinings tea business at the age of fourteen with his mother after the death of his father in 1762, and succeeded to sole management in 1782 (joined later by his brother John). He participated in the major development of the tea trade caused by the operation of Commutation Act in 1784–6, during the drafting of which William Pitt the Younger repeatedly consulted him.
   
  In 1793 Twining was elected a director of the East India Company. He had published three papers of Remarks on the tea trade of the company, and one of his first acts was to carry a self-denying motion prohibiting directors from trading with India; he took a prominent part in the affairs of the court until his resignation in 1816 in consequence of poor health.
  Twining was a traveller, and his tours on the continent and in England formed the subject of journals and letters to his half-brother Thomas, extracts from which were published by his grandson Richard Twining in 1887, as Selections from Papers of the Twining Family. He died on 23 April 1824.
caption: Entrance to Twinings in The Strand, built by Richard Twining
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