Thomas de la Rue

Thomas de la Rue (1793-1866)

Undoubtably Guernsey’s greatest entrepreneur 

Thomas de la Rue, founder of the famous firm of international extent which prints Guernsey’s postage stamps and with ramifications embracing, inter alia, the Security Express delivery service, was born at Le Bourg in the Forest parish on 24 March 1793 in the house with a dower addition standing behind a post box on the side of the road opposite Le Perron du Roi. And one of less than a dozen Blue Plaques in Guernsey commemorates his birth and life.

In 1803, at the age of ten, young Thomas was apprenticed to a printer and publisher named Joseph Antoine Chevalier. In 1811, his apprenticeship completed, he was engaged by Thomas Greenslade as editor (at the age of 19) of a new newspaper called La Publiciste, which was first issued in September 1812. The following year de la Rue left Greenslade to start his own newspaper - Le Miroir Politique - which he continued to issue. After going into business in 1815 with his brother-in-law. Publishing La Liturgies, illustrated with engravings on steel.

Apart from The Star (Guernsey’s first English language newspaper, which first appeared in 1813) all newspapers had been in French since the advent of the very first Le Gazette de L’Ike de Guernesey  in 1789. There was now a proliferation of them, and de la Rue felt that the market was saturated. With the comment, C’est trop peut-être pour fetter ile, he sailed for England in 1816 to seek wider scope for his talents.

In London he became engaged in the manufacture of straw hats as well as entering the stationery business with his two partners, producing the first de la Rue playing cards in 1831. When straw bars went out of fashion in 1835, de la Rue’s inventiveness led him to introduce bonnets of embossed paper, which were a great success for a time, and led him into the ornamental paper trade. Thus arose the House of de la Rue and Sons. In 1838 the firm produced a special gold edition of The Sun newspaper to commemorate Queen Victoria’s coronation, while the year 1851 saw de la Rue acting as deputy chairman to the paper, printing and bookbinding class in the Great Exhibition. 

De la Rue’s forbears had come to Guernsey as Huguenot refugees from France, and with this ancestry in mind, the French acknowledged his achievements by creating him Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1855. In the same year the firm secured the contract fir printing the Great Britain fourpenny carmine postage stamp, following this up in 1859 with a further contract to print three denominations of currency notes fir Mauritius.

The extensive use of sulphate of barytes as a pigment was initially introduced by de la Rue and the white enamel used on superior types of playing cards is a barytes white. Among his other innovations, de la Rye introduced several new printing inks, and invented the embossing of bookbinders’ cloths and paper hangings. He also patented the fixing of iridescent film on paper. Thomas de la Rue died on 7 June 1866, after which the firm passed into the hands of his son, Warren de la Rue who had been born in Guernsey in 1815.

But the big irony about the de la Rue Press is that for many years it held the contract for printing UK Passports. While some people were happily celebrating the fact that they would no longer need to have a red EU Passport but would in future have a “proper” navy coloured one the de la Rue Press lost the contract which was awarded to a French company!