Effingham Grant

[close] Effingham Grant (1820 - 1892) was an English diplomat, businessman, and philanthropist. He was born on the island of Guernsey, the first child and only son of Lieutenant Edward Effingham Grant and his wife Marie Le Lacheur Grant.

In 1837, at the age of sixteen, Grant found a vacancy at the British Consulate in Wallachia, under Sir Robert Gilmour Colquhoun. In 1847 his sister Mary married the Romanian literary and political leader C.A. Rosetti.

Colquhoun assigned Grant duties of a delicate nature. In 1849, het was sent to Transylvania, to meet with Józef Bem and obtain a first-hand report on the Russian intervention in the area, during the Hungarian Revolution.

In 1850 Grant married Zoe Racoviță (1827 - 1892), the daughter of Alexandru Racoviță and Ana Golescu, and the granddaughter of Dinicu Golescu. After the marriage, the family came into possession of the Belvedere Palace and the related estate, inherited by Zoe.

Grant gave up his diplomatic career to devote himself to business. In 1863 he established the Foundry E. Grant & Co. Belvedere, the first foundry in Bucharest. He also built there a large workshop for assembling and repairing agricultural machinery. In 1864, Grant founded the first tobacco processing workshop in Romania, the Manufactura de Tutun de la Belvedere (Belvedere Tobacco Factory). Grant established in 1879 the Regia Monopolurilor Statului in the area; he parceled out the land around the factory and sold it to the workers, giving birth to what would become the Regie neighborhood of Sector 6 of Bucharest.