Sotonopedia

Thomas Trew was appointed manager of the Hampshire Banking Company in summer 1836. The bank, with headquarters at 21 High Street, Southampton, had been established on 1 May 1834. Trew came from Romsey, where he had been elected a Town Councillor in the first reformed Corporation of 1835. He was Romsey agent for the Guardian Fire and Life Assurance Company. He held a variety of posts in Southampton. He was elected Treasurer of the Southampton Mechanics' Institute in June 1838, and was active in the institute's attempts in 1841 to take over the library bequeathed to the Corporation by Captain George Frederick Pitt, then languishing in the Audit House. He continued as Treasurer to the successor Polytechnic Institution until obliged to resign owing to ill-health in July 1844. He was elected Treasurer of Southampton Yacht Club (later the Royal Southern Yacht Club) in March 1839, and was in office during negotiations for the building of the new club house in 1845-6. In November 1842 he was appointed Honorary Treasurer of the organising committee of the Royal Agricultural Society's show, held in Southampton in March 1844. He was later elected a member of the national society. He was Southampton agent of the Royal Union Annuity Office.

Trew was instituted Worshipful Master of the influential Royal Gloucester Lodge of Freemasons on 30 December 1842, and played a prominent role in the Masonic Festival in June 1843 commemorating the laying of the foundation stone of the South Hants Infirmary. At that time he was also Provincial Grand Treasurer of the Province of Hampshire.

In politics he claimed, in November 1841, to have always kept himself free from party. Whilst in Romsey, however, he had appeared before the Revising Barrister's Court in November 1832 pressing the claims of the friends of Lord Palmerston and Sir George Staunton - Whig and liberal Tory respectively - to votes in the new constituency of South Hampshire.

Thomas Trew died on 1 October 1845, aged 45 years, and was buried in the catacombs under St Lawrence's Church. He was survived by his widow - Mary Ann Trew (nee Pinhorn), four years his junior and born in Shalfleet, Isle of Wight - and six daughters: Mary (born 1827), Eliza (1829), Sarah Jane (1832), Fanny (1838), Ellen (1842) and Alice (1843). The first three were born in Romsey: the latter three in Southampton. Two sons had failed to survive: the elder, Thomas, died in May 1839, aged nearly 4 years; the younger was still-born in October 1842. His widow survived Thomas by 46 years, living in Frederick Street, Newtown and then at 24 The Avenue until her death on 23 May 1891, in her 91st year.

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