The John Ellerman Foundation is a charitable trust which owes its existence to two men called Sir John Reeves Ellerman - father and son.

The first John Ellerman (1862-1933) was a shipowner and financier, and probably the most successful businessman of his time. Having started his working life as an accountant, he succeeded in building up a shipping empire from almost nothing. Between 1890 and the Great War he bought numerous shipping companies, mostly old-established and respected names, and rapidly expanded his business as the 'Ellerman Lines'.



Father and Son – in the early 1920’s.
(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – ODNB)

During the Boer War he provided ships to the British government, for which he was rewarded with a baronetcy in 1905. By 1914 he owned more shipping tonnage than the entire French merchant navy. He was also a significant entrepreneur in many other fields, including newspapers, brewing and property. After the 1914-18 War his empire continued to grow and, in 1921, he was made, unusually for a businessman, a Companion of Honour.

By the time of his death, in 1933, he had accumulated a prodigious fortune from an extraordinary entrepreneurial career. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as 'certainly the greatest tour de force in British business history'.

His son, the philanthropist John Ellerman (1910-73) inherited the major part of his father's fortune, and his baronetcy, at the age of 23. Having read for the bar, he later joined his father's shipping business.

Like his father, the second Sir John was a complex and private man. He used his father's inheritance to support charitable causes, and devoted much of his life to those in need or distress. Amongst the charities that he set up and financed were a number to help the blind and disabled near his winter home in Cape Town; some of these the Foundation continues to support. He had a lifelong interest in music, light opera and the theatre and displayed a rare capacity to recall the details of every theatrical production that he saw. All these interests he shared with his wife Esther, an artist whom he had married in the year of his father's death.

Sir John loved the natural world and became an internationally recognised expert on small mammals. His published work, still well regarded in scientific circles today, includes Families and Genera of Living Rodents and Checklist of Palaearctic and Indian Mammals 1758-1946. Much of his research was done at the Natural History Museum in London, with fieldwork in South Africa. From the mid 1950s, due to poor health, he spent most of the winter months in Cape Town.

Shortly before his death he transferred 79% of the shares in Ellerman Lines Ltd to grant-making trusts: The Moorgate Fund (1970) and The New Moorgate Fund (1971). This choice of names reflected his extreme dislike of personal publicity. He did not live to see the growing impact of the grant-making. In 1983 the Trustees, facing the need to diversify the investments, sold the shares in Ellerman Lines and invested the proceeds on the Stock Exchange.

In 1992 the Trustees amalgamated the two Moorgate Funds under the new title of The John Ellerman Foundation. Thus, the name both of the creator and of the donor of these funds was restored to public view. Over the years the Foundation has continued to uphold the aims, interests and values of its benefactor, while adapting to the changing needs of the charitable world.