Whatever happened to Mr Rutley, Knight Frank’s mysterious third founder?
From a trailblazing auctioneer to a juvenile hippo, the name of one of Knight Frank’s original trio has travelled further than you might think
If you had opened The Times newspaper on Saturday April 11, 1896, you’d have found an impressive advertisement offering the services of “Messrs Knight, Frank & Rutley, Auctioneers, Surveyors and Valuers”.
How the trio – John Frederick Horace Knight, 38, auctioneer; Howard George Frank, 25, estate agent; and William Rutley, 42, expert in antique valuation – met is lost to history, though the story is they spent fishing holidays together on the River Teign.
The original articles of partnership, agreed on October 3, 1895, named the firm as Rutley Frank & Knight. Had the name remained so, perhaps we might be asking what happened to Mr Knight today, instead.
Of the three partners, Rutley’s membership was the shortest. He died of a heart attack aged 55 in 1909, having been on the rostrum of a jewellery sale only the day before. He was generously praised in the Estates Gazette for his “wide culture and exceptionally fine taste” and his “quiet and unassuming nature”.
Nevertheless, as the decades rolled on, so did Rutley’s enduring name. Knight Frank & Rutley became an international business and wherever the firm had an office, the names of local partners were added to the mix. So, in 1983 when Knight Frank & Rutley joined with a leading Hong Kong surveyor they formed Knight Frank Kan & Baillieu.
A hundred years after the company was founded, with offices all over the world, a simpler approach and a united identity was needed. Knight Frank were the two names every office had in common, and so, inevitably, that was what the business’s name became.
To mark the moment, the firm made a donation to a wildlife charity in Botswana working to protect the hippopotamus from extinction. In return, Knight Frank named a hippo: Rutley. Though Mr Rutley’s life may have been shorter than it should have been, his legacy stretched far beyond what he could have imagined – in business, in geography, and, as it turned out, in zoology.
