Philip Henman
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Philip Henman was a man best known for creating the Philip Henman Trust. The original aim was to continue funding causes supported by Philip Henman during his lifetime. After ten years the trustees felt a need to restructure the Trust and a consultant was brought in to recommend more effective grant making.
The Trust now spends all its grant expenditure on long term projects operated by major UK overseas development charities.
At 15 Philip was bedridden for a year by fever and forced to leave Caterham School. After two years in the army, he spent a further two years queuing up at the dole office during the depression that followed the first world war.
He then moved to London, where he found work running two army barges on the Thames. Over the next thirty years Philip Henman turned The General Lighterage Company into a huge public international transport company, that later became the Transport Development Group.
Henman was a Dorking Councillor, a deputy Lord Lieutenant of Surrey, the High Sheriff of Surrey, the vice president and an honorary fellow of the Chartered Institute of Transport, a Patron of the Royal College of Surgeons, a member of court of the Worshipful Company of Farmers and he was given an honorary Doctorate from the University of Surrey.
Philip Henman was well known for his philanthropy. He took a personal interest in every cause he supported and today there are many memorials to his charity both in this country and abroad. His list of benefactors, contained in a small diary that was discovered after his death, shows the enormous diversity of his interests and this is why the trust today has little restriction on the nature of the charities it will support.
