Letter: Putting a Victorian value on `fat cat' salaries

Sir: Regarding the "top jobs controversy" ("Fat cats stalk Britain's boardrooms again", 23 March) it is interesting to compare the incomes of certain professional men in the last century.

In the early part of the 19th century the Bishop of Winchester had an income of pounds 50,000 per annum, and Joseph Pitt, the Cheltenham entrepreneur, pounds 20,000. At the end of the Victorian era Sir William Henry Perkin of the Royal College of Chemistry, the founder of the British dye industry, received pounds 60,000 a year.

In the 1830s the average salary of the working man was about pounds 26 per annum and in comparison with today's incomes the Bishop of Winchester would be enjoying a yearly income of around pounds 19,000,000. Pitt and the bishop, although men of property, were not by any means the richest in the land; there were merchants and members of the aristocracy who were much wealthier.

The chairman of the Gas Board's salary of pounds 475,000 (pounds 1,200 per annum in Victorian times), would appear to be a meagre pittance in the last century. In the novels of Jane Austen and Trollope pounds 500 per annum was not considered sufficient to maintain the lifestyle of a gentleman. Glaxo's chief's income of pounds 2,150,000 (pounds 5,430 per annum in Victorian England) would still have been a modest return.

We have a long way to go before we reach last century values.

Charles Westmore

Cheltenham