Australian Dictionary of Biography

John Sutcliffe Horsfall (1837-1916), wool-broker and pastoralist, was born on 12 September 1837 at Haworth, Yorkshire, England, son of Jones Horsfall and his wife Martha, née Sutcliffe. As a boy he was impressed by his father's friend, Branwell Bronte. Horsfall was educated in Bradford and then worked in the family woollen mills. Discontented he migrated to Victoria in June 1856. In 1857 he joined the firm of Richard Goldsbrough as a travelling representative and in 1864 was given a share of the profits as well as his £1000 salary. In 1873 he became a partner. Horsfall extended the business and built up a large personal following. In 1877 he became a director of the Australian Agency and Banking Corporation Ltd which in 1881 merged with R. Goldsbrough & Co. In 1888 the firm amalgamated with Mort & Co. of Sydney to form Goldsbrough, Mort & Co. Ltd. Horsfall remained a director and was on the local committee of management. His policy of lower dividends, increasing reserves and squaring advances with securities was popular with the London board but not among his fellow committeemen.

Horsfall's first pastoral investment was Ensay in Gippsland. In the drought of the late 1880s he acquired Widgiewa, Momalong and Kerarbury in the Riverina, financed by Goldsbrough, Mort & Co. When he resigned in 1889 a committee of shareholders exonerated him from a charge of embezzling £25 but could not stop a pamphlet war between him and Andrew Rowan, each accusing the other of improperly taking large advances from the company. In 1890 Rowan sued Horsfall for £25,000 damages for libel. Next year the case went to arbitration and Rowan was awarded £50 but costs were shared. In 1892 Horsfall became pastoral adviser to the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency. About 1894 he returned to Goldsbrough, Mort & Co. as pastoral adviser; his secret price was a £10,000 advance to his son-in-law, Rupert Carington, and in 1904 his agreement with the firm was not renewed. Influenced by his neighbour, Samuel McCaughey, in 1892 Horsfall introduced Vermont blood into his stud merinos and by 1905 had won eight championships at the Sydney Sheep Show and in 1906-07 bred the grand champion rams. He was a vice-president of the New South Wales Sheepbreeders' Association. In 1909-12 he sold all his stations except Kerarbury and became curmudgeonly with fears of 'certain poverty impending, thanks to labour legislation which is very hard on large land-holders like myself, simply confiscation in many cases'.

In 1912-16 Horsfall reluctantly gave £10,000 for a chapel in memory of his daughter Edith at Trinity College in the University of Melbourne after Dr Alexander Leeper had accepted his unmatriculated nephew. A friend of Maurice Brodzky, he had probably supplied information for the exposures in Table Talk of fraudulent Victorian companies in the early 1890s. Horsfall visited England at least once and New Zealand many times. He equipped and sent 200 bushmen to the Boer war. His great pleasure was boating and he kept a small fleet at Widgiewa. He died on 11 June 1916 at Toorak, survived by a son and several daughters of his first wife Mary, née Maiden, and by his second wife Agnes, née Mahoney. He had already provided for his daughters and his son Richard inherited nearly £115,000.