William Vestey, 1st Baron Vestey (21 January 1859 – 10 December 1940), was an English shipping magnate. Biography Early life William Vestey was born on 21 January 1859. He came from an old Liverpool family of traders. In 1876, at the age of seventeen, he was sent to Chicago by his father Samuel Vestey, a provisioner of Liverpool. Career He first managed a meat canning factory that was financed by his father. Together with his younger brother Edmund, he established Vestey Brothers (which later became the Vestey Group) in 1897 from a family butchery business in Liverpool. They were pioneers of refrigeration, opening a cold store in London in 1895. The Vestey brothers then went to South America in an attempt to make a fortune because the economy there was booming. They started by buying game birds and storing them in the cold stores of American companies before shipping them to Liverpool. These early activities soon developed into importing beef and beef products into the UK, which in turn led to them owning cattle ranches in Brazil, Venezuela and Australia, and their own meat processing factories in Argentina, Uruguay (Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay), New Zealand and Australia. In 1914, they built a meat processing works at Bullocky Point, Darwin, Australia, but closed its operations in 1920 after the Darwin Rebellion. They acquired the Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory of Australia, in 1914. At that time, legislation permitted Aboriginal Australian workers to be paid in tea, tobacco and other rations. The Vesteys refused to pay their workers in wages, leading to tensions and arguments from the beginning, which continued until the Wave Hill walk-off, a strike beginning in 1967 and lasting eight years. In 1915, the brothers, after being refused a request for income tax exemption made to David Lloyd George, moved to Buenos Aires to avoid paying income tax in the UK. The family later administered the business through a Paris trust that enabled it to legally avoid UK tax until the loophole was closed in 1991. From 1915 to 1918, they moved to Chicago then to Argentina and back to England. Lord Vestey later became an important benefactor to Liverpool Cathedral, where he funded the building of the bell tower. First World War and peerage During the First World War another Vestey company, the Blue Star Line (now part of P&O Nedlloyd), was a major supplier of