Sir Francis Bond Head, 1st Baronet KCH PC (7 December 1793 – 20 July 1875) was Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada during the rebellion of 1837.
Biography
Head was an officer in the corps of Royal Engineers of the British Army from 1811 to 1825; as such he earned a Waterloo Medal. Afterwards, he attempted to set up a mining company in Argentina. Head rode between Buenos Aires and the Andes twice, from which he was given the nickname "Galloping Head".
Head was born to parents, James Roper Mendes Head and Frances Anne Burgess. He was descended from the Spanish Jew Fernando Mendes, who accompanied as her personal physician Catherine of Braganza in 1662 when she came to England to marry Charles II. His grandfather Moses Mendes married Anna Gabriella Head and took on the Head name following the death of his wife's father, Sir Francis Head, 4th Bt. He married Julia Valenza Somerville in 1816, and they eventually had four children.
King William IV knighted him in 1831 after he demonstrated the military usefulness of the lasso. In 1834, Head was appointed as an assistant Poor Law Commissioner in Kent. While serving in this capacity, he drew up a document called Plan of a Rural Workhouse for 500 Persons, which established separate areas for males and females but mingled sick and well, young and old, sane and insane. He argued that provisions for the poor should not be superior to those earned by the independent labourer. The rooms, for example, were to hold eight residents in a 15' x 10' space, and the diet was to be strictly for subsistence, resulting in the kind of gruel portrayed in the workhouse scenes of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.
