Career
Backhouse was a director of Backhouse"s Bank the family bank in Darlington, County Durham, which merged with Barclays Bank, of which he became a director He was created a baronet in 1901
He served as a Justice of the Peace (Justice of the Peace) for Durham and the North Riding of Yorkshire. He was for many years an active Liberal Unionist.
In 1881 he was resident at The Rookery, Middleton Tyas, North Yorkshire.
Of these, the most famous was the fourth son, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Backhouse who was First Sea Lord from 1938 to 1939. Their eldest son, the reclusive sinologist and historian Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet, became the most notorious following the publication in 1976 of a biography by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, in which he was exposed as a serial forger and confidence trickster.