This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, (MUP), 1996

This is a shared entry with Herbert Field

Thomas Alfred Field (1874-1944) and Herbert Field (1878-1955), meat exporters and graziers, were born on 9 May 1874 and 12 August 1878 at Erith, Kent, England,

eldest and second of six children of Thomas Alfred Field, butcher, and his wife Eliza Jemima, née Jaques.

In 1885 the family emigrated to Sydney.

Young Tom left school to work in his father's growing retail and wholesale butchering business which he and his brothers Herbert and Sydney inherited in 1900. Under the general direction of Tom, they began to acquire grazing properties and to channel resources into the firm's wholesale and export businesses.

At St James's Catholic Church, Forest Lodge, on 26 June 1900 Tom married Leontine Mildred Clark. On 9 May 1906 at St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral, Sydney, Herbert married Nellie Pointing, an attractive, 20-year-old concert pianist and quite a different character from her husband.