Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/216

208 placed at our disposal records which had long been treasured as family heirlooms. The whole body of records thus recovered is undergoing careful investigation by a group of students of local and industrial history, and the present article is an attempt to state some of the broader results yielded by a preliminary survey. Samuel Oldknow was born in 1756 at Anderton, which lies about half-way between Bolton and Chorley in the immediate neighbourhood of Rivington Pike. His father, who died in 1759 aged 25, is described on his tombstone at Rivington Chapel, where he was buried, as 'Samuel Oldknow of Nottingham late of Anderton'. A migration of the family in three generations appears to have taken place about this time to Nottingham, where Thomas Oldknow, the grandfather of our Samuel, and Thomas junior and Joseph his uncles, are found carrying on business. Joseph was apparently a grocer, since he dealt in tea, and Thomas junior was certainly a linendraper. Short as his father's married life had been, Samuel had a brother Thomas and a sister, both of whom lived with him later at Heaton Mersey. His widowed mother returned to Anderton and married John Clayton of Roscoe Low. The records give many glimpses of the Clayton family. We hear of three children, Margery, Sam, and John Clayton, junior, who ultimately succeeded Samuel Oldknow at Mellor in 1827.

Samuel Oldknow was apprenticed to his uncle Thomas the linendraper, and in 1781, when in his twenty-fifth year, was taken into partnership with him. This partnership had lasted scarcely a year when it became the starting-point of a new enterprise. It was proposed that Samuel, whilst retaining his connexion with the Nottingham business, should return to Anderton and set up as manufacturer of cotton goods and fustians. The Nottingham shop would furnish the beginnings of a market, but there was to be a salesroom in Manchester, and Samuel might as a further string to his bow undertake an agency for Nottingham hosiery. There can, however, be little doubt that the production of muslins, which within eighteen months had become the essential feature of the enterprise, was from the first under consideration. In his Early English Cotton Industry Professor Daniels has shown how favourable in 1781 the conditions were to such an undertaking. The disallowance of Arkwright's patent for carding as a result of the trial of that year, and the almost simultaneous publication of Crompton's invention, gave an immense stimulus to the manufacture of the finer cotton fabrics.

It took me [says the inventor of the mule] from 1778 to 1779 to finish it. From 1779 to the beginning of 1780 I spun upon it for my own use both warp and weft. In the beginning of the year 1780 I began to spin only