between two iron rollers. In that instant he first saw dimly the
tiny seedling that was to grow one day to the mighty tree of the
spinning-frame. The idea lodged in his brain and took firm hold of him.
In outward appearance at this time Arkwright was in no way specially
attractive or remarkable, but genius is not always outwardly beautiful,
and "there were notions in that rough head of his" that were one day to
alter England.
But Arkwright was no practical mechanic, and so he called in help
from outside--from one Kay, a clockmaker in Warrington, and under his
directions Kay made rollers and wheels, and shortly Arkwright had his
models ready to hand. Meantime, while his heart beat high with hope and
exultation, his pet models being always in his mind though for bread and
butter he still made wigs and shaved chins, he received a sudden and
unexpected check. His wife--for he was already married--chafing in
secret over what she considered his fantastic imaginings and idle
dreamings, made up her mind to destroy that which distracted his mind
from the business of shaving and money-making. As the surest means to
her end she burned his models one day when he was out of the way. Poor
Arkwright returned and discovered the mischief. In an instant his whole
stubborn nature was up in arms. Indeed, so wrathful was he that he
would from that day have nothing more to do with his wife, and the two
separated.
And now the great question was--how best to push the new model Kay had
made. Poverty handicapped him sadly. It was impossible to push anything
without money. He cast about in his mind where the money was to come
from, and settled on an old friend in Preston, "a liquor merchant and
painter" (probably a house-painter). To Preston he took his way. The
friend consented to help him, and together with high hopes and great
rejoicing he and Kay set up their model. But their secrecy had roused
suspicion. Behind this friend's house there happened to be a closed-in
garden with a number of gooseberry bushes. Close by in a neighbouring
cottage lived two old ladies. At nights they declared they heard a
strange humming noise among the bushes, as if the devil himself were
making music, tuning up his bagpipes for Arkwright and Kay to dance a
reel! The story got abroad. The people of Preston, excited and curious,
were eager to break into the house and discover if Arkwright and Kay
were indeed in league with the Evil One.
But after the model had been set up and was about to be shown in the
Free Grammar School in Preston, there came a sudden memory of dark
stories still fresh in men's minds of how other inventors had been
treated in Preston--how they had been mobbed and furiously ill-used,
while their inventions had been smashed to atoms by a people
panic-stricken because of their dread of machinery, which they believed
would throw them out of work and take the bread out of their and their
children's mouths. Arkwright remembered all this, and he and Kay finally
made up their minds to pack up their models and set off for Nottingham.
While Arkwright had been at Preston engrossed with thoughts of his model
a political election took place, and he was called upon to vote. But
so poor and so wretchedly clad was the man who was by-and-by to be a
knight--the man who was to leave behind him half a million--that before
he could present himself at the poll, several people had to club
together to exchange the tattered garments for something that would at
least be presentable!
Arrived at Nottingham, Arkwright tried to get someone to help him with
money. This brave man had firm faith in his invention and firm faith in
himself. It was simply impossible to discourage him. But the time of
waiting was long and weary before he fell in with a Mr. Strutt, the
inventor of the stocking-frame. An inventor himself, perhaps he was the
man who could best understand and appreciate Arkwright's invention. The
two entered into partnership, and it may have seemed to Arkwright that
his time of trial and waiting had at last come to an end.
And now truly enough he had his foot firmly planted on the ladder of
success. Behind him was a hard and toilsome boyhood. Before him were
still long waiting, difficulties to face, men's opposition to overcome,
dislike, distrust, envy, and jealousy to live down and conquer. But the
first step had been taken, and never once along the difficult way do we
find him flinch.
In 1769, the same year in which James Watt patented his Condensing
Steam Engine, Arkwright at the age of thirty-seven took out the patent
for his Spinning-Frame. His next step was to erect a cotton mill at
Chorley, and following that, one at Cromford, in Derbyshire. No sooner
were they finished than men flocked from Lancashire, and indeed from
all parts of England, to see them at work. They were the gazing-stock
of the country.
But Arkwright's brain was not the only one that had pondered on cardings
and rollers and wheels and spindles, and soon there sprang up men who
said this invention was not all his. He had taken other men's thoughts
and adapted them, and joined them together, and called the whole his
own. And now there followed hard years of opposition, fightings,
struggles, before which a weaker man than Arkwright would have gone
down. But nothing discouraged or defeated him. Not even five years of
weary waiting, an expenditure of L12,000, and yet no profit from his
invention! His brave spirit was still undaunted. Men did not try to hide
their envy and jealousy. They fell upon his mill at Chorley in mobs of
hundreds. A strong force of police, and even of the military, was called
out to quell the rioters. Two of them were shot dead, one was drowned,
and several were wounded; while the rest smashed every machine they
could lay hands on, everything that was worked by horse-power or by
water-power, sparing only and alone what human hands could undertake.
And it was not the workmen only who, with blind or short-sighted eyes,
looked on machinery as a curse, believing that it would rob them of
their living, but the better, more enlightened classes as well, who
regarded Arkwright as an enemy to mankind. They were doubtless at the
same time looking to their pockets. If working men were thrown out of
work, it meant that _they_ would have larger poor rates to pay, and so
they too fell upon Arkwright, not seeing that here was the man ready and
anxious, if they would but listen to him, to give thousands of people
work where now instead only hundreds had it.
Meantime he faced his opponents, showing always a brave front, and
trying to defend himself at every point. He endured the spoiling of his
property, and then, not content with browbeating him, they seized upon
his patent rights and disputed them. And the upshot was that Arkwright's
patent was set aside by Parliament. But even then the great inventor was
not overwhelmed. Passing by the hotel where some of his enemies were
standing after his defeat, he overheard one say to another--
"Well, we have done for the old shaver at last." Arkwright turned round,
ready, cool, immovable.
"Never mind," he said, "I have a razor left in Scotland that will shave
you all yet."
He had first tried horse-power for his mills. Now he was trying
water-power, and he foresaw that Lanark, in Scotland, so well situated
on the Clyde for his purpose, would furnish him with all that was
wanted.
Meantime, cotton was gradually growing to a great industry in England.
People who had looked suspiciously and enviously on Arkwright at first
now reluctantly admitted that his goods were the best to be had, and
by-and-by it was he who fixed the prices in the market. It was as if by
his own efforts he had created a little world. The originality of each
part of his invention, may not entirely have been his. This part or
that--a roller, a carding, a crank, a spindle--one of these may have
belonged to some other man, but to Arkwright belongs the joining of all
together. It was his master mind that collected under one roof the whole
series of machines, from the engine that received the cotton-wool, much
as it came from the pod, to that which wound it in bobbins--a hard
and firm cotton-yarn. It was he who made each thing dovetail into the
other, who worked out the one perfect, harmonious whole. His, too,
was the strong mind that trained men and boys--never before used to
machinery--to its irksomeness, its regularity, its exactitude, taking
them from idle, desultory lives, it might be, and accustoming them to
system and discipline. In the old days the slow sale of the yarn and the
stupidity of workmen had sometimes almost daunted him, but these days
were past.
And how the man worked!--with a quick, all-grasping mind. It was the boy
over again in his underground cellar, unwilling to be worsted in his
"penny a shave," striking out the bold line of a halfpenny one. Riches
from his machines--and even more from his mills--flowed in upon him. He
was a man of no small account now. England had come to identify the name
of Arkwright with an open door to a great source of wealth for the land.
King George III. knighted him, and a year later he was made High Sheriff
of Derbyshire. But still he went on working, managing, superintending
his mills and his machinery--leading a life of sacrifice. As he had done
when a boy, so still as a man, he made the very most of his time, even
grudging that spent on a journey, and generally travelling with four
horses in order to overtake it quickly. He who had lived as a boy in an
underground cellar, now occupied a magnificent mansion, and was a man of
note in the county and in England. But we remember, and not without
sadness, how for long in the midst of his hard work he was a victim
to bodily suffering--subject to severe asthma--and how bravely and
uncomplainingly he bore up and struggled on in spite of all! Now,
already early--while he was but in his sixtieth year--he began to fail.
Asthma was complicated with other disorders. There were, too, the strain
and stress of a life of hard work, and these reached a climax while the
great man was still in the zenith of his mental powers, and he passed
away on the 3rd August, 1792.
Arkwright's name was now of world-wide fame. Hundreds and thousands of
people, many of whom had come to see his first cotton-mill, crowded the
rocks and roads about Cromford, and mingled with the long procession
that bore the body of the great inventor to his last resting-place.
They erected a monument in the church of Cromford to his memory. But the
name of Arkwright needs no carved memorial of stone. His memorial is of
a more lasting kind, for it is he whom England has to thank to-day for
an industry that has enriched the land. Not "proud Preston" alone--a
small town at his birth, a mighty place of manufacture now--has
Arkwright made to grow and flourish.
He was a man of "Napoleon nerve." Where other men saw but a short way
ahead, he grasped the end from the beginning; where other minds saw
merely a part, his eye was able to take in the whole. He may have
gathered up some threads from other men's brains, but it was he who wove
them into one great whole. He had a business faculty--he had shown it as
a boy--that rose almost to the height of genius. And he believed in
himself. He had great notions, great ambitions. Nothing was too big a
project for him to attempt. And success was his--great success, as the
world counts it. Immense riches, too, were his, for when he died he left
behind him half a million. But to us that seems not of so much account
as that that great mind of his was the first to grasp what was to put
within their reach a source of riches and profit to thousands of
working-people in England, and this in face of bitter opposition from
the people themselves. He braved their jealousy, he held his own against
their prejudices and attacks, and working often in bodily weakness and
pain, but with persevering determination, he brought this boon to his
country. With untiring courage and long, patient labour, he built up the
splendid scheme that has turned out for us to be the Factory System of
our country to-day.
JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.
When Josiah Wedgwood was born, some 170 years ago, I daresay the people
of the little village of Burslem would have been greatly astonished had
they been told that the humble potter's child was by-and-by to change
the place, with its few straggling houses, into a flourishing town with
thousands of inhabitants. And not this alone, but that he would make for
himself such fame that his name should be a household word throughout
Great Britain, and indeed throughout the world.
When Josiah came into the world there was already a small army of
brothers and sisters awaiting him in the humble little house close by
the churchyard of Burslem, for he was the youngest of thirteen.
Although then large towns and places near the sea were marching on with
the progress of civilisation, little country places buried inland were
shunted into a siding, as it were, and so were left far behind the great
world. In this way the midland counties of England were a long time
emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Staffordshire, the county
of pottery, lagged a long way behind in improvements. Its villages were
straggling and dirty. Its houses little better than thatched hovels or
mud huts. Heaps of waste and dirt and rubbish blocked their doorways.
Broken ware was scattered everywhere. Hollows in the ground, where clay
had been scooped out to make ware, gaped close to the doorways, and
collected great pools of evil-smelling stagnant water.
Burslem was in something of this sorry state when Josiah Wedgwood opened
his eyes on the world. The people of the village for the most part had
been potters for upwards of 200 years. That is, they made pots and
butter-dishes and porringers--for spoons and plates were still of
wood--out of the clay of which their soil was made; not fine and
polished and gleaming white, as we know them to-day, but rough-hewn
things, for the trade of pottery was yet in its infancy.
A potter's work could be divided among one family. The father and sons
made and fired the dishes. The mother and daughters strapped them on
the backs of horses and donkeys, driving them along roads so wretched
that the poor beasts often stuck in the mud or fell down in the ruts,
while the women, with pipes in their mouths and rough words on their
lips, urged them on with whip and lash.
It was this sort of life that lay before Josiah. But he had been born
with a boy's best blessing--a good mother--a woman who had a heart large
enough for thirteen children, and who tried what she could to hand down
to them by example a birthright better than riches--to make them
patient, industrious, dependent on self.
When the child was little more than a baby, and able only to toddle with
uncertain step, he was sent to a dame's school, quite as much to be out
of the way as to learn his A B C. For the rest he played about the door
of the cottage, his greatest treat to bestride the pack-horse's back,
hoisted up by some good-natured packman. When he was seven years old he
was sent to school to a place called Newcastle-under-Lyme, some three
and a half miles across the fields. In long days of sunshine the
walk was full of pleasure to the boy, as he came to know Nature's
beauties--her birds and flowers and sweet fragrances--as we best can
know things, by close and loving intimacy. Long years afterwards, when
he had reached the highest heights of his trade, it was the unforgotten
faces of the wild flowers lurking in the fields between Newcastle and
Burslem that rose before his mind's eye as he decorated his china
services with coloured leaves and flowers.
When Josiah was nine years old his father died, and the mother was left
to struggle with her thirteen as best she could. Nor do we find that she
failed. She was a woman with a large, loving heart, that rarely quailed
before stress or struggle. The old potter had not been able out of his
hard-won earnings to leave to his children much--L20 when they reached
the age of twenty-one.
"And so," as Josiah used to say long afterwards, "I began on the very
lowest round of the ladder."
And now the child's scanty schooling had come to an end. He could write
and he could read, and he knew something of the mysteries of arithmetic,
but for the rest--that great storehouse of knowledge the world
contained--he had to unlock the door of _that_ for himself, and he did
it patiently, often in weariness and pain and suffering, as the years
went on.
To his eldest son Thomas the father had left the pottery, and now it
fell to him to act as father to the family. Josiah, as a matter of
course, went into the business, beginning, I suppose, at the humble post
of turning what was called "the potter's wheel."
This was a wheel with a strap round it attached to a disc that revolved
horizontally and beside which sat a man called "a thrower," shaping with
his fingers and hands the moist clay that was to form a bowl or plate or
whatever vessel was to be made, copying a pattern in front of him.
The boy worked steadily, but hardly had he reached the stage of
"thrower," hardly had people noted and admired the wonderful deftness
with which the boyish hands moulded and shaped the clay, when a cloud
descended and settled on his life--a cloud that, though he struggled
bravely against its depression all through life, never entirely lifted.
The terrible epidemic of small-pox visited Burslem, and the Wedgwood
family, living as they did on the edge of the churchyard, were among the
first to take it, the youngest so badly that his life was despaired of.
However, after long struggle, they pulled him through; but the disease
left behind it a knee which gave him hours and days of excruciating
pain, and seemed almost as if it would blight his whole life and ruin
his career. Every remedy was tried, in vain. At first when he rose in
bed, weak and unstrung, he fell back again. When later he began to stand
it was with weariness and pain. But the dark cloud had, though all
unseen at first, a silver lining. Out of what looked a great calamity
there sprang good. The boy when he crawled back to work was no longer
fit for the "thrower's" bench. The position he had now to take--with his
leg stretched out in front of him--cramped and impeded him. No longer
active and able-bodied, he was thrown, as it were, in upon himself, and
so took to thinking--not in a gloomy, despondent way, but thinking how
best he could improve himself, how best he could succeed in that calling
that from the very outset held a charm for him and all through life lay
very near to his heart.
At the age of fourteen Josiah was formally bound apprentice to his
brother. Here is the form. The quaint words sound ceremonious--almost
solemn. The writing provided that he was--
"To learn the Art, Mystery, Occupation or Imployment of throwing and
handling which he, the said Thomas Wedgwood, now useth, and with him as
an apprentice to dwell, continue and serve."
An apprentice in those days at the pottery works was allowed "his meat,
drink, washing and lodging, with suitable apparel of all kinds, both
linen and woollen and all other necessaries, both in sickness and in
health."
In return the master "was to teach or cause to be taught the art of
throwing and handling."
How poor these potters were, and how poorly they paid their apprentices,
may be gathered from this:
For the first three years he got 1_s._ a week, for the second three
years he got 1_s._ 6_d._ a week, and for the seventh and last 4_s._ a
week. Besides this he got, once a year, a pair of shoes. At the end of
his apprenticeship, if he chose, he got 5_s._ a week for five years. It
was a dreary enough outlook for an eager, ambitious boy anxious to make
his way in the world.
But boy though he was, the difficulty of getting on--pain,
weakness--none of these obstacles were allowed to overcome Josiah.
Then even at that early age he showed the germs of that perseverance
that stood out so strongly by-and-by in the character of the man.
Strange as it may seem to us, what sounds the very common business of
making rough earthenware milk-bowls and butter-pots and plates was often
half shrouded in mystery, and went near to being something of a secret.
Pottery was yet in its beginnings--not yet an art--and it could only
grow and come to perfection by someone giving to it deep thought and
long, patient, painstaking experiments. For instance, one man might pore
over the matter and discover something new or come to some conclusion.
He might find one substance, a clay or a soil, that when mixed with a
second substance produced a third thing--something new. He might begin
to work this out in his pottery, and immediately all the workmen in the
place knew the secret of how he did it. The knowledge spread, and while
he believed it was still all his own, other men had seized on his
discovery; other potteries were turning out his ware and selling it.
So keen were men to find out the discoveries of other men, and so
closely have these secrets been kept, that sometimes a master would
prefer to employ idiots, when he could get them, to turn his wheel. If
one workman appeared more skilled than the others he was shut up while
at work. The door was locked, the windows were blinded, and when he came
out he was carefully searched. Men have been known to pretend to be
idiots just that they might get inside a noted pottery; even to put up
with kicks and blows for their stupidity; to make intentional mistakes
to encourage the falsehood; to hold on to this perhaps as long as two
whole years; while night after night they crept home and there wrote
down carefully every item of what they had seen, and so made the secrets
their own.
In Josiah's boyhood there was much of this sort of thing carried on. A
strict secrecy--a protection of themselves--as merchant vessels on the
high seas in olden days guarded themselves from the pirates who, ready
to pounce upon them, roamed the waters.
But as a man--a great, large-hearted, open-minded man--and one of the
greatest inventors of his time, Wedgwood never followed this line of
action. Rather was he nobly willing that others should be the better
for his brains. And so during his long life he took out only one patent,
as we call that which makes an invention all a man's own and prevents
others touching it.
At the time we write of there was just beginning to dawn on Josiah's
boyish mind what was by-and-by to raise him to the very top of his
calling.
He took to pondering and considering and making experiments with the
clay that lay about the doors. How to make the black mottled ware more
delicate--the ruddy-coloured of a fairer hue--how to mould rough edges
more smoothly--how to introduce fresh colours and glazes.
The whole thing threw over the boy a great glamour of fascination. They
show in Burslem yet a teapot--an ornamented thing made of the ochreous
clay of the district--as "Josiah Wedgwood's first teapot."
But the elder brother, brought up to the cut-and-dried routine of the
potteries life, had little patience with what he looked on as the
younger's shiftless dreamings. He had brothers and sisters to keep, and
money to make, and if Josiah were not more practical he wanted him no
longer.
And so the honest but short-sighted brother, his eyes blinded by the
present need of ready money, failed to realise that there was something
greater, and that the young brother would one day leave him and his
plodding ways far behind.
But while his brother looked upon the boy as an unpractical dreamer,
there were others in Burslem who saw the beauty of the patient,
uncomplaining, steadfast life, and more than one father in the place
called on his sons to take a pattern from Josiah Wedgwood.
But in the midst of his patient inquiries, and while he was yet little
more than a boy, a swift blow descended upon the Wedgwoods. The mother
who had for so long been father and mother in one to them was taken from
them. They laid her in the quiet little church of Burslem, and the
brothers and sisters went on living together.
It was not till he had reached the age of twenty-two that Josiah cut the
knot that bound him to home and went out into the great world to seek
his fortune, as eager youths will do to the end of time. He took with
him his little all--his father's legacy of L20, a pair of capable
hands, and a wonderful brain.