John Fielden

British industrialist and Radical Member of Parliament

[[File:John Fielden 1845. jpg|thumb|"One of the most experienced, most wealthy, most intelligent, and most humane men in the kingdom" Having started work in his father's cotton mill when little more than ten, he was a firm and generous supporter of the factory reform movement. He also urged repeal of the New Poor Law and pressed for action to be taken to alleviate the 'distress of the country' (in particular the plight of hand loom weavers), but found little support in Parliament on these issues. Despairing that the concerns of the poor would never be given adequate attention by a 'Ten Pound Parliament' (elected on the 1832 franchise), he became a 'moral force' Chartist. On the failure of the Chartist National Petition he argued for the movement to organise further petitions; when this advice was rejected he ceased to appear at Chartist events: whilst supporting the aims of Chartism, he concentrated on single issues, striving to attract wider support for reform (including those who would be deterred by any linkage to Chartism or its full agenda). In 1847 he introduced and piloted through the Commons the Ten Hours Act, limiting the hours of work of women and children in textile mills. "Prompted solely by humanity and a sense of justice, he spent much valuable time, much earnest labour, and much of his pecuniary means, in procuring an act of parliament for shortening the hours of labour of women and children in factories."

In 1811, he married Ann Grindrod of Rochdale, and bought and converted the "Coach and Horses" public house (opposite the Fieldens' Waterside Mill) as a family home named Dawson Weir. They had 7 children: Jane (1814), Samuel (1816), Mary (1817), Ann (1819), John (1822), Joshua (1827) and Ellen (1829). Ann died in 1831; John remarried Elizabeth Dearden of Halifax in 1834; she survived him, dying in 1851. Fielden was a deeply religious man but always nonconformist in his affiliations. Born into a Quaker family, by the age of seventeen he was a teacher in a Methodist Sunday School. When the Methodist Unitarians (later simply Unitarians) seceded from the Methodists, John went with them. A Unitarian Chapel was built in Bank Street, Todmorden c 1823 but struggled financially. In 1828, John bought the chapel, paid off its debts and supported its running costs throughout his life. He taught in the Sunday School for many years, eventually becoming its Superintendent. He founded several other Sunday Schools (and to allow genuine compliance with factory legislation requirements on the education of mill children there was a school in the Fielden mill in Todmorden). He is buried in the small burial ground of the chapel (which is now flats).

Although their father had been a Tory, John and his brothers were Radicals. John in particular a follower of William Cobbett. and factory reform (including Michael Thomas Sadler’s Ten Hour Bill).

John was involved in Reform Bill agitation in Manchester. He was a member of the deputation which carried to London a petition calling upon the Commons to refuse to vote supply until the Reform Bill was passed. To resolve differences between local Radical and Whig supporters of the Bill he subsequently drafted and at a great reform meeting moved adoption of an address to the King declaring a preference for universal manhood suffrage but expressing willingness to settle for Lord Grey's Reform Bill. It being intended to form a Manchester Reform Association a sub committee was set up to draft rules and a statement of objects: Fielden was a member of the sub committee and responsible for the draft produced. On passage of the Reform Act, Fielden Brothers gave a dinner for their entire workforce " Two thousand pounds weight of beef of the choicest cuts between three and four hundred puddings weighing 7 or 8 lbs each, and a proportionate quantity of other dishes, bread and vegetables. There were 24 barrels or 3456 quarts of good brown stout Messrs. Fieldens assisted at the tables. After the workpeople had dined, nearly 2000 persons not connected with the works partook of the remainder of the repast."

thumb|upright|Portrait of William Cobbett by George Cooke, c. 1831As early as July 1831, hoping the Reform Bill would soon be passed, the Manchester Times (a Radical organ) had turned its thoughts to who should be Radical candidates for Manchester and other nearby newly enfranchised boroughs, asking "Can the people of Rochdale send a better representative than their neighbour Mr John Fielden?". For Manchester itself, it thought that only a very moderate Radical would stand a chance of election As for William Cobbett he should not seek election: he would be wasted in Parliament; he was a better speaker than a debater, and a better writer than either. ) and invited Cobbett to a fund raising dinner in his honour. Fielden was persuaded (against his objection that there were others better suited for the task) to take the chair for the meeting. His speech of welcome and introduction for Cobbett showed him to be a close adherent to Cobbett's views. Cobbett thought it an able speech, said as much in his own speech, and printed it two weeks running in his Weekly Political Register. (The Manchester Guardian criticised his views on banking and paper money; he responded in a series of three letters, promptly published (together with his speech) as The Mischiefs and Iniquities of Paper Money.) Whilst preparations for Cobbett to stand for Manchester went ahead, Fielden decided to stand, not for Rochdale (which would elect only one MP), but for Oldham (which would elect two). He declared he would not wish to be an MP unless Cobbett had also been elected for Oldham or for some other place. Cobbett had high hopes of being elected for Manchester (failing that Preston) but allowed his name to go forward as the other Radical candidate for Oldham. "And is not the honour of being chosen by such a man as Mr John Fielden as his colleague more than a reward for all that the hellish borough mongers and their base and bloody press have been able to inflict upon me and upon my family?" Fielden then devoted his energy, influence, and resources to securing the election of both himself and Cobbett for Oldham. Fielden and Cobbett were duly elected for Oldham, Fielden heading the poll. Cobbett came bottom of the poll in Manchester, with half the votes of the successful (Whig) candidates: he blamed this on the result of the Oldham election being known at an early stage of the Manchester poll.

In 1833 Fielden supported Lord Ashley’s Ten Hour Bill. Instead, Althorp's Act (the 1833 Factory Act) was passed, Althorp commenting that if adult millworkers wanted to limit their hours of work they should do it themselves. Fielden joined with others to form a National Regeneration Society which intended to accumulate enough adherent millworkers to insist to mill owners that adults as well as children should work no more than an eight hour day. This led to a split with those factory reform leaders still pinning their hopes in securing a ten hour act by legislation. A plan to coordinate presentation of demands to mill owners in spring 1834 came to nothing. It amounted to formation of a national trade union; this was difficult at the best of times (which 1834, the year of the conviction of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, was not) and the union was broken up by pre emptive action by employers

In 1835 he suggested that the government should set minimum piece rates for hand loom work. In response to hand loom weavers doubting his sincerity and proposing instead other measures including a tax on power looms, Fielden concurred with the desirability of many of the other measures, but held that the best tax on machinery was to limit the hours it could be worked. In 1836 he opposed Poulet Thomson's Bill, speaking against it in Parliament and producing a pamphlet The Curse of the Factory System ("A Short Account of the Origin of Factory Cruelties; of the Attempts to Protect the Children by Law; of Their Present Sufferings; Our Duty Towards Them; Injustice of Mr Thomson's Bill; the Folly of the Political Economists; a Warning Against Sending the Children of the South into the Factories of the North") whose object he summarised as "to show that the workpeople have been and are cruelly treated; that they have not idly asked for protection, but that humanity and justice require it; that we shall do ourselves no harm by granting it to them; but always avowing, that I would cast manufactures to the winds, rather than see the workpeople enslaved, maimed, vitiated, and broken in constitution and in heart, as these pages will but too amply prove they now are." He spoke of his own experience as a factory child forty years previous, and showed why the work was as (or more) onerous for children in the 1830s as he had found it in the 1790s: <blockquote>As I have been personally and from an early age engaged in the operations connected with factory labour; that is to say, for about 40 years, a short account of my own experience may not be useless in this place, as it is this experience which teaches me to scoff at the representations of those who speak of the labour of factories as "very light," and "so easy, as to require no muscular exertion." I well remember being set to work in my father's mill when I was little more than ten years old; my associates, too, in the labour and in recreation are fresh in my memory. Only a few of them are now alive; some dying very young, others living to become men and women; but many of those who lived have died off before they had attained the age of fifty years, having the appearance of being much older, a premature appearance of age which I verily believe was caused by the nature of the employment in which they had been brought up. For several years after I began to work in the mill, the hours of labour at our works did not exceed ten in the day, winter and summer, and even with the labour of those hours, I shall never forget the fatigue I often felt before the day ended, and the anxiety of us all to be relieved from the unvarying and irksome toil we had gone through before we could obtain relief by such play and amusements as we resorted to when liberated from our work. I allude to this fact, because it is not uncommon for persons to infer, that, because the children who work in factories are seen to play like other children when they have time to do so, the labour is, therefore, light, and does not fatigue them. The reverse of this conclusion I know to be the truth. I know the effect which ten hours' labour had upon myself; I who had the attention of parents better able than those of my companions to allow me extraordinary occasional indulgence. And he knows very little of human nature who does not know, that, to a child, diversion is so essential, that it will undergo, even exhaustion in its amusements. I protest, therefore, against the reasoning, that, because a child is not brought so low in spirit as to be incapable of enjoying the diversions of a child, it is not worked to the utmost that its feeble frame and constitution will bear. I well know, too, from my own experience, that the labour now undergone in the factories is much greater than it used to be, owing to the greater attention and activity required by the greatly increased speed which is given to the machinery that the children have to attend to, when we compare it with what it was 30 to 40 years ago; and, therefore, I fully concur with the government commissioners, that a restriction to ten hours per day, is not a sufficient protection to children. The work at which I was employed in my boyhood, while it was limited to ten hours a day, was similar to the work that children have to do in the woollen mills of Yorkshire at the present time, with this difference, that wool is the manufacture in the Yorkshire mills to which I allude, and the manufacture that I was employed in was cotton, the mode of manufacturing which has been altogether changed since that period by the improvements made in machinery. These are facts which I mention, because the labour of the child in the woollen now, is what its labour in the cotton was then, the work being done on what are called "billies" and "jennies"; and I mention them, too, because the woollen manufacturers would have it believed that the work of children in woollen mills is still lighter than that in the cotton factories, and that children, much younger than those whose labour is now limited to eight hours a day, may without injury to their health, be worked 69 hours per week. Indeed, it is on this, that the Yorkshire mill owners have petitioned the House of Commons to allow them to work children of eight years of age as many as 72 hours in the week, or 12 hours in the day ! He was the only MP present at the great Yorkshire Anti Poor Law Meeting at Hartshead Moor in May 1837 (and spoke at that meeting.) In 1837 8 he was a member of a Commons committee taking evidence on the working of the New Poor Law; when the committee reported favourably Fielden complained that it had taken evidence chiefly from members of the Poor Law Commission and from Poor Law Guardians known to be supportive of the new regime and that his attempts to submit them to hostile questioning had been obstructed. In Parliament, he moved repeatedly for repeal of the 1834 Act: "so long as he had a seat in that House, he would by speech and vote resist a law which was based upon the false and wicked assertion that the labouring people of England, or any material part of them, were inclined to idleness and vice" but he was always defeated by overwhelming majorities, most MPs with misgivings about the administration of the New Poor Law thinking its complete repeal too drastic a step. In 1842, when a Poor Law Amendment Act was required to extend the life of the Poor Law Commission, Fielden repeatedly attempted to obstruct this by procedural means: "Mr. Fielden moved that the Chairman do leave the Chair. Sir R. Peel protested against the course which the hon. Member was pursuing. He hoped that hon. Members would not thus endanger one of the most important privileges of the House. The course now adopted was calculated to obstruct the progress of legislation, to bring the House into great discredit, and to impair their authority as a deliberative assembly"

Fielden attempted to prevent the New Poor Law from being implemented in his area, threatening to close the family firm down unless the Guardians of the Todmorden Poor Law Union resigned. When they did not the Fielden mills duly closed, throwing nearly 3,000 out of work. The Guardians stood firm, troops were moved into the area, and after a week Fieldens re opened (paying their employees as normal for the week not worked)

However, some townships refused to recognise the authority of the Guardians. and instructed (or intimidated) their 'overseer of the poor' to ignore the Guardians' instructions. Two constables were sent from Halifax to distrain the goods of an overseer fined for disobeying the Guardians. The constables were surrounded by a mob summoned from two of Fielden's mills (supplemented by navvies building the Manchester & Leeds Railway), roughly treated and made to promise never to return. The following week a mob again gathered in the belief that another attempt at distraint was to be made; when this did not happen, they attacked the houses of various guardians and supporters of the New Poor Law, causing damage put at over £1000. The Manchester Guardian thought it significant that a JP in residence (meaning Fielden) had made no effort to quell the riot, even though the rioters had marched past his front door. Fielden was not a magistrate; he had been nominated in 1836, but made no attempt to qualify as he would 'have to sit in judgement on men driven to crime by poverty' which the Government had refused to relieve; furthermore, he had not been in Todmorden on the day of the riot. The Guardian thought this to also be significant, but Fielden was never implicated in the riots, although he was ostentatious in his non cooperation with attempts to identify and arrest ringleaders and in his attempts to get those arrested released on bail.

Fielden concurred with the aims of Chartism, and throughout was a good friend to the movement and to its more moderate leaders. He refused, however, to be associated with anything going beyond 'moral force' (meetings and petitions). Consequently, he was actively associated with the Chartist movement in 1838–1839, seeing its National Petition as a more hopeful route to reform than his efforts in Parliament: "He was sick of this piecemeal labouring for the last six years to benefit the people. In all his attempts he had failed " He was chairman of a monster Chartist meeting at Kersal Moor (Manchester racecourse) in September, at which he warned his hearers against being bought off by piecemeal reforms. This culminated with his involvement in the presentation of the National Petition to Parliament. When the National Petition was rejected, Fielden advised that another petition should be produced, but this time with greater care to collect only valid signatures; no representative legislature could for long withstand repeated petitioning. His advice was rejected as being a slow and uncertain route to success, and the Chartists turned towards 'physical force' methods (a general strike, or the acquisition of arms with the inherent threat of their eventual use, rather than an imminent uprising). Fielden was opposed to such methods and severed all formal links with the movement. Henceforth, he attended only meetings for reform on a single issue, and opposed any introduction of other Chartist demands into the meeting resolutions: any association of a specific reform with the Charter would drive away non Chartist sympathisers.

Jane (1814) died 11 October 1846. Samuel ('Black Sam') (1816 1889): Principal partner in the family firm. On his death the Manchester Guardian noted that he was from ‘first to last a Radical Reformer’, but ‘was not and never desired to be "a public man"’. In conjunction with his brothers John and Joshua, he built and endowed the magnificent Todmorden Unitarian Church at a cost of about £45,000, and Todmorden Town Hall at even greater cost. (Both are now Grade I listed buildings). He had donated liberally to national, regional and local charities (including the National Lifeboat Institution and Owens College Manchester). He was a director of, and the largest shareholder in, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and left an estate worth £1.1m net, roughly equivalent in purchasing power to £120m in 2011. Mary: Married (1851) John Morgan Cobbett who had twice stood unsuccessfully for Oldham. Cobbett was a barrister, a Sussex JP and in his later years chairman of Quarter Sessions for West Sussex. He served as MP for Oldham 1852 1865: outside Oldham he was generally taken to be sitting as a Liberal, despite having been elected in 1852 as the Radical half of a Radical Tory alliance, and in 1857 whilst admitting to supporting Lord Palmerston being careful to note that the Liberal Chief Whip had no confidence in him. In 1865 he stood unsuccessfully in conjunction with a Conservative and was opposed by two avowed Liberals. He was again elected as one of the MPs for Oldham in 1872, and served until his death in 1877 as an acknowledged Conservative (but one calling for annual Parliaments and manhood suffrage). Ann: Married Henry Brocklehurst, son of John Brocklehurst, MP for Macclesfield. Both Ann and Henry died 1870; their two youngest children being effectively adopted by their uncle John Fielden of Grimston Park. One of the other children of the marriage( John Fielden Brocklehurst) was raised to the peerage as Lord Ranksborough in 1914. John: Chairman of the Todmorden Local Board, and a JP. Married twice; firstly a Unitarian Power Loom Weaver, secondly the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. An accident at a meeting of the Bedale Hunt in 1873 confined him to a wheelchair thereafter. Not a public man, but having bought Grimston Park an estate near Tadcaster served for a year as High Sheriff of Yorkshire and launched an orphaned Brocklehurst niece in Yorkshire county society. A Conservative and an Anglican in his later years. Joshua: Married Ellen Brocklehurst, a niece of John Brocklehurst. From 1868 to 1880 Conservative MP for Eastern Division of West Riding, arguing Conservatism was a better home than Gladstonian Liberalism for a Cobbettite Radical such as himself. Bought and moved to Nutfield Priory, near Reigate in the early 1870s. Briefly a director of the South Eastern Railway, resigning after objecting to the chairman's autocratic regime. Retired from Parliament because of ill health which caused a prolonged absence from Parliament in 1876 1877 and dogged him to his death in 1887, leading to him wintering in Cannes and cruising in his steam yacht Zingara for his health. As a result of this extravagant lifestyle his estate when he died was valued at only slightly over half a million pounds. Ellen: Married William Charge Booth of Oran Hall Catterick,; two daughters (1862, 1864); died 1864.