Later, still at Hall i’ th’ Wood just three years after the spinning jenny became available to the public (around 1769 Samuel then being of age 15 or 16) Samuel was using this machine for spinning the yarn needed for the family’s looms.

There are conflicting accounts about the origins of Swedenborgism in the UK and Crompton's connection with the "New Church" in Bolton.

The Mule was working by 1779.

The official inauguration of the Swedenborgian Church in the UK is 7th May 1787.However Swedenborg paid many visits to England   prior to 1787 and it seems that in various parts of the country, around Manchester especially people were meeting together to discuss his theories. In Bolton it seems o be without doubt that members of a Swedenborgian society were worshipping is a building in Bury Street as early as 1781.It seems that Crompton became a member of this society, the so-called New Jerusalem Church, around the year 1791 (gracesguide.co.uk/Samuel_Crompton) and finding himself reasonably well-off by 1803 was able to lend £100 for the erection of a new church building in Bury Street.  Samuel Crompton’s name has been found among a list of subscribers as a member of the New Jerusalem Church 1791.

These dates still indicate that Crompton could not have discussed spinning machines with Highs while both were members of the Bolton New Jerusalem Church.

If the two men were members of the same Unitarian style sect at the same time one would guess that they would almost certainly have discussed the other topic that they had in common, spinning machines. If these discussions took place it might be that the men met at the Bank Street Unitarian Church before the formation of the Bury Street society.  The discussions would have had to have taken place before 1779. It might be best to assume that they did not in fact take place.

The question of Crompton's discussions with Highs led us to a consideration of his association with the Swedenborgians An we must now go back a few years and return to Hall i' th' Wood.

Samuel soon found that more money was to be made producing yarn to sell for other people to use than to use it for his own weaving. He produced cotton of 40 count of better quality that anyone else. (Count is a measure of thread weight and thickness. It is the number (count) of hanks (840 yd or 770 m) of thread that weigh 1 pound.) He earned 70p a pound for 40s – that is a length of 40x840=33,600yards=19miles or so. As his skill increased, he produced 60s that sold at £1.25 a pound (29miles). Soon, he was producing 80s (38miles) for £2 a pound. We do not know how long it took to produce one pound of thread but wages at that time were less that 10/- a week. It is stated that he was earning four or five times more with his spinning than any weaver could earn.

Could Samuel secure a patent for his machine then he could reveal it to the world?

Unfortunately Richard Arkwright had already patented the water frame, and protected copying of the invention vigorously. As a result Samuel was persuaded not to try to apply for a patent himself. Samuel consulted John Pilkington, a respected local merchant. Pilkington was a member of the Manchester Council of Manufacturers, a group that was opposed to patents and the monopolies that these created. He had witnessed already “the strangling of the developing textile industry by the patent rights held by Arkwright for roller drawing in spinning machines”.

Perhaps he was not the best person to ask about patents!! 

He offered Samuel the opportunity to display his machine to other Council members at the Exchange in Manchester. A fee of £200 raised by subscription was customarily awarded to any inventor displaying models of their machines on the Exchange floor. Unfortunately few were impressed by Crompton’s humble looking machine and many refused to pay. They were also mindful of the patent issue and even if they wanted to install a mule they would not do so until Arkwright’s patent expired in 1785. Samuel only earned £60 from the showing.

Instead of investing this money in building more or better mules, Samuel took his wife and new son to a new home at the Oldhams in Sharples. They took up residence there in 1782, where he farmed and wove in the traditional manner of the cottage weaver. He installed two mules in the farmhouse but found it difficult to keep staff working for him. Every time he trained a new mule spinner they were lured by higher paid work and gave away the secrets of the mule’s construction to their new employers.

Sadly for Samuel Crompton, his having shown the mule at the Manchester Exchange and many people realising that this machine was the means by which Crompton produced such superior yarns, copies were being made, powered mules built in cast iron instead of wood had more and more spindles and factories were equipped with mules totally outside Crompton’s control – and in most cases knowledge.

Unable to compete with the new factories, which had been started with the water frame but more and more equipped with copies of the Mule, Samuel’s fortunes continued to slide. He also refused offers of employment and partnership by Sir Robert Peel of Bury in 1780 and a similar offer from Mr. W. McAlpine in 1785. Samuel was committed to being self-employed though the steady pace of industrialisation was quickly making his ideal, working as an independent cottage spinner and weaver, irrelevant and unviable.

A notice in Hall i’ th’ Wood suggests that it had been Crompton’s intention that the Mule would be for the benefit of the cottage worker but the factory system was unstoppable.

Even so, Crompton rallied and invested this money in his workshop to increase capacity and to start selling high quality cloth. The mule in Bolton Museum’s collection comes from this workshop.

This was the time when the factory system for cotton spinning was taking off. In 1824 there were 24 factories in Bolton; in 1835 there were 42; in 1839 there were 69 with 9918 workers. But weaving continued to be a cottage industry.

In 1809 Parliament awarded Edmund Cartwright the inventor of the power loom a £10,000 reward for his invention. Crompton decided it was about time that his efforts were similarly rewarded. In 1811 he toured the 650 cotton mills working within the 60 mile radius of Bolton gathering evidence of how widely the spinning mule had been adopted. He would use this to petition parliament for compensation.

He found that:

•Of the spindles in use 155,880 were on Hargreave’s jenny, 310,516 were on Arkwright’s water-frame, and 4,600,000 were on Crompton’s mule

•The capital invested in the cotton industry was worth nearly four million pounds

•40 million pounds of cotton wool was spun annually

•Duty paid to H.M. Government was £350,000 per annum

•Around 80% of the cotton goods bleached in Lancashire were woven on Mule-spun cotton

•He concluded that around 700,000 people were directly or indirectly dependent on mule-spun yarn for their livelihood.

Many letters exist written by and to Samuel Crompton between 1810 and 1812 concerning this survey and his appeal to Parliament. He was supported by Sir Robert Peel, John Pilkington (mentioned earlier and with a street named after him off Derby Street), James Watt (of steam engine fame), Thomas Ainsworth and Joshua Ridg(e)way (with crofts in the centre of Bolton and remembered by Ridgway gate off Deansgate.

In support, James Watt testified that two thirds of all the steam engines installed in spinning mills by his company were for running mules.

The spinning mule, Crompton concluded, had become the mainstay of cotton spinning in Britain.

Samuel took his evidence to parliament in 1812 expecting £50,000 compensation. Again timing was against him, the national economy was funding the Napoleonic wars. Samuel’s supporters convinced him to ask for £10,000 to £20,000. Another stroke of bad luck occurred when Spencer Perceval the prime Minister was assassinated. (worse luck for Spencer Percival, perhaps.) Legend has it that at the time he was on his way to recommend that Crompton be granted the sum he requested. This is disputed though. At the time of his death it is likely that Perceval was hurrying to a committee dealing with an unrelated matter. In the end the new chair of the committee overseeing Samuel’s claim only awarded him £5,000. But this is more or less equivalent to £1million today.

In this period he also ran a cotton trading business taken over with his then partner Richard Wylde of Ridgway Gate, Bolton from the previous owner who was in financial difficulties. You can’t say he didn’t try! This was quite successful until the warehouse in Delph where the business was based was washed away in a flood. (This is not Delph near Oldham but a small hamlet north of Bolton where the Delph Reservoir is now, Longsight Road, Egerton.)

Isaac Dobson (founder of what was later Dobson and Barlow) lodged at the pub shortly after he arrived in Bolton in 1789. Very soon he was joined by other ironworks and engineering bosses, Benjamin Dobson (presumably his brother), Peter Rothwell (owner of Union Foundry whose name is commemorated off Derby Street (he later made locomotives)) and Benjamin Hick (co-founder of Hick-Hargreaves) These men formed ‘the Black Horse Club,’ an informal business club.

So can you imagine these clearly well off, important people meeting in that pub – mostly as a social get-together but often discussing business, iron forging, the next development of the cotton machinery they were manufacturing – and in a far corner, with a hat and jacket that had seen better days, an older man trying to make one pint last all night? That man was Samuel Crompton. However that picture was not quite true because Samuel was himself part of the Black Horse Club though he was described as “famed at the Black Horse for sitting with his one glass of ale and seldom speaking, except when directly addressed, and then always briefly and to the point.”

In 1823, the Black Horse Club, under the name “The Black Horse Prosecution Club” (full name “The Black Horse Prosecution Club for the apprehension and prosecution of felons”) - without Crompton knowing, he might have been quite upset if he had known as he was too proud to be the recipient of charity - bought an annuity for him which provided him with an income of £63 15s per year for the rest of his life. (x200 = £12750 pa as a rough equivalent amount today)

He drew his annuity for about four years until his death 26 June 1827 at the age of 74, leaving the princely sum of £25 and debts of rather more.

That is not quite the end of the story.

30 years after Samuel Crompton died Gilbert James French a local textile merchant and antiquarian researched Crompton and lectured on him at Bolton Mechanics Institute, persuading the people of Bolton of the significance of Samuel’s contribution to local prosperity and concluding that Crompton had been shamefully neglected by the town. The lecture sparked discussion and debate in the press with proposals including a Crompton literary and scientific institution, the purchase of Hall i’ th' Wood, and the erection of a statue. The institution was favoured but was eventually abandoned and the statue idea revived in 1860. The statue, sculpted by William Calder Marshall was made of electroplated copper by Elkingtons in Birmingham.

Nelson Square 2016

The Samuel Crompton Statue

Plaques on the side of the plinth

Mr Coxwell's Mammothe High-level Balloon on display at the Crystal Palace.

posted on Facebook by Denis McCann.

In 1927 a four day celebration of Samuel Crompton was organised on the Centenary of his death. Quite a party!

In 1952 for the 125th anniversary of his death schoolchildren in Bolton were given a leaflet with some details of Crompton's life and achievements.

Notes on Swedenborgianism

The New Church (or Swedenborgianism) later “new Jerusalem church”, is the name for several historically related Christian denominations that developed as a new religious movement, informed by the writings of Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedenborg claimed to have received a new revelation from Jesus Christ through continuous heavenly visions which he experienced over a period of at least twenty-five years. In his writings, he predicted that God would replace the traditional Christian Church, establishing a "New Church", which would worship God in one person: Jesus Christ. So it is “Unitarian” but centring on Jesus as God as opposed to God whom Jesus referred to as Father. The New Church doctrine is that each person must actively cooperate in repentance, reformation, and regeneration of one's life. Swedenborg spoke of a "New Church" that would be founded on the theology in his works, but he himself never tried to establish an organization. In 1768, a heresy trial was initiated in Sweden against Swedenborg's writings and two men who promoted these ideas. It essentially concerned whether Swedenborg's theological writings were consistent with the Christian doctrines. A royal ordinance in 1770 declared that Swedenborg's writings were "clearly mistaken" and should not be taught even though his system of theological thought was never examined.[6]

Swedenborg's clerical supporters were ordered to cease using his teachings, and customs officials were directed to impound his books and stop their circulation in any district unless the nearest consistory granted permission. Swedenborg then begged the King for grace and protection in a letter from Amsterdam. A new investigation against Swedenborg stalled and was eventually dropped in 1778.[7]

At the time of Swedenborg's death, few efforts had been made to establish an organized church, but on May 7, 1787, 15 years after Swedenborg's death, the New Church movement was founded in England. It was a country Swedenborg had often visited and where he died. By 1789 a number of Churches had sprung up around England, and in April of that year the first General Conference of the New Church was held in Great Eastcheap, London.

This last paragraph is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Church_(Swedenborgian) and is not consistent with another souce.

https://swedenborg.com/.../2015/08/NCE_ScribeofHeaven.pd is a book bublished by the Swedenborgian organisation entitled "Scribe of Heaven". A footnote (23) on page 256 has the following:

in the Lancashire region of England, with a total membership in the hundreds. By 1784,

the Radcliffe society had a Sunday school that accommodated two hundred children, and by

1790, approximately fifty families made up the membership. These groups were run by lay leaders

and were tutored in their understanding of Swedenborgian Christianity by John Clowes (see below);

they sprang up in the villages surrounding Manchester during the takeoff phase of industrialization.

Samuel Compton (1753–1827), inventor of the spinning mule, was the leader of the

Bolton society (founded 1781); James Hargreaves (1720–1778), inventor of the spinning jenny, was a member at Bolton. See Williams-Hogan 1985, 520–550, and generally Dakeyne 1888.

THANK YOU Denis McCann for pointing me to this source.