Marshall, John (1765-1845), flax spinner and politician

Marshall, John (1765-1845), flax spinner and politician, was born on 27 July 1765 at 1 Briggate, Leeds, the third, but only surviving, child of Jeremiah Marshall (1731–1787), linen draper, and his wife, Mary (1728–1799), daughter of John Cowper of Yeadon. For health reasons he did not live in Leeds until 1772, when he returned to start learning his father's business. On Jeremiah Marshall's death, John Marshall inherited £9000, £1500 of which was made up of a new-built house and warehouse on Mill Hill, Leeds.

In 1788 Marshall and two partners struck out as pioneers in mechanized flax spinning under a licence from the inventors, Kendrew and Porthouse of Darlington, renting a water-powered corn mill in the wooded gorge at Adel, 5 miles north of Leeds. Their venture was poorly rewarded until the mechanical experiments of a young employee, Matthew Murray, produced improved machines, which were patented in June 1790. A less remote and restricted site was purchased on the Hol Beck at Water Lane, just across the river from Leeds. By September 1791 a four-storey mill was erected, and Marshall withdrew from the drapery business.

In 1793 Marshall broke with his partners, and on the strength of a new patent from Murray persuaded Thomas and Benjamin Benyon of Shrewsbury, two of his customers, to join him in financing an additional larger mill at Water Lane, where eventually there was an industrial complex of nine units, strategically placed next to the Round Foundry (1802) of the engineers Fenton, Murray, and Wood, and culminating in Joseph Bonomi's large one-storey mill of 1840, designed after an Egyptian temple. At Shrewsbury in 1796 the partners had erected the world's first multi-storey building to be defended from fire risk by iron beams and columns.

Marshall bought out the Benyons in 1804, and henceforward chose his partners from able but more subservient employees. Increasing profits enabled him to move house in 1805 to New Grange, Headingley, which stood in a small park on the fringe of Leeds, with space enough for ten servants to minister to the family and visitors, among whom were Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and the painter John Russell.

In a town with a closed tory council and bench, direct involvement in local politics was denied to a whig and a dissenter but, like many members of the Mill Hill congregation, he was active in secular organizations and in intellectual life. He was a founder and sometime president of the Lancasterian School, the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and the Mechanics' Institution. He was generous in the provision of a school for Holbeck and another for the part-time education of his more promising workers for whom he set out the principles of The Economy of Social Life (1825), his only known publication.

His life came to be centred on the Lake District, where, on his marriage to Jane Pollard (1765–1849), he had spent his honeymoon, and where in 1815 he built a house, Hallsteads, on the shore of Ullswater. He became high sheriff of Cumberland in 1821. At the general election of 1826 he had the distinction of being a manufacturer nominated by the whig gentry of Yorkshire to an uncontested seat. However, he did not find that the Commons ran with the efficiency of a flax mill, and was glad to retire in 1830.

From 1796 Marshall kept an introspective diary, ‘My Life’. He was a self-confessed workaholic; confident that hard work and deliberate risk-taking accounted for his success. His active years were marked by many presidential addresses to Leeds organizations, and by vocal support for Benthamite causes in London (including membership of the council of the university), and in Leeds where, in 1826, in the columns of the Leeds Mercury he advocated a university eighty years ahead of the event. He was a founding council member of University College. In retirement he maintained a house in London and continued to support liberal and Benthamite principles.

Marshall died at Hallsteads on 6 June 1845, and was buried at the adjoining church, which he had rebuilt. It would seem that, like many dissenting manufacturers in Leeds, he had attached himself in later life to the Church of England. His fortune at death was variously assessed at £1.5–2.5 million; he reckoned that he had spent £0.5 million on philanthropy, politics, and paintings, and he had made generous gifts to his large family of eleven children. Unfortunately he was not able to bequeath his passion for the detailed supervision of a large enterprise nor that alertness for mechanical ingenuity in employees, which had taken him so far. The Marshalls withdrew from the mills, which were sold in October 1886, and the male line died out by 1939.

MAURICE BERESFORD