It was a neglected and dilapidated old house to which the Cromptons came in 1758. For economical reasons—the window-tax then prevailed—all the unnecessary windows, and some that really were necessary, had been bricked up, rain came through the roof, and rats ran unchecked from room to room. There, in a house a world too large for them, the widowed Mrs. Crompton and her little lad lived upon the proceeds of a small farm and the insignificant gains she made from spinning yarn, by hand, as all yarn then was spun. Samuel helped in the spinning, much, it may be supposed, against his will; and in the drudgery of it his inventive powers were wakened, in the direction of labour-saving. Hargreaves’ spinning-jenny of 1768 and Arkwright’s invention were new when he began to plan, and his machine took the form of an improvement combining the principles of both. He was twenty-one years of age before he began the work, and not until five years were gone had he completed it. The times were not propitious for inventors, bands of infuriated weavers roaming the districts round about, destroying everywhere the spinning-jennies that they imagined were depriving them of work; and Crompton was obliged constantly to take his model to pieces and hide it in the garret roofs of his wind-swept, rat-haunted home. But at length the weavers’ fury spent itself, and then he could experiment without fear of house and model being wrecked. Then, however, arose a newer danger. Crompton, it became gradually known, had a wonderful new machine in the old place, and many were those who sought in some way to surprise the secret of it, among them the crafty Arkwright, inventor and man of business too: an unusual combination of talents that Crompton, unfortunately for himself, did not possess. In the result, the secret was given away for a miserable pittance, and not even patented. Factories were equipped with his invention, and manufacturers combined to subscribe, as an act of grace, a hundred guineas that should, multiplied a thousandfold, have been his by right. In 1812, Crompton found that the number of spindles worked on his principle totalled five millions. In that year a reward seemed almost within his grasp, for a vote of £20,000, in recognition of his services was proposed, and was to have been submitted to Parliament by Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister; but that very day, in the act of carrying a memorandum to that effect in his hand, Perceval was assassinated by Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons, and the proposal was not renewed. But by the intervention of some friends a memorial to Parliament was prepared, which was signed by the principal manufacturers of the kingdom, with the result that the sum of £5,000 was granted to him. Let us here observe the exquisite humour of the thing. The “principal manufacturers” had become such, and had amassed great wealth by aid of Crompton’s mule, but they meanly went to Government, and thus taxed the whole nation for a sum themselves should have raised.
With this sum Crompton established his sons in the bleaching business; but the establishment failed, and the inventor was again in straitened circumstances. A second subscription was raised, and a life annuity purchased for Crompton, producing about £63 per annum. He enjoyed it only two years, for he died in 1827, aged seventy-three, and was buried in Bolton parish churchyard.
The last stroke of cynic fortune was not dealt until 1862, when the hapless inventor had been thirty-five years in his grave. Then the town of Bolton, whose manufacturers had, living, denied him a livelihood, set up a statue to the man who had made their town, and twenty other towns, great and prosperous. Among those present at the unveiling, and shrinking in his poverty from the robed and finely apparelled magnates, was Crompton’s surviving son, then aged seventy-two, and in the poorest circumstances. Palmerston eventually sent him a dole from the Royal Bounty Fund.
RELICS OF CROMPTON
If the spirits of the departed can know what goes forward in the world they have left, there must be bitter ironic laughter in the Beyond. Plundered and neglected in life, Crompton is tardily honoured in death. The darkling, mouldering old Hall has, through the munificence of Mr. W. H. Lever, been purchased from the representatives of the Starkie family, finely restored, stored with personal relics of Crompton, and presented, as a lasting memorial, to the town of Bolton. It is open, freely, every day. There you see Crompton’s old violin, his Bible, and chair, and a model of his Spinning Mule. But there is much else besides. Old portraits and old prints decorate the panelled walls, and ancient furniture fills the room. Panelling has been brought from an ancient house at Hare Street, near Buntingford, and a finely moulded plaster ceiling copied from the “Old Woolpack” inn, Deansgate, Bolton, pulled down in 1880. From the stone-flagged terrace of the garden you look across to Bolton itself and the clustered chimneys whose murk affronts the sky.
XII
There are two ways out of Bolton, to Chorley and Preston; known severally as the Chorley Old and New Roads. The old road ascends windy heights, and although still a practicable highway, is of such a character that any traveller—not being a professional explorer of old roads—who finds himself on it, and perceives the new road going flat, below, is deeply sorry for himself. The way into this old road is by the group of houses called Dorfcocker—where the “Tempest Arms” displays the Tempest cognisance and their motto, “Loywf as thow Fynds”—and along Boot Lane. Thence comes a steep steady ascent past the “Bob’s Smithy” inn and the cottages of Scant Row—well-named in its meagre, hungry look—to the “Horwich Moorgate” inn with the subsidiary title of the “Blundell Arms.” Did any authority compensate these unfortunate inns when the traffic was diverted into the “New” road? Let us hope so, for the doing of it deprived them—not of a livelihood, else how could they have continued to live?—but certainly of all save the merest means of existence. There remains yet a look about the “Moorgate” inn which tells you that not always did it rub meanly along on selling beer to rustics or mill-hands. Alas!
THE RESERVOIRS
Henceforward, having reached the summit, and not wishing to remain on this wind-swept height, it is necessary to descend: that is obvious enough. But not easily is that descent made. To Avernus the transition is reputed to be easy and comfortable: to Horwich, where the old and new roads join, it is martyrdom, especially if it be undertaken on a cycle. And so descending, cautiously and with alternate prayers and curses, over the agonising pits and gullies in the neglected setts of the Chorley Old Road, to the only less fearful surface of the Chorley New Road at Horwich, we come at the two hundredth mile from London to the great lake-like reservoirs of the Liverpool Waterworks, formed in 1848, stretching for a long way alongside the road, and occupying the site of Anglezarke Moor. To a height of 1,545 feet rises the sullen mass of Rivington Pike, in the background, crowned with its masonry beacon. There are at least two dozen other reservoirs of different sizes up there, in the vast gloomy moors where the Pike presides: reservoirs in solitudes looking down upon the circle of busy towns comprising Bolton, Bury, Wigan, Blackburn, and Preston, and supplying their needs.
