As a consequence of this additional capital, he soon after rented the top storey of a neighbouring factory, one of the oldest in Bolton, in which he had two mules—one of 360 spindles, the other of 220—with the necessary preparatory machinery. The power to turn the machinery was rented with the premises. Here also he was assisted by the elder branches of his family, and it is our duty, though a melancholy one, to record that the system of seducing his servants from his employment was still persisted in, and that one at least of his own sons was not able to withstand the specious and flattering inducements held out by wealthy opponents to leave his father’s service and accept extravagant payment for a few weeks, during which he was expected to divulge his father’s supposed secrets and his system of manipulating upon the machine.
Aided by the mule the cotton manufacture prodigiously developed itself. The tiny rill which issued from the Hall-i’-th’-Wood had become swollen into a mighty river, carrying wealth and prosperity along its course; and he who had started the stream looked not unreasonably to obtain some small share of the riches that were borne upon its bosom. With this hope, he was induced in 1807 to address a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, the then president of the Royal Society, in which he modestly set forth his grievances, and, describing himself as “a retired man in the country, and unacquainted with public matters,” requested the society’s advice “to enable him to procure from Government or elsewhere a proper recompense for his invention.” There had been some mistake in the address of the letter. It, however, eventually found its way to the Society of Arts, where the application was discussed; but, to Crompton’s great disappointment, nothing more came of it.
Four years later he made a survey of all the cotton districts in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and obtained an estimate of the number of spindles then at work on his principle. On his return he laid the results of his inquiries before his friends, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Lee, with the suggestion that Parliament might “grant him something.” It was proved that 4,600,000 spindles were at work upon his mules, using upwards of 40,000,000 pounds of cotton annually; that 70,000 persons were engaged in the spinning, and 150,000 more in weaving the yarn so spun, and that a population of full half a million derived their daily bread from the machinery his skill had devised. This statement, as was afterwards found, fell far short of the actual facts, for it did not include any of the numerous mules used in the manufacture of woollen yarn. The claim was indisputable. With the data before him Mr. Lee entered fully into the case. A Manchester solicitor, Mr. George Duckworth, of Duckworth and Chippindall, Princess Street, offered his gratuitous help, and drew up a memorial to Parliament on his behalf which was signed by most of the principal manufacturers in the kingdom who were acquainted with his merits. In February, 1812, Crompton proceeded to London with this memorial, and obtained an interview with one of the Lancashire members; and, through the influence of powerful friends who appreciated his merits and sympathised with his misfortunes, he was enabled to place his memorial before Mr. Spencer Perceval, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who appears to have taken a favourable view of his claim. The matter was referred to a select committee, of which Lord Stanley, the great-grandfather of the present Earl of Derby, was chairman. Evidence was given in favour of the inventor, and, among other information given, it was stated by Mr. Lee that at that time the duty paid upon cotton imported to be spun by the mule amounted to not less than £350,000 a year. The committee reported favourably, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was ready to propose a vote of £20,000, when Crompton’s usual ill-luck intervened in a very shocking manner. It was the afternoon of the 11th May, 1812, and Crompton was standing in the lobby of the House of Commons, conversing with Sir Robert Peel and Mr. John Blackburne, one of the members for Lancashire, when one of them observed, “Here comes Mr. Perceval.” The group was instantly joined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who addressed them with the remark, “You will be glad to know I mean to propose £20,000 for Crompton. Do you think it will be satisfactory?” Hearing this, Crompton moved off from motives of delicacy, and did not hear the reply. He was scarcely out of sight when there was a great rush of people—Perceval had been shot dead by the madman Bellingham. The frightful catastrophe had in an instant deprived the country of a valuable minister, and lost to Crompton a patron and £15,000. When the new Government had been formed the matter was again brought before the House, and on the 26th of June, on the motion of Lord Stanley, it awarded him £5,000, a sum altogether inadequate for the services he had rendered, as well as out of all proportion to the rewards which Parliament had previously given to other inventors. In an article which appeared some years afterwards in the Edinburgh Review[53], the paltriness of the award was severely commented upon. The reviewer said:—
To make a lengthened commentary on such a proceeding would be superfluous. Had the House of Commons refused to recognise Mr. Crompton’s claim for remuneration they would, whatever might have been thought of their proceedings, have at least acted consistently. But to admit the principle of the claim, to enter into an elaborate investigation with respect to the merit and extensive application of the invention, and then to vote so contemptible a pittance to the inventor, are proceedings which evince the most extraordinary niggardliness on the part of those who have never been particularly celebrated for their parsimonious disposition towards individuals whose genius and inventions have alone enabled Parliament to meet the immense expenses the country has had to sustain.
With the £5,000, or rather with such portion of it as he received—for there were considerable deductions for fees and other charges—Crompton entered into various commercial speculations; but the fickle goddess did not smile on any of them. Anxious to place his sons in some business, he fixed on that of bleaching, and rented a works at Over Darwen; his eldest and youngest sons, George and James, being admitted as partners. But the unfavourable state of the times, the inexperience and mismanagement of his eldest son, a bad situation, and a tedious and expensive lawsuit with the landlord conspired in a very short time to put an end to this establishment. He was also engaged in cotton spinning and manufacturing, in connection with his sons Samuel and John; but they disagreed, Samuel withdrawing from the concern and going to Ireland, leaving his father to carry it on with such help as John could give him. The only business in which he may be said to have been at all successful was that of a cotton merchant, which he carried on in conjunction with his favourite son, William, and a Mr. Wylde. The firm eventually extended its operations to cotton spinning; but young Crompton disliking this branch of the business, the partnership was dissolved, the father and son retiring. The latter afterwards began business on his own account in Oldham, but the fate of the family followed him. He was unsuccessful; a fire consumed his stock, a lawsuit grew out of the fire; and finally, in 1832, he was carried off by an attack of cholera.
Left almost alone in the world, with old age creeping upon him, his sons dead or dispersed, and his only daughter—then a widow—for his housekeeper, Crompton carried on his small original business without assistance, “spending much of his time in devising the mechanism proper for weaving new patterns in fancy muslins.” But his lack of business capacity and inability to cope with the common-place incidents of ordinary life destroyed his chances of success, and that unhappy fatality which had accompanied him through life still dogged his steps. To use his own words, he was “hunted and watched with as much never-ceasing care as if he was the most notorious villain that ever disgraced the human form; and if he were to go to a smithy to get a common nail made, if opportunity offered to the bystanders, they would examine it most minutely to see if it was anything but a nail.” His patterns were pirated by his neighbours, who reproduced them in fabrics of inferior quality, and thus they were enabled to undersell and beat him out of the market. As he advanced in years his means became more and more straitened, and he was beginning gradually to drift into a state of poverty when, in 1824, Messrs. Hicks & Rothwell, of Bolton, his old friend, Mr. Kennedy, of Manchester, and some other sympathisers, unasked and unknown to Crompton, who had then reached his 72nd year, made a second subscription to purchase a life annuity, and the sum raised yielded a payment of £63 a year. He did not, however, live long to enjoy it. Wearied and worn out with cares and disappointments, but to the last retaining the esteem of his friends and the respect of all who knew him, he died by the gradual decay of nature at his house in King-street, Great Bolton, on the 26th June, 1827, at the age of seventy-three, and a few days later his body, followed by many voluntary mourners, was committed to the dust in the churchyard of Bolton, where a modest flagstone thus perpetuates his name:—
Beneath this stone are interred the mortal remains of Samuel Crompton, of Bolton, late of Hall-i’-th’-Wood, in the township of Tonge, inventor of the spinning machine called the Mule; who departed this life the 26th day of June, 1827, aged 72 years.[54]
Such is the sad and simple story of the inventor of the spinning mule. Though his life was passed in comparative obscurity and neglect, and he was allowed to end his days in poverty, the name of Samuel Crompton will be held in honoured remembrance so long as the cotton trade endures, for it is to Crompton’s mule more than to any other invention we owe that vast Lancashire industrialism which has been the source of untold benefits to his native shire, and has so greatly increased the power and wealth of the nation at large. Looking at the splendid results which his genius accomplished, it must ever be a cause of regret that Lancashire men did so little for him who did so much for them. In the various relations of life Crompton was in all things upright and honourable; he had his failings like other men, but they were those which arose from his simple and unsuspecting nature, and such as should excite commiseration rather than condemnation. The weak point in his character, and that from which nearly all his troubles and misfortunes arose, was the absence of those faculties which enable a man to hold equal intercourse with his fellows. His morbid sense of independence made him averse to the very appearance of favour or patronage, and to ask for even that which was his due was always at the cost of acute pain. His manners and actions were at all times guided by a natural politeness and grace, as far from servility as rudeness. By those who knew him in the strength and fulness of his manhood he is described as having been handsome and singularly prepossessing in appearance, and this description is borne out by his portrait, which displays the lineaments of a well-formed head and face that strongly suggests the idea of the thoughtful philosopher and the true gentleman.
Though Crompton’s memory remained long neglected, a succeeding generation has happily done something to remove the stain of ingratitude, and to atone in some measure for the shortcomings of his contemporaries. The late Mr. Gilbert James French, a man of energy, intelligence, and culture, first aroused his fellow townsmen to a better appreciation of the value of Crompton’s achievements. In two lectures he delivered to the members of the Bolton Mechanics’ Institute, and in the handsome volume subsequently issued—“The Life and Times of Samuel Crompton”—a work to which we are indebted for some of the facts here recorded, Mr. French gave a very circumstantial account of the great inventor’s career; not content with this tribute to his memory, he set about obtaining subscriptions for the purpose of doing honour to Crompton’s name. A sum of £2,000 was raised, and on the 24th Sept., 1862, a bronze statue of the inventor of the mule by Calder Marshall, with bas reliefs of Hall-i’-th’-Wood, and Crompton at work upon his machine, was presented with much pomp and circumstance and many outward manifestations of rejoicing to the Corporation of Bolton. In this tardy recognition of his services Bolton has done something to efface the reproach which the ingratitude of a former generation had stamped upon the town. But Crompton has a more fitting as well as a more enduring monument in those outward indications of active industry which now surround his humble dwelling-place, and borrowing the oft-repeated line from Wren’s monument in St. Paul’s, it may be said—Si monumentum requiris—circumspice.