Jedediah’s education can have been only that of a country school of those days, though it is but fair to surmise that his father must have been a man superior to the farmers and yeomen of his day, otherwise his sons, Jedediah in particular, could not have been so successful in the respective occupations of their after life.
Mr. Felkin[131] tells us that in very early years Jedediah’s thoughts took an eminently practical turn, and that as a boy he occupied himself in making toy water-mills on a small brook, in endeavouring even to improve his father’s plough, and in other ingenious pastimes. The writer of this memoir is unaware from what source Mr. Felkin obtained his information as to the early tastes and occupations of Jedediah, but as he (Mr. Felkin) was a friend of the first Lord Belper, the grandson of Jedediah, the writer feels confident that nothing was inserted in Mr. Felkin’s account that had not Lord Belper’s full knowledge and approval.
It is at all events clear that at fourteen years of age Jedediah had shown a greater taste for mechanics than for husbandry, for he was then apprenticed by his father to a Mr. Ralph Massey, a wheelwright of Findern, a village about five miles from Derby, and twenty miles from his paternal home. It was to this apprenticeship, and to this life at Findern, that Jedediah Strutt owed a great part of his success in after life, and it is interesting to know that the document of the original indenture, of which a facsimile is given, is in the hands of and prized by his great-grandson, the second Lord Belper.
At Findern, Jedediah was put to lodge with a family of the name of Woollatt, who were what were called hosiers (i.e., hosiery manufacturers in a small way); it was, as we shall see, from his intimacy with this family that a great deal of his success in after life emanated.
It may be presumed that William Strutt’s family were not members of the Church of England, but belonged to the Presbyterian, or, as it was called in later years, Unitarian persuasion. Whether that was so or not, the Woollatts at all events belonged to that sect, and sat under a Dr. Ebenezer Latham, who was a scholar of some repute, and had chapels both at Findern and at Caldwell.
Jedediah Strutt, we know, served the full time of his apprenticeship at Findern, and after that was in service or employment at Leicester, or at Belgrave, near that town, for a period of about seven years.
Apprenticeship Indenture of Jedediah Strutt, 1740.
It must have been about the year 1754, when he was twenty-eight years of age, that an uncle, who was a farmer at Blackwell, the parish next to South Normanton, died; he left his stock on the farm to Jedediah, with the idea, we suppose, that he would succeed him as tenant. This legacy seems to have been sufficient to induce Jedediah to give up his employment, whatever it was, near Leicester, and return to the land or to husbandry. It served also as a reason for thinking he was in a position to marry. We find him, therefore, almost at once, after settling at Blackwell, writing to Elizabeth Woollatt, with whom he had been ever since his residence at Findern, now more than eight years before, on terms of intimacy if not of affection. Miss Woollatt had during that time been very little at home, but had been out in service, and at the time of Jedediah’s proposal was acting as servant or housekeeper to a Dr. Benson, an eminent Presbyterian divine in the east of London, who had written several works on divinity, and who has in more recent days been deemed worthy of a place in the Dictionary of National Biography.
The characteristic letter containing Jedediah’s proposal to Elizabeth Woollatt, which we are about to give, is a long one, but it is rather typical of the writer, and is also worth inserting as a proof of how well he, who was little above a working man in position, had managed to educate himself.