John Marshall (English industrialist)
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John Marshall (1765 - 1845) was a British businessman and politician.
John joined the family business when he was seventeen. Five years later his father Jeremiah died and John became the controlling partner in the company. He also inherited a new house, a warehouse, and £7,500.
Shortly before his father's death John heard that two men from Darlington, John Kendrew, a glass-grinder, and Thomas Porthouse, a watchmaker, had registered a patent for a new Flax Spinning Machine. Marshall visited the men and purchased the right to make copies of their invention. He spent much of the next decade trying to improve the performance of the machines but found little success until he recruited engineer Matthew Murray.
In 1790, he bought the freehold of an acre of land on Water Lane in Holbeck near Leeds. This was an ideal location for a mill because of its close proximity to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Aire and Calder Navigation.
Between 1791 and 1792, he constructed Marshall's Mill on this site. This mill was a six-storey water-powered mill using water drawn from the nearby Hol Beck to spin yarn. Marshall was able to create enough power to run 7,000 spindles employing 2,000 factory workers. Only a generation earlier, the making of hand-spun yarn had been a traditional Yorkshire cottage industry.
In 1796, he was a partner (with Thomas Benyon, Benjamin Benyon, and Charles Bage in building a flax mill at Ditherington near Shrewsbury, which was the first iron framed building in the world.[1]
Adjacent to Marshall's Mill, he built his most ambitious project: Temple Works flax mill between 1836 and 1840. Temple Works was based on the Temple of Edfu at Horus in Egypt, with a chimney designed in the style of an obelisk; at the time, it was said to be the largest single room in the world.
Employees at Temple Works worked 72 hours a week, 40% of the people employed by Marshall were young women aged thirteen to twenty, and about 20% were under thirteen. Conditions in the flax mills of that era were extremely hot and humid because of the number of workers and the fact that humid conditions made the flax easier to work.
Despite the age of his workers and the conditions in his factories, Marshall is considered to be one of the most liberal factory owners of the industrial revolution. In his factories, overseers were not allowed to use corporal punishment on the workers. Younger children were encouraged to attend day school, and older children were given free education on Monday afternoons.
Marshall was involved in the founding of the Leeds Mechanics' Institute and the Leeds Literary and Philosophical Society. In 1826, he began a campaign to establish Leeds University. Marshall also gave money to the Leeds Library.
In 1827, Marshall became a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. In 1830, he resigned his seat and retired to his country home in the Lake District due to ill health.
- ^ A. W. Skempton and H. R. Johnson, 'The First iron frames' Archiectural Review (March 1962); repr. in R. J. M. Sutherland, Structral Iron 1750-1850 (Ashgate, Aldershot 1997), 25-36.
