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The fall of William Hirst!
[Impact of the crash of 1825] [Financial distress and ongoing disputes] [Last years] [Summary] [Bibliography]
The public acclamation in Saddleworth marked the turning point
in Hirst’s fortunes. Two other similar events planned by the townspeople of The reverberations of the slump were to cost Hirst dear and he
was later to estimate that in financial terms the slump had lost him upwards of
£120,000 (equivalent to approximately £5.3 million at today’s prices!!). In
particular it had caught Hirst and Heycock with large stocks of wool and
finished cloth which could not easily be disposed of.
For the next two years to 1827, the financial slump caused all business
activity to be ‘out of joint.’ and
merchants were forced to sell at whatever price they could obtain. As Hirst
later observed, those with least stocks fared best ‘our stock of both wool and cloth was heavy, and in the same
proportion were the consequences disastrous.’ As he had left his capital in the business,
so Hirst was liable for the financial distress of Heycock and Co. He was forced
to mortgage his property with the Bank of England for £20,000 and when it
called in the debt later in 1826 Hirst resorted to the ‘mortgage
of my mills to three different parties to raise the amount’. Hirst was able to secure credit on the
strength of his name and as a result became more heavily involved in the
business. Perhaps with an element of self-pride he declared ‘I
agreed to take the management of the business and to assist the firm all in my
power, without profit to myself, my sole object being to enable them if possible
to ‘weather the storm.’’ Despite making a small profit in the next
two years business remained difficult, and in 1829 following a disagreement
between the other partners, Hirst agreed to take over the firm himself which
involved taking on the debts of the firm personally and waving monies owed to
him of £32,000! Hirst’s
conviction that the slump would ‘be like
similar visitations we had had before and would soon blow over’ led him
‘to take the whole responsibility upon
myself’. Pride and a desire to regain his former status also played a part
in laying himself open to unnecessary risk as he later acknowledged ‘I
had no ready money to work with, but I thought my previous character would have
gained me credit sufficient to do it.’
Financial
distress and ongoing disputes Hirst’s optimism was misplaced as the
financial collapse had ‘deranged all
mercantile affairs’ and all ‘confidence
was gone.’ Unable now to secure the necessary credit to continue trading
and recover the position Hirst was gazetted as a bankrupt the following year. In
most contemporary cases, bankruptcy would have signalled the end of a
businessman. However, as a result of his reputation Hirst still enjoyed
significant goodwill in the community. He was set up again in business by his
assignees under the bankruptcy, led by Abraham Naylor, a woolstapler from Batley
and Mr Leather a Under the new arrangement business started
favourably and in the first fifteen months to March 1832, Hirst cleared a profit
of about £10,000. It was then that Hirst and Naylor fell out spectacularly and
began a long running and acrimonious dispute which was to engage the In Hirst’s mind, Naylor’s ‘tricks’
included amongst others the following:
A much more damaging ‘trick’ in
Hirst’s eyes was Naylor’s later accusation of impropriety on the part of
Hirst and specifically the ‘fraudulent’ transfer of ownership of one of his
mills to his son Thomas at the time of his bankruptcy. This allegation was a
hammer-blow for Hirst who was fiercely protective of his hitherto good name
which he believed with some justification had been sullied by Naylor’s
allegations. The impact of falling out with his financial
backers combined with another down turn in trade forced Hirst into making a
series of increasingly desperate and pitiful pleas for financial aid to the
public through the local press. The following extract from a letter Hirst
wrote to the Leeds Mercury in June 1832 provides an insight: ‘…my
life has been a life of struggle and disappointment since 1825 from causes not
of my making. I appeal to you this last time to save me and my family from ruin,
that is to get over this present bad time…and all will be well. Will the
people of Matters came to a head in 1836 when the
assignees finally withdrew their financial support which led to Hirst’s second
bankruptcy. As a result in October of that year Hirst was imprisoned at the
Debtor’s jail in Rothwell ‘a brick
building of two stories with an adjoining house for the keeper and a small lodge
for the turnkey’ which at that time housed 14 prisoners. During the nine
months he spent in prison, comment in the Leeds newspapers focused on the
tragedy that had befallen Hirst and a subscription was held by the people of
Leeds raising £1,308 for him. He had particular cause to be grateful to the
jailor, Christopher Jewison, who petitioned King William IV on Hirst’s behalf
for a contribution to his subscription. The King was sufficiently impressed to
authorize the dispatch of £20 in relief. The contemporary view of Hirst was that he
alienated those that tried to help him and suffered under a delusion that he was
a victim of a conspiracy. Certainly he raged against those who he perceived were
taking advantage of him or whom he blamed for his downfall. In addition to
Naylor, he railed against his former partner Heycock for luring him back into
business (‘I had placed myself in
bondage by giving them freedom’) and there were numerous other targets. In
truth, many of the failings he attributed to others were of his own making. For
example, he saw too late the need for safeguarding his inventions by patent and
by the time he realized the value of obtaining patents, he was no longer in a
position to enforce them as ‘great
numbers have taken advantage of my depressed circumstances and have adopted
them.’ Hirst’s contribution to the advancement of
the local woollen trade and the resultant success of many of the town’s
merchants was a strong theme in his public appeals for financial assistance. He
felt a monetary contribution was his due from those merchants he had helped
earlier. His bitterness against Naylor was magnified by the knowledge that the
stain on his character was limiting the potential contributions from any public
subscriptions raised in his name. Hirst vigorously petitioned through the ‘It
is the very thing I desire above every other; because my character is involved,
which I hold dearer to me than I should the wealth of Despite his long standing and public
altercation with Naylor (Hirst later declared that he
‘could fill a book nearly as large as the Bible, all about Naylor’s
treatment to me’) After hearing the respective cases, Shaw
ruled against Hirst. Although he found Hirst’s conduct ‘perfectly
free from any taint of fraud’ and recognized that his actions had ‘not
proceeded from malice, but solely from excitement and misconception’ his
charges against Naylor in the judge’s view were ‘wholly groundless’. The judge’s observation that ‘the
energy and ability with which he [Hirst] combated and overcame his difficulties
in 1831 are truly admirable; and that very great allowances ought to be made for
those bitter feelings of disappointment and vexation
which the destruction of his hopes and prospects in 1832 naturally
excited’ was of scant comfort
to Hirst and he reacted with a tirade against the judgment in the following
week’s newspapers. One reason for this lay in the fact that
Naylor had successfully managed to exclude consideration of the ‘mill
transfer’ from the judgement, which so exercised Hirst and which perpetuated
his sense of injustice. Research to date, suggests that in this instance there
was a case for Naylor to answer, one which he consistently refused to engage in
despite Hirst’s repeated exhortations. Although unable to recover his former
success, Hirst showed a marked perseverance in attempting to resurrect his
business career throughout this period. As late as 1842 and by then in his mid
sixties, he was still obtaining various patents for the felting process which he
firmly believed was to be the next boom area for the industry. Several times he
borrowed money and started manufacturing but in each case he was unable to
sustain himself and was forced to give up through a lack of funds.
In 1844 at the age of 67, and encouraged by
his friends Hirst wrote his autobiography, described by a later commentator,
perhaps a little unfairly as ‘a small
book with a long title’. However, much of the volume was essentially a
diatribe against Naylor as Hirst gave his side of the dispute. The following
description of his nemesis was fairly typical: ‘O
Naylor, Naylor, I can never forget, if I forgive the injuries you have done me
since that time when you sat lolling in an easy chair, eating my bread and
drinking my wine and evidently endeavouring to gain my confidence in order that
you might the more easily entrap me. You are a cunning fox, Naylor; but you are
sadly deficient of that fair play which is an Englishman’s pride’ Sadly, putting pen to paper wasn’t the
cathartic exercise that might have been expected and it merely opened up the
wounds with Naylor still further, and deepened Hirst’s sense of injustice. After apparently enduring a further spell of
imprisonment for debt at
William Hirst was considered by
contemporaries to be a deluded and misguided individual who alienated those that
tried to help him and by later writers as a reckless and paranoid businessman
who could not cope with failure. Certainly there is some truth in these views,
though research indicates this view is perhaps a little harsh. With hindsight,
and by his own admission, he tended to keep excessive wool stocks and he
speculated too readily in unfamiliar areas, involving land transactions. He also
exhibited poor judgment, particularly in underestimating the catastrophic nature
of the financial crash of 1825. However, Hirst was a catalyst at an
important time during the industrialization of a key local industry. Rising from
humble beginnings he combined a spirit of innovation and a talent for practical
application which helped develop the local woollen industry significantly in the
early part of the nineteenth century and his achievements deserve to be
remembered.
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