New Lanark and Robert Owen
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Robert Owen, Mary Ann Knight, Scottish NPG
Robert Owen was born 1771 in Newtown, Powys and by the age of 7 had outstripped his school teacher in learning and become his assistant. When he was 10, he set out for London to live with his brother who, like their father, was a saddler. From here he went to Stamford, Lincolnshire as apprentice to a draper who laid the foundations for Owen’s excellent business sense. When he was just 18 he partnered an engineer in producing spinning mules and then started a profitable yarn spinning business. He secured a position at £100 pa managing the Bank Top Mill in Manchester so that before he was 20 he was in charge of 500 workers and the production system from the raw cotton to fine yarn. He improved the conditions for his workers and in 1793 was elected to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society which discussed the ideals of the Enlightenment. In 1794 Owen was offered a partnership in what became the Chorlton Twist Company and during a business trip to Glasgow he met Caroline Dale.
In 1786 Caroline’s father David Dale had set up New Lanark Mills and the model village for the workers in a steep gorge on the River Clyde, using its water power to run the Mills. All the buildings are handsome - made of locally quarried sandstone – and include houses for Dale himself and the Mill manager. David Dale, a noted philanthropist and Abolitionist despite being a cotton mill owner, had started a school for the pauper apprentices, who were a large part of the workforce, in the 1790s.
Robert and his partners bought the New Lanark Mills in 1799, the same year that he and Caroline were married. They set up home in New Lanark on January 1st 1800 and went on to have 8 children over the next 10 years. They lived on site until their family became too large for the house.
In the Mills Robert was a firm disciplinarian and workers who stole or were absent through drunkenness were dismissed and the remaining work force was strictly supervised. The Mill prospered under this strict but fair system and turned a huge profit. Some of this was invested in improving the lives of the workforce and child labour was abolished. No child under 10 was allowed to work in the Mill, where previously children of 6 worked a 13 hour day. Free medical care and education were provided as well as a Village Store and street cleaning. His old partners lost faith but by 1813 Owen had managed to attract new investors, the most famous of whom was the Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. All investors agreed to take just 5% return and any other profit was to be used to benefit the workers.
In 1816 and 1817 The Institute for the Formation of Character and The School for Children were built. As soon as children could walk they were taken into the Nursery and from 3 to 6 years old they went to the infant school, possibly the first in the world.
Owen paid as much attention to the outside environment as to working condition in the Mill. The village was:
Surrounded by gardens and an abundance of space in all directions to keep the air healthy and pleasant: they will have walks and plantations before them, and well cultivated grounds, kept in good order, as far as the eye can reach.
Each householder had a garden and an area of valley side was laid out for all to enjoy in a series of zigzag woodland footpaths with views over the beautiful Clyde gorge.
detail, after New Lanark from the south with mill buildings fronting the River Clyde, John Clark, 1825, World History Archive
Beyond the promenades which ascended the valley side were allotments on the outskirts of the village (where the car park now is) which grew fruit and vegetables. ‘Spade cultivation’ rather than the use of the plough for large areas of fields was another of Owen’s ideas. This may have been a ploy to provide employment for the glut of unemployed labourers following the Napoleonic Wars but Owen seems to have believed that double digging improved yields and crop health.
As well as the hillside promenade there was a landscaped garden in the centre of the village in front of the 2 houses in which David Dale and Robert Owen lived at various times. At the rear of the owners’ houses is a strip of slightly more private herbaceous garden which have been restored by the New Lanark Village Group assisted by the Beechgrove team from BBC Scotland.
Robert Owen died in 1858 but the success of the New Lanark venture inspired other successful model villages based around a dominant industry such as Saltaire, 1851 (woollen mills), Bournville, 1879 (chocolate), Port Sunlight, 1887 (soap) and in Essex, Silver End, 1926 (metal window frames).
Robert’s Utopian co-operative community idealism did not thrive when not supported by an industry - as the failed social experiments at New Harmony in Indiana, Orbiston in Lanarkshire and Queenswood in Hampshire attest. However, Professor Gregory Claeys in the Selected Works of Robert Owen writes:
His ideas on co-operative ownership and profit-sharing are again increasingly popular in an era where over half the world’s population strives to seek a middle way between chaotic and exploitative laissez-faire capitalism and inefficient centrally planned communism.
