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Thomas Cook and the American Blanket Trade in the Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2012
Abstract
Dominance of the American blanket trade was obtained and held for half a century through a combination of aggressive marketing, progressive manufacturing methods, and far-sighted administration of a business beset by constant difficulties, part of which were peculiar to the times; part familiar to business in every age and circumstance.
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- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1961
References
1 John Hague, a Dublin merchant, had family and business links with Yorkshire. In 1811 he purchased the Dewsbury Mills Estate, adjacent to the River Calder and situated one mile southwest of the town of Dewsbury. The purchase consisted of an extensive area of land, two fulling mills, and a number of buildings which had formerly been used for woolen yarn processing. The major advantage of this location resided in the availability of the water power, and water wheels were employed as prime movers at Dewsbury Mills throughout the nineteenth century. John Hague then leased the Estate to the newly formed partnership of Hagues and Cook, of which he was the senior member, but from the beginning he seems to have given Thomas Cook his head in determining business policy.
2 Hagues and Cook, Balance Sheets. The records of the firm, consisting of journals, plans, inventories, legal documents, some fragmentary financial papers, and 175,000 copy letters are the property of the present firm of Wormalds and Walker, Ltd., of Dewsbury. These records are at present housed in the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds and they form the basis of the present writer's two-volume work, “Dewsbury Mills,” an unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 1959. I am much indebted to Professor A. J. Brown and Dr. E. M. Sigsworth for their encouraging interest in my researches; and also to Mr. William Wormald and his fellow directors of the firm of Wormalds and Walker, Ltd., for their helpful cooperation.
3 “I know very little of grammar or of grammar books, being taken from a poor school at 13½ years old.” Thomas Cook to Frank Wormald in a letter dated April 24, 1830.
4 Cook fits almost exactly the colorful description of the early nineteenth-century businessman in England given by Charles Wilson in his article, “The Entrepreneur in the Industrial Revolution in Britain,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, vol. VII (1955), pp. 129–145Google Scholar. For a general discussion of the education of merchants see W. R. Minchinton, “The Merchants in England in the Eighteenth Century,” The Entrepreneur, papers presented at the Annual Conference, Economic History Society, Cambridge [England], 1957.
5 The standard works dealing with the West Riding woolen industry for this period are Heaton, Herbert, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (Oxford, 1920)Google Scholar; Crump, W. B., The Leeds Woollen Industry, 1780–1820 (Leeds, 1931)Google Scholar; Crump, W. B. and Ghorbal, G., History of the Huddersfield Woollen Industry (Huddersfield, 1935)Google Scholar; but see also, Frederick J. Glover, “Dewsbury Mills,” especially chaps. I, IV, and V.
6 Benjamin Gott, of course, was the outstanding pioneer in “merchant-manufacturing” in the West Riding woolen industry. See Heaton, Herbert, “Benjamin Gott and the Industrial Revolution in Yorkshire,” Economic History Review, vol. III (1931), pp. 45–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Thos. Cook, Diary, Aug. 23, 1821. This diary was kept by Cook only for the period May, 1819, to Jan., 1823, when general pressure of work at the mills seems to have forced its discontinuance.
8 For a general discussion of the “auction” system and of Anglo-American trade in woolen fabrics in the period 1815–1840, see Cole, A. H., The American Wool Manufacture, vol. I (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), especially pp. 156–160Google Scholar.
9 The risks and dangers of the consignment trade after 1815 are well reviewed by Jenks, L. H., The Migration of British Capital to 1875 (New York, 1938)Google Scholar, especially chap. III.
10 Thos. Cook, Diary, Dec. 3, 1821.
11 Ibid., July 27, 1822.
12 Thomas Dixon was probably a member of the Dixon family which emigrated to the United States from the West Riding in 1815. See Heaton, Herbert, “Yorkshire Cloth Traders in the United States, 1770–1840,” Thoresby Society Journal, vol. XXXVII (1941)Google Scholar.
13 The whole story of the mechanism of Anglo-American trade and its functioning is illuminatingly told by Hidy, R. W. in his The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance (Cambridge, Mass., 1949)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See especially chaps. III and IV.
14 Hagues and Cook to Thos. Dixon, New York, March 23, 1823.
15 This unequivocal statement of Cook's business motives occurs repeatedly throughout the firm's correspondence books and portrays Cook as almost a textbook entrepreneur.
16 Hagues and Cook to Dixon, Nov. 4, 1823.
17 Hagues and Cook to Colburn and Holbrook, Charlestown, March 31, 1823. I have explored Cook's trading relationships with Philadelphia importers in my article, “Philadelphia Merchants and the Yorkshire Blanket Trade, 1820–1860,” Pennsylvania History, vol. XXVIII (1961), pp. 121–142Google Scholar.
18 Buck, N. S., The Development of the Organisation of Anglo-American Trade, 1800–1850 (New Haven, 1925), especially p. 99Google Scholaret seq.
19 Hagues and Cook to Dixon, May 11, 1825.
20 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to Dixon, March 22, 1825. John Wormald, a relative of John Hague and a member of the London banking house of Child and Company, joined the partnership in 1824 with an investment in the enterprise of £20,000. He took no active part in the business.
21 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to Brown and Company, Liverpool, Dec. 12, 1825. Hibberson's bad debt amounted to £623.
22 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to Dixon, Jan. 20, 1826.
23 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to Alexander Henry, Manchester, Feb. 28, 1826. For the story of “the Henrys” in the American trade see Fortunes Made in Business, vol. III (London, 1884), p. 201Google Scholaret seq. Cook established an association with this house which lasted until the 1860's.
24 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to Dixon, July 5, 1826.
26 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to J. C. Jones, Philadelphia, July 21, 1825.
26 The phrase is V. S. Clark's in describing British export successes in the 1820's in his History of Manufactures in the United States, vol. I (New York, 1929), p. 361.Google Scholar
27 The new impositions were the outcome of a complex debate between the protectionist northern states and the free-trade southern states, and the rival interests of the domestic wool growers and the manufacturers.
28 Herbert Heaton, “Yorkshire Cloth Traders…,” especially pp. 275–279.
29 Report from the S. C. of the House of Lords on the State of the British Wool Trade, 1828 (515) viii, p. 214.
30 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to J. Oakford, Philadelphia, June 24, 1828.
31 Flannels were seldom woven more than 30 inches in width.
32 See Cole, A. H., The American Wool Manufacture, vol. I, especially pp. 202–204Google Scholar.
33 Thos. Cook to C. H. Russell, New York, Nov. 22, 1829.
34 There was no tariff levied in Britain on imported Colonial wools after 1825 and in that year the tariff on cheap foreign fibers was reduced to a nominal ½d. per pound. It remained at this level until its final abolition in 1844.
35 The appeal to patriotism was not yet a “respectable” tariff argument in either the United States or Britain.
36 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to Robert Nicholson, London, Feb. 4, 1839. Nicholson acted as London agent for the partners. The profit per unit of output was reduced from 10 per cent to 2½ per cent of total production costs when the new price policy was introduced.
37 Thos. Cook to W. H. Russell, New York, July 14, 1834.
38 Thos. Cook to Jones, Gibson and Ord, Philadelphia, Dec. 8, 1834.
39 Thos. Cook to Dixon, Dec. 28, 1834.
40 Thos. Cook to John Wormald, London, Feb. 20, 1835.
41 Information contained in a letter from Cook to John Addams, Manchester, May 2, 1835.
42 Ibid.
43 Thos. Cook to R. T. Horner, Leeds, May 7, 1835.
44 Thos. Cook to John Chadwick, Rochdale, May 24, 1835.
45 Thos. Cook to Nicholson, Sept. 20, 1836.
46 Thos. Cook to A. and S. Henry and Company, Manchester, April 30, 1835.
47 The experiences of the Witney blanket industry in the nineteenth century have received little attention from economic historians, but see Plummer, A., The Witney Blanket Industry (London, 1934)Google Scholar.
48 Thos. Cook to A. and S. Henry and Company, Oct. 28, 1835.
49 Hagues, Cook and Wormald to Alexander Henry, Jan. 8, 1836. The French designs were very popular in the New Orleans trade.
50 Ibid.
51 Benjamin Gott was experimenting with cotton-warped or “union” cloths in the early 1820's, but they seem to have been chiefly undyed fabrics. See Crump, The Leeds Woollen Industry, p. 55.
52 See Matthews, R. C. O., A Study in Trade-Cycle History (Cambridge, 1954), especially pp. 152–155Google Scholar. See also McGrane, R., The Panic of 1837 (Chicago, 1927)Google Scholar.
53 Thos. Cook to John Cryder, London, April 2, 1838.
54 This “advantage” enjoyed by small entrepreneurs over employers of labor has been found characteristic of many industries at different times in different places. See, for example, Phillips, J. D., Little Business in the American Economy (University of Illinois Press, 1958)Google Scholar, especially chap. V; and Steindl, J., Small and Big Business (Oxford, 1945)Google Scholar.
55 Thos. Cook to Robert Barbour, Liverpool, Jan. 9, 1843.
56 Cook's description of the effects of the depression on some of his business associates was contained in a letter dated May 15, 1841.
57 Cook was using a copy of the American invention, “Goulding's condensing device” in 1834.
58 Hagues, Cook and Wormald, Private Ledgers. The wool element constituted slightly more than 50 per cent of the total selling cost per blanket.
59 Thos. Cook to Nicholson, Dec. 18, 1832.
60 For the “shoddy” story see the percipient little work by Jubb, S., History of the Shoddy Trade (Batley, 1860)Google Scholar.
61 See Table II.
62 On this point it is perhaps worth stressing that spectacular rates of profit were not crucial to the development of entrepreneurship in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.
63 Thos. Cook to Dovemus and Nixon, New York, June 7, 1861.
64 Thos. Cook to W. H. Russell, Dec. 21, 1861.
65 The firm's surviving records are lamentably deficient in yielding information concerning the supply of labor to the enterprise.
66 For an interesting discussion of the vertical extension of entrepreneurship, see Stigler, G. J., “The Division of Labor is Limited by the Extent of the Market,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. LIX (1951), p. 185CrossRefGoogle Scholaret seq.
67 Cook's entrepreneurial development could certainly be fitted into Professor A. H. Cole's typing of entrepreneurship as set forth in his “An Approach to the Study of Entrepreneurship,” Journal of Economic History, vol. VI, Suppl. (1946), pp. 1–15Google Scholar.
68 Throughout the correspondence books, the letters written by Cook are always clearly expressed, dignified in tone and precise in meaning. By contrast, he was often complaining of the looseness of expression which characterized the communications of his correspondents.
69 He was writing long letters to his customers on the day he died.
70 See Cole, A. H., Business Enterprise in its Social Setting (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), especially pp. 56–59Google Scholar for a general discussion of entrepreneurship and the family firm.
71 The legal and business aspects of partnership also contributed to this failure.
72 The influence of W. W. Rostow is acknowledged in this final paragraph.