The Marshall Business Papers Project
The University of Leeds Special Collections is currently working in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as part of a project to digitise the business records of Marshall & Co, Leeds. These records cover the period 1788-c1900, documenting the life and work of one of Leeds’ largest textile firms of the nineteenth century and the family who owned it.
The project will involve the cataloguing and digitization of all the records of the company as well as the creation of a website to allow public access to these documents. The site will be hosted by UCLA and be freely available to researchers as a valuable research tool on for social, technological and industrial history in the period of the Industrial Revolution and the decades that followed.
More information on the project will be posted as it progresses.
History of Marshall and Company of Leeds
Marshall, Fenton & Co was founded in 1788 by John Marshall (1765 1845), son of a Leeds draper, to take advantage of recent developments in the spinning of flax by machine. He set up a short-lived partnership with Samuel Fenton and Ralph Dearlove who were subsequently replaced by Thomas and Benjamin Benyon, Shrewsbury woollen merchants. By 1795, the latter had a controlling interest, and built a mill at Shrewsbury for making thread. Marshall grew dissatisfied with his minority holding, and in 1804 bought the pair out. He appointed two men from the works as junior partners, John Hives and William Hutton, who were later joined by a third, Moses Atkinson.
The business prospered as a result of experiment, trade conditions in the Napoleonic wars, John Marshall's commercial ability and his concentration upon what he wished to achieve. As a consequence, he made a fortune between 1803 and the year of Waterloo. In the latter, 1815, John's son, also named John (1797 1836), entered the firm, becoming a partner five years later. The remaining junior partners withdrew ; Marshall's thus became and would remain a family firm. Marshall's other sons joined the business in the next decade, and he gradually retired from active participation. His son James Garth Marshall (1802 1873) subsequently became the dominant partner in the management of the business.
Despite early success, conditions in the trade inevitably changed. Other firms were now producing yarn of the quality that Marshalls had pioneered and monopolised for decades. After 1850, the firm became unprofitable, partly due to the younger Marshalls’ lack of drive or business acumen. By the 1870s, the third generation had little interest in the business, faced by a world-wide recession, falling prices and rising wages. Labour troubles began to affect the firm and by 1884 only two partners, John III (1840 1894) and Stephen (1843 1904), were active in the company. The firm closed in 1886.