Sir James Duckworth (14 February 1840 – 1 January 1915)[1] was a self-made English businessman from Rochdale, Lancashire who rose from poverty to start a large chain a grocery shops known popularly as "Jimmy Duck's" and entered politics as a Liberal.
In his autobiography, Duckworth recorded that three weeks after his birth his mother carried him in her arms to join her husband, "begging her way over Ashworth Moor".
[2] Ralph's father died when James three years old, who as the eldest of three sons was set to work at the age of six-and-a-half as a doffer in a cotton mill.
Fifty years later, he described his experiences to the House of Commons, when he spoke in favour of the Education of Children Bill, which raised the minimum working age to 12.
[5] In a speech which was widely circulated,[4] he attributed his own good health and six-foot stature to the "survival of the fittest", noting: I happen to come from an ancestry not composed of cotton weavers, but of yeomen farmers, who endowed me with a stock of vitality which all the hardships of my early life could not kill.
They are younger than I am, but they are grey and bent, and show unmistakeable evidences of the hardships they have gone through.By the age of fourteen he was earning 15 shillings per week and was the main support of his family.
Having considered emigration to the United States, he escaped unemployment with a job in the warehouse of a wool merchant, and later described this as the turning point in his career.
[2] The firm moved beyond grocery to include bakery, confectionery, general provisions, bookselling, and even hotel and coffee-house keeping.
His other business interests included involvement in the cotton industry in the Stockport area, and to newspapers as proprietor of both the Manchester Weekly Chronicle and the Cheshire and County News He also bought the Rochdale Coffee House Company, partly for commercial gain but also in support of temperance and to create in each of the taverns a large room fitted with cubicles for the accommodation of working men who needed temporary lodgings.
[4] Duckworth had been a reformer since his youth, driven by own impoverished beginnings and inspired by attending the speeches of the Radical politician John Bright.
[4] He first stood for election to the House of Commons at a by-election in May 1895 in Warwick and Leamington, where he lost to the Liberal Unionist candidate, Alfred Lyttelton.
Duckworth won the seat by only 300 votes (less than 3% of the total), but at the 1900 general election he was unseated by an even smaller margin by the Conservative candidate Edward Brocklehurst Fielden,[1][11] his predecessor's brother.