He and his wife Hannah Greg assumed welfare responsibilities for their employees, many of whom were children, building a model village alongside the factory.

The son of a Scottish blacksmith, in the 1740s Thomas Greg bought a small ship which carried salted provisions, linen and butter to the West Indies and returned with flaxseed.

[3] At the age of eight, Samuel Greg was sent to live with his maternal uncle, Robert Hyde, at Ardwick Hall, Manchester, in the heart of England.

His uncles, Robert and Nathaniel, were linen merchants and, after completing his education at Harrow School, near London, Samuel joined their business in 1778.

At Cross Street Chapel, Hannah introduced Samuel (raised Presbyterian) to Unitarianism, a latitudinarian faith indulgent of "rational dissent".

Hannah had completed her education at a Unitarian academy at Stoke Newington outside London, where she lived with her cousin Thomas Rogers, a close friend and an immediate neighbour to Richard Price.

[5] Richard Price was the "non-conforming minister of eminence" that Edmund Burke pilloried in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as the leading light of a circle of "literary caballers and intriguing philosophers" naïve and seditious in their embrace of the French revolutionary doctrine.

[6] It was in this same circle that Samuel's older sister Jane Greg moved, associating with John Horne Tooke of the London Corresponding Society (arrested, but acquitted, in 1794 of high treason) and Irish radical Roger O'Connor.

Although the extent of her activities are unclear, in suppressing the Society of United Irishmen in advance of their Irish rebellion of 1798, British commander Gerard Lake described Jane Greg as "the most violent creature possible" and as someone who had caused "very great [political] mischief" in her native Belfast.

Hannah Greg's influence has been seen in what might otherwise be seen as a hard-headed, if unusual, decision to invest in improved conditions so as to make the new and regimented mill work attractive.

The arrangement was still operating in 1835 when Andrew Ure observed "at a little distance from the factory, on a sunny bank, stands a handsome house, two stories high, built for the accommodation of the female apprentices.

[8]Over half of Samuel Greg’s workforce were poor and orphaned children ... the children were given good medical care by the Greg family doctor, and education in writing and maths three nights a week ... although the child workers were not subjected to corporal punishment, bad behaviour brought overtime, threats that girls would have their heads shaved or young workers being locked in a room for days on a porridge-only diet".The children were overseen by Hannah Greg, who delivered the services of a doctor, two teachers and two singing masters.

Of Hannah and Samuel's thirteen children Robert Hyde Greg continued in the textile business and became a Member of Parliament for Manchester in 1839 opposed to extension of the franchise and to factory legislation; Samuel Rathbone Greg had little inclination for business and developed a career as a writer and critic publishing in 1840 Past and Present Efforts for the Extinction of the African Slave Trade in which he argued that cotton, sugar and coffee could be grown more cheaply by free labour; Elizabeth Greg (married to William Rathbone V) founded the first public wash-houses in the United Kingdom in the wake of the 1832 cholera epidemic, and later helped William Forster in formulating the 1870 Education Act.