They had previously been employed by the brothers, Joseph and William Drabble, as workmen[1] at a machine-making factory, Midland Mills, in Water Lane, Leeds.
[3] On 7 November 1812 a notice in the local paper, the Leeds Mercury,[4] announced that ‘Messrs Taylor, Wordsworth and Marshall, Flax Tow and Worsted Machine-Makers (late Workmen to Mr William Drabble) … have engaged a Commodious Place in Holbeck, where they intend carrying on the above business in all its branches’.
[5] On 19 December 1812 the Mercury reported that William Drabble had been declared bankrupt, and advertised all his factory machinery and household furniture for sale by auction.
[14] One year later, a local Directory gave the firm's name simply as Taylor and Wordsworth, and described it as ‘flax, woolen and worsted machine makers and manufacturers of patent axle trees’.
At some point the firm branched out into spinning: the Mercury of 19 May 1821 recorded that it had been awarded a prize at a dinner in London for 'spinning the best 6 gross of worsted yarn of British Merino wool.
Holbeck been a country area outside Leeds - 'a detached village chiefly inhabited by clothiers, with an interval of many pleasant fields planted about with tall poplars, by which it was separated from the town'.
Although Joseph Taylor appears always to have been the senior partner, he is a shadowy figure, with few records surviving to show how he contributed to the firm's success.
[28] The two firms appear to have become close, to the point where, by August 1844, they organised a joint ‘away weekend’ in Liverpool for their workers, a prospect which caused even the editor of the normally liberal Leeds Mercury some concern:[29] ‘Entirely approving of excursions for the working class, and with the kindest feelings towards the workmen of Messrs Marshall and Messrs Taylor and Wordsworth, we would express our earnest hope that the Sunday spent in Liverpool may not in any respect be spent in a manner unbecoming the day, and that every prudential care will be exercised to keep the younger hands under the guardianship of the more experienced, so that no moral harm may result from an excursion calculated otherwise to be so agreeable and improving.
They stopped the engines at Messrs. Benyon's mill, and all the hands turned out with apparent universal exultation … they proceeded to the shops of Messrs. Maclea and Marsh, where a number entered by the watch-house door, and opened the large gates.
The people seeing only a few policemen, made an attack upon them with sticks, bludgeons, and stones, but were eventually compelled to fall back without again getting possession of the yard.
The volley of stones poured upon the police was terrific for a short time … About four o'clock the riot act was read, and two pieces of artillery were paraded into Holbeck.
As the Northern Star put it: ‘…Leeds is just as tranquil as though no Strike had ever been, and as though no ‘yeos’, ‘blues’ or bayonetteers had been imported...The bells ring and the shops open, and mill tyranny goes on, and those who have any employment go to it, and those who have none starve quietly and patiently in the streets...’.
The Leeds Mercury in the late 1830s and early 1840s carried many public notices of auctions of the equipment of bankrupt firms, which showed that they had been using – and so were now dumping on the second-hand market – machinery made by Taylor Wordsworth and Co, among others.
[34] In parallel, many manufacturers, including Joshua Wordsworth, were pressing for the repeal of the Corn Laws, to allow the import of cheap foreign grain which would lower the price of bread and permit them to cut wages.
Cannon were also fired at several other establishments up to a late hour last night; and at two o’clock the bells of the Parish Church struck up a merry peal.