James Cropper, Liverpool docks and the Liverpool & Manchester railway

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 1998 by Jarvis, Adrian

The realisation that he might as well appeal to the better nature of a hungry alligator as to that of a plantation owner, coupled with his circumvention of counter-accusations of self-interest, suggests that Cropper was not as stupid as some railway historians have claimed. To allege that he was reactionary is even wider of the mark: some of the public meetings which he and his circle called and addressed were far more 'seditious' than that which ended in the Peterloo massacre - and were a good deal more dangerous, backed as they were by substantial mercantile wealth and power.

We are thus driven to the conclusion that he must have been malicious, and that is certainly the impression Rolt seeks to create: `James Cropper's principle that if you sling mud sufficiently copiously and vigorously some of it is bound to stick was certainly well founded ...'21 Let us consider a little character evidence. Cropper continued for some forty years in the anti-slavery campaign, and on 1 August 1834, the very day the Act finally took effect outlawing slavery in British colonies and dominions, he opened an agricultural school on his estate at Fearnhead, near Warrington. The purpose of this venture was to try and break the poverty trap in which agricultural labourers' children had been caught by the lean years the industry had suffered since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The solution was to run a `farm school' in which children could be taught the basic skills of agriculture and given the rudiments of an education, rather in the manner of the mill schools run by the more generous factory owners. The difference, of course, was that the profits from employing child labour in mills could support such generosity, while those from agriculture could not. It was a purely philanthropic venture. When, after a few years, the farm was producing creditable yields and yielding a small return the profit was divided between master and pupils as an incentive to further improvements in skill and effort.22

One part of the education the pupils received consisted of their being assigned a small plot of ground to do with as best they could. That is entirely in line with the precepts of Cobbett's Cottage Economy, and Cobbett had been something of a hero in the Radical circles in which Cropper had moved in his youth. They were, of course, the men who organised an enthusiastic public welcome for Cobbett when he returned from America, bringing with him the bones of Tom Paine.23 In his sixties Cropper may have mellowed a bit, but his basic sympathies had not changed. Nor did his school: it was still working successfully when he died in 1841.

Cropper and the Stephensons

The picture which emerges is of an able merchant, a philanthropist and a man who did not mind waiting decades to see results. Why then did such a man conduct a long-running campaign against both George and Robert Stephenson? While some of the more recent established histories of the subject suggest that George Stephenson was a man with whom people might fall out, Robert appears as one of nature's gentlemen. Yet Cropper hounded him consistently. As late as 1835, when he was working on the London & Birmingham line, Robert wrote to Michael Longridge, `Our enemies, viz Rathbone and Cropper, are raising a hue and cry about our having an engine to build at Newcastle,' and in another letter, early the following year, he complained of the malign influence of a Quaker clique which was seeking to aid his competitor, Edward Bury."