ABSTRACT
The town of Marki with its company housing, shops, school and church might be considered a typical British-style model industrial community, less developed and without the fine infrastructure of Bournville or Port Sunlight, but essentially the same. Indeed the nineteenth-century Yorkshire press described it as ‘a second edition of Saltaire’. 2 However, just as the plant was intended to improve upon contemporary British industrial practice, the planned town was also a carefully considered response to Russian-Polish social conditions; part and parcel of the Bradford entrepreneurs’ strategy to create the optimum manufactory. At Marki the entrepreneurs made every effort to correct the deficiencies which had limited the profitability of their domestic concerns and might reduce the sustainability of the new enterprise. With reference to evolving techniques of workforce management in Britain, this chapter will show the central importance of paternalism, social-overhead investment and employment policy to the Briggs-Posselt partnership’s Polish enterprise.
