ABSTRACT
[William Marcroft (1822–1894), was born in Middleton, Lancashire, the illegitimate son of a farm servant. Marcroft’s early life was hard; he began work at the age of six collecting dung, then was taken on as a piecer a year and a half later. Gaining employment at a machine-making works in Heywood he eventually became a grinder, married Jane Smith the daughter of a local brewer at the age of twenty two, then worked his way up to foreman at a works in Oldham. As a young man, Marcroft was active in the Oddfellows, the Machine Grinders’ Society and the temperance movement, though the co-operative movement became his chief passion, especially after the defeat of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in the 1852 lock-out. He became a leading figure in the Oldham Industrial Co-operative Society and a keen promoter of co-operative production, serving as a director of one of the most famous of the so-called working-class limiteds, the Sun Mill Company. His wealth at death amounted to nearly £15,000, a remarkable sum for an individual from such humble origins. [R.E. Tyson, “William Marcroft (1822–94) and the limited liability movement in Oldham”, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 80 (1979); Donna Loftus, “Capital and community: limited liability and attempts to democratize the market in mid-Nineteenth Century England”, Victorian Studies, 45/1 (2002)] Marcroft was fanatically thrifty, saving most of his wages and insisting that his family live on a frugal diet and wear homemade clothing. His wife Jane must have had a sorry time, managing on the meagre weekly allowance Marcroft provided, a practice which subverted the normal custom in the region whereby the husband gave up his wage to his wife who then made him an allowance. Neighbours disapproved of Marcroft’s stingy ways, taunting Jane that “If my husband could not trust me with his wage, he should spend it hisself”. [The Marcroft Family…, 63] Marcroft’s sanctification of the home as woman’s natural sphere, reproduced below, is an excellent albeit extreme 257example of the patriarchal obstacles within the movement that so infuriated women like Miss Greenwood and Catherine Webb.]
