ECCLES, William (1793-1853), of Spring Mount, Blackburn, Lancs. and 8 Salisbury Street, London, Mdx.

From ‘lowly working-class origins’,1D. Beattie, A history of Blackburn (2007), 71. Eccles initially worked in the warehouse at the Mill Hill calico-printing works in Blackburn as a boy and was also a handloom weaver, before being articled in an attorney’s office.2Blackburn Standard, 28 Oct. 1857; Preston Guardian, 2 Feb. 1878. He entered the legal profession in around 1820, joining in partnership with James Neville as a solicitor at Blackburn, where ‘by his diligent attention to professional studies, he acquired a deep insight into our system of jurisprudence’.3B. Lewis, The middlemost and the milltowns. Bourgeois culture and politics in early industrial England (2001), 347; F. Boase, Modern English Biography, v. 193; Blackburn Standard, 22 June 1853. His ‘lucrative gains’ in the law enabled him to invest in the construction of a cotton spinning and weaving mill at Nova Scotia, Blackburn in 1836-7, and he left his legal practice in around 1840 to pursue these manufacturing interests full-time.4Preston Guardian, 2 Feb. 1878; PP 1852-53 (217), viii. 456; www.cottontown.org: ‘Commercial Mill’. He expanded his business with the purchase of Wensley Fold mill in 1849, at a cost of £13,600.5Preston Guardian, 28 Apr. 1849. Through ‘his close application to business, his tact and ability, and his indomitable perseverance’, he built up one of Lancashire’s largest manufacturing enterprises6Blackburn Standard, 22 June 1853., employing 1,700 hands in 1853, and taking out patents for cotton machinery.7Preston Guardian, 26 Feb. 1853; The Mechanics’ Magazine (1850), lii. 459; The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal (1850), xiii. 32. Remembered for his ‘strict punctuality and undeviating integrity’ in business8Blackburn Standard, 22 June 1853., he was said to have earned ‘the well-deserved respect and esteem of all classes’, notwithstanding his firm’s prosecution in 1844 for infringing the factory laws.9Blackburn Standard, 16 June 1852; PP 1843 [503], xxvii. 346; PP 1844 [524], xxviii. 545. In 1848 his workers at Nova Scotia were provided with allotments, a female schoolroom and a reading room, while Wensley Fold’s facilities included baths.10H.I. Dutton & J.E. King, ‘The limits of paternalism: the cotton tyrants of North Lancashire, 1836-54’, Social History, 7 (1982), 61; Preston Guardian, 6 July 1850. Eccles was a Congregationalist and from 1817 belonged to Chapel Street Independent Chapel, where he served as deacon, 1821-7.11D. Bebbington, Congregational members of Parliament in the nineteenth century (2007), 39. Although he affirmed at an anti-church rate meeting in 1837 that ‘he should be with Dissenters to the end of his days’, he later joined the Anglican church.12Blackburn Standard, 18 Jan. 1837; Preston Guardian, 18 June 1853. Bebbington does not refer to this later Anglicanism: Bebbington, Congregational members of Parliament, 39. Described in the local press in 1852 as ‘a sound Churchman’, he did not feature on The Nonconformist’s list of Dissenting MPs when he was returned for his native borough that year.13Blackburn Standard, 16 June 1852; Manchester Times, 7 Aug. 1852.

A staunch free trader, Eccles signed a requisition for a local meeting to consider the corn laws in 1826.14Blackburn Standard, 22 Feb. 1890. His legal expertise meant that he was called upon to draft local petitions, such as that of 1830 calling for repeal of the duty on printed calicoes.15Lancaster Gazette, 11 Dec. 1830. Reading Blackburn’s pro-reform petition at a meeting in February 1831, he explained that it excluded radical demands such as universal suffrage and the ballot for the sake of unanimity. While not personally opposed to the ballot, he declared that ‘if universal suffrage were to prevail, property would not be fairly represented’.16Preston Chronicle, 26 Feb. 1831. In addition to his involvement with this petition, Eccles transmitted a later petition to Lord Derby, urging the Lords to support reform: Preston Chronicle, 2 June 1832. Prominent in the local reform movement, he was said to have headed the procession to a mass meeting on Blakey Moor, together with William Feilden, a local cotton manufacturer.17Lewis, The middlemost and the milltowns, 382. He chaired the committee which successfully oversaw the return of Feilden, a Whig who soon drifted to Conservatism, for Blackburn in 1832.18PP 1852-53 (217), viii. 470. He continued to support Feilden until the 1841 election, when – having promised not to vote against him – he abstained because of Feilden’s failure to support the reduction of the sugar duties.19Blackburn Standard, 30 June 1852.

Eccles was also involved with the anti-church rate campaign, chairing a meeting in 1837 at which his measured speech reflected his political moderation: he explained that ‘he could not use strong expressions; it was not his habit’.20Blackburn Standard, 18 Jan. 1837. He joined fellow manufacturers campaigning for free trade, serving as chairman of Blackburn’s anti-corn law association, 1841-6, and on the committee of the Blackburn association for repealing the East India Company’s salt monopoly.21Boase, Modern English Biography, v. 193; Blackburn Standard, 21 Oct. 1846. He signed a national memorial for reduction of the sugar duties in 1844.22PP 1845 (168), xlvi. 571-4. His prominent position among Blackburn’s manufacturers was confirmed by his chairing of meetings which made agreements on short time working in 1846, and he also presided over local meetings on the relief of distress in 1847, with his firm subscribing £50 to the relief fund.23Blackburn Standard, 12 Aug. 1846, 28 Oct. 1846, 24 Nov. 1847; Preston Guardian, 27 Nov. 1847. He became vice-president of the Blackburn Commercial Association upon its foundation in 1847.24Blackburn Standard, 8 Sept. 1847. He was later highlighted by Lord Ashley as a former opponent of the Ten Hours Act who came to see its benefits.25Hansard, 14 Mar. 1850, vol. 190, c. 896. He was involved with a range of other local institutions, including the Blackburn Bible Society, the Church Missionary Society and the Blackburn Mechanics’ Institute, of which he was a vice-president.26Blackburn Standard, 16 May 1838, 21 Apr. 1847, 15 Sept. 1847.

In 1847 Blackburn’s free trade association invited Eccles to offer for the borough, but he declined due to his ‘numerous’ engagements and the fact that his sons were still young,27Blackburn Standard, 30 June 1852. declaring that ‘I hope my vanity does not exceed my regard for my family. My character as a prudent and sensible man would have been ruined by the attempt to become a member of parliament’.28Preston Guardian, 26 June 1852. Eccles later recalled that he was approached twice by Richard Cobden and John Bright, and twice by James Pilkington, who was returned as a Liberal in 1847. Although it was later alleged that William Hargreaves, Pilkington’s running-mate, was brought out at Eccles’s behest – and he was therefore attacked for failing to support him and Pilkington – he denied this, explaining that he had merely named Hargreaves at Cobden and Bright’s suggestion, and did not know him personally.29Preston Guardian, 26 June 1852; Blackburn Standard, 30 June 1852. Hargreaves was brother-in-law to Eccles’s former partner, James Neville. Indeed ‘long before the election I told his friends that I could not go the length of his party’.30Blackburn Standard, 11 Aug. 1847. Eccles instead promised his vote to the Conservative, John Hornby, because he had supported Peel on corn law repeal, and duly plumped for him and supported him on the hustings, although he did not propose him due to ill health.31Blackburn Standard, 29 July 1847; Blackburn Standard, 30 June 1852.

Eccles qualified as a local improvement commissioner in 1850, and, although he had opposed incorporation, he was elected as a councillor for Park ward when Blackburn was incorporated the following year, and subsequently selected as an alderman.32Preston Guardian, 5 Jan. 1850, 15 Nov. 1851; Blackburn Standard, 5 Nov. 1851, 12 Nov. 1851. He was a diligent local magistrate, appointed for Lancashire in 1849, in which capacity he took on ‘almost single-handed, the onerous duties’ at Blackburn, until the town received its own magistrates, of whom Eccles was one, in 1852.33Blackburn Standard, 31 Jan. 1849, 16 June 1852; Liverpool Mercury, 27 July 1852. His legal knowledge meant that fellow magistrates deferred to him on key questions, and he was praised both for his ‘inflexible sense of justice’ and his ‘suavity of manner which tended to conciliate’.34Preston Guardian, 18 June 1853; Blackburn Standard, 22 June 1853.

Just three weeks before the 1852 election, Eccles overcame his previous reluctance and offered as a candidate, upsetting expectations that Hornby and Pilkington would be unopposed.35PP 1852-53 (217), viii. 459. Hornby’s protectionist votes in 1850 appear to have prompted Eccles to rally to the defence of free trade.36Ibid., 455. Eccles also advocated reform of the constitution and church to remedy imperfections, such as the inadequate pay of parochial clergy, although he warned that this should not be undertaken by ‘reckless or unskilful hands’. He favoured a £5 or £7 franchise, granted to those who had a certificate to prove that they could read and write, and although he regarded the ballot as ‘unmanly’, saw it as a necessary accompaniment to franchise extension.37Blackburn Standard, 30 June 1852. He declared that ‘I have never been a person of strong political predilections... I never was anything of a party man; but I have endeavoured to act upon principle’.38Preston Guardian, 26 June 1852. Although the Conservative Blackburn Standard endorsed him, together with Hornby, Hornby did not join forces with him, believing him to be ‘as great a Radical as Mr. Pilkington’.39Blackburn Standard, 16 June 1852, 21 July 1852. Eccles owed his return to split votes with Pilkington, who topped the poll.40Preston Guardian, 10 July 1852. Pilkington and Eccles shared 487 split votes; in contrast Eccles and Hornby shared only 73, while the sitting members shared 210: Blackburn Standard, 14 July 1852. Although the Preston Guardian expressed concerns that Eccles was ‘not hearty in his attachment to Reform principles’41Preston Guardian, 3 July 1852. See also the assessment of a correspondent to the Blackburn Standard, 28 July 1852., and he described himself as a Peelite rather than a Liberal, he was considered in analyses of the new Parliament to be a Liberal, which seemed to be confirmed by his actions after his return.42PP 1852-53 (217), viii. 471; Morning Post, 28 July 1852. He and Pilkington introduced James Heywood and Richard Fort to Blackburn’s electors as prospective Liberal candidates for North Lancashire, and shared a banquet to celebrate the triumph of Liberal principles in Blackburn.43Blackburn Standard, 14 July 1852, 15 Sept. 1852. Later that year Eccles chaired a Liberal meeting which protested at wholesale Conservative objections to municipal voters on the Blackburn register.44Preston Guardian, 2 Oct. 1852. Shortly after his return he donated £100 to the local Ladies’ Charity, £50 towards a new chapel and schools in connection with St. John’s Church, and £100 to send local inhabitants to Southport Infirmary, of which he was local treasurer.45Blackburn Standard, 28 July 1852.

‘Attentive to his public duties’ at Westminster, Eccles divided in support of free trade, 26 Nov. 1852, and confirmed his Liberal leanings by opposing Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852.46Preston Guardian, 18 June 1853. He was in the minority for the second reading of Sir De Lacy Evans’ parliamentary electors bill (which proposed to extend the period within which electors wishing to be registered could pay their rates), 8 Dec. 1852, and supported the limitation of county polls to one day, 16 Feb. 1853. However, his parliamentary career was curtailed when he was unseated on petition on grounds of bribery, principally because of payments made or authorised by his sons to publicans who had kept ‘open house’ at the election, 24 Feb. 1853.47PP 1852-53 (217), viii. 351; Preston Guardian, 26 Feb. 1853.

Eccles moved the selection of Montague Feilden as Liberal candidate for the vacancy created by his unseating, and seconded him at the nomination in March 1853.48Preston Guardian, 5 Mar. 1853; Morning Post, 24 Mar. 1853. He died at his Blackburn residence that June after ‘a somewhat protracted and painful illness’,49Blackburn Standard, 22 June 1853. having been unable to leave his sickroom for a fortnight due to gastric fever.50Preston Guardian, 18 June 1853. His funeral was attended by a public procession which included members of the town council, gentry, tradesmen and his workpeople. He was buried in the family vault at Chapel Street Congregational chapel, but a funeral sermon was also preached at St. John’s (Anglican) church.51Blackburn Standard, 29 June 1853. His business was continued by his sons, the eldest of whom, William, had qualified as a barrister the previous year, and was rumoured in October 1853 as a future candidate for Blackburn, although this did not materialise.52J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis, ii. 380; Preston Guardian, 15 Oct. 1853. At the end of the decade he and his younger brother Thomas became embroiled in a dispute with Blackburn corporation over the water supply to Wensley Fold, and although they were partly successful, this costly litigation and the adverse effects of the cotton famine led to the closure in 1862 of the business, which was sold in 1865.53Blackburn Standard, 23 Nov. 1859, 21 Mar. 1860, 31 May 1865; Preston Guardian, 8 Feb. 1862; www.cottontown.org: ‘Wensley Fold Mills’. An attempt to sell the mills in 1864 had been abandoned when they failed to reach a sufficient price: Blackburn Standard, 15 June 1864, 27 July 1864.