MORLEY, Samuel (1809-1886), of 18 Wood Street, Cheapside, Mdx. and Craven Lodge, Stamford Hill, Stoke Newington, Mdx.

Entering parliament at the age of fifty-five, Samuel Morley was not only one of the most significant entrepreneurs in the country, but also a philanthropist and champion of radical political causes. His family manufactured hosiery in Nottingham, Morley’s father having moved to London at the end of the eighteenth century to establish a further branch of the business, which eventually traded under the name I. and R. Morley. By 1860 Morley, who had gained a reputation as a successful and honest businessman, was responsible for both the London and Nottingham branch, with sales exceeding £1 million. He also followed his father, a leading Hackney Congregationalist, into philanthropy, spending £14,400 on new dissenting chapels between 1864 and 1870, and contributing to the building expenses of at least eleven Congregational training colleges in England and Wales. 1J. Parry, ‘Morley, Samuel (1809–1886)’, Oxf. DNB, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/; E. Hodder, The life of Samuel Morley (1887); Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 6 Sept. 1886. His support for the right of dissenters to preach their ideals led him into politics, as chairman of, firstly, the dissenters’ parliamentary committee in 1847, and then the electoral committee of the Liberation Society in 1855. Appearing in the latter role before an 1859 select committee of the Lords inquiring into the assessment and levying of church rates, he asserted that the cause of religion was injured by forced contribution to its support,2PP 1859 sess. 2 (179), v. 89-108. a position which arguably gave the pro-church party grounds to suggest that the ulterior motive behind the campaign for the abolition of church rates was disestablishment.3The parliamentary diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858-1865, ed. T.A. Jenkins (1992), 12, 96. He engaged further with parliamentary politics through his chairmanship of the Administrative Reform Association, established in May 1855 to seize on public dissatisfaction at the management of the Crimean War, which Morley tried to use as a platform to encourage ‘efficiency and honesty’ in government. As a movement, however, it failed to flourish, and after the 1857 general election fell from view.4Parry, ‘Morley, Samuel’.

Rejecting the advice of Richard Cobden, who urged him to seek a seat in parliament in 1857, Morley, who in that instance had cited too heavy a workload, acceded to a request to become one of two Liberal candidates for Nottingham at the 1865 general election. Favouring the £6 franchise, but only as a first step because of the need to enfranchise lodgers, his campaign speeches centred on electoral reform, a subject he believed to be ‘the foremost question of the present time’. He also supported direct taxation, and continued his denunciations of any alliance between church and state.5Leeds Mercury, 17 May 1865; Pall Mall Gazette, 23 May 1865. However, Morley’s platform took second stage during a campaign that was, in his words, ‘charged with an electric current of violence’,6The Times, 18 Apr. 1866. and although he topped the poll, a petition was launched against his election,7CJ, vol. cxxi, 17 Feb. 1866, 88. leading him to appear before an election committee to explain his conduct.8The Times, 18 Apr. 1866. The committee’s verdict, that he was ‘by his Agents, guilty of bribery’ due to the hiring and payment of voters,9Hansard, 20 Apr. 1866, vol. 182, cc. 1766-8; The Times, 21 Apr. 1866 deeply shocked the duly unseated Morley. His ‘painful recollections’ of ‘toil, annoyance, and humiliation’,10Hodder, Samuel Morley, 224. left him unwilling to be associated with the constituency again,11Parry, ‘Morley, Samuel’. although his son, Arnold, sat as a Liberal for Nottingham from 1880 to 1885, and for Nottingham East from 1885 to 1895.

Morley’s tenure of his seat was thus dramatically curtailed, but he did make a small number of contributions to debate concerning the labouring classes’ dwellings bill, the Oxford tests abolition bill, and, most candidly, on the church rates abolition bill in 1866,12Hansard, 12 Mar. 1866, vol. 182, c. 118; 21 Mar. 1866, vol. 182, c. 710-11; 7 Mar. 1866, vol. 181, cc. 1688-9. when he made a passionate case for the bill, reiterating his belief that levying rates damaged the cause of religion by asking ‘how, with a church confessedly the richest in the world, millions of our population were living beyond the influence of religion?’13Hansard, 7 Mar. 1866, vol. 181, cc. 1689. There was little time for him to establish a voting record, but it is notable that, due to his opposition to clauses relating to corporal punishment and branding, he was in the minorities on the marine mutiny bill.14House of Commons Division Lists, 1866 sess., 8 Mar. Eleven days before he was unseated, he was named to the select committee on the contagious diseases bill.15Hansard, 9 Apr. 1866, vol. 182, c. 967. Morley was involved in the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act from 1875. Parry, ‘Morley, Samuel’.

Morley became MP for Bristol at the 1868 general election, six months after losing a by-election there, and held the seat until his retirement in 1885. Maintaining his interest in education and religion, he supported the 1870 Education Act and backed the trade union legislation of 1871-5. A loyal follower of Gladstone, he championed retrenchment and the defence of free trade, and although he initially opposed Irish home rule, he supported Gladstone’s declaration for it in 1886. Disapproving of the House of Lords, he declined a peerage from Gladstone in June 1885. Morley never recovered from a severe attack of pneumonia in the summer of 1886, and died on 5 September at his London home, 34 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair. Succeeded by his eldest son Samuel Hope, he left a fortune of £467,474, and a 1,400 acre estate at Hall Place, Leigh, which he bought in 1870 in place of Craven Lodge, where he had lived since 1854.16Parry, ‘Morley, Samuel’. His letters and papers are located in Dr William’s Library, London; his correspondence with Edwin Chadwick in University College London; his letters to W.E. Gladstone in the British Library, and his letters to George Howell in the Bishopsgate Institute, London.