PLATT, John (1817-1872), of Werneth Park, Oldham, Lancs. and Bryn-y-Neuadd, Caern.

At the time of his death in 1872, John Platt was ‘the head of one of the largest and most important industrial firms in the world’, and was regarded by the Daily News as ‘one of the most earnest and consistent Liberals’ in the Commons.1Oldham Standard, cited in North Wales Chronicle, 1 June 1872; Daily News, 20 May 1872. Born in 1817 in Dobcross, where his grandfather (also John) was a prosperous machine maker, Platt lived in Oldham from the age of four when his father Henry moved there to manufacture machinery for the burgeoning cotton textile industry, forming a partnership with Elijah Hibbert in 1822. Trained as an ironmoulder, Platt became a partner in Hibbert & Platt in 1837, and following the deaths of his father (1842), his older brother Joseph (1845) and Elijah Hibbert (1846), became the senior partner in the firm, assisted by his younger brother James. In 1854, John and James Platt bought out the Hibbert interest, renaming the firm Platt Bros. & Co. Under John Platt’s able and energetic supervision, the firm expanded rapidly, obtaining numerous patents, capturing valuable overseas markets, and winning plaudits at the Great Exhibition and subsequent international shows. Platt was made a Knight of the Légion d’Honneur following the Paris Exhibition.2D.A. Farnie, ‘The Platt family’, Oxford DNB [www.oxforddnb.com]; R. Eastham, Platts. Textile Machinery Makers. Civic Leaders in Oldham. Country Squires in North Wales (1994), 5; E. Butterworth, Historical sketches of Oldham (1856), 246. By the 1850s, the firm was the largest machinery maker in the world, and ‘if any one man may be credited with founding the industrial power and commercial prosperity of Oldham then it should be John Platt’.3Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB. In 1852, Platt was involved in a bitter dispute with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), over issues such as the use of unskilled labour, during which he rallied fellow employers to defeat the union in a national lock-out.4J.B. Jefferys, The story of the engineers (1945), 35-40. Speaking in the Commons in 1866, he noted approvingly that bodies such as the ASE had abolished their restrictive laws and become ‘simple benefit societies’, ‘after which their employers had had no further trouble’.5Hansard, 23 Mar. 1866, vol. 182, cc.865-6. Platt’s technical ingenuity – adapting machinery to process Indian cotton – helped Oldham to weather the cotton famine better than other Lancashire towns.6Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB. He joined the Central Executive Committee of the Fund for the relief of distress in the manufacturing districts in 1862.7The Times, 14 Oct. 1862.

Alongside his engineering interests, Platt served as chairman of the Oldham, Ashton and Guide Bridge Railway, and as a director of the London and North Western Railway Company (1862-7), the Indian Branch Railway and the Ebbw Vale Iron Company.8Eastham, Platts, 16; Daily News, 14 Feb. 1862; The Times, 13 Feb. 1867; Leeds Mercury, 1 Apr. 1862; Daily News, 30 June 1866. He was also chairman of the Manchester Cotton Company established in 1861 to develop the supply of cotton from India, in an effort to reduce dependence on America. However, Platt later recalled that this venture ‘came to grief in consequence of the want of roads’ in India.9The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review (Nov. 1861), 475; The Times, 29 Aug. 1861; Hansard, 5 Aug. 1869, vol. 198, c.1356. He was a member of the Manchester Royal Exchange (from 1842) and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (from 1859) and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1861.10Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB.

Platt constructed a mansion at Werneth Park, Oldham in 1847 at a cost of £10,000, to which he added a country estate at Ashway Gap, Saddleworth in the early 1850s, purchased in conjunction with his brother James.11Eastham, Platts, 25; Manchester Times, 14 Jan. 1865. He incurred local criticism in 1865 when he appealed (unsuccessfully) against the rating valuation of his Werneth Park property, on the grounds that Oldham’s rapid expansion and ‘consequent encroachment upon the privacy of the house’ had depreciated its worth.12Manchester Times, 14 Jan. 1865. Following James’s untimely death in a shooting accident at Ashway Gap in 1857, John Platt purchased a new country estate at Bryn-y-Neuadd, near Llanfairfechan, to which he later added the neighbouring Gorddinog estate.13W. O. Williams, ‘The Platts of Oldham: a chapter in the history of a Caernarvonshire parish’, Trans. Caern. Historical Society, 18 (1957), 75-88. He devoted a considerable amount of time and money to his North Wales retreat, helping to transform Llanfairfechan from ‘a barren and desolate village… into one of the prettiest watering-places on the Welsh coast’.14North Wales Chronicle, 25 May 1872. (He also spent £5,000 on a new church, where services would be conducted in English rather than Welsh, £2,000 on a new infants’ school, and was instrumental in securing a railway station at Llanfairfechan.)15Williams, ‘Platts of Oldham’, 75-88; Eastham, Platts, 28-33; North Wales Chronicle, 25 May 1872. His leading role in local society was confirmed by his appointment as high sheriff of Caernarvonshire in 1863.16London Gazette, 14 Nov. 1862.

Platt was an equally generous benefactor in Oldham, taking a particular interest in technical education. He set up a works library (1848), constructed the Oldham School of Science and Art (1865), and assisted with the establishment of the Werneth Mechanics’ Institute, opened by Gladstone in 1867.17Eastham, Platts, 17, 21; The Times, 20 Jan. 1865. He was also involved with efforts to expand Owens’ College, Manchester, notably the creation of a chair of civil engineering, towards which he subscribed £500 in 1867.18PP 1867-8 (432) xv. 325, 501. He was a trustee of Oldham Grammar School and president of the Oldham Lyceum (a mutual improvement society for working men), 1865-8.19PP 1865 (467) xliii. 142; Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB. He contributed towards the building of St. Thomas’s Church, Werneth during the 1850s.20Eastham, Platts, 33. Platt played a leading role in Oldham’s civic life from the late 1840s, and his ‘zealous and persevering advocacy’ was instrumental in securing the town’s incorporation as a municipal borough in 1849.21Manchester Examiner and Times, 1 Dec. 1849. Having served as one of the police commissioners who administered Oldham’s affairs prior to incorporation, he was elected to the first municipal council in 1849, re-elected in 1852, and appointed alderman in 1856; he also served three terms as Oldham’s mayor.22Manchester Examiner and Times, 4 Aug. 1849, 9 Feb. 1850, 29 Oct. 1851, 15 Nov. 1856; H. Bateson, A centenary history of Oldham (1949), 229. Platt regularly appeared on local public platforms to support causes ranging from the campaign for a public park to Oldham’s testimonial to the late Sir Robert Peel, which resulted in the opening of Oldham’s public baths in 1854.23Manchester Times and Gazette, 26 Dec. 1846, 1 Jan. 1847; Manchester Examiner and Times, 24 July 1850; Morning Chronicle, 29 Sept. 1854. Although the Platts promised £250 towards it, the campaign for a public park did not come to fruition at this date, but Platt attended its opening as MP in 1865: Manchester Times, 2 Sept. 1865. In 1851, he addressed a meeting in honour of Kossuth, praising Palmerston’s ‘steady and firm conduct’ which had enabled his liberation from captivity in Turkey.24Manchester Examiner and Times, 8 Nov. 1851. Although Platt was involved with the Peace Society in 1853, he changed his views and in 1855 organised the local branch of the New National Movement to call for total mobilisation.25J. Foster, Class struggle and the industrial revolution (1974), 239. Yet he was not always in favour of an aggressive foreign policy, urging non-intervention in the American civil war and in Denmark when he chaired a local Liberal meeting in 1864.26Manchester Times, 6 Feb. 1864.

Notwithstanding his subsequent support for the Crimean war, Platt had long allied himself with the Manchester school and saw himself as a disciple of Richard Cobden.27North Wales Chronicle, 25 May 1872. He acted as local treasurer to the Anti-Corn Law League’s ‘Quarter of a Million Fund’ in 1846.28The League, 17 Jan. 1846. In 1860, at Cobden’s request, he went to Paris and gave evidence to the Conseil Supérieur du Commerce as part of the negotiations surrounding the Cobden-Chevalier treaty.29E.W. Watkin, Alderman Cobden of Manchester. Letters and reminiscences of Richard Cobden (n.d.), 190; H. Reader Lack (ed.), The French Treaty and Tariff of 1860 (1861), 20. In that same year, with Cobden suffering financial difficulties, Platt reassured Cobden’s wife that ‘the middle class of England would never see Cobden go down’, and he was a leading contributor to the fund to support Cobden’s widow and family after his death in 1865.30Watkin, Alderman Cobden, 190; R.A.J. Walling (ed.), The diaries of John Bright (1930), 289. Platt supported financial and parliamentary reform – ‘he did not see how they could obtain one without the other’ – and was a member of the Manchester Financial and Parliamentary Reform Association, and served on the Council of the Lancashire Reformers’ Union.31Manchester Examiner and Times, 1 Dec. 1849; Daily News, 29 Nov. 1851; Liverpool Mercury, 15 Feb. 1860. He became President of the Oldham Freehold Society on its establishment in 1850, overseeing its purchase of 29 acres of freehold land.32H. Bateson, A history of Oldham (1949), 109. In 1851, he served on a deputation from the Oldham Radical Reform Association to a reform conference at Manchester, backing universal male suffrage and the other points of the Charter.33Manchester Examiner and Times, 3 Dec. 1851.

At the bitterly fought 1847 election, with Oldham’s Liberals divided over the decision to run John Morgan Cobbett in conjunction with John Fielden, Platt seconded William Johnson Fox’s nomination as a rival candidate, and assumed the leading role in Oldham’s Liberal politics thereafter.34Morning Chronicle, 30 July 1847. He became president of the newly-created Oldham Reform and Free Trade Association in 1852.35Manchester Examiner and Times, 6 Nov. 1852. He again backed Fox in 1852, promising at the declaration to defray all his election expenses up to a total of £500.36Manchester Examiner and Times, 4 Dec. 1852. His dispute with the ASE was recalled at the hustings at the December 1852 by-election with a banner declaring ‘No go for Fox’, which caricatured Platt forcing his workmen to submit.37Manchester Examiner and Times, 4 Sept. 1852, 4 Dec. 1852. In 1857, Platt and his brother James were both approached as potential running mates for Fox; John declined, but James accepted and was subsequently elected.38Morning Chronicle, 25 Apr. 1856. In 1859, John again declined the candidature – ‘at the present moment nothing should induce him to accept that office’ – but finally agreed to contest the seat alongside John Tomlinson Hibbert in 1865, when both were returned.39Leeds Mercury, 9 Apr. 1859. Hibbert and Platt were re-elected in 1868, but with Platt only six votes ahead of his (now officially Conservative) rival, John Morgan Cobbett, they were subjected to an unsuccessful petition. It was reported in 1871 that Platt did not intend to seek re-election.40Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 30 June 1871. In addition to funding Fox’s electoral campaign, Platt contributed financially to Oldham Liberalism by subsidising the local press.41Foster, Class struggle, 247-9.

Platt’s extensive business concerns may explain why he is only known to have made one parliamentary speech before 1868; his firm’s transformation into a limited liability company in that year may have afforded him more time for his parliamentary duties thereafter.42Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB. In March 1866, he declared his support for the Liberal ministry’s reform bill, speaking as an employer of 5,000 adult males, only 69 of whom were enfranchised, despite being ‘among the most intelligent and best paid workmen in this country’.43Hansard, 23 Mar. 1866, vol. 182, cc.865-6. He opposed an attempt to raise the county franchise to £20, 7 June 1866. In 1867, he joined his Oldham colleague, Hibbert, at the tea room meeting, and being opposed to Gladstone’s £5 rating franchise, they were among 19 Liberals absent from the key vote, 12 Apr., by which the Conservatives established the principle of personal rating.44Daily News, 10 Apr. 1867; Pall Mall Gazette, 15 Apr. 1867, 23 Apr. 1867; M. Cowling, 1867. Disraeli, Gladstone and revolution (1967), 236. Platt divided for John Stuart Mill’s amendment on women’s suffrage, 20 May, the disfranchisement of boroughs of under 5,000 population, 3 June, and an amendment to pay returning officers’ charges from the rates, 27 June. While his family were Congregationalists, Platt had become an Anglican, probably on his marriage in 1842 to Alice Radcliffe, daughter of a local cotton manufacturer who had been one of Henry Platt’s first customers.45Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB; Eastham, Platts, 9. However, he retained his voluntaryist views, supporting disestablishment and disendowment.46Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB. His sympathies with Dissent were demonstrated by his vote for the second reading of the Uniformity Act amendment bill, allowing Dissenters to become Fellows of Cambridge Colleges, 29 May 1867, and he consistently divided for the abolition of church rates. Platt’s technical expertise was called upon when he gave evidence to the select committee on technical instruction in June 1868, at which he outlined his endeavours to provide education for his Oldham workforce, and explained that he had sent his second son to be educated in Berlin, believing that he would receive superior scientific instruction.47PP 1867-8 (432) xv. 322-6. Platt later served on select committees on steam boiler explosions (1870, 1871) and patents (1871).48PP 1870 (370) x. 450ff.; PP 1871 (298) xii. 268ff.; PP 1871 (368) x. 603ff.

Platt died in Paris in May 1872, having been taken ill at Turin during a continental tour.49Williams, ‘Platts of Oldham’, 86. Contemporary reports gave the cause of death as apoplexy; recent biographies ascribe it to pneumonia or typhoid. Daily News, 20 May 1872; Eastham, Platts, 34; Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB. Following a public funeral attended by over 20,000 people, he was buried in Chadderton cemetery.50North Wales Chronicle, 1 June 1872. In 1878 he was commemorated with a statue outside Oldham town hall (towards which a public subscription contributed £3,558), which was relegated to Alexandra Park when Oldham’s town centre was remodelled in 1924.51http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/large.php?pic=mrold021&page=877&mode=boolean&words=art&idSearch=boolean&vadscoll=Public+Monuments+and+Sculpture+Association [see Full Catalogue record]. The bulk of his estate – under £800,000 for probate purposes, although valued by his family at £6,500,000 – was divided between his children.52Farnie, ‘Platt family’, Oxford DNB; Eastham, Platts, 37. His oldest son, Henry, followed his father as a Welsh country squire, having taken on the running of the Gorddinog estate during Platt’s lifetime. He stood unsuccessfully as Conservative candidate for the Arfon division of Caernarvonshire in 1885 and 1886, and at Caernarvon Boroughs in 1900, when he failed to oust Lloyd George. The Bryn-y-Neuadd estate was occupied by Platt’s youngest son, Sydney, after his marriage in 1884. Platt’s sixth son, James Edward, served a term as municipal councillor in Oldham, but was unsuccessful in his attempts to enter Parliament as Liberal candidate for Great Yarmouth in January and December 1910. His second son, Samuel Radcliffe Platt, was the only one to maintain a permanent connection with Oldham. He succeeded his father as head of the firm and also followed in his footsteps in municipal politics, serving as a councillor and alderman, and as Oldham’s mayor in 1887-9, by when he had become a Liberal Unionist.53Eastham, Platts, 34-5, 43, 54, 56; Williams, ‘Platts of Oldham’, 86-7; Harrow School Register 1800-1911 (3rd edn., 1911), 468; D.A. Farnie, ‘Platt, Samuel Radcliffe’, Dictionary of Business Biography (1985), iv, 729-31. Papers relating to the Platt estate at Gordinnog are held by Conwy Archive Service.