BUCKLEY, Edmund (I) (1780-1867), of Higher Ardwick, Manchester, Lancashire; Grotton Hall, Saddleworth, Yorkshire

A businessman who was described as ‘probably the richest man in Manchester’ in 1858, Buckley sat in one parliament as Conservative MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, where his benevolence ensured his popularity.2The diaries of Samuel Bamford, ed. M. Hewitt and R. Poole (2000), 56 (26 Dec. 1858). During his only election campaign Buckley confessed that ‘he was not a public speaker, but he thought he should be enabled to prove himself a public doer’.3Staffordshire Advertiser, 26 June 1841. The Manchester Courier described him as ‘one of the worthiest and wealthiest of Manchester merchants, who, by his own persevering industry, raised himself to honour and affluence, and he has long been known for the benevolent purposes to which he applied his well-earned wealth’.4Manchester Courier, 22 Jan. 1867.

Buckley hailed from the West Riding gentry, his family being described as ‘landowners of no inconsiderable possessions’ in the Saddleworth area.5Burke’s landed gentry (1855), 148-9; Manchester Courier, 22 Jan. 1867. In his youth, he had worked in the local cotton and wool trade, perhaps for his father, a ‘sturdy yeoman’, whose investment in handloom weaving proved to be a mistake. When the trade declined, John Buckley was forced to sell off the old family lands and became an agent of the Huddersfield Canal Company. Buckley worked under his father for a time before joining Rooth & Company, canal carriers. Buckley later took over the firm, which thereafter traded as E. Buckley and Company, and ‘long carried a successful business’.6Manchester Courier, 22 Jan. 1867. In 1825 Buckley was described as a canal carrier, an iron merchant, coal proprietor and copperas manufacturer.7F.S. Stancliffe, John Shaw’s, 1738-1938 (1938), 129. His successful investments in the iron trade enabled him to act as the ‘banker and support of many of those now great mechanical firms of the Lancashire district’, and his wealth also allowed him to buy back the old family lands sold by his father.8Manchester Courier, 22 Jan. 1867.

Buckley’s admission into John Shaw’s Club in Manchester in the 1820s ‘was a recognition not only of his business worth but also of his dependability in matters of church and state’.9Stancliffe, John Shaw’s, 117. He became increasingly involved in Manchester public life, becoming a highway surveyor and holding a number of offices in the court leet from 1827, culminating in his tenure as boroughreeve 1834-5.10Manchester Court Leet Records (1889), xii. 167, 205, 211, 250, 278. He was on the election committee for the moderate reformer Samuel Jones Loyd’s unsuccessful campaign for Manchester in 1832.11S. Jones Loyd, To the electors of the borough of Manchester (1832), 5. Thereafter Buckley lent his support to the local Conservatives. He was among the notables who attended the ‘great Conservative meeting’ in South Lancashire in September 1836 and celebrated the third anniversary of the establishment of the Manchester Conservative Operative Association in 1838.12Morning Post, 10 Sept. 1836; Manchester Courier, qu. in Blackburn Standard, 25 Apr. 1838. He was among Sir George Murray’s supporters at the 1839 Manchester by-election and the following year was nominated as a churchwarden by Manchester Conservatives.13Blackburn Standard, 11 Sept. 1839; Leeds Mercury, 25 Apr. 1840. He was also involved in non-partisan moves to promote the city’s business interests, such as the deputation led by Mark Philips MP that lobbied Lord Melbourne for the repeal of the duty on cotton in 1837.14Morning Post, 11 Mar. 1837.

Buckley’s interests in the iron trade gave him a connection with Newcastle-under-Lyme. He issued an address for the constituency at the 1837 general election, but took no further action. However, he accepted a requisition from electors in 1840 and stood at the general election the following year.15Staffordshire Advertiser, qu. in The Standard, 27 June 1837; The Era, 20 Sept. 1840. Buckley was ‘very popular in the borough’ and styled himself as a Liberal Conservative, standing on ‘independent ground’.16Staffordshire Advertiser, 5 June 1841. He strongly criticised the new poor law and supported the modification, if not the repeal of the corn laws, both of which were well received by the local freemen.17Staffordshire Advertiser, 12 June 1841. During the campaign he employed the Manchester barrister Charles Wilkins to broadcast the anti-poor law cry.18Staffordshire Advertiser, 26 June 1841. This was perhaps necessary because at the nomination Buckley admitted that ‘he had scarcely ever spoken twenty words in public life’, but promised to oppose the new poor law ‘whenever he had the opportunity’. Having essentially formed an alliance with another more conventional Conservative, Buckley now distanced himself from the revision of the corn laws, explaining that he had favoured a fixed duty, but had since abandoned that view.19Staffordshire Advertiser, 3 July1841. No doubt aided by his deep pockets in this notoriously venal constituency, Buckley was returned at the head of the poll.

Buckley, who is not known to have spoken in debate, gave silent support to Sir Robert Peel’s 1842 revision of the corn law and reintroduction of the income tax. Despite his promises on the hustings, he was generally absent from votes on the new poor law, although he was in the minority of 58 that endorsed the ‘re-construction’ of the statute ‘as shall make it conformable to Christianity, sound policy, and the ancient Constitution of the realm’, 23 Feb. 1843. He opposed the abolition of Anglican oaths and subscriptions for Oxford and Cambridge universities and the investigation of Irish church temporalities. He rarely voted on factory regulation, but divided against Roebuck’s dogmatic motion against any legislative interference in adult working hours, 3 May 1844. Buckley wrote to Peel in the same year that ‘you will be glad to know that the iron trade is getting into a very healthy state’.20Edmund Buckley to Sir Robert Peel, 31 Mar. 1844, Add. 40541, f. 461. The following year, Buckley repeatedly opposed the government’s Maynooth college bill. However, in 1846 he supported Peel’s abolition of the corn laws.

Pleading the ‘pressure of private business’, Buckley retired at the 1847 general election.21Staffordshire Advertiser, 12 June 1847. In addition to his iron and coal interests, he was heavily involved in railways. He was a director of the Edinburgh and Glasgow, Shrewsbury and Chester, and Manchester, Bolton and Bury railway companies, and a founder member of the Railway Club, established in Manchester in 1855, to provide a forum for railway directors.22Dod MS, i. 185; The railway directory for 1845 (1844) 31, 35; The railway directory for 1850 (1850), 114; Morning Post, 6 Nov. 1855. Buckley also held numerous commercial, civic and philanthropic positions in Manchester public life. He was chairman of the Manchester Insurance Company, had long been a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and was a proprietor of the Manchester Royal Exchange and its chairman 1856-61.23Manchester Times, 13 May 1848, 8 Mar. 1851; Stancliffe, John Shaw’s, 218, 303. Buckley served on the management committees of the Manchester Infirmary, Lunatic Asylum and Blind Asylum.24Stancliffe, John Shaw’s, 252. He was on good terms with the working-class radical and autodidact Samuel Bamford who described Buckley as having ‘long been a friendly patron of my books’.25Diaries of Samuel Bamford, 56 (26 Dec. 1858).

Buckley never married, but sired a number of illegitimate children. In one letter to his son Edmund Peck, who assumed his father’s patronymic in 1864, Buckley wrote that ‘you are aware that I had 16 young ones or more to bring up’.26Edmund Buckley to Edmund Peck, 28 Oct. 1859, qu. in Stancliffe, John Shaw’s, 295. As well as Edmund and his brother John Peck, the letter mentioned Tom and Ralph Buckley and Edmund Shaw. With a view to setting up his ‘greatest favourite’ Edmund Peck as a landed gentleman, Buckley purchased the Dinas Mawddwy estate in Merioneth for £35,000 at a public auction in October 1856 and served as high sheriff of that county in 1858.27Edmund Buckley to Edmund Peck, 28 Oct. 1859, qu. in Stancliffe, John Shaw’s, 294; Cheshire Observer, 25 Oct. 1856. Even late in life, Buckley was diligent in his business habits, one observer noting that he ‘can still be seen in the counting-house or the boardroom, doing his just share of every day work with all the alacrity, and more than the patience and judgment, of youth’.28Manchester Courier, 22 Jan. 1867.

On his death in 1867, Buckley left a personal estate sworn under £140,000 by his executors, who included his favoured son and successor Edmund Buckley (formerly Peck) (1834-1910). Usually described as the elder Buckley’s nephew in contemporary genealogies, the younger Buckley inherited the Dinas estate, Grotton Hall in Saddleworth, and valuable land in Lancashire.29B. Ll. Jones, ‘The “great landowners” of Wales in 1873’, National Library of Wales Journal, 14 (1966), 301-20 (at 306); J.K. Walton, A social history of Lancashire, 1558-1939 (Manchester, 1987), 128; Calendar of Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration (1867), 200. He followed in his father’s footsteps by sitting as Conservative MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1865-78, and he received a baronetcy in 1868. However, Sir Edmund lacked his father’s business sense and aptitude, and losses arising from stock market speculation led to him filing for bankruptcy in 1876.30Sheffield Independent, 20 May 1876. It subsequently emerged that he had abused his position as executor of his father’s estate by selling off land held in trust for the benefit of the family of his late brother John.31N.C. Moak and C.T. Cook, Reports of cases decided by the English courts, vol. 18 (1878), 641-2; Birmingham Daily Post, 5 Dec. 1876; Western Mail, 5 Dec. 1876; Manchester Times, 9 Dec. 1876. He was stripped of his position as trustee, but his disgrace did not prevent him from playing a prominent role in Merioneth.