Samuel Greg (26 March 1758 – 4 June 1834) was an Irish-born industrialist and entrepreneur of the early Industrial Revolution and a pioneer of the factory system. He built Quarry Bank Mill, which at his retirement was the largest textile mill in the country. He and his wife Hannah Greg assumed welfare responsibilities for their employees, many of whom were children, building a model village alongside the factory. At the same time, Greg inherited and operated a slave plantation in the West Indies.
Atlantic-trading Belfast family
Greg was born in Belfast, Ireland, the second son, and one of thirteen children, born to Elizabeth (Hyde) (1721-1780) and Thomas Greg of Belfast (1718 – 1796). With his business partner and brother-in-law, Waddell Cunningham, Thomas Greg commanded one of the greatest mercantile fortunes in Ireland.
The son of a Scottish blacksmith, in the 1740s Thomas Greg bought a small ship which carried salted provisions, linen and butter to the West Indies and returned with flaxseed. Dealings in New York brought him into contact and partnership with Waddell Cunningham, another Belfast Presbyterian. By 1775 Greg and Cunningham was one of the largest shipping companies in the New York, having benefitted from the rise in the prices of provisions during the Seven Years’ War, license to attack enemy and plunder enemy vessels, and the opportunity to smuggle to the embargoed French colonies. After the war, Greg and Cunningham set up a sugar plantation on Dominica called "Belfast" for which Thomas Greg's brother John, already established on the island, supplied slaves.
At home, as Belfast’s richest merchants, the partners played a leading role in improving the town’s port and commercial infrastructure, including construction of the White Linen Hall which attracted the linen trade from the north of Ireland that had formerly gone through Dublin.
At the age of eight, Samuel Greg was sent to live with his maternal uncle, Robert Hyde, at Ardwick Hall, Manchester, in the heart of England. His uncles, Robert and Nathaniel, were linen merchants and, after completing his education at Harrow School, near London, Samuel joined their business in 1778.
Marriage to Hannah Lightbody
In 1789 Greg married Hannah Lightbody (1766–1828), the daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant. At Cross Street Chapel, Hannah introduced Samuel (raised Presbyterian) to Unitarians, a latitudinarian faith indulgent of "rational dissent". The new church was also his introduction to an influential network of Manchester and Liverpool trading and banking families. Greg was active as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.
Hannah had completed her education at a Unitarian academy at Stoke Newington outside London, where she lived with her cousin Thomas Rogers, a close friend and an immediate neighbour to Richard Price. Richard Price was the "non-conforming minister of eminence" that Edmund Burke pilloried in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as the leading light of a circle of "literary caballers and intriguing philosophers" naïve and seditious in their embrace of the French revolutionary doctrine. It was in this same circle that Samuel's older sister Jane Greg moved, associating with John Horne Tooke of the London Corresponding Society (arrested, but acquitted, in 1794 of high treason) and Irish radical Roger O'Connor. Although the extent of her activities are unclear, in suppressing the Society of United Irishmen in advance of their rising in 1798, the British commander, General Lake, described Jane Greg as "the most violent creature possible" and as someone who had caused "very great [political] mischief" in her native Belfast.
Hannah's religious and social views are credited with influencing Samuel's approach to the workers' welfare.
A former director of the Quarry Bank Mill, and author of a book about Hannah Greg, provided this summary of her philosophy and work. She was liberal and compassionate by nature, and all her friends were active campaigners to stop the slave trade and to move forward the emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies and America ... In reality, Hannah Greg did not say anything publicly about this because, apart from anything else, Samuel Greg inherited slave plantations. She couldn’t be a public hypocrite so she kept quiet.