Popp's detailed study of a single entrepreneurial family enduring separation in the interests of preserving their family business presents a plausible but problematic view of the extent to which a commitment to capitalism changed marital relations.61 In Popp's example, the husband was
the family's commercial traveller and his wife was their shopkeeper. He travelled the country gathering and delivering orders whilst she remained in the marital home, managing the children as well as the shop.62 Both made sacrifices, but Elizabeth Shaw seems to have sacrificed more
than her husband because she relocated from her childhood home to her husband's home, and lost her own family's support. The couple communicated by exchanging letters, which Popp argues gave Elizabeth Shaw the opportunity to undermine her husband's authority. This raises the question of whether Mrs Shaw genuinely considered herself empowered by enterprise. Returning to the point made earlier in this thesis, that the historiography of women's work in industrialising Britain has erred on the side of caution when tracing the ways in which capitalism had the potential to increase rather than decrease women's vulnerability, Popp's
58. Hughes, Lead, Land and Coal, 194-196: two other women lent money to the Grey and Allgood families; Mrs Pierson loaned them £8,000 at 5% (1752) and Mrs Stainforth loaned them £3,000 at 4.5% (1800); the loan at 5%, ½% above the prevailing rate, indicates that lenders negotiated higher rates of interest in certain circumstances. 59. Green & Owens, 'Gentlewomanly capitalists'.
60. Morris, Men, Women and Property, 7-10. 61. Popp, Entrepreneurial Families.
62. See also: A. Day, 'The Treadgold family ironmongery business c. 1770-1900: A study in the construction of identities' (PhD, Portsmouth University, 1997).
description of the Shaw's marriage as entrepreneurial is slightly ambiguous.63 It seems to echo
Davidoff and Hall's pessimistic 'separate spheres' thesis, as opposed, for example, to Joanne Bailey's conclusion that women were 'favoured' rather than 'oppressed' by capitalism.64 It is
clear that there is much more to be discovered about enterprise and entrepreneurship as a form of power in patriarchal Britain and one of the most promising routes in this regard is to examine the roles women occupied in family businesses.65 Wadhwani's and Lubinski's theory of
'distributed agency' frames what is contended here about family businesses: that 'the actions of [the] individuals' within them were fundamental in the 'cumulative entrepreneurial processes [involving] multiple actors…over time' which led, eventually, to female emancipation.66
Female innkeepers have rarely been studied in their own right, yet they emerge from this study as being involved in a highly respectable and ungendered occupation which led to the acquisition of significant wealth, high status and considerable power in a local context.67
Women like Ann Guthrie, Jane Mills, Mary Hume and Hannah Turner can be compared with aristocratic coal owners in the sense that they built 'whole communities' in urban locations just as did Diana Beaumont, Theodosia Crowley and Elizabeth Montagu did in colliery villages and remote rural areas.68 There were, of course, different inns for different sorts of
people. The Queen's Head aimed to attract 'the Nobility [and] Gentry', whilst Mrs Garbet's Quayside Sun Inn offered just what Newcastle's itinerant population required, a home-from-
63. Hufton, 'Women without men'; J. Humphries, 'Enclosures, common rights, and women: The
proletarianization of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries', Journal of Economic History, 50, 1 (March 1990), 17-42; S. Horrell & J. Humphries, 'Women's labour force participation and the transition to the male breadwinner family', Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 89-117; J. Burnette, 'T. S. Ashton prize- winning essay: An investigation of the female-male wage gap during the industrial revolution in Britain',
Economic History Review, 50, 2 (May 1997), 257-28; J. Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages.
64. Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes; Bailey, 'Favoured or oppressed'; J. Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and
marriage breakdown in England, 1660-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Popp, Entrepreneurial Families; Wadhwani & Lubinski, 'Reinventing entrepreneurial history', 779, 785, 787.
65. Tilly & Scott, Women, Work and Family; Earle, English Middle Class; Church, 'The family firm in industrial capitalism'; S. Nenadic, 'The small family firm in Victorian Britain', Business History, 35, 4 (1993), 86-114; Hunt, Middling Sort; P. K. O'Brien & K. Bruland (eds.), From Family firms to Corporate Capitalism: Essays in
honour of Peter Mathias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Beachy, 'Business was a family affair';
Sharpe, 'Gender in the economy'; A. Owens, 'Inheritance and the early life-cycle of family firms in the early industrial revolution', Business History, 44, 1 (2002), 21-46; Wall, 'Economic collaboration of family members'; Barker, Family and Business.
66. Wadhwani & Lubinski, 'Reinventing entrepreneurial history', 779, 787-788; Honeyman, Origins of
Enterprise, 1; Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion.
67. George, London Life, 47, 292; L. Davidoff, 'The separation of home and work? Landladies and lodgers in nineteenth and twentieth-century England', in S. Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (Oxford and New York: Croom Helm, 1979), 64–97; P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A social history, 1200-1800 (New York: Longman Inc., 1983); K. Green, 'Urban innkeepers, their inns and their roles in the economic and cultural life of Leeds and York, 1720-1860' (MA, York University, 2015).
home.69 The Sun Inn was not merely a tavern, however; it was also the virtual address for the
seasonally-employed, which included the wherry-men Thomas Forster and William Nelson; it was also the office of the east coast shippers, Wilson and Young. Though in a different league to Hannah and Charles Turner's Queen's Head, Mrs Garbet's inn was the equivalent of a penny bank and a pay-day loan agency which served both local people and their national and international commercial contacts. It is likely that the Queen's Head offered similar, perhaps more discreet, services for a gentrified clientele which also lived on credit.
In terms of its scale, capitalisation needs and organisational complexity the hospitality
industry, as it has been designated in this study, emerges as having offered considerable scope for female entrepreneurship and empowerment. Innkeepers had a control function in towns, based on close relationships with their clients. Mrs Guthrie and Mrs Hall may not have been paid to police their neighbourhoods but Newcastle had two female beadles in in 1801, Mrs Cockburn and Mrs Fairbridge, both widows. These women, like Mrs Douglas, who became the Customs Officer in Gateshead in 1801, occupied important positions in this dynamic society. Unlike male innkeepers, female innkeepers rarely had more than one occupation at a time. The exceptions were Mrs Fleming, Mrs Lamb and Mrs Thompson, all of whom ran long-lived enterprises but declared themselves to have a second occupation (linen draper, midwife and baker respectively). It is not possible to determine whether these were combined or consecutive, but what this shows is that innkeeping was not necessarily a full-time
occupation, though it was one which depended on being physically present in the town rather than absent. The fact that some women were less mobile than men, which is often assumed to have been a constraint on their work, becomes, in this instance, a distinct advantage. It
enabled male innkeepers to have more than one occupation, as William Wilson, James Easton and John Fryer (plummer [sic], Colliery Agent and notary public, respectively) did, and it was especially important in innkeeping families (as shown in Appendices G, H and J).70
Innkeeping emerges from this study as a prime example of the dynastic family-orientated entrepreneurship, as exemplified by the Dixons, Halls, Johnsons, Nicholsons, Turnbulls and Wilsons. Where this was combined with transportation, distribution and postal services, the women involved were not merely enterprising but entrepreneurial: female masters. Family conglomerates also emerge from this study as having interests in a number of different sectors of the regional economy; Phillips valued large coaching inns, for example, according to their
69. Newcastle Courant (10 October 1778); NYCRO/TD/28: Muster Roll of Whitby Ships; P. Clark, The English
Alehouse: A social history, 1200-1800 (New York: Longman Inc., 1983).
fire insurance policies, at £15-20,000 per enterprise, of which £8-10,000 was paid in
insurance.71 These estimates bear comparison with the valuations Berg established for small
manufactories.72
It has been intimated here that inns played a much more important role than banks did in industrialising regions. Large coaching inns were the epicentre of a daily level of commercial transactions that exceeded bank custom, simply by providing the kind of facilities cautious banks' eschewed. The scarcity of 'ready money' remained a perennial problem throughout the eighteenth century: credit, or 'imaginary 'money had become ubiquitous.73 This is not to say
that banks were not entrepreneurial in some ways, merely that they were not the
democratising institutions inns were. The ubiquity and ease of access to all types of capital, from small change to large amounts of credit, raised the status of the inn to that of a financial institution and the status of female proprietors of large inns to that of quasi-bankers. Within Newcastle, it is likely that the innkeeper, Mary Hume, had a considerable amount of local influence. Mrs Hume was well connected, in an enterprising sense, because she was both a sole proprietor and a partner in several public houses connected with the glassmaking and seafaring Henzells. There were several innkeepers in that family too, but what singles Mary Hume out is her prodigious wealth. When she died, without making a will, Mary Hume's estate was estimated at £4,000; her nephew paid a bond for that amount to begin the
administration process.74 Whilst Mrs Hume's estate was reduced to £2,000, probably because
a large innkeeper's debts were correspondingly large, Mrs Hume emerges from this study as the epitome of the wealthy middle class woman.75 Had women been permitted to be elected as
Members of Parliament, Mary Hume's wealth qualified her to campaign for a seat.76
The example of Mary Hume exposes one of a number of double standards which militated against women's high status, as revealed in their wealth and occupations, being considered equivalent to men's wealth and occupations. It has been suggested that wealth should not be considered the sole measure employed to determine a woman's 'worth' in the eighteenth 71. Phillips, Women in Business, 133; Ann Nelson's and Sarah Ann Mountain's coaching inns were insured for £8,650 in 1819; this included the premises, the coaches and stock kept at several different locations.
72. Berg, 'Small producer capitalism', 34.
73. A. Marshall, Money, Credit and Commerce (London: Macmillan & Co., 1923); J. Walvin, The Quakers:
Money and morals (London: John Murray Ltd., 1997); M. Miles, 'The money market in the industrial revolution:
The evidence from the West Riding attorneys, c. 1750-1800', Business History, 23, 2 (1981), 127-146; A. N. Porter & R. F. Holland (eds.), Money, Finance and Empire, 1790-1960 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); A. Laurence, Women and their Money, 1700-1950 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).
74. DPR/I/3/1812/A64: Mary Hume's bond: probate: 26 June 1812.
75. See www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/ relativevalue.php: £4,000 = £400,000 and £2,000 = £200,000 today.
century, but, as Mary Hume's experience shows, the combination of wealth and status was not inconsequential. Other measures of worth include public philanthropy, husbands' opinions of their wives' worth in obituaries, men's wills bequeathing enterprises and daughters carrying a family business on. Amalgamating all of these enables a more nuanced view of women's worth to be arrived at. In Jane Thompson's case, for example, the fact that it was she who was chosen as the executrix of her father's will in preference to a male cousin, despite the fact that he was also a goldsmith, reinforces her worth. Jane had clearly acquired the kind of
experience considered most suitable for carrying an enterprise on though she was not yet married when her father died, leaving her his business, stock and work tools.77 Jane
considered selling the shop but received no interest in it so decided to carry it on 'for a few months'.78 She was still trading a year later, as Mrs Robinson, employing journeymen
goldsmiths to fulfil orders from distinguished clients, including Newcastle's most famous engravers, Beilby & Bewick.79
As Chapter One established, the North East had a long history of female enterprise, which is likely to have pre-dated the Norman Conquest in 1066, but was still apparent in the late- eighteenth century, when Ann and Elizabeth Blagdon both leased properties in Westoe and South Shields, and Elizabeth Cookson had her own shares in her Quaker family's
glasshouses.80 These examples suggest that there was a familial dimension to female
enterprise in this region, which could be regarded as a covert form of enterprise, were it not for the fact that entrepreneurial families appear to have become the norm in the North East in the course of the eighteenth century. In view of what has been contended here about the ubiquity of familial female enterprise, it appears irrelevant to focus on distinguishing between overt and covert forms of enterprise when the primary purpose is to evaluate the role that enterprising women played in the industrialisation of the North East of England. It is useful, however to note that that role was one which Adam Smith praised in individuals as well as economic communities; he also asserted that an individual's engagement with enterprise was significant in a 'public' sense.81
77. Gill, Goldmiths, 232. 78. Ibid., 232, 265-6. 79. Ibid., 232.
80. Leyser, Medieval Women, 86; DCD/K/LP/266015, 266016, 266017: Ann and Elizabeth Blagdon's leases: a house and garden and a parcel of land at Westoe (24 June 1784); houses at South Shields (19 July 1784); DCD/K/LP/266381: Elizabeth Cookson's lease on three salt pans at South Shields (20 November 1788); see also DUEP/GB-033/CKS, which trace the long history of Cookson women's proprietorship, dating from 1722. 81. George, London Life, 100-101; Smith, Wealth of Nations, 433; Ross, Adam Smith, 176.
Adam Smith's ideas were still regarded as controversial in the period studied here. The idea of free trade, for example, challenged centuries of economic protectionism. Industrial
production, however, had already transformed the British economy before Smith provided the rationale for a new political economy.
It would be interesting to know how Theodosia Crowley, the owner of the North East's largest industrial enterprise, interpreted Smith's ideas. Theodosia Crowley's ancestor, Sir Ambrose Crowley I, brought large scale production, a new division of labour and stringent working conditions into the North East in the late-seventeenth century. It included the first vertically integrated productive process encompassing both primary and secondary manufacture, where even in the earliest days, 1,000 employees turned Baltic and Welsh bar iron into the
implements which shaped not just Britain's economic transformation but that of its Empire. Furnaces, rolling mills, water and steam pumps reverberated and illuminated south Tyneside by day and night. Managing such an enterprise involved sourcing reliable supplies of raw materials, experimentation, for greater precision in engineering, and establishing new markets. The Company also paid substantial duties to import their raw materials and export their goods, thus representing an important source of government revenue.82 Theodosia
Crowley commanded a business empire which supported collieries, quarries, lime-burning, land, farms and livelihoods throughout the North East. She also continued to supply
armaments to the Navy just as the Company had done in her husband's time, having eschewed the pacifist principles of his Quaker forebears.83 As the managing owner of the largest iron
and steel manufacturing company in Europe, 'a giant in an age of pigmies', Theodosia Crowley was clearly unusual.84 When her husband, John, died in 1728, Theodosia took
control of a family business in its third generation of Quaker ancestry. One of the first things she did was to commission an inventory of the stock in her London warehouse. This included locks, chains, hoops for barrels and cooking pots for the British market and 'saws, axes, Sheffield plate and japanned objects…oiled and wrapped' for export throughout the world; included in Theodosia Crowley's inventory were 154 types of nail, 80 types of file and three different types of hoe, adapted to suit particular soil conditions in Barbados, Carolina and Jamaica.85 The contents of the Crowley's Upper Thames Street warehouse were all
manufactured in the North East, at Winlaton and sent via the Tyne, coastwise, to several 82. See www.henrycort.net/fkcrowley.htm (13/3/12).
83. Ibid.
84. Flinn, Men of Iron, 252.
85. Evans & Ryden, Baltic Iron, 3: Theodosia Crowley's London warehouse, Hallett & Co., was managed by her nephew; http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/70508?docPos=3: John Crowley's grandfather, Ambrose Crowley I (1635-1720) was a semi-literate nailer from Stourbridge, Worcestershire.
different countries; they were valued at £48,115.86 Theodosia managed the Company from her
London house, adjacent to her wharves and warehouses in Upper Thames Street, employing agents in her northern factory and warehouses in several locations in Britain, and staff in the Company's own shops and on board Crowley ships. Yet relatively little is known about her, beyond the fact that she was 'Britain's foremost manufacturer' of engineered products for 39 decisive years.87
Despite the magnitude of the Crowley's role in Britain's early capitalist economy and therefore in Britain's 'take-off' into industrialisation, only a few references to Theodosia's management of the Company have survived: they refer, for example, to a series of disputes with Newcastle's Corporation over minor matters such as the amount of duty Crowley's paid for access to the Tyne, compared with other industrialists.88 It would be interesting to know
whether Theodosia subscribed to the Quaker work ethic her husband's ancestor, Ambrose Crowley I, defined in his Law Book, since her husband, John, appears to have left the Friends, but what we do know, is that she was an exemplary manager, that she chose her managers wisely and rewarded them for their service beyond what was expected, an important refinement of Ambrose Crowley I's inventory of workmen.89 Also, that the managers
Theodosia were exceptionally efficient and reliable, as Pollard considered essential in modern management.90 Theodosia Crowley remains one of the great female enigmas of her age, a
female master who clearly exerted a great deal of influence on England's industrialisation despite being denied access to the one vital forum in which she might have been able to exert an even greater influence: England's aristocratic parliament.91
It was Nossiter who cautioned that eighteenth and early-nineteenth century occupations 'were not always what they seemed'.92 Whilst Nossiter was referring to the ambiguous descriptions
of men's occupations in local poll books before 1832, Chapter Five has established that occupational ambiguity was endemic throughout the eighteenth century and also highly beneficial for enterprising and entrepreneurial women. Elaine Chalus's research into the quasi- political roles that aristocratic women like Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, Lady Huntingdon and the Countess of Ashburnham played in politics in the course of the eighteenth century
86. Ibid., 3; see www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php: £48,000 = £4,800,000 today.