3-008-942 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Inauguration of the statue to Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning-mule, in Nelson-square, Bolton: Sunday-school children singing the national anthem, 1862. 'The mills were all closed, and large numbers...[of people] crowded the streets...[The statue] is a seated figure of Crompton, by W. Calder Marshall, R.A., and is executed in electro-plated bronze, by Elkingtons, of Birmingham. The likeness is taken from a portrait of Crompton, painted during his lifetime, and from a cast taken at his death by Baily...Mr. Henry Ashworth, cotton-spinner...addressed the assemblage, giving a brief descriptive sketch of the progress of invention with regard to cotton-spinning, stating that the machines of Arkwright and others had been found capable of spinning a pound of cotton into forty hanks, or to the length of fourteen miles; whilst the mule-machine of Crompton had not found any limit short of two thousand hanks, or seven hundred miles to the pound. The immediate effect of these inventions, and more particularly that of the mule, was to change the pastoral character of the people of Lancashire, and to direct them to those more lucrative pursuits now laid open to their industry in the manufacture of cotton'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.