George Jelliss writes on the life and works of social reformer Robert Own

Robert Owen

I inherited my regard for Robert Owen (1771 – 1858) from my mother who revered him as the Father of the Cooperative Movement. She was born in Beckermet (now in Cumbria) and although living most of her life in southern England thought of herself as a Lancashire Lass (ala Gracie Fields) and was fond of the Lancashire saying “Everyone’s a little queer, save me and thee, and even thee’s a little queer!” Which is often attributed to Owen.

It was only in later life, when I lived in Leicester for nine years and found that one of the five busts on Leicester’s Secular Hall was of Robert Owen that I seriously researched his life. Since the Hall was built in 1881 and Owen died in 1858, this must probably be the earliest memorial to him, and was erected by people who actually knew him in person. In 1839 Owen gave a series of four lectures in Leicester, supporting the already strong tradition of freethought in the town.

The builders of the hall, principally the local industrialists Josiah Gimson and Michael Wright, evidently thought Owen of equal merit to the others depicted there, namely Tom Paine who died in 1809 (and whose bust is also probably also the earliest memorial in Britain), Voltaire who died in 1778, Jesus (whom the secularists regarded as a moral teacher and social reformer) and the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. Wright had been involved in the unofficial Owenite community at Manea Fen (1838-41) which however had ended with the shooting of its founder William Hodson.

Robert Owen was an essentially self-educated man, the sixth of seven children of an ironmonger and postmaster at Newtown in Wales, leaving home at the age of ten for London and then to Stamford where he was apprenticed to a draper. In 1785 he joined a cotton textile manufacturer in Manchester and saw the potential of steam-driven mass production using the recent inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton and Cartwright. With a borrowed capital of £100 Owen began making spinning ‘mules’ and setting them to work. At the age of 20 he was manager of a large spinning mill employing 500 workers, and by 1797 a partner.

On a business visit to Glasgow he met Anne Caroline Dale, daughter of David Dale, owner of the great spinning mill at New Lanark, which Dale had built with Arkwright in 1780. They married, and Owen and his partners bought the New Lanark mill. Here it was that he began to put into practice the ideas which made him known all over Europe as a practical reformer. He banned employment of young children in his factories, provided schooling, began schemes for old age and sickness insurance. He converted New Lanark into a model community which drew pilgrims, even from Russia.

His main principle was that “man’s character is made for and not by him”. This was contrary to the orthodox thinking, which was that the masses were poor because they were congenitally idle and lacking in self-control, so their poverty was a just consequence of their sins and a part of the divine order of the world. On the contrary he thought that as people were better housed, fed, clothed and given cultural and educational opportunities, rather than being treated as malcontents, so their character, by and large, would be transformed.

For a time statesmen and members of the Royal family were among his supporters but, once his anti-religious views and utopian ideals became clear, religious opposition and the need for the ruling class to retain their privileges prevented his reforms being implemented by the state, although they marked the start of a series of reforms that would take place over the next century, thanks in large degree to the efforts of those sympathetic to his views.

Robert Owen believed that “all the religions of the world are false”. He campaigned for a form of Socialism, and later an ethical movement which he called Rational Religion, which attracted 100,000 members. There was not a reform of the time (peace, trade unions, feminism, prisons, education, marriage, etc.) that was not included in his ideal, and he spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on trying to establish utopian communities in Britain and America.

George Jacob Holyoake (1817 – 1906) who joined the Owenites as a lecturer in 1838 carried on his work in the Cooperative movement and incorporated his ideas into his version of ‘Secularism’. Another notable Owenite was Henry Hetherington (1792 – 1849) whose Last Testament (August 1849) written when he was dying of cholera, is a very moving and important statement of belief in atheism, anticlericalism, humanist morality and cooperative socialist ideals.

Another memorial to Robert Owen is his statue in Newtown, erected in 1956, near to where he is buried. The statue in front of the Cooperative Bank Headquarters in Manchester is a replica of this statue.

This post is part of  a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

George Jelliss is the Secretary of Hastings Humanists, and an Honorary Life Member of Leicester Secular Society