Anthony John Mundella (28 March 1825The National Archives of the UK; Kew, Surrey, England; General Register Office: Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths surrendered to the Non-parochial Registers Commissions of 1837 and 1857; Class Number: RG 4; Piece Number: 3189– 21 July 1897) was an English manufacturerEconomic and Social Change in a Midland Town: Victorian Nottingham 1815—1900, Roy A Church, Frank Cass, London, 1966 and later a Liberal Party MP and Cabinet Minister who sat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from 1868 to 1897. He served under William Ewart Gladstone as Vice-President of the Committee of the Council on Education from 1880 to 1885 and as President of the Board of Trade in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894. As education minister he established universal compulsory education in Britain and played the major part in building the state education system. At the Board of Trade he was instrumental in the reduction of working hours and the raising of minimum ages in the employment of children and young people. He was among the first to prove the effectiveness of arbitration and conciliation in industrial relations.A.J.Mundella 1825–1897 — The Liberal Background to the Labour Movement, WHG Armytage, Ernest Benn Limited, London, 1951 He also brought in the first laws to prevent cruelty to children.Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Death of The Right Hon. A. J. Mundella, M.P., 22 July 1897 He was also an early supporter of women's suffrage. His political achievements in the late Victorian age are said to have anticipated 20th century society.
Early life Anthony John Mundella was born in Leicester, England in 1825. He was the first of five children of Antonio Mondelli (later known as Anthony Mundella), a refugee from Lombardy of uncertain background, and his wife Rebecca Allsopp of Leicester. At the time of Mundella's birth, his father was a poorly paid trimmer in the hosiery trade. His mother made lace on a frame in their home and was regarded as adept at this work but, nonetheless, she too was poorly paid and after rent for housing and for the lace frame there was invariably little left to live on.
Mundella was christened on 15 August 1826 at the Great Meeting Unitarian chapel in Leicester. His granddaughter maintained that he was named Antonio GiovanniCall Back Yesterday, Lady Charnwood (Dorothea Benson), Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1937 but the Great Meeting baptismal register confirms that he was christened Anthony John.
Though from a Catholic and nonconformist background, he attended the Church of England school of St Nicholas in Leicester, an establishment maintained by the National Society for Promoting Religious Education to provide elementary education for children from poor homes, until the age of nine. Though he rebelled against the catechism and disliked the creed, describing them in later life as "my especial abomination", Mundella remained loyal to his early education in Anglicanism for the rest of his life. Outside school, his mother, with her wide knowledge of English literature, particularly Shakespeare, instilled in his mind a love of the beautiful in nature, in literature, and in art.Sheffield Independent, Death of Mr. A. J. Mundella, M.P., 22 July 1897 Because of the family's then abject financial circumstances, when Rebecca Mundella's eyesight worsened and she could no longer work at lacemaking the boy had to be withdrawn from school so that he could earn money to help the family. At nine, he started work in a printing office as a printer's devil, an opportunity used by him to extend his education. At eleven he was apprenticed to William Kempson, whose business made footwear, hosiery and haberdashery.The Surveyor, Engineer, and Architect for the Year 1841, Robert Mudie, Wm S Orr and Co, London, 1841
From his father, and the exiled Italians who occasionally visited the family home, Mundella acquired at an early age what was described as "a kind of strange unconventional political education". At fifteen he became politically engaged and, inspired by the local Chartist leader, Thomas Cooper, enrolled as a Chartist, becoming increasingly involved in the movement. He became adept at writing political ballads and while still fifteen heard his compositions sung on the streets and at political meetings.Eminent English Radicals in and Out of Parliament, XII, Anthony John Mundella, John Morrison Davidson, W Stewart & Co, London 1880 At the same age he made his first political speech, in support of the Charter.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Anthony John Mundella (1825—1897), Jonathan Spain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004 He was further politically inspired by the arrival in Leicester of Richard Cobden on his nationwide campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws,A.J.Mundella and the Hosiery Industry, WHG Armytage, The Economic History Review, volume al8, Issue 1–2, April 1948 and was always active in advocating the causes of the working classes.
Mundella had always been a regular Sunday School scholar and as he grew older he became a teacher, then secretary, and ultimately superintendent of a large, poor Sunday School in Sanvey Gate in Leicester.
At the age of eighteen Mundella left Kempson's to become a journeyman, then an overseer (in which post he earned £200 a year and a commission on profits) and ultimately manager of a large warehouse set up by another hosiery manufacturing business in Leicester, Harris & Hamel. Richard Harris was a prominent Liberal and Chartist in the city. Mundella prospered and, while still eighteen, he married.General Register Office, England and Wales Marriages, 1844 He worked for Harris for three years, until he was 22, and while there the firm experimented seriously and secretly with machinery driven by steam power. Mundella was not technically minded, though his experience at Harris's with mechanical experimentation helped to form his abiding interest and fascination in new steam-powered hosiery-making machinery.British Industrialists: Steel and Hosiery 1850—1950, Charlotte Erickson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1959 He was one of the first industrialists in the Midlands to realise that steam power was something far more than a means to great wealth. He believed that it could be "so applied and developed as to lift the mass of workers out of serfdom"."One of Our Pioneers", SK Ratcliffe, John O'London's Weekly, London, 11 January 1952
Manufacturing career In 1848 Mundella was offered a partnership by old-established hosiery manufacturers, Hine & Co of Nottingham, who needed help to construct and open a large new factory. He became a partner in the company, which soon became known as Hine & Mundella.
For the next fifteen years Mundella devoted his energy to reinventing the mechanics of a hosiery industry which for the most part relied on old-style mechanical stocking frames operated by perennially poor framework-knitters in their own homes.A History of Machine Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacture, William Felkin, Longmans Green, London, 1867 He pioneered many changes, including new machines which produced tubular knitting rather than the stocking-frame's straight knit. Mundella had long maintained that the best machines in the hosiery trade were "principally the inventions of working men"."A.J.Mundella and industrial Conciliation", JD Marshall, The Guardian, Manchester, England, 19 September 1960 Not by his own invention, but by encouraging inventors within the company (many of them loom operators) and sharing patents with them, Mundella was able to develop plentiful new hosiery-making machinery, a lot of it steam-driven, including a technological revolution: a machine which for the first time enabled a stocking to be made and fully fashioned automatically without stopping the action. The result was stockings made a hundred times faster than they could be by the framework knitters.
Mundella built large new premises for the company in 1851, the first steam-operated hosiery factory in Nottingham. It had wide and spacious workrooms, was lit entirely by daylight and gas jets, and had the finest machinery. By 1857 Hine and Mundella were employing 4,000 workers who were well paid, partly because by attracting good operatives Mundella hoped they would use their intelligence and inventiveness to suggest improvements in the way they worked. Improved conditions, Mundella observed, brought enhanced loyalty.
There was a setback in 1859 when Hine & Mundella's factory was damaged by fire, but it was soon rebuilt and returned to operation with the advantage of newer and more powerful machines, in large part paid for by the company's insurers. Hine and Mundella continued to prosper. They opened factories in Loughborough in Leicestershire, England in 1859 and Chemnitz, Saxony in 1866. A London warehouse at the centre of the textile trade in Wood Street was acquired.
In 1860, a series of strikes and lock-outs hit Nottingham's hosiery business. The inadequate wages of home framework-knitters compared to those of the factory operatives led to demands for higher pay (although Mundella's employees were not involved). Mundella organised a conference between workers and the employers. He had to contend with suspicious employers and with powerful trade unionists, and reconcile the penurious framework-knitters with the comparatively well-paid and skilled factory workers. He proposed that the workers should have the wages they demanded and also that a board of arbitration (the Nottingham Board of Arbitration and Conciliation for the Hosiery Trade) composed of both employers and workers should be established to prevent further strikes by fixing the price for handwork and preventing disputes by constant conference between both sides. The essence was that prevention of strife was better than subsequent remedy.
Mundella's principle of conciliation was not entirely original; other such boards of conciliation or arbitration had been set up, mostly successfully, in a few other trades but none of them had been established in an industry as antagonistic and complex with technological change as the hosiery trade. Mundella was the first to prove that the principle worked in an industry of much complexity with the aim of, rather than fighting fires, preventing fires starting in the first place. It was hailed as a success and was adopted not only in other parts of the country, but also in continental Europe and in the United States.
In 1863 the stress of business became so great that Mundella's health broke down. He went to Italy and spent two years recuperating. In his absence the firm of Hine & Mundella was converted into a limited liability company, the Nottingham Hosiery Manufacturing Company. The firm continued to expand, developing further interests in Saxony, and Boston in the United States.
Mundella had made a success out of the business. When he joined Hine & Co in 1848 the annual turnover was £18,000 (); when he left the firm in 1873 (finding it impossible to live in London as an MP and manage a business in Nottingham) the annual turnover was £500,000 ().
Mundella was a prominent and popular public figure in Nottingham and was an active force in his local Liberal Party, becoming sheriff of Nottingham in 1852, at the age of 28. In 1856 he was elected a town councillor and helped to set up the Nottingham Chamber of Commerce. From 1859, at the time of increased fear of an invasion by France, he was one of the founding members of the local volunteer corps, the Robin Hood Rifles, joining in May 1859 and being promoted to lieutenant in June and captain five months later.Victorian Nottingham, Volume 15, Richard Iliffe and Wilfred Baguley, The Nottingham Historical Film Unit, Nottingham, 1975