THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN SIR CHARLES W. MACARA SIR CHARLES W. MACARA, BART. Sir Charles W. Macara, Bart. A STUDY OF Modern Lancashire BY HASLAM MILLS SECOND EDITION MANCHESTER SHERRATT & HUGHES 1917 CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. INFLUENCES - i II. VICTORIAN MANCHESTER - - 17 III. THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN - 35 IV. THE OPERATIVES - - 53 V. MASTERS AND MEN - - 73 VI. THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT AND THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL - 93 VII. INTERNATIONALISM : INTERNATIONAL COTTON FEDERATION : INTER- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF AGRICUL- TURE - 125 VIII. WAR : COTTON RESERVE : COTTON AS CONTRABAND: NATIONAL REGISTER 155 "'\ IX. REST IN CHANGE OF WORK : LIFEBOAT SATURDAY, ETC. - - - - 177 APPENDIX PAGE A. The Cotton Industry : A comprehensive Survey from the Earliest Times, A paper prepared, at the request of the Belgian Government, by Sir C. W. Macara, Bart., and delivered at the Ghent Exhibition, 1913 - - 191 ft CONTENTS APPENDIX PAGE B. America : Address on the Opening Day of the International Convention of Cotton Growers, Spinners and Repre- sentatives of the Cotton Exchanges, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., 1907 - 209 President Roosevelt : Correspondence, etc. - 218 C. Egypt : Address on the Opening Day of the International Cotton Confer- ence, Alexandria, 1912 - - 222 The Development of the Sudan : Deputa- tion of the British Cotton Growing Association to the Prime Minister (1913) : British Government re- quested to guarantee a loan of 3,000,000 - - 233 Reception by Viscount Kitchener at Cairo - - 239 Text of Illuminated Address - - 245 D. India : Deputation of the International Cotton Federation to the Most Hon. the Marquess of Crewe, Secretary of State for India - - 249 E. The Industrial Council : An article contributed to the "Financial Review " of Reviews by Sir C. W. Macara, Bart., Oct. 1911 - - - 253 Industrial Unrest : Inquiry by the Industrial Council .... 272 Capital and Labour : Paper read before the British Association. Manchester Meetings, 1915 - ... 276 F. Letter to President of the Free Trade ' Union, 1909 - - - - - 289 CONTENTS APPENDIX PAGE Defence of Mr. Macara's position by the Chairman of the Manchester Royal Exchange 295 What the Leaders of the Operatives in the Cotton Trade and Allied Indus- tries think of Protection - - 298 " Manifesto against Tariff Reform," with List of Signatures - - 299 Lancashire's Verdict - - 312 The Indian Cotton Duties, 1917 : Interviews with a representative of the Manchester Guardian - - 318 G. Women on the Land : The Needs of Agriculture - 321 Speech on Trafalgar Day, 1916 - - 324 Tribute to Lord Kitchener - - - 327 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. SIR CHARLES W. MACARA, BART. - Frontispiece (From a painting by C. Rowley.) Presented by the General Committee of the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, January, 1909. FACE PAGE LADY MACARA - - - - - - 182 I (From a painting.) MRS. HENRY BANNERMAN - - 22 (From a miniature). Wife of the founder of Henry Bannerman & Sons; grandmother of Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman. REV. WILLIAM MACARA - - 54 MRS. WILLIAM MACARA - - 70 SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN - - 118 MAJOR-GENERAL SIR ARCHIBALD GALLOWAY - 150 Chairman of the Honourable East India Company. Influences CHAPTER I 4 INFLUENCES. ONE of the best gifts for life is to be born into a definite to be racial to taste positive atmosphere ; ; of the soil; to have flavour, aroma, and what one may call bite. There is a number of such atmospheres. Sometimes it is a social stratum. The English governing classes are a social atmosphere to themselves. To be born into an English governing family is to belong to a soil and climate and to be one of the definite cultures of life ; it is to have a bias a bias in this instance towards public life, and an instinct and a habit for public affairs. There are counties and corners of the earth, again, in which it is almost momentous to have been born. To begin life in Aberdeen, for example, is to begin it with a start. Fifeshire again, is a fermentation of human character, the forcing ground of a distinct type of man. Charles Wright Macara was a son of the Free Kirk Manse. This also was an atmosphere an atmosphere oxidised by strong principles, enlarged CHARLES W. MACARA " by the historic experience which is called The Disruption," enlightened by the familiar play of great names and great ideas. Nor was this all. On another side he was connected by many ties with the government of India, and heard much of life and of death in the remote and burning plains of Empire, and, fed and nourished thus on strong traditions, he was, himself a Fifeshire village lad, equally at home with the son of the laird and the son of the in and out of the ploughman ; cottages of one of the knottiest peasantries of Scotland. These experiences, though he may not have known it, were the silver spoon in the mouth of the young Charles Macara. They were the preparation, and almost the predestination of the life he was to live. It was his own wish to be a soldier. The manse at Strathmiglo looked at the proposition, but was entertain not wealthy enough to it, and we shall see him going into business, making his own way, and then, in later years, when his real nature began to get its scope and its chance, bringing into the industrial affairs of England the qualities of strategy, management and providing which would have made him a successful leader on INFLUENCES the field. Lancashire got what the Army and what India lost a general who knew when to advance, and, not less important, when and how to retreat; one who could fight a stern battle, and, when the time came, negotiate a lasting peace. It was he who very largely gave Lancashire a new sense and a habit of he in the new organisation ; ushered new age of the collective spirit. Others of an earlier age had won Lancashire her freedom. In the forties the object of statesmanship was to get undone things which ought not to have been done in the nineties the had ; problem changed, and was to be stated in terms of getting done things which could no longer safely be left undone. It was Charles Macara who very largely showed how. His business career is part of the public life of Lancashire.****** The Macaras are a clan. They are related to the larger clan of Macalpine, and their origin is traced to the Trossachs. Charles Macara was the eldest of the seven children of the Rev. William Macara, and was born at Strathmiglo, a Fifeshire village, in 1845. William Macara, the father, was born in 3 CHARLES W. MACARA Glasgow in 1812. He had a distinguished though distant relation in the person of a certain Colonel Sir Robert Macara, who flowered during the Napoleonic wars into the full command of the Royal Highlanders, and gave up his life at Quatre Bras, the day before Waterloo. In the landscape of family history its secluded pastures of quiet living and sober undulations of achievement and character this Sir I Robert Macara, a soldier steeped and seasoned in the strong martial brine of his times, the colonel of the wild and barbaric Black Watch, promoted and finally decorated for eminence on the field, and cut down at last on the eve of the supreme agony of Waterloo, occurs like an abrupt eminence, sudden, solitary and scarred, a spasmodic upheaval of the family habit into adventure and romance. But for him the family of William Macara was made of the good plain prose of Scottish citizen- " ship : it was a family, at any rate, in which the ministry and the pulpit were the natural outlet of superior promise, and so we find that in 1836 William Macara, after a period of study at the Glasgow University, was licensed INFLUENCES as a preacher of the Gospel by the Glasgow Presbytery of the Church of Scotland. It was a step towards ordination, though it still fell short of the full degree, and in the next few years William Macara is acting as assistant to one elderly and eminent Divine after another in the cities of Glasgow and Perth. It was a period of great crisis and moment in Scottish politics and theology. The waters were definitely racing and churning to the brink of the the of Disruption ; Free Church Scotland was stirring to its birth, and we get glimpses of William a fine in the the Macara, presence pulpit and parish ; strong swimmer in the excited waters of con- heart soul the of troversy ; and with party Chalmers ; edifying his congregation in Free Church principles with such a thoroughness of edification that, when the Disruption occurred, the church at Perth left the Establishment with hardly the shed- ding of a single member; now attending the first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland to ; now hurrying back Perth, where he preached twice the next day from texts so minutely applicable to the crisis, and so completely 5 CHARLES W. MACARA expressive of his own views, that the argument may be said to have been clinched in their mere announcement. Still lacking full ordination, he was unable to take part in the solemn spectacle in St. Giles' Cathedral on May i8th, 1843, at which the seceding ministers asserted the spiritual independence of the Church of Christ, and then, bench after bench, and file after file, withdrew from the presence of the secular authority, but he joined them, so to speak, in the cold grey light of the street outside, and lent all his will and strength to the practical business of the next moment, which was an urgent exercise, not of theory, but of action. Born of the spirit, the new Church had yet to be born of the flesh the Word had to be incarnated ; in a Church, in a governing mechanism, in a membership, in bricks and mortar.