Entrepreneurship and the family business: the fluctuating fortunes of clothmaking dynasties in Reading and Newbury c.1500-1650

"It is a commonplace of British business history that few family businesses survive beyond three generations and that entrepreneurial expansion normally occurs in the first or second generation. By the third generation the business has almost invariably been sold off or wound up, or is destined to decline. Taking the findings of research into the business activities, achievements and motivation of leading family businesses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as its starting point, this paper explores the factors facilitating, sustaining and curtailing entrepreneurial activity in family clothmaking businesses in early modern Reading and Newbury. Over the centuries the family business has contributed significantly to the pace and direction of economic development. Its role in the expansion of English clothmaking during the sixteenth century is particularly visible in specialist clothing towns such as Reading and Newbury where the scale and profitability of industrial entrepreneurship were exceptional because the towns produced fully rather than semi-manufactured cloths. Evidence from a range of sources is utilised to examine the concept and structure of the family clothmaking business in the two towns and the timing, scale and success of entrepreneurial activity across the generations. The paper focuses upon the leading clothmaking families of the period and examines the management and organization of their individual businesses, the progress of vertical and horizontal integration and the extent and impact of their financial success. Bankruptcy occurred in a few of the families studied, but was not necessarily terminal, and most avoided it. The training and deployment of sons and other close family members in the family business or in related trades in the two towns or in London was crucial to the longterm success and survival of the family business but clothiers also entrusted considerable responsibility within their businesses to former apprentices. Wives and daughters not only played an important part in conveying business capital, premises and skills between clothing families but in a number of families contributed directly to the running and preservation of clothmaking businesses. Entrepreneurs typically emerge when new or highly advantageous economic opportunities occur and when the commercial environment is ripe to exploit them. Clothiers in Reading and Newbury were well placed to take advantage of high levels of demand for their products in overseas markets during the early and late sixteenth century. They enjoyed considerable locational advantages, which enabled them to resist the advance of rural competition in other regions until the early seventeenth century, and the long tradition of clothmaking in the area provided a skilled nucleus for an expanded clothing workforce. Those with entrepreneurial aptitude and access to the requisite expertise and capital invested in vertical and horizontal integration by increasing the size and output of weaving or clothworking shops and by centralizing several stages of manufacture on one site and buying or leasing a fulling mill. A small number of Reading and Newbury clothiers experimented with the development of the proto-factory. The motivation for entrepreneurial drive and vision in the period was complex and can only be deduced indirectly from the known activities, expenditure and achievements of Reading and Newbury clothiers and from the provisions made and sentiments expressed in their wills. In the clothmaking dynasties studied, the attainment of financial security and a comfortable life-style were clearly significant initial goals for pioneer entrepreneurs, but once a modest degree of success had been achieved and adequate provision made for dependants, other factors kicked in, including: the desire to emulate the trading and social success of relations and competitors, the ambition to exercise political power and influence, the aspiration to secure social advancement, and for some, the enjoyment of exceptional occupational success per se. It is noticeable that a number of second and third generation clothing entrepreneurs passed through life-style changes, moving from a life devoted to profit maximisation to one with free time for conspicuous consumption, public service and even recreation or hospitality. Despite enjoying sustained periods of success and profitability, few, if any, of the family clothmaking businesses studied appear to have survived longer than 80 years and most flourished and declined over a rather shorter life-cycle. The paper looks beyond advantageous and adverse national and local manufacturing and trading conditions to explore the evolving business ethos of the clothier. It examines the demands placed upon clothmaking entrepreneurs by the drive to generate wealth, the opportunities for organisational and product innovation, the pressure to provide employment, the pursuit of personal ambition and the need to diversify investment, and places them within the context of contemporary religious teaching and social mores. It considers the objectives and scope of business succession planning and investigates how far succession strategies were successfully implemented in a period when early death, the failure to produce sons and the occupational preferences and competence of successive generations conspired with the lure of conspicuous consumption, the drive to achieve upward social mobility, the influence of Puritan beliefs and the desirability of philanthropic impulse against the survival of the family business."