A Quaker Business Man: The Life of Joseph Rowntree, 1836-1925 (review)

136Bulletin of Friends Historical Association A Quaker Business Man: The Life of Joseph Rowntree, 1836-1925. By Anne Vernon. London: George Allen and Unwin. 1958. 207 pages. 21/. Friends should be pleased that the life of a man as good, as successful, and as interesting as Joseph Rowntree has received the attention of a popular biographer. "Anne Vernon" lightly sketches the story of Rowntree 's business experience. He guided a small cocoa factory employing some dozen workers in 1869 to a giant in its class, which fifty-five years later had over seven thousand employees. However, this is no technical business history, replete with graphs and learned economic analysis, despite the title, A Quaker Business Man. The author's chief interest is in Rowntree the man, in his deep sense of social responsibility—for his family, for the wider community, and particularly for his own employees. Not every prosperous Quaker merchant has had such success in preserving his family's sense of proportion and simplicity in the face of vast wealth. Joseph Rowntree gave himself and his family full lives without indulgence in luxury or social ostentation. Most exciting was Rowntree's struggle to maintain his fine Quakerly regard for the dignity and humanity of his workers in a system growing ever larger and more impersonal. Because the intimate paternalism that made sense in an earlier age could not be applied meaningfully in a plant employing thousands, Rowntree became a doughty pioneer in finding ways to express his concern. Far in advance of legislated reform and usually in advance of his own directors, Rowntree became a leader in providing for his workers free medical and dental care, old-age and widows' pensions, grievance machinery, a voice in plant management, and meaningful profit sharing. Rowntree sought practical measures to alleviate the poverty which deeply disturbed him. Through a Village Trust he built a model village of well-designed homes that paid for themselves despite low rents. Appalled that workers spent one sixth of their income on drink, Rowntree brought out careful studies of the situation, including analyses of various reform measures, one of which, The Temperance Problem and Social Reform, unexpectedly became a best seller (almost 90,000 copies). As an early admirer of John Bright, Rowntree saw his way clear to finance newspapers and journals which supported the Liberal cause. His Social Service Trust bought up the Northern Echo, helped to finance the Nation, the weekly that became in 1931 the New Statesman, and with the help of the Cadburys, purchased two London papers, the Morning Leader and the Star. Highly individualistic in making his bequests, Rowntree believed that it was "highly undesirable that money should be given by the Trusts to Hospitals, Almshouses, or similar institutions." These were the prime responsibility of the State, not private charity. As he saw it: "It is much Briefer Notices137 easier to obtain funds for the famine-stricken people of India than to originate a searching enquiry into the causes of these famines. The Soup Kitchen in York never has difficulty in obtaining . . . aid, but an enquiry into the causes of poverty would enlist little support." Similarly he discouraged the use of his money for meetinghouses or school buildings but encouraged its use to augment teachers' salaries or to found a Quaker college for Biblical and social studies. George Allen and Unwin deserve credit for publishing this readable and attractive book about a distinguished Quaker. "Anne Vernon's" judgments are generous and, though the lack of any documentation is to be regretted, her research seems sound. And even if a tendency to sentimentalize and to include irrelevant family lore may occasionally weary both the serious student and the browser in Quaker history, the central figure whose life she recreates commands our interest and respect. Amherst CollegeRobert Davison Briefer Notices By Henry J. Cadbury William Logan, son of James, died in 1776, when inventories were taken of his possessions both at Stenton and at his house on Second Street, Philadelphia. These inventories, lately acquired by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, have been published by F. B. Tolles in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXII (1958), 397-410, under the title "Town House...