Archibald Winterbottom

Archibald Winterbottom (1814–1884) was a British cotton cloth merchant who is best known for becoming the largest producer of bookcloth and tracing cloth in the world. Bookcloth became the dominant bookbinding material in the early 19th century, which was much cheaper and easier to work with than leather, revolutionising the manufacture and distribution of books.

Early life
Winterbottom was born in Linthwaite in the heart of the West Riding of Yorkshire, the son of a third generation wool cloth merchant, William Whitehead Winterbottom (1771–1842) and Isabella (née Dickson, 1784–1849). Not long after, the family moved to the civil parish of Saddleworth, where Winterbottom, at the age of 15, left home in search of his fortune. He reportedly promised his father that, when he obtained a position, he would "do his utmost to succeed".

Early career
In 1829, Winterbottom is said to have walked the 12 miles to Manchester, presumably seeking an apprenticeship, beginning his working life as a clerk with the largest cotton merchants in Manchester (Henry Bannerman & Sons). He remained with Bannerman's for the next twenty-three years, where he learned how to refine cloth to the highest degree and developed different finishes that could be applied to plain cloth. At the age of nineteen, he was appointed to manage their Bradford accounts and to run their Silesia department, patenting a silvery finish lining, which became known as Dacians. Winterbottom was made a partner at Bannerman's aged thirty, which he held for the next nine years.

Social reformer
Manchester was at the heart of the cotton industry in Britain during the 19th century, which was a labour-intensive sector at a time when half of the workforce were children. In 1845, Winterbottom married Helen Woolley, whose family came from a Unitarian tradition. At the same time, he became actively involved in the Lancashire Public School Association (LPSA) founded in 1847, which was dominated by Unitarians. By 1852, Winterbottom formed part of a delegation of the National Public School Association (NPA) to present a draft bill to Lord John Russell at 10 Downing Street for the establishment of non-denominational free schools in England and Wales". He remained active within the NPA, listed as secretary to the general committee on education in 1857, but by 1862, the NPA had achieved some of what it had set out to achieve and was dissolved. Winterbottom went on to work with the newly formed Manchester Educational Aid Society campaigning for compulsory primary education.  He spent the rest of his life actively involved in improving child welfare, creating new schools and changing legislation to protect children.

Entrepreneur
By 1851, Winterbottom had a successful career working at Henry Bannerman & Sons, living in a prosperous neighbourhood in the northwest of Manchester. He had been gaining experience in working the machinery needed to create the highest quality bookcloth featuring innovations of his own and, in the same year, he presented his latest bookcloth samples to the Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace. The following year, Winterbottom retired from the Bannerman partnership to start his own business, taking with him the Dacian patent. A few months later, he opened an office in the city centre at Mosley Street, as well as a small factory containing two calendering machines in the Ancoats district, later opening offices in Bradford as well as London, growing a business that thrived for over a hundred years. Initially, he experimented with new designs, winning a prize medal at an exhibition in London in 1862. With competition increasing in the bookcloth sector, Winterbottom argued for improved standards in the way that goods are labelled, a cause championed by his previous partners at Bannerman's.

An embargo on cotton exports from America at the outbreak of the American Civil War triggered a crisis in Lancashire, resulting in mass redundancies and social unrest, attributable as much to mis-management as to supply challenges. The embargo created a five-fold increase in cotton prices at a time when the market was already flooded with finished goods, causing it to collapse. Winterbottom had managed to continue trading throughout the crisis, which left him with large debts. By 1869, he was forced to report the failure of his business to his creditors, who met to agree refinancing, accepting an offer of 50% market value on his assets to raise fresh capital.

Supported by his Bradford creditors, Winterbottom sought to increase market share and searched for larger premises. In 1874, he purchased and refurbished Victoria Mills,  making him the leading cloth producer of bookcloth and tracing cloth in England (ibid.), opening new storage premises at 43, Fountain Road adjacent to the warehouse occupied by Bannerman & Sons in the city centre. In 1879, Winterbottom created an Imperial Trade Mark for tracing cloth, which became the global benchmark for quality. The Victoria Mills complex was gradually expanded, making him the largest producer of bookcloth and tracing cloth in the world. In the same year, he brought his two surviving sons into the business and in 1881, a new office was established in Newton Street, an address that was to become synonymous with the bookcloth industry. By 1882, he was in a position to pay back all his creditors with full compound interest. Two years later, he died quite suddenly at his house in Pendleton, but not before he had assured his own legacy.

Legacy
Winterbottom created a business that lasted over a hundred years, which found a place on the bookshelves of every middle-class household in Britain, while providing the means for educating those less fortunate. Much of that wealth generation was in creating patents, but as orders increased (4,000 customers) and the volume of different patterns soared (50,000), the staggering number of permutations prompted Winterbottom to create an innovative indexed codification system. The code tracked customer details, orders, stocks, materials, invoicing and delivery. By creating index tables in much the same way as relational tables are structured in databases today, meant that customers only had to register their names and addresses once (unique identifier) and the system took care of the orders. Once staff had been trained in its application, inventories were augmented, suppliers were paid and orders were delivered on time. An attempt was made to replace Winterbottom's system with an expensive computer in the 1950s but the attempt failed and the company was forced to revert to his original code (ibid.).

Arguably Winterbottom's greatest but least remembered legacy was his commitment to child education. He was directly and indirectly involved in the reformation of public education in England and Wales through legislative reform. It was also through his work with children and young men that he came in to contact with luminaries of the time, such as the poet Charles Swain, who dedicated his last book of poetry to him. Schools in Manchester then and today, such as the Manchester Free School and the Manchester District School for Orphan and Necessitous Children of Warehouseman and Clerks, owed their existence in part to the dedication of men like Winterbottom. He was president of the Unitarian Home Missionary College the year before he died.

There were two occasions in Winterbottom's life, however, when his actions did achieve national attention, prompting scores of newspaper articles that had little to do with Winterbottom's own notability. Firstly in 1863, when he challenged the Earl of Derby’s right to deny public access to a well and an ancient footpath that went across Derby's land. The ruling in Winterbottom's favour was so popular in Manchester that he gave lecture tours for entertainment. The second was in 1882, when Winterbottom paid back his creditors, which was repeated a year later when the same creditors presented him with an extravagant 3-foot high silver centre-piece, featuring Sabrina, the Goddess of the River Severn, flanked by a pair of massive candelabra.

Winterbottom was interred in the family vault at the Unitarian Chapel in Stand.