Anthony John Mundella 1825-1897

Anthony John Mundella was born in Leicester on 28th March 1825. His mother was a local framework knitter called Rebecca Allsop described as ‘richly endowed mentally, and possessed of some property’ and his father, Antonio, is variously described as an immigrant or refugee from Como in Italy. Young Mundella attended St. Nicholas National School, which provided elementary education for the poorer classes, until the age of 9 and then worked for two years for a local printer before taking up an apprenticeship with a stockinger called William Kempson who had premises on Albion Street, in Leicester. He was later engaged as an overseer by Leicester stockingers Harris and Hamel. As a witness to the poor conditions of the framework knitters in Leicester he was influenced by local Chartists like Thomas Cooper and in 1848 was reported to have signed a local declaration of Chartist support and to have spoken on platforms for franchise reform but he seems to have moved, possibly as he became more wealthy himself and possibly because of his acknowledgement of shifts in local political alliances, from Chartism towards a more Liberal position.  In 1848 he was taken into partnership by Hine & Company of Nottingham and in 1851 Hine & Mundella opened a modern, purpose built, steam powered hosiery factory on Station Street, Nottingham, subsequently the site of Boots Head Quarters and currently of Capital One. On the first of February 1859 the factory was burnt down but was quickly rebuilt.

Hine & Mundella were credited with revolutionising, or at least innovating, the hosiery trade through the provision of modern factory production combined with the generation of an immense amount of out-work for finishing by workers in their own homes and in doing so they effectively increased wages and saved the Nottingham industry.  They opened other factories in Loughborough in 1859 and Chemnitz, Saxony in 1866, and kept up with the rapidly developing technology by recruiting able young mechanics.  A London warehouse at the centre of the textile trade in Wood Street was acquired when Hine & Mundella bought out an old merchant company.  The firm was incorporated as The Nottingham Manufacturing Company in 1864, the earliest in the knitting industry to do so.  NMC closed its Nottingham and Chemnitz factories before World War I, but the large Loughborough factory continued to be a major producer until the early 1960s, when it was taken over by Djanogly Brothers of Mansfield Hosiery Mills, the principal suppliers of knitted outerwear to Marks & Spencer.  Djanoglys used the NMC name as an umbrella for their growing range of hosiery and knitwear factories through the Midland counties.  The Loughborough factory remained in production until 1995.

Although born in Leicester Mundella was a Nottingham businessman, local politician and pragmatic social reformer. He was a typical example of the political middle-class industrialist activists who formed the core of the Liberal Party after 1868. He was part of a newly emerging industrial middle class that was rapidly replacing the old political order in Nottingham. He took an active part in local municipal politics and was a member of the town council where he took the vacant seat when William Felkin, the author of the ‘History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures’, became an Alderman; he was Sheriff in 1853; Alderman in 1887 and one of first five volunteers who formed the Robin Hood Volunteer Corps. He was a liberal and a radical, Vice-Chairman of the local Liberal party where he acquired something of a reputation as a ‘wirepuller’, Chairman of Nottingham Chamber of Trade, board member at Nottingham People’s College, businessman and social philanthropist. He was also extremely rich, having made his fortune through his business interests, and owner of house in the fashionable Park district of Nottingham as well as a second house in London.

The bitterly contested parliamentary election of 1861 saw the tory Sir Robert Clifton and the liberal Lord Lincoln elected for Nottingham but during the contest Mundella was attacked personally for his perceived foreignness based on his appearance (particularly his great hooked nose), his Italian name and his commercial interests, and in several satirical cartoons he was depicted as ‘The Wandering Jew’. Following some sort of mental breakdown and a period of recuperation in Italy in 1863 Mundella was active in the 1865 parliamentary election for Nottingham in support of Samuel Morley and Charles Paget.

He would probably have gone into national politics himself in any case as he had the wealth, the social status and the political connections however it was a local issue that served to move him onto the wider stage as an MP and then into government office and that issue was the establishment of the Nottingham Board of Arbitration and Conciliation in the Hosiery and Glove Industry in 1860. Mundella opposed calls from his fellow employers for a lock-out to combat a wave of local strikes and instead promoted the idea of a round-table conference between manufacturers and operatives which resulted in a formal meeting in the Committee Room of the Nottingham Chamber of Commerce on 17th September 1860. At that meeting he proposed wage increases and the creation of a board of arbitration to resolve disputes within the Nottingham framework knitting industry.

It was his involvement with the Board as well as the part he played as an arbitrator for the South Lancashire pit strike combined with his views on social harmony and industrial peace and his willingness to work with the trade unions that brought him to the notice of the national leadership of the ‘new model’ craft unions where he created a close political alliance that culminated on 17^th November 1868 in his election as MP for one of the two borough seats for Sheffield. On 24^th November 1885, following the Redistribution of Seats Act and re-organisation of the Sheffield constituencies, he was elected as MP for Sheffield Brightside, which he held until his death in 1897.

He took an active part in defending Sheffield trades against foreign interference and was involved in the passing of the 1887 Merchandise Marks Act to prevent the fraudulent trade marking of goods. He also seems to have been vigilant in watching developments in the Government Workshops to ensure that they did not adversely affect his Sheffield constituents. He was reported to have been a frequent visitor to the meetings of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce where his business experience was highly valued. Outside of Parliament he served as President of the second day of the first ever Co-operative Congress in 1869. He was a Charity Commissioner between 1880 and 1885. 

An advocate of greater government intervention on social and industrial issues he was a forerunner of those who looked to the state for solutions that had previously been regarded as personal or voluntary issues. E. P. Thompson described him as ‘devoted to strengthening the alliance between the Liberal Party and organised labour, and to promoting the politics of enlightened capitalist administration, arbitration in trades disputes, and “class peace”.  Politically he was a Gladstone loyalist and enthusiastic home-ruler on the progressive or advanced wing of the Liberal Party. In Parliament he was instrumental in furthering the development of state education, particularly the principle that elementary education be made compulsory, he worked on the ‘architecture’ of Forster’s Elementary Education Act of 1870 and promoted the Educational Code of 1882, afterwards known as the Mundella Code. He supported the Factory Act of 1875 that introduced the ten-hour working day for women and children in textile factories and he was a supporter of the removal of restrictions on trade unions. He was also responsible for the establishment of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade. Mundella had problems with his Railways and Canal Traffic Bill where he proposed a dramatic increase in the Board of Trade’s powers to enforce reductions in freight charges which were vigorously opposed by Liberal Free-traders and vested Conservative interests resulting in the failure of the bill. 

He served under Gladstone as Vice-President of the Committee on Education between 1880 and 1885, and under Gladstone and later Lord Rosebery as President of the Board of Trade in 1886 and between 1892 and 1894 with a seat in the cabinet. In 1880 he was appointed to the Privy Council and in July 1874 he was elected to the Political Economy Club to fill the vacancy created by the death of John Stuart Mill

The end of his ministerial career came in 1894 with his resignation from the Board of Trade brought about by his connection with the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency which speculated with loans, intended to fund the production of sheep meat for the UK market, and went into liquidation in circumstances calling for the official intervention of the Board of Trade. Mundella had been a director of the Agency between 1870 and 1892 but had resigned following the issuing of government guidelines for ministers but, as he later admitted at the public enquiry on 9th April 1894, he continued to hold debentures issued by the Agency. It was suggested that Mundella had tried to suppress or at least delay the enquiry, something that he strenuously denied. However innocent his own connection with the Agency was, he remained a party to an enquiry carried out by his own department and that involved him in unpleasant public criticism and his position quickly became untenable. Mundella resigned from office but remained as an MP and continued to enjoy the support of his Sheffield constituents who returned him unopposed for Brightside in the July 1895 general election. In the House of Commons he took a place on the Liberal opposition’s front bench and took a prominent role in opposing the Education Bills of 1896 and 1897.

He died on Wednesday 21st July 1897, aged 72, and was buried in The Rock Cemetery, Nottingham following no less than three services: one in London, one at St. Mary’s Church, Nottingham and one at the cemetery. He seems to have been respected and admired for his diligence, his vigilance, his efficiency and his industry and it was reported that he had been as well known for his commercial as for his political work.

On his death there was universal regret in Sheffield by people of all politics and creeds. In life his personal popularity was demonstrated by the crowd that greeted him at the Midland Station on his return from his election victory in Sheffield in 1868,

Mundella is the poor man’s friend
And Sheffield people may rejoice
There’s none more able to defend Them,
than the man they’ve made their choice.

His interest is the poor man’s cause,
And all their rights he will maintain;
His aim will be to make good laws
Success and honour to his name.

Disraeli thought little of him and remarked that he looked like ‘an old goat on Mount Haemus, and other dreadful beings’.

A marble bust of Mundella, by the society sculptor Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, which was paid for through the subscriptions of factory workers, mostly women and children, was presented to Mrs. Mundella, the portrait and bust as well as a portrait by Black are now to be found in Bromley House Library on Angel Row, Nottingham.

Mundella School on Collygate Road in The Meadows area of Nottingham was opened in 1899 and was for many years the home of the oil painting by A. J. Black which hung on the wall near to the head-master’s study along with a framed certificate telling how the school had provided a dog named Mundella for Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition. The school itself was closed in 1985 and largely demolished to provide space for housing, all that remains is the old sixth form block which is now the Meadows Muslim Centre.

The artwork and street names, as well as a primary school in the Sheffield suburb of Norton, are largely all that remain to commemorate his life.

John Parker