Samuel Smiles
Samuel Smiles, the eldest of eleven children, was born on the 23rd December, 1812. His parents ran a small general store in Haddington in East Lothian, Scotland. After attending the local school he left at the age of fourteen and joined Dr. Robert Lewins as an apprentice. After making good progress with Dr. Lewins, Smiles went to Edinburgh University in 1829 to study medicine. While in Edinburgh, he became involved in the campaign for parliamentary reform. During this period he had several articles on the subject published by the progressive Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle.
Smiles graduated in 1832 and found work as a doctor in Haddington. He continued to take a close interest in politics and became a strong supporter of Joseph Hume, the Scottish radical politician from Montrose. Hume, like Smiles, had trained as a doctor at Edinburgh University. In 1837 Smiles began contributing articles on parliamentary reform for the Leeds Times. The following year he was invited to become the newspaper's editor. Smiles decided to abandon his career as a doctor and to become a full-time worker for the cause of political change. In the Leeds Times he expressed his powerful dislike of the aristocracy and made attempts to unite working and middle class reformers. He also employed his newspaper in the campaign in favour of factory legislation.
In May 1840 Smiles became Secretary to the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association, an organisation that believed in household suffrage, the secret ballot, equal representation, short parliaments and the abolition of the property qualification for parliamentary candidates.
Samuel married Sarah Ann Holmes Dixon in Leeds on the 7th December 1843. They had three daughters, Janet, Edith and Lillian, and two sons, William and Samuel. In his late teens, Samuel junior contracted a lung disease, and his father was advised to send him on a long sea voyage. The letters young Samuel wrote home, and the log he kept of his journey to Australia and America between February 1869 and March 1871, were later edited by his father and published in London in 1877, under the title 'A Boy's Voyage Round the World'.
In the 1840's Smiles became disillusioned with Chartism. Although he still supported the six points of the Charter, he was worried by the growing influence of Feargus O'Connor, George Julian Harney and the other advocates of Physical Force. Smiles now argued that "mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society” and stressed the importance of "individual reform" and promoted the idea of "self-help".
Smiles began to take a close interest in the ideas of Robert Owen. He contributed articles to Owen's journal, The Union. He also helped the co-operative movement in Leeds. This included the Leeds Mutual Society and the Leeds Redemption Society. In 1845 Smiles left the Leeds Times and became secretary to the Leeds and Thirsk Railway. After nine years with this company he took up a similar post with the South-Eastern Railway.
In the 1850s Samuel Smiles completely abandoned his interest in parliamentary reform, arguing that self-help provided the best route to success. His book “Self-Help”, which preached industry, thrift and self-improvement, was published in 1859, and though some people regarded this work with scepticism, it became a best-seller in it's day. He also wrote a series of biographies of men whom he regarded as having achieved success through the qualities he believed in. These included George Stephenson (1875), Lives of the Engineers (1861) and Josiah Wedgwood (1894). Samuel Smiles died in Kensington, London, on the 16th April, 1904 and was buried in Brompton Cemetery.
An extract from the book “Self-Help” by Samuel Smiles, with regards to the life and times of Richard Foley, father of Thomas Foley (T1).
The father of Richard Foley, the founder of the family, was a small
yeoman living in the neighbourhood of Stourbridge in the time of
Charles I. That place was then the centre of the iron manufacture
of the midland districts, and Richard was brought up to work at one
of the branches of the trade--that of nail-making. He was thus a
daily observer of the great labour and loss of time caused by the
clumsy process then adopted for dividing the rods of iron in the
manufacture of nails. It appeared that the Stourbridge nailers
were gradually losing their trade in consequence of the importation
of nails from Sweden, by which they were undersold in the market.
It became known that the Swedes were enabled to make their nails so
much cheaper, by the use of splitting mills and machinery, which
had completely superseded the laborious process of preparing the
rods for nail-making then practised in England.
Richard Foley, having ascertained this much, determined to make
himself master of the new process. He suddenly disappeared from
the neighbourhood of Stourbridge, and was not heard of for several
years. No one knew whither he had gone, not even his own family;
for he had not informed them of his intention, lest he should fail.
He had little or no money in his pocket, but contrived to get to
Hull, where he engaged himself on board a ship bound for a Swedish
port, and worked his passage there. The only article of property
which he possessed was his fiddle, and on landing in Sweden he
begged and fiddled his way to the Dannemora mines, near Upsala. He
was a capital musician, as well as a pleasant fellow, and soon
ingratiated himself with the iron-workers. He was received into
the works, to every part of which he had access; and he seized the
opportunity thus afforded him of storing his mind with
observations, and mastering, as he thought, the mechanism of iron
splitting. After a continued stay for this purpose, he suddenly
disappeared from amongst his kind friends the miners--no one knew
whither.
Returned to England, he communicated the results of his voyage to
Mr. Knight and another person at Stourbridge, who had sufficient
confidence in him to advance the requisite funds for the purpose of
erecting buildings and machinery for splitting iron by the new
process. But when set to work, to the great vexation and
disappointment of all, and especially of Richard Foley, it was
found that the machinery would not act--at all events it would not
split the bars of iron. Again Foley disappeared. It was thought
that shame and mortification at his failure had driven him away for
ever. Not so! Foley had determined to master this secret of iron-
splitting, and he would yet do it. He had again set out for
Sweden, accompanied by his fiddle as before, and found his way to
the iron works, where he was joyfully welcomed by the miners; and,
to make sure of their fiddler, they this time lodged him in the
very splitting-mill itself. There was such an apparent absence of
intelligence about the man, except in fiddle-playing, that the
miners entertained no suspicions as to the object of their
minstrel, whom they thus enabled to attain the very end and aim of
his life. He now carefully examined the works, and soon discovered
the cause of his failure. He made drawings or tracings of the
machinery as well as he could, though this was a branch of art
quite new to him; and after remaining at the place long enough to
enable him to verify his observations, and to impress the
mechanical arrangements clearly and vividly on his mind, he again
left the miners, reached a Swedish port, and took ship for England.
A man of such purpose could not but succeed. Arrived amongst his
surprised friends, he now completed his arrangements, and the
results were entirely successful. By his skill and his industry he
soon laid the foundations of a large fortune, at the same time that
he restored the business of an extensive district. He himself
continued, during his life, to carry on his trade, aiding and
encouraging all works of benevolence in his neighbourhood. He
founded and endowed a school at Stourbridge; and his son Thomas (a
great benefactor of Kidderminster), who was High Sheriff of
Worcestershire in the time of "The Rump," founded and endowed an
hospital, still in existence, for the free education of children at
Old Swinford. All the early Foley’s were Puritans. Richard Baxter
seems to have been on familiar and intimate terms with various
members of the family, and makes frequent mention of them in his
'Life and Times.' Thomas Foley, when appointed high sheriff of the
county, requested Baxter to preach the customary sermon before him;
and Baxter in his 'Life' speaks of him as "of so just and blameless
dealing, that all men he ever had to do with magnified his great
integrity and honesty, which were questioned by none." The family
was ennobled in the reign of Charles the Second. [sic] *
* Richard Foley's great-grandson Thomas (T3) became the 1st Baron Foley (1st creation) in 1712, during the reign of Queen Anne.
