Mon Dec 4 09:45:28 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (December 2006)
John E. Waite, _Peter Tait: A Remarkable Story_. Stoke sub Hamdon,
Somerset: Milnford Publications, 2005. xiii + 338 pp. =A320 (cloth),
ISBN: 0-9550379-0-5.
Reviewed for EH.NET by James Jaffe, Department of History, University
of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The extensive research that appears to have gone into the writing of
this book was undoubtedly a labor of love for the author. Apparently
the result of many hours in a number of archives and research
libraries throughout the UK, Ireland, and as far afield as Istanbul,
the biography of this nineteenth-century entrepreneur tells the not
altogether uncommon story of a man blessed with unpredictable
success, but then brought down by ill-advised investments,
unsatisfactory legal entanglements, and almost inevitable financial
failure and ruin. EH.NET readers, however, must be warned that while
there is much that may be extracted from this book that may be
relevant to the history British and Irish entrepreneurship during the
mid-nineteenth century, this work appears to be that of a dogged and
determined genealogist rather than that of a professional academician.
Of course, professional economic or business historians hold no
patent over the production of material in their field. They have
often learned much from the contributions of genealogical historians
like John Waite, the author of this biography, who have sought to
recover the history of their families and forebears. Yet, obviously,
the interests of the two groups are not always the same and I need
not belabor the differences in training, perspective, interpretation,
and audience, to name but a few areas, which distinguish and separate
the two.
Peter Tait, the author's great-grandfather, was typical of many
Smilesian entrepreneurs. Born in the Shetland Islands in 1828, he was
apparently apprenticed to a Limerick draper in 1844. By 1850, he had
begun to manufacture shirts on a small scale. When Britain entered
the Crimean War in 1854, Tait was therefore in an advantageous
position to reap the benefits of the Government's increased demand
for military clothing. Tait even gained some measure of historical
fame by virtue of his adoption of Elias Howe's sewing machines
sometime in the mid-1850s. By some accounts, he was the first
entrepreneur to manufacture clothing using the sewing machines
powered by steam. While the author argues here that there is evidence
that a French factory employed the machines briefly before Tait, it
is not clear whether or not Tait's example was the first of its kind
in the UK. Whatever the case, Tait certainly reaped substantial
rewards. Between 1855 and 1858, Tait & Co. generated approximately
=A3250,000 in total sales on Government orders of 120,000 uniforms and
employed about 1,000 people.
Thereafter, Tait's fortunes were tied to his ability to secure
Government contracts first in Britain and Ireland but then throughout
the world. Peace-time demand for his product was naturally low,
although he did continue to produce uniforms for local
constabularies, so it is not surprising to find Tait profiting from
or attempting to profit from many of the most significant outbreaks
of military hostilities that occurred in the West during the next
thirty years. If Tait was not a 'merchant of death,' as arms
manufacturers came to be called in the 1920s, he was nonetheless
quite typical of the legion of profiteers for whom war is nothing
more, or nothing less, than a unique business opportunity.
If Tait's name is known at all, it is most often recognized in the
context of the American Civil War during which he supplied uniforms
to the Confederacy. Through Peter Tait's brother, James, Tait & Co.
initiated contact with James A. Seddon, the Confederate Secretary of
War, in December 1863. Offering to supply well over =A3150,000 worth of
clothing and related supplies, the rather jumbled account presented
here does not make clear whether the company fully understood the
difficulties inherent in fulfilling such an order. Indeed the offer
was phrased in quite the opposite manner. James Tait offered to
protect the Confederacy from the unscrupulous English broadcloth
trade, a trade, he wrote, that was "beset with snares and pitfalls"
and "unprincipled shoddy houses."
Yet to supply the Confederacy from Britain or Ireland entailed
running the Union blockade of southern ports. Toward this end, Tait
came into contact with Alexander Collie, one of the South's principal
financial links in England, and owner or part-owner of several
infamous blockade-runners. The author quite adamantly contends that
Collie repeatedly cheated Tait by hiding the accounts of profits or
sales from him, an argument that Waite tries to support by
introducing an apparently unconnected account of Collie's bankruptcy
a decade later. At the end of war, Collie presented Tait with a bill
for approximately =A330,000, Tait's share of the alleged losses in this
joint venture. Despite these losses, Tait's relationship with Collie
was not broken and they continued some sort of business relationship
for the next several years.
After the Civil War, Tait appears to have tried to diversify the
company, first by purchasing a colliery in South Wales and then by
making substantial investments in the floatation of a shipping
company. In this latter adventure, Collie reappeared and, according
to the author, once again cheated Tait. The evidence again is
inferential rather than conclusive. More importantly, however, the
shipping company failed and contributed to the eventual bankruptcy of
Tait & Co. in 1869. Tait struggled on nonetheless trying to revive
his company. Perhaps fittingly, he died in 1890 after spending many
of his last fifteen years chasing down clothing orders from the
Ottoman Empire during the Christian Rebellion of Bosnia and
Herzegovina in 1875-78 and from Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of
1877-78.
For professional business and economic historians this book will have
only very limited value. The review here omits discussion of the many
pages allocated to the various illicit affairs of family members and
associates, at least three by my count, the reprints of laudatory
poems written for and about Tait by his personal poet, Michael Hogan,
Tait's years in Irish politics, and the complete menus of Tait's
celebratory dinners. An interesting although not altogether
remarkable portrait of nineteenth-century British entrepreneurship
may be extracted from this account, but it is unlikely to repay the
effort.
James Jaffe is Professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has recently completed editing and
transcribing the diaries of Francis Place, which will be published by
the Royal Historical Society in 2007.
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