JOSEPH M. FEWSTER, The Keelmen of Newcastle upon Tyne 1638–1852

Abstract

younger brother Michael and had married a distant Blackett cousin. It was Wilkinson who took over when William II died suddenly in 1705 leaving only a 15-year-old to inherit the baronetcy but not, initially at least, the businesses. Finch sees this as an early example of the sort of changeover from personal to corporate management that characterised large firms at a later date. That may be so, but the fact remains that William Blackett III was hardly equipped to take on much responsibility for the family businesses, even though his name gave him what Finch calls the ‘brand value’ to get him elected a Newcastle MP despite suspicions of Jacobite sympathies. The young Blackett’s personality was in marked contrast to that of his forebears. He was a profligate, frivolous, self-indulgent womaniser who fathered two illegitimate daughters and, although ultimately married to an heiress, no son, which meant that the best that he could do to save the family name was to leave it (literally) at his early death in 1728 to his young nephew Walter Calverley on condition that he marry his daughter and take the name of Blackett. There was a temporary glitch when the young lady proved reluctant but the managers who had carried on the businesses during William III’s disastrous tenure managed this bit of business too and the brand name was preserved. There had been an earlier ’glitch’ when Blackett, true to form, seduced the daughter of John Wilkinson, his manager. Wilkinson resigned but the managerial structure survived. It is at this point that the author homes in on another element in his account of the Blackett family’s survival: the growing relative economic status of land as a capital asset both in terms of rental value and as security for loans and mortgages. The acquisition of landed estates and property by the Blacketts is a recurrent theme which only comes to the fore during the depression in mineral prices and the pressure on the family finances of the later years. This is the century of agricultural improvement, enclosure and enhanced rental values. Finch contends that good management and clever manipulation of this landed capital enabled the family business to survive its disastrous third generation and a slump in both the coal trade and the lead market. The book is impeccably researched and if some of the conclusions reached are a touch speculative it has opened up new lines of enquiry which will no doubt be pursued by others in the future