Hannah Greg (1766–1828)

Hannah Greg (née Lightbody) and her husband Samuel Greg were the owners of Quarry Bank Mill at Styal near Manchester in north-west England. The water-powered cotton-spinning factory was built by Samuel Greg in 1784 and continuously enlarged with the addition of steam power. Hannah Greg influenced the model village and provided health care for the community and education for the child workers ten years earlier than the paternalistic scheme developed by Robert Owen at New Lanark. The mill and village survive in the care of the National Trust.

Hannah was born in 1766 into the Lightbody family of merchants at Liverpool who were religious nonconformists with strong interests in social conditions. Her father died when she was aged 11: she was left one third of his wealth. From the age of 16 she lived with cousins in London, where she attended school and met Unitarian thinkers and intellectuals, including the moral philosopher Richard Price and the campaigner for the rights of women, Mary Wollstonecraft.

She met Samuel Greg after she returned to Liverpool. They married in 1789. Samuel was a successful cotton merchant and had built the Quarry Bank factory. They moved to Manchester, where they joined intellectual circles associated with the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. In 1800, they built Quarry Bank House next to the factory at Styal.

The Gregs laid out a model village that expanded over the next decades with more cottages, a school and chapels. Hannah oversaw new cottages and, in 1790, an ‘apprentice house’ with dormitories for around 90 child-workers from as young as 8 years. Most of the children were orphans or abandoned. They worked in the mill in return for food and shelter. Hannah ensured the children were healthy and personally gave them lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic and preached to them. She arranged for her own children to take part in teaching, believing that all people should mix together and show responsibility to others. The workers and their families were provided with medical care.

The Gregs business became one of the largest in the British cotton industry. In addition to Quarry Bank Mill, they owned other factories in north-west England, at Reddish, Calver, Bollington, Lancaster and Caton. They had thirteen children. After Hannah died in 1828 and Samuel died in 1834, the business continued into the next generation.