Reviewed by Christopher Noke London School of Economics and Political Science
During the period, 1795-1857, the 4th and 5th Earls Fitzwilliam were owners of Wentworth Woodhouse, “a palatial setting for the grand occasion and for the annual gathering of the aristocracy for the Doncaster races.” Not content with adopting the role of racing rentiers, the Fitzwilliams singlemindedly exploited the resources of the estate; they expanded the coal mining operations, established (but soon afterwards closed down) a coal tar works and, albeit reluctantly, took over the working of the llescar Ironwarks when the lessee went bankrupt in 1827. Dr. Mee’s book is a case study of the estate during the period. He tries to ascertain why the Fitzwilliams became entrepreneurs, examines the problems posed by adoption of the entrepreneurial role during the middle years of the Industrial Revolution, and analyses the responses of the Fitzwilliams and their managers to the technical, marketing, financial and social challenges presented by estate management.
Although it is a business history, much light is cast on matters of social interest. The assumption that life in the pits was necessarily one of unrelieved gloom and hardship is given the lie by Mee’s analysis of working conditions and welfare provisions at Wentworth. Not only was the moral philosophy of the Fitzwilliams conducive to the provision of many “comforts and advantages” for the workers, but they were fortunate too in the choice of Benjamin Biram as Superintendent. Biram’s contribution to a safe and healthy workplace is well documented by Mee, who writes as clearly about technical aspects of centrifugal fans, rotating vane anemometers, the Biram safety lamp and Fourdrinier’s apparatus as about the more mundane, but equally vital, provisions made for widows’ pensions, schools and medical care.
The account of the 5th Earl’s reaction to trade unionism following the founding of the Miners Association at Wakefield in 1842 is of topical as well as historical interest. There had been unrest before, but faced with growing union membership and collective action, the Earl closed the collieries, only reopening them when all his miners had resigned from the union “obedient to the command of their master.” Mee persuasively sides with J. S. Mill, arguing that such a response was perfectly compatible with—indeed, a part of— the paternalism exhibited elsewhere.
Such paternalism is, however, unlikely to explain the 5th Earl’s insistence on drawing up his own balance sheet and the reluctance to delegate below senior managers “particularly in what was re-garded as the primary management function of accounting.” Many managers had great difficulty in submitting regular accounts and extravagance and confused accounts appear to have been a perennial problem. The auditor—a barrister—frequently expressed concern over waste and extravagance and saw it as part of his job, on one occasion, to exhort the Earl to order heads of department to reduce expenditure by 10 or 12 percent, and to appoint a “properly qualified” person to exercise financial management. Much use is made throughout the book of quotations from correspondence, diaries and the like, but the most memorable must be the auditor’s reproach, “Economical reform, really so necessary, should be mainly applied to Mr. Biram’s book. It is quite true that I have no knowledge of the Details of which this is composed and therefore cannot speak with the slightest authority.
Although Mee refers frequently to the problems with the accounts the accounting historian is likely to be disappointed with the analysis given. At one point Mee writes, “The collieries, ironworks and tar-works all inherited the master and steward system of accounting which was traditionally used by agents on landed estates. The accounts were therefore based on double entry bookkeeping and had a debit or charge side and a credit or discharge side.” This apparent confusion between the traditional Charge and Discharge and double entry is never fully resolved. There are some interesting illustrations of the practice of charging interest on “capital expended” and of opportunity costing, and an attempt is made to strike a net surplus cash flow for the period, but there is little to tell us why accounting seems to have caused such problems or, for example, for what “sinister practices” the ironworks’ bookkeeper was dismissed.
Several managers were rewarded by commission based on profits (giving rise to complaints about transfer prices and the charging of “extraordinary” items), but it does not clearly emerge how annual profits were determined. It is suggested that losses at the ironworks were “almost certainly” the difference between total receipts and payments, but as a general principle this would have been unsophisticated even by the standards of some thirteenth century estates. And a footnote dismissing Spring’s observation (that the collieries were profitable for only four years between 1830 and 1850) as being “only tenable if one accepts a highly questionable definition of profit used on the Wentworth estate” teases more than it informs.
To be fair, the book is not directed towards accounting historians but rather towards students of management and industrial history and as such should prove a useful study of the paternalistic approach. It is not to denigrate the book to say that its approach is scarcely that of the scholarly treatise; rather, its unassuming style, often in the form of telling a story, is one of its principal qualities.
