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This site celebrates the life and work of sculptor John
Cassidy (1860 - 1939).
The Kay Memorial.
Above: 'Engineering'
Above: 'Agriculture'
INVENTOR ALSO OF
METAL REEDS FOR LOOMS, IMPROVED METHODS OF SPINNING TWINE, WORSTED AND MOHAIR,
WIND & HORSEPOWER PUMPS,
POWER TAPE LOOM,
MALT KILNS, SALT PANS,
AND MANY OTHERS.
METAL REEDS FOR LOOMS, IMPROVED METHODS OF SPINNING TWINE, WORSTED AND MOHAIR,
WIND & HORSEPOWER PUMPS,
POWER TAPE LOOM,
MALT KILNS, SALT PANS,
AND MANY OTHERS.
The Whiteheads
Robert Whitehead was born in Bolton in 1752. In 1771 he moved to Bury and opened a cotton bleaching works, where he utilised the application of steam power to cotton looms. His business prospered and eventually he was able to purchase a country mansion at Elton, a village outside Bury, called Haslam Hey. His wife, Alice, bore him two sons, James in 1788 and John in 1790.
James Whitehead grew up to be a 'practical industrialist' and run the family firm, In 1814 he married Ellen Swift.
James and Ellen's son Robert Whitehead, born in 1823, became an engineer, and is considered the inventor of the sea-borne weapon known as the torpedo, which he first developed in 1866. His work brought him fame around Europe. One granddaughter, Marguerite Hoyos, married Herbert von Bismarck, son of the German Chancellor, and another, Frances, married Captain von Trapp of 'Sound Of Music' fame.
John Whitehead, second son of James and Ellen, lived at Haslam Hey, with his wife Eliza, and managed the family firm. In the 1871 census he appears, aged 81, living in retirement in Elton.
John and Eliza's eldest son, Walter Whitehead, born in 1840, was educated for a time at a boarding school in the Isle of Man, and worked for three years in the family firm, but then enrolled at a Medical School (without telling his parents) and later became a Professor at Owens College and 'one of the most distinguished and brilliant surgeons of his day' according to Manchester medical historian William Brockbank. He retired in 1903 to Colwyn Bay in North Wales, where he died in 1913. His 37-acre estate above the town is now home to the Welsh Mountain Zoo.
Bury's Clock Tower, designed by Maxwell and Tuke 'In eclectic, mainly neo-mediaeval style', was given to the town by Henry Whitehead in commemoration of his brother.
The bleaching firm passed, along with the house at Haslam Hey, to his second son Henry Whitehead, (picture above, from Contemporary Biographies) born in 1842, Bury's great benefactor, who paid for the John Kay memorial. Henry served as High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1903, became a Deputy Lieutenant for Lancashire, and Justice of the Peace, as well as Managing Director of the Bleachers' Association. He was later knighted.
Whitehead Park, Elton was established in 1883 with contributions from Lord Derby, the Lord of the Manor, a public subscription and generous contributions of money from Sir Henry. Among Henry's other benefactions are the clock and chimes in the tower of St Mary's Church, given in 1903, and paintings it Bury Art Gallery.
Henry and Walter were, it is said, directly descended from John Kay. Their great-grandmother was a daughter of John Kay, according to an account in The story of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Bank Limited, 1872-1922 - Henry was a director of the bank.
Links and References
Douglas Farnie: 'John Kay' - entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
William Brockbank: The Honorary Medical Staff of the Manchester Royal Infirmary 1830-1948. Manchester University Press, 1965. (Available on Google Books)
Tracy, W. Burnett and Pike, W.T: Manchester and Salford at the Close of the 19th Century: Contemporary Biographies. Brighton: W.T. Pike & Co., 1899. (Available on the Spinning the Web website)
Robert Whitehead (1823 - 1905) - Wykenet
''[Walter] Whitehead's operations': British Journal of Surgery, Volume 12, Issue 48 p. 625-629.
The John Kay memorial, Bury, Greater Manchester
Arrive in Bury by bus or tram, visit the town's famous market or shopping centre, and you cannot fail to see the Kay Memorial, which is right in the centre of things, in the centre of Kay Gardens, an open space created from the former market place when a new market hall was built in 1901. The new space, and the memorial at its centre, erected in 1908, were paid for by Henry Whitehead, a wealthy local millowner (see lower left column).
An imposing (over ten metres high) and complex structure, designed by Bristol-based architect, William Venn Gough (1842-1918), the memorial, constructed by local builders, Thompson and Brierley, comprises, in the words of the Public Monument and Sculpture Association National Recording Project (PMSA):
Ornate Italianate domed octagon
on base of seven steps. Horizontally
rusticated based sandstone, re-used from the old market hall. Main
stage of
eight red granite ionic columns broken forward under entablature. These
frame four bronze
panels depicting looms, the inscriptions and a medallion of
Kay.The dome of
Portland stone is encircled by a balustrade, surmounted by bronze
figure of
Fame, and surrounded by smaller figures of Agriculture, Engineering,
Mining and Weaving.
Above 'Mining'
The bronze statues, medallion and plaques are all by John Cassidy. Fame, perched at the top of the dome, is shown blowing a long this trumpet and holding a laurel wreath. Of the four workers the original description was: 'Agriculture is a young man with a sickle, mopping his brow; Engineering is a man with a cogwheel and a pair of compasses or dividers; Mining is a bare-chested man with a pickaxe and safety lamp; and Weaving is the main in a cap holding a shuttle.' Our pictures from 2008 show that the pickaxe and the sickle are missing: they would have been separate parts from the main casting, and may well have been removed in case they fell on the people who congregate around the memorial.
'Fame' and 'Weaving'
Kay Gardens and the Kay Monument were opened in April 1908. Mrs Henry Whitehead opened the gardens and the Earl of Derby unveiled the monument.
THE GIFT OF HENRY
WHITEHEAD OF HASLAM HEY TO HIS NATIVE TOWN
TO PERPETUATE THE NAME AND FAME OF
JOHN KAY
OF
BURY.
WHOSE INVENTION IN THE YEAR 1733 OF THE FLY SHUTTLE
QUADRUPLED HUMAN POWER IN WEAVING & PLACED ENGLAND IN THE FRONT RANK
AS THE BEST MARKET IN THE WORLD FOR TEXTILE MANUFACTURES.
HE WAS BORN IN BURY IN 1704, AND DIED IN EXILE AND POVERTY IN FRANCE,
WHERE HE LIES IN AN UNKNOWN GRAVE.
TO PERPETUATE THE NAME AND FAME OF
JOHN KAY
OF
BURY.
WHOSE INVENTION IN THE YEAR 1733 OF THE FLY SHUTTLE
QUADRUPLED HUMAN POWER IN WEAVING & PLACED ENGLAND IN THE FRONT RANK
AS THE BEST MARKET IN THE WORLD FOR TEXTILE MANUFACTURES.
HE WAS BORN IN BURY IN 1704, AND DIED IN EXILE AND POVERTY IN FRANCE,
WHERE HE LIES IN AN UNKNOWN GRAVE.
The memorial was sadly neglected in later years, in parallel with the decline of the Lancashire textile industry, and by 1996 it was in such dangerous condition that it had to be fenced off. However, it was restored, although the condition of the dome by 2008 appears to belie this fact. Originally there were railings round the top step of the plinth - perhaps these vanished in the Second World War scrap drive.
These lion's heads are presumably also by Cassidy.
John Kay (1704–1780/81), was born at Park Farm in the parish of Bury, Lancashire, on 16 July 1704, the fifth son of prosperous farmer Robert Kay (1651–1704) and his wife, Ellen, née Entwistle, of Quarlton.
He is famous in Lancashire the 'Inventor of the flying shuttle' - the flying shuttle being a mechanism for speeding up the production of cloth on a hand-operated loom. He was in fact a prolific inventor; his first invention, which passed into general use, arose from he first employment as a maker of reeds, and was an improved reed for the loom, which substituted thin wire for the usual strips of cane or reed. In 1733 he patented a shuttle, which was much lighter than the existing one, ran upon four wheels, and could be used for weaving woollen or linen broad-goods. Termed at first a wheel-shuttle, a spring-shuttle, or a bobbin-shuttle, it was only later called a fly-shuttle. Unfortunately Kay's business skills did not match his ingenuity, and he charged so much for the use of his invention that it was widely pirated. Other ideas were a water-powered device for raising water from mines, and a new type of loom for weaving tape.
In 1747 he emigrated to France, where he set up as a manufacturer of his designs, with encouragement from the French government. Historian Douglas Farnie wrote:
To help him in the task of
manufacture in a Paris workshop he brought over three of his sons from
England - Robert Kay (1728–1802), James Kay, and John Kay (1740–1791) -
but he soon found that French weavers were diligently counterfeiting
‘the English shuttle’ (la navette
anglaise, as it was styled in a French publication of 1763).
Unfortunately his inventions were pirated in France too, but by all accounts he made a reasonable living. He died in the south of France during the winter of 1780–81. The exact date and place remain unknown, as does the site of his grave; at the time France and England were at war.
Although he left Bury, he has always been seen as a celebrated son of the town and one of the men responsible for Lancashire's success in the cotton industry, although he left before the development of the cotton industry and powered looms. Legends have developed around him, including the idea that he was driven out of Bury by hostile weavers who believed his inventions threated their livelihoods, and 'died in exile and poverty' as the working on the memorial has it. The legend is fostered by being included in Ford Madox Brown's series of murals in Manchester Town Hall chronicling Manchester's history.
The official description of this work (above) from the Manchester City Council website reads: 'For thousands of years, weaving was done by hand, throwing the shuttle across the loom. If a wider cloth was needed, two weavers threw the shuttle to each other. John Kay invented a shuttle fired by a cord into boxes either side of the loom. On the left, rioters are breaking in to smash the loom, while Kay is being smuggled to safety.'