Love, espionage and Matthew Boulton

Jul 3 2009 By Chris Upton

He guessed that the French authorities would be only too keen to welcome a man who knew more than most about toy-making. If the French government would give him what was known as a “privilege”, Mr Alcock was ready to bring the Industrial Revolution to France. He also was prepared to share the secrets of transfer printing on to porcelain, a new technique which Alcock had coaxed out of a London craftsman.

All this was highly illegal. An Act of Parliament of 1719 banned the transfer of technology, including skilled workers. But it was impossible to close this stable door once the horse was gone.

Michael Alcock established his factory at a place called La-Charite-sur Loire, in the province of Berry. But he could not run a factory on his own, and a steady progression of skilled workers and assistants began to make the journey from Birmingham. This included, remarkably, Mrs Alcock herself, who became reconciled with her husband and brought across their two sons, Joseph and Michael junior.

Sarah Green was not excluded from the arrangement, and she sent for her father and two brothers.

This was not the end of the poaching. Since Mrs Alcock was the only member of the team who did not bring industrial expertise to the table, she was deployed instead to make regular trips across the Channel to induce more Birmingham workers to come over, with the promise of higher wages.

The recruiting campaign came to a sudden halt when Mrs Alcock (on her third visit) was arrested, along with four workers, and incarcerated in Warwick Gaol. The workers themselves, it seems, were released – the Government was much more interested in prosecuting the ring-leaders.

At her trial, however, Mrs Alcock was, somewhat surprisingly, acquitted and allowed to return to France. Recruitment, therefore, continued, though it was always fraught with danger. A further 16 Birmingham workers were intercepted in February 1763 and arrested.

By 1764, for all Michael Alcock’s ingenuity and planning, the model factory at La-Charite-sur-Loire was beginning to go wrong. Technology transfer was one thing, but mentality transfer was quite another. In the absence of sufficient skilled workers from home, Alcock was having to train local agricultural workers instead, and they did not take kindly to him, to the rates of pay and to the long hours.

There were rumours of ill-treatment at the factory, and fierce disagreements between Alcock and his French partners and investors. Sarah Green and her family had had enough, and returned to the Black Country.

By the mid-1760s Michael Alcock was eager to get out of La-Charite, and begin afresh with new ideas and new products elsewhere. One thing he could certainly not do was return to England. Two new factories were set up, one to produce steel and the other hardware, to be run principally by his two sons.

But here too it would not be easy. Despite the French ban on the import of British metalware, so much was flooding through the porous frontiers, especially through the Low Countries, that French manufacturers were finding it almost impossible to compete with the cheaper Birmingham products.

Whether, at the end of all this, Michael Alcock regretted that moonlight flit from Birmingham in 1755, we will never know. But his personal “Year in Provence” had hardly been a runaway success. By 1809, the factory at La-Charite-sur-Loire had closed and was operating instead as a workhouse.