Matthew Boulton

In March 1776 James Boswell, the Scottish writer and biographer of Samuel Johnson, went out from Birmingham to see “the great works of Mr. Bolton, at a place which he has called Soho”. The owner showed him round in person. Boswell never forgot one line. “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have — POWER,” Boulton told him (as Boswell recorded it in his Life of Johnson, describing his visit of March 1776).

It was a salesman’s line with a double meaning. Boulton had just gone into business selling James Watt’s steam engines. He was also one of the most ambitious manufacturers in Britain. Getting there had taken thirty years, two marriages, a great deal of borrowed money and a gamble on a Scottish instrument maker that took years to pay off.

A toymaker’s son

Matthew Boulton was born in Birmingham on 3 September 1728. His father, also Matthew, was a “toy” maker, and his mother was Christiana. In eighteenth-century Birmingham a toy was not a plaything. It was a small metal object: a button, a buckle, a snuff box, a toothpick case. The town made them by the million.

He was taught at the Rev. John Housted’s school in Deritend, and in 1745, while still a teenager, he joined his father’s business. In 1749 he married Mary Robinson. After her death in 1759 he married her sister, Ann, in 1760. The Library of Birmingham notes that money from both marriages helped pay for what came next.

His father died in 1759, and the son set about turning a family workshop into a metalwork business known across Europe. From 1756 to 1761 he leased Sarehole Mill in Hall Green as a flatting mill, rolling sheet metal for buttons. (The mill that stands there now is mostly a rebuilding of 1771.)

Soho

In 1761 Boulton took the Soho estate on the Hockley Brook, where a rolling mill already stood. With his partner John Fothergill he began building the next year. Boulton & Fothergill traded from 1762 until Fothergill’s death in 1782, making buttons, buckles, plated ware, silver and ormolu.

The showpiece was the Principal Building, finished around 1765–66 and designed, according to the Library of Birmingham, by the local architect William Wyatt. The idea behind it was radical for the time. Instead of farming work out to small masters in their own workshops, Boulton wanted whole processes under one roof. The Victoria County History puts the workforce at about 800 to 1,000 around 1770. Boswell, six years later, counted “about seven hundred people at work”.

Two myths need clearing away. Soho is often called “the largest factory in the world”. That is a superlative nobody can check, and it is best read as the boast of admirers. And Soho was not, at the time, in Birmingham at all. It lay in the parish of Handsworth, in Staffordshire, and Handsworth only joined Birmingham in 1911. Boswell put it “about two miles from Birmingham”.

In 1766 Boulton and Ann moved into Soho House, up the slope from the works. It became the favourite meeting place of the Lunar Society, the circle of friends — Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, William Withering and others — who met near the full moon to dine and talk science. The house has been described as the first centrally heated house in England since Roman times.

Silver and the Assay Office

Boulton’s ambitions ran from buttons to fine silver. To sell silver it had to be assayed and hallmarked, and Birmingham had no assay office of its own. Boulton campaigned for one, and after an Act of Parliament the Birmingham Assay Office was set up in 1773.

Buying into steam

Water power had a weakness. In dry seasons the Hockley Brook ran low. In February 1766 Boulton wrote to Benjamin Franklin about a “fire engine” to pump water back above his water wheel. Franklin had already introduced him to Dr William Small, and in 1767 it was Small who showed a visiting Scot round Soho. His name was James Watt.

Watt had found a way to make steam engines far less wasteful: the separate condenser. In 1774 his experimental engine was brought to Soho, where it was used to pump water back to the mill pool. In 1775 Boulton was “instrumental”, in the Library of Birmingham’s word, in persuading Parliament to extend Watt’s patent for twenty-five years, to 1800. The partnership of Boulton & Watt began the same year.

Boulton brought what Watt lacked: money, contacts and nerve. But engines were slow to pay. In July 1778 Boulton, who owed money to a London bank whose main business was the West India trade, wrote to Watt that the bank “may yet be saved, if ye West Indian Fleet arrives safe”. The firm needed improvements such as rotary motion, which turned the up-and-down beam into the turning power that factories needed.

Making money, literally

Boulton had been striking tokens since 1772. Britain’s copper coinage was riddled with fakes: in 1787 the Royal Mint found that only about 8 per cent of the halfpennies it sampled were genuine. Boulton saw his chance. In 1788–89 he built the Soho Mint, the world’s first steam-powered mint, hidden among his garden buildings for secrecy.

In 1797 the government contract came at last. Soho struck the heavy copper “cartwheel” pennies and twopences, all dated 1797, with “SOHO” beneath Britannia’s shield. The Royal Mint Museum puts the pennies at about 44 million. The Mint also struck medals, tokens and foreign coins, and the firm later supplied minting machinery to the rebuilt Royal Mint, Calcutta and Bombay.

Commerce and slavery

Boulton’s links with Atlantic slavery were indirect, and his record is mixed. No evidence has been found that he owned or traded enslaved people. But he borrowed from that West India bank, and he courted Caribbean planters. On 19 April 1783 he dined with Richard Pennant, owner of large Jamaican estates, and others “who wish to see steam power in lieu of horses”. In 1784 he dined with John Dawson, a Liverpool slave trader, to talk about engines for Trinidad.

Yet no Boulton & Watt engine is known to have gone to the West Indies before he retired in 1800. The historian Stephen Mullen, in a 2021 report for Birmingham Museums Trust, calls the reason “a mystery”. On the other side of the ledger, Boulton subscribed to Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, and Equiano thanked him by name in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette on 28 June 1790. In 1791 the Soho Mint struck coins for the Sierra Leone Company, the abolitionists’ settlement for free Black people. But unlike Wedgwood, Darwin and Priestley, Boulton did not speak publicly for abolition after 1787. Mullen and the Revolutionary Players project both call his position “equivocal”. The large trade in engines for sugar estates came after 1800, under the sons.

The last years

In 1795–96 a new works rose beside the Birmingham Canal at Smethwick: Soho Foundry, built to make complete steam engines on one site. Much of the credit belongs to the sons, Matthew Robinson Boulton and James Watt junior. In 1800, when the patent ran out, Boulton and Watt handed the engine business to them. Boulton kept the Mint.

He died at Soho House on 17 August 1809, aged 80, and was buried at St Mary’s Church, Handsworth, on 24 August. An obituary in the Monthly Magazine reported 600 workmen at the funeral, each given a silver medal struck for the day. His son commissioned a wall monument by John Flaxman: a bust of Boulton above two putti, one of them holding a picture of the Soho works.