Samuel Galton junior

Picture a Quaker meeting in Birmingham in January 1796. Quakers are a people of peace. They refuse to fight. And before them comes a defence from a wealthy member of their own Society, a man who makes guns.

Samuel Galton junior was a scientist, a friend of Priestley, a Fellow of the Royal Society and, in the words of the historians of Revolutionary Players, “the most successful businessman” of the Lunar Society. His story is also the story of where Birmingham’s money came from, and what it cost.

Born into the gun trade

The family business went back to Joseph Farmer, an ironworker with a shop at the corner of Bull Street in 1702 who turned to gunmaking. In 1735 Farmer moved to a house in Steelhouse Lane. Samuel Galton senior married into the family in 1746, and the firm traded as Farmer & Galton.

Samuel junior was born at Duddeston in 1753 and educated at the Dissenters’ academy at Warrington. In 1773 his father put him in charge of the Steelhouse Lane gun works. A year later, in 1774, he was an equal partner. The firm made guns under government contract, and in the French wars of 1793–1815 it armed British troops.

Guns for the African trade

It also armed the slave trade.

The Library of Birmingham’s archivists state plainly that Farmer & Galton “made and supplied guns to European slave traders, and was also involved more directly in slave trading”. The firm’s own papers survive. In 1743 James Farmer wrote to his brother asking for “an abstract for a cargo for the Windward or Gold Coast for a vesel that caries about 250 slaves … observe to add a few more guns”.

Guns were packed with cloth and metal goods into cargoes that were exchanged on the West African coast for enslaved people. A study of the firm by W. A. Richards concluded that its origins, growth and sales were “rooted in the slave trade”. It was probably the largest Birmingham gun firm in the African trade in the eighteenth century.

No evidence has been found that the Galtons owned enslaved people themselves. Their main part was to supply the goods, though the firm also had a share in at least one slaving voyage: HSBC’s historians record it as a part-owner of the Bristol ship Africa on its voyage of 1774–75. In Birmingham’s Gun Quarter, all of this was part of the business.

A gentleman of science

From the 1780s Galton was at the Lunar Society’s table with Boulton, Watt, Priestley, Withering and Darwin. He experimented on optics, light and colour, and the Royal Society still holds his paper “Experiments on the prismatic colours”. He was elected a Fellow on 8 December 1785.

Like his father, he helped pay for Priestley’s experiments. Priestley wrote warmly of the family: “Seldom, if ever, have I known two persons of such cultivated minds … as he and Mrs. Galton.” When the mob burned Priestley out of Fair Hill in 1791, Galton gave personal help to Priestley and his family.

The Lunar Society at Great Barr

Here the story comes very close to home.

In 1785 Galton moved his family out to Great Barr Hall. Its owner, Joseph Scott, had overspent on rebuilding it in the fashionable Gothick style and gone abroad, so the Galtons took a lease. They spent summers there and winters in Birmingham.

According to Historic England, the Lunar Society “met occasionally at Great Barr between 1785 and 1796”. Galton’s daughter, Mary Anne, later Mrs Schimmelpenninck, remembered those gatherings in an account of her childhood.

Great Barr Hall stands just north of Kingstanding, across the city boundary in Walsall. For a decade, the men who were changing the world sometimes dined just over the boundary from where Kingstanding’s streets run today. The lease ended in 1797. The hall survives, though now a roofless ruin on private land.

“Instruments of War”

Quaker unease was growing. In 1790 the Yearly Meeting told Friends to deal with any member “concerned in fabricating or selling Instruments of War”. Disapproval of the Galtons sharpened from 1792, partly because of the slave trade. In March 1795 Warwickshire North Monthly Meeting sent three Friends to visit both father and son. By July, Samuel senior had “relinquished the business”.

Samuel junior would not. On 13 January 1796 he addressed the Meeting in his own defence, and he had the defence printed and circulated, so it became a public argument rather than a private plea. His family had made guns for more than seventy years without complaint, he said, and his money could not be moved at once. Then he turned the argument on his accusers: “those who use the produce of the labor of Slaves, as Tobacco, Rum, Sugar, Rice, Indigo, and Cotton, are more intimately, and directly the Promoters of the Slave Trade, than the Vender of Arms is the Promoter of War”.

His wider argument was that nobody could draw a clean line. A gun passed through many skilled hands before it was finished, and the iron, brass, wood and money behind it came from many more. Was the farmer who grew barley, he asked, or the brewer, the importer of rum or the distiller, to blame for the drunkenness that followed? Almost everyone in the Midlands economy, Quakers included, was supplying the wars in some way. “The practice of your principles,” he told his judges, “is not compatible with the situation in which Providence has placed us.”

It was self-serving. It was also a real point: the whole British economy ran on slave-grown goods and on war. The historian Priya Satia notes the ironies in the room. One of the Friends sent to visit him was the banker Sampson Lloyd III, whose family had long supplied iron for Galton guns. Another, Joseph Gibbins, would soon go into business with him. The Meeting was not persuaded. In February it refused his contributions while he stayed in the trade. In August 1796 it disowned him, declaring him “not in unity with friends”.

Guns to banking

Galton did not walk away from his faith. He kept attending meetings for worship and kept giving money to the Quaker school at Ackworth. The Meeting later accepted his donation to enlarge its burial ground.

Nor did the family walk away from guns. The disownment came just as the wars with France sent orders soaring, and the firm’s profits rose sharply. In 1804 Galton retired from the gun trade and handed it to his son Samuel Tertius, though his own money stayed in the business. The same year father and son founded a bank with Joseph Gibbins, one of the Friends who had been sent to reclaim him.

For the next eleven years Samuel Tertius was both a banker and a government gun contractor. The gun business was finally wound up in 1815. It was not a change of heart: Waterloo ended the wars, and the government’s orders stopped. The bank, renamed Galton and James in 1812, was dissolved in 1831.

Meanwhile his daughter Mary Anne backed the 1791 boycott of slave-grown sugar, and later sat on the committee of Birmingham’s pioneering women’s anti-slavery society of 1825.

The family web

The Lunar friendships ran into the family. Galton’s son Samuel Tertius married Violetta, daughter of Erasmus Darwin. Their son Francis Galton was born in 1822 at The Larches, Sparkbrook, the house rebuilt on the ruins of Priestley’s Fair Hill, where William Withering had died. Francis became a celebrated scientist, whose later work on eugenics casts a long and troubling shadow and needs telling honestly in its own right.

Samuel Galton died at Duddeston on 19 June 1832, leaving about £300,000. He was buried in the Friends’ burial ground at Bull Street.