Samuel Fludyer

• Born: 1704
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: January 18 or 21, 1768
• Place of death: London, England

English textile merchant

Fludyer dominated the West Country woolen-cloth trade in the mid-eighteenth century. He used his wealth to climb the social and political ladder of eighteenth century England.

Source of wealth: Trade

Bequeathal of wealth: Children

Early Life

Sir Samuel Fludyer (FLUHD-yehr), first baronet, was born in 1704 or 1705 to English clothier Samuel Fludyer and his wife, Elizabeth de Monsallier. As was the custom, young Samuel was trained in his family’s business and did not receive a formal education. In addition to learning the wool textile trade in London, he accompanied the pack trains that moved merchandise between the London merchants and the cloth production areas of the West Country—predominantly the counties of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. Since he did not come from the upper class, it is not surprising that his early life is poorly documented.

First Ventures

At an unknown date, Fludyer entered an independent cloth-trading partnership with his brother Thomas. The two brothers are listed as “warehousemen” or wholesalers in London directories of the time, but they also received woolen cloth on consignment from manufacturers in their positions as Blackwell Hall factors. (Blackwell Hall was the site of the Woolcloth Exchange.) The brothers sold cloth far beyond London, exporting their trade to other locations in Great Britain and to Britain’s colonies in America. As the papers of their business do not survive, many aspects of its day-to-day operations are unknown. Fludyer seems to have been the more important of the two brothers. By 1750, the brothers’ credit and economies of scale were so well established that Fludyer’s notes circulated as currency in the wool country, and the brothers had become the dominant force in the British wool trade. At the same time Fludyer married Jane Clerke.

Mature Wealth

Such was Fludyer’s power as a purchaser that he began to exert control over production, assigning manufacturers to produce specific kinds of cloth at specified prices in a manner unprecedented in the wool trade. He also began to contract directly with dyers rather than sell white cloth which customers would arrange to have dyed. By 1760, he had branched out from his original base in the West Country to Yorkshire, another key area of woolen production. Fludyer also ventured into other areas of business, bidding with several others for a concession for the coal mines at Cape Breton, which Britain had won in the Seven Years’ War.

Fludyer’s wealth led to political power and influence. He was elected a director of the Bank of England, the central financial institution of the British Empire, in 1753, and he served as the bank’s deputy governor from 1766 to 1768. He was also a London alderman, and in 1761–62 he served as the city’s lord mayor, the highest position for members of the city’s business elite. In 1754, Fludyer was elected a member of the House of Commons, representing the Wiltshire borough of Chippenham, a major cloth center. Fludyer would promise to supply Chippenham manufacturers with wool and buy their cloth on favorable terms in order to secure their votes. He then used his position in Parliament to support his highly profitable work as a government contractor during the Seven Years’ War.

Fludyer moved into England’s social, economic, and political elite. His second wife, whom he married on September 2, 1758, was Carolina Brudenell, a niece of the earl of Cardigan. In 1755, Fludyer was knighted, and in 1759 he was made a baronet with a seat at Lee in Kent County. He was reportedly worth £900,000 when he died in 1768.

Legacy

Fludyer’s career demonstrated the opportunities for businessmen to advance themselves socially and economically in eighteenth century England. Although Fludyer was not associated with technological advances in cloth manufacture, the enormous scale and centralization of his enterprises helped set the stage for the massive transformations of the textile industry that would take place during the Industrial Revolution. However, as was common during the eighteenth century, his descendants lived as landed gentry rather than carrying on his cloth business.

Bibliography

Michinton, Walter E., ed. Industrial South Wales, 1750-1914: Essays in Welsh Economic History. Reprint. London: Taylor and Francis, 2006.

Price, Jacob M. Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700-1776. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Smail, John. Merchants, Markets, and Manufacture: The English Wool Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Truxes, Thomas M. Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.