Tag: John Henry Clive

John Henry Clive’s Outlook on Life

John Henry Clive, an astute entrepreneur, founded the company that created Tunstall‘s Market Place (Tower Square) and built the first Market Hall. He believed time was money and too precious to waste.

In 1830, John wrote The Linear System of Short Hand, a practical textbook for students. One of the exercises in the book is called a Letter Against Waste of Time, in which he gives his philosophy of life.

LETTER AGAINST WASTE OF TIME

Converse often with yourself, and neither lavish your time, nor suffer others to rob you of it. Many of our hours are stolen from us, and others pass insensibly away; but of both these losses, the most shameful is that which happens through our own neglect. If we take the trouble to observe, we shall find, that one considerable part of our life is spent in doing evil, and the other in doing nothing, or in doing what we should not do. We do not seem to know the value of time, nor how precious a day is; nor do we consider, that every moment brings us nearer our end. Reflect upon this, I entreat you, and keep a strict account of time. Procrastination is the most dangerous thing in life. Nothing is properly ours but the instant we breathe in, and all the rest is nothing; it is the only good we possess, but then it is fleeting, and the first-comer robs us of it. Men are so weak, that they think they oblige by giving trifles, and yet reckon that time as nothing, for which the most grateful person in the world can never make amends. Let us, therefore, consider time as the most valuable of all things; and every moment spent without some improvement in virtue, or some advancement in goodness, as the greatest sublunary loss.

Tunstall’s First Market

John Henry Clive founded an unincorporated company that gave Tunstall a market hall and a Market Place (Tower Square).

He was born at Bath on 29 March 1781. After his father’s death, John and his mother, Sarah, came to live in Longton.

On 28 May 1793, Sarah married earthenware manufacturer Charles Simpson at St. Giles’ Church, Newcastle-under-Lyme.  

John served an apprenticeship in the pottery industry. He married Lydia Cash on 30 September 1805 at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Norton-in-the Moors.

Shortly after John’s wedding, his stepfather, Charles Simpson, started making pottery at a factory in Sandyford.

Sarah and Charles left Longton and moved to Tunstall, where they lived at Newfield Hall. John and Lydia came to live with them. John managed the Newfield Estate for its owner, Admiral Smith Child, and went into partnership with him. They formed a company, Child & Clive. The firm mined coal and ironstone at Clanway Colliery and made earthenware at Newfield Pottery. 

John was an astute entrepreneur. He realised Tunstall was a growing industrial town. A town that needed shops, a market square and a civic building containing a covered market and a courtroom, where Justices of the Peace could hold Petty Sessions (Magistrates’ Courts) and try minor criminal cases.

John formed a company to finance the project and sold its shares to local businesspeople. The company leased a plot of land, on a field called Stony Croft, for 500 years at an annual rent of £5 from Walter Sneyd, the Lord of the Manor, who lived at Keele Hall. Shares in the company cost £25 each. John bought one share. Walter bought eight, and Ralph Hall, the company’s treasurer, bought two.  

Between 1816 and 1817, the company created Market Place, a market square surrounded by shops and erected a civic building. The building had two names until it became known as the Town Hall in the 1840s. The company called it the Courthouse, and the Sneyd family called it the Market Hall. In the late 1830s, Market Place’s name was changed to Market Square.

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