A Liverpool Exemplar - Sarah Clayton

Sarah Clayton was born in Liverpool on the 26th August 1712 to one of Liverpool's greatest merchants, Alderman William Clayton and his wife Elizabeth. Living south side of Water Street between Fenwick Street and Lower Castle Street, William died when Sarah was just three years old and her mother Elizabeth assumed responsibility for the family’s affairs, which she did with great skill until her own death in 1745. Sarah inherited the family home, Clayton House on Water Street, where she immediately turned her attentions to the running the business. In 1757 she successfully merged a Clayton family interest in the coal trade, acquiring the colliery in Parr Hall in 1756, with that of her brother-in-law’s family, the Cases of Redhasles, until she eventually presided over a considerable tranche of mines, fortuitously situated with access to the Sankey Canal in regard to the Liverpool trade. During the late 1750s and 1760s, she became known as the 'Queen of Parr', as one of the most important coal dealers in Liverpool in providing coal to the city during the developing industrial revolution which made her, for a time perhaps, the most successful merchant in Liverpool. It was of course quite unheard of for a woman to assume the place of a captain of industry in the mid-eighteenth century, and Sarah remains a most extraordinary figure, perhaps unique at that early date. Records of her business dealings show her engaging with the same vigour of her exclusively male rivals in business partnerships, price wars and competitions for transport and emerging with considerable success.

Clayton Square showing Houghton Street

She enjoyed a rich lifestyle and apparently lived a quite luxurious existence and exhibited a pretentious display of wealth, in the early 1750s, she was one of only four Liverpool residents to own her own coach. In 1746 and 1751 she renewed an inherited lease of land on what was then on the edge of Liverpool, opposite the newly-built St Peter's Church, and proceeded to lay out Clayton Square and also the adjacent Leigh, Tyrer, Houghton, Parker, and Cases streets (named after her mother's maiden name and the married names of her sisters). When laid out it contained four houses, including a meeting place for large public and political gatherings as she designated the largest house in the Square for herself. Her house was to go through a number of transformations, becoming a theatre in the late 19th century and a cinema under various different names for most of the 20th century. The whole square was finally demolished in 1986 and on the site now stands the Clayton Square Shopping Centre. From the beginning, again, extraordinarily for a woman at the time, Sarah Clayton appears to have been civic-minded like her father and to have taken an active interest in the welfare and development of the city of Liverpool. Her name appears on a 1745 subscription list for the new Liverpool Infirmary with a gift of twenty guineas. She also erected a notable marble monument to the memory of her mother Elizabeth in St Nicholas’s Church.

As was the fashion, Sarah Clayton frequently travelled to Bath to take the waters. It was during one of her residences there that Clayton met the architects John Wood (father and son). In an important letter of June 1749 Sarah Clayton wrote to Alderman Thomas Shaw, Mayor of Liverpool in 1747-1748, who was then on the committee to select a plan for the new Town Hall for Liverpool, as well as the committee appointed to contract for a new altarpiece and ornamentation of St George’s Church; Shaw also had been appointed by Liverpool’s Common Council to raise funds for the building of St Thomas’s Church in Park Lane. In her letter, Clayton wrote in glowing terms of John Wood’s character and talents, calling him a 'great genius.' She indicated that she had been particularly impressed by the architect’s designs for Queen Square and the North and South Parades in Bath, as well as the Exchange at Bristol, and she recommended that the Woods be given the commission for the Liverpool Town Hall. John Wood and his son did eventually design and oversee the erection of Liverpool Town Hall in the first half of the 1750s, and all of the basic texts on Liverpool recount this chain of events and credit Sarah Clayton with being the lynchpin in the scheme. The letter also bears testament to Sarah's evident concern to benefit Liverpool in its forward development. She suggested to Alderman Shaw that a stool John Wood had designed for a chapel in Bath might be of great use in St Thomas’s Church in Liverpool, and she even recommended a 'stop' Wood had designed for use on Liverpool’s warehouse capstans, believing that it 'might prevent many accidents.' She also advised Shaw that an altarpiece like the one she had seen in Ralph Allen’s chapel in Bath might 'complete' Liverpool’s St George’s Church and be less expensive than a design already proposed.

Sarah was also charged with managing the business affairs of her elder sister Margaret's husband, Thomas Case of Huyton, who had inherited the struggling Whiston colliery and she was made one of his estate trustees. She continued to struggle with the Cases' intractable financial problems after Thomas' death until 1753, when a mortgage was arranged with two Liverpool merchants for £4,255 to cover the family's debts.

She suffered financial troubles herself during the mid-1760s when another colliery Parr, which she owned independently was flooded. In 1773 and 1774 Sarah sued Alexander Tarbuck, the manager of her Parr collieries, for neglecting the collieries, keeping his books in a very irregular manner, and misappropriating monies belonging to the collieries. It would appear that this had an adverse effect on her fortunes as within four years of the litigation the firm of Clayton, Case and Company went into bankruptcy. On 19 June 1778, Williamson's Liverpool Advertiser announced: 'Bank- ruptcy, Sarah Clayton of Liverpool, Dealer in Coals, to appear July 14, 15 and 25 at the Golden Lion in Dale Street, Liverpool'. She was then in her sixty-seventh year and less than a year later, on the 1st of May 1779 she died and in her will of October 1778 bequeathed only a few momentoes to her nieces and the servant who 'hath shown the greatest attention to me thro my misfortunes and the ill state of health they have brought me too'. She had died at the house of her niece Elizabeth Case, in Liverpool and was commemorated by a small stone on the wall of St Nicholas's Church, next to the splendid monument erected in memory of her father.

In an age when women were not usually concerned in civic and mercantile affairs, Sarah Clayton was conspicuous in both and was a public-spirited woman, imbued like her father with considerable zeal for the welfare and prosperity of Liverpool.

 

see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2020/09/a-liverpool-exemplar-john-hulley.html?q=Fanny