We Had Adventures of All Sorts

Abstract

Very little suggested his spectacular rise to fame, fortune, and notoriety when John Thomas North was born in Holbeck in south Leeds on January 30, 1842. However, it is not surprising that North became an engineer, and then an entrepreneur, and cast his eyes on working overseas. Holbeck was a significant center of the Industrial Revolution, with foundries and mills that manufactured machinery, steam engines, cloth, and equipment for companies throughout the world. In the late eighteenth century, for example, John Marshall had founded the flax spinning industry in Leeds with the help of a talented young engineer named Matthew Murray by moving his factory to Water Lane in Holbeck. Marshall became one of the first millionaires of the Industrial Revolution. Some years later, while John Thomas North was serving his apprenticeship, Colonel Thomas Harding opened his Tower Works at Globe Road in 1864. This factory made steel pins for wool combing engines. It was built in the Italianate architectural style and still stands today.

This “King” of a new order is most affable and most sociable, of middle height, strong looking, military in appearance, with plenty of good colour in his face, auburn whiskers and moustache, but with a shaved chin, very blue eyes, his hair growing already a little thin, but carefully brushed over the crown, which in places shows white as a piece of ivory, and there stands before you Colonel North, who has just reached his fifty-second year.

—Interview with Gastón Calmette, Editor of Le Figaro, April 23, 1895¹