BRITISH ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN POLAND
Modern Economic and Social History Series
General Editor: Derek H. Aldcroft
Titles in this series include:
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The Making of a World Trading Power
The European Economic Community (EEC) in the GATT Kennedy Round
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Eastern European Railways in Transition
Nineteenth to Twenty-first Centuries
Edited by Ralf Roth and Henry Jacolin
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Mediterranean World (17301808)
Manuel Prez-Garca
National Identity and the Agrarian Republic
The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas between America and France (17501830)
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A History of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and Royal Mail Lines
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Money Pits: British Mining Companies in the
Californian and Australian Gold Rushes of the 1850s
John Woodland
From Rail to Road and Back Again?
A Century of Transport Competition and Interdependency
Edited by Ralf Roth and Colin Divall
British Entrepreneurship in Poland
A Case Study of Bradford Mills at Marki near Warsaw, 18831939
SARAH DIETZ
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright Sarah Dietz 2015
Sarah Dietz has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Dietz, Sarah.
British entrepreneurship in Poland : a case study of Bradford Mills at Marki near Warsaw, 18831939 / by Sarah Dietz.
pages cm.(Modern economic and social history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-4138-6 (hardcover)ISBN 978-1-3155-7010-5 (ebook)ISBN 978-1-3171-7202-4 (epub) 1. Investments, BritishPolandHistory19th century. 2. Investments, BritishPolandHistory20th century. 3. Industrial policyPolandHistory. I. Title.
HG5587.D54 2015
338.88777310943841dc23
2014048293
ISBN 9781472441386 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315570105 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781317172024 (ebk-ePUB)
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my late husband, John Haigh, who first showed me the Marki memoir of his great-grandfather John Hinchcliffe in the early 1990s. At that time I was working at Briggella Mills in Bradford and the story of the firms Polish sister company, Bradford Mills at Marki, was largely forgotten. Hinchcliffes unpublished memoir began with his first train journey across Europe in 1910 and ended with his dramatic escape into Russia as the Germans advanced on Warsaw in the summer of 1915. It is full of affectionate descriptions of afternoon teas in Warsaws luxurious Hotel Bristol, riotous nights of drinking in the Marki social club and more than one dramatic report of being threatened at gunpoint in the lawless suburbs of Warsaw, but provides very little information about factory life in Poland. Nevertheless, it inspired my interest in the subject and a trove of family letters and postcards exchanged between Marki and Bradford from 1910 to 1924 provided a more intimate portrait of expatriate life in the remote factory settlement. Thus my connection with this subject is both personal and professional: my career in Bradfords textile industry and our family history in Marki have encouraged almost a decades research into why and how Bradfords Briggs-Posselt partnership built a factory and town in Poland in 1883 and what became of it.
I consider myself privileged to have had the guidance of Dr James Gregory of the University of Plymouth, Dr Gbor Btonyi of the University of Bradford and Professor Derek Aldcroft of the University of Leicester. I am enormously grateful to Anna Wawrzyniak, ne Ptasinska, for her assistance throughout this project: for facilitating my interviews with the mayor of Marki, Janusz Werczyski, local historian Zbigniew Paciorek, residents of Briggs factory housing at Marki and with Dr Piotr Jaworski, senior curator of the Centralne Muzeum Wkiennictwa in d. In the interests of historical research we have also enjoyed many leisurely afternoon teas in the Hotel Bristol! I offer heartfelt thanks to Anna Draniewicz for her patience and dedication in teaching me the Polish language and involving me in Polish cultural events in Bradford. I am indebted to both Olga Lawler and Alexander Magen for translations of the Russian sources and would like to thank Ghislaine Young for her assistance with the nineteenth-century French texts, as well as a great deal of general encouragement.
Dr Jochen Ostermeyer, great-grandson of Ernst Posselt, generously shared his recollections with me and I thank Dr Annette Frese, curator of Posselts art collection at the Kurpflzische Museum, for her hospitality in Heidelberg. I am grateful for the interest and advice of Professor Andrew Popp of the University of Liverpool Management School, Colum Giles of English Heritage, Ewa Wartalska at the Muzeum Wojska Polskiego, Dr Marcin Grski at the Faculty of Architecture for Warsaw University of Technology and Dr Mary Blewett of the University of Massachusetts, Mark Keighley, the author of Wool City, and Dr Andrzej Suchcitz of the Sikorski Institute in London. My particular thanks go to the Saltaire Historians, David King and David Shaw, who provided the answers to so many of my questions about Bradford, Saltaire and the Salts foreign direct investments in the USA.
The assistance of residents of the Briggs brothers former homes in Ilkley: Tim Edwards at Westwood Lodge, David Wiley at Hebers Mount and also Dairine Nethercott at Briggella Mills in Bradford has been much appreciated. I would like to acknowledge the research of a community of amateur genealogists with connections to Marki: particularly Nancy Peel, Teresa Baron, ne Lilpop, and my own father-in-law Ralph Haigh who preserved the Hinchcliffe letters and memoir which have provided so much useful insight for this case study. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, making special mention of Anita Southwell and Fionna and Peter Harnett who all told me to write this book, and especially my late parents, Doreen and David Dietz, for all their support and encouragement.