Business
Fielding Johnson's adoptive father Joseph was a freeman of the City, a member of the new corporation (from 1835), an alderman and (between 1846 and 1847) Lord Mayor. He was a well-known figure in early Victorian Leicester who was, by the time his nephew arrived, the owner of a successfully established worsted spinning business in West Bond Street. He made Thomas a partner in 1852 and on his uncle's death in the same year, Thomas assumed control aged 24 years.
Fielding Johnson appears to have been a gifted but careful businessman who recognised that his best hopes for sustainable success lay in developing an effective business model in one factory and then duplicating it in others. It appears to have worked (during his own lifetime, at least). Throughout the 1914-18 war the Fielding & Johnson Company supplied more yarn to the Government for army purposes than any other firm in England.
Like many of his Victorian counterparts, Fielding Johnson seems to have had a painstaking and comprehensive approach and concerned himself with commercial, technical and employment aspects of the business. The picture that emerges from the history books is of a hardworking, decent man whose business ambitions were a means to achieving broader social goals and who was content that they could be satisfied within the part of England that he knew best and among the people that he had grown up with. In this, he is very different from today's modern entrepreneur for whom a more fragmented, globalised approach is more normal.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Fielding Johnson
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