Memorial to Robert Owen. Erected in 1879. Pink and grey granite obelisk on sandstone base with bronze portrait relief on east face.
Erected by public subscription to the philanthropist Robert Owen (1771-1858), who is buried in Wales.
A rare instance of a non-funerary monument in a private cemetery, erected in memory of the pioneering socialist and founder of the New Lanark experiment in benign employment, a manifestation of the mid-Victorian Non-Conformist awareness of its own heritage.
Robert Owen (14 May 1771 – 17 November 1858) was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. He worked in the cotton industry in Manchester before setting up a large mill at New Lanark in Scotland. In 1824, Owen travelled to America to invest the bulk of his fortune in an experimental 1,000-member colony on the banks of Indiana's Wabash River, called New Harmony. New Harmony was intended to be a Utopian society.
Robert Owen was born in Newtown a small market town in Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales, in 1771. He was the sixth of seven children. His father, also named Robert Owen, had a small business as a saddler and ironmonger. Owen's mother came from a prosperous farming family called Williams. There Owen received almost all his school education, which ended at the age of ten. In 1787, after serving in a draper's shop for some years, he settled in London.
He moved to Manchester, and was employed at Satterfield's Drapery in St Ann's Square (a plaque currently marks the site). With money borrowed from his brother he set up a workshop making spinning mules but exchanged the business for 6 spinning mules, which he operated in a rented space. In 1792 he was made manager of the Piccadilly Mill at Bank Top by the mill-owner Peter Drinkwater at the age of 21, but after two years he voluntarily gave up a contracted promise of partnership in the company and left to go into partnership instead with other entrepreneurs to establish and manage the Chorlton Twist Mills in Chorlton-on-Medlock.
His entrepreneurial spirit, management skill and progressive moral views were emerging by the early 1790s. In 1793, he was elected as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, where the ideas of reformers and philosophers of the Enlightenment were discussed. He also became a committee member of the Manchester Board of Health which was instigated, principally by Thomas Percival, to promote improvements in the health and working conditions of factory workers.