Country Images Magazine North Edition September 2017 | Page 51

Th e original mills at Lowell c. 1828 [City of Lowell]
set up a works to construct railway locomotives
there in 1832. His son was the eminent London-
based impressionist painter James Abbott McNeil
Whistler, later brother-in-law - and eventually,
as with most of his friends, sworn enemy – of
Boott’s nephew Sir Francis Seymour Haden,
etcher and leading surgeon.
Boott himself was killed in a street accident in
1837, but his legacy – and posterity – continued.
Exactly how much of William Strutt’s own
idealism and ingenuity went into Lowell and
its extensive mills it is impossible to say, but the
Derby intellectual revolution of the 18th century
was a fundamental inspiration behind Lowell and
that it should prove to have been international in
its consequences should surprise no one.
A Duesbury Connection
Whilst Kirk Boott the elder imported and sold
the products of William Duesbury’s Derby
China factory, the two families also seem to have
remained in touch, for much later the under-
estimated William Duesbury III (invariably
portrayed as a talentless ne’er-do-well by China
enthusiasts) sold his interest in the china works
in 1815 in order to set up a white paint factory
at Bonsall using a new process of his own
devising, omitting the toxic lead element. Indeed,
Duesbury was a formidably talented chemist, but
ahead of his time by about 150 years.
dyes for the fabrics being manufactured there. He
was a convinced Universalist and, like Boott and
William Strutt, a competent architect, designing
his sect a fi ne chapel in Shattuck Street, Lowell.
Once ensconced in the Massachusetts city he
also married again – perhaps bigamously, for
we do not know the fate of his fi rst family in
Derby. He duly fathered more children, before,
tragically, doing away with himself for reasons
that remain obscure, on 12 December 1845. Nor,
apparently, was he by any means the last migrant
from Derby to settle at Lowell, the city’s textile
mills attracting a signifi cant proportion of their
workforce from Derby and its region before being
supplanted by Irish migrants fl eeing the potato
famine in the later 1840s.
Photographs below:
St. Anne’s Episcopalian Church
in 1999
[the late John Kavanagh]
Boott Mills, Lowell, in 1999
[the late John Kavanagh]
Why Lowell has never been seriously thought
of as a formal twin town of Derby one cannot
imagine. It was canvassed in 1990, met with a tide
of indiff erence.
Th e business at Bonsall failed, aft er which he
went to America, following in the footsteps of
his scallywag of an uncle James Duesbury. Having
known Boott from his Derby days, he settled in
Lowell almost from its foundation, working on
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