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Stannard Lodge, as it was marked on eighteenth-century maps, just escaped being a folly but was the poorer for it. Seddon Moss operatives, who sometimes walked the eight miles sim ply to gape at it, knew it by another name. They called it “Scab’s Castle,” a name derived from a rumour that the new owner had ob tained his start in life by leading a counter-revolutionary work force at the Rochdale mill where he had begun his career as an eight-year-old coal-comber and had progressed, through bale-breaking and furnaceman, into the lower grades of management.
    Nobody in the Warrington area knew the facts of Sam’s rise from the coal-comber to the mill owner, but it had been achieved in a mat ter of thirty-five years. There was nothing very spectacular about that. In the decades leading up to the late eighteen-fifties the same rate of progress had been accomplished by hundreds of men, most of them cottagers’ sons. The only thing singular about Sam Rawlinson was his willingness to leave production in the hands of a few, higher-than-average mechanics, and divide his tremendous vigour between administration and salesmanship. He had sold his first small mill at a handsome profit during a boom season and then ploughed every thing he possessed or could borrow into Seddon Moss, a business that had been steadily running down owing to the reluctance of its elderly owner to replace the outworn plant.
    That was in 1850, and in less than two years the decline of Seddon Moss Mill was halted and reversed, and the town had had to adjust to the impact of Sam Rawlinson’s restless energy. He reorganised the mil from top to bottom, instal ed machinery that had not even been patented, signed on all the hands he could get, and went out after big oriental orders that called for quantity rather than quality.
    The home market he ignored, preferring to deal through his Liverpool brokers with customers who were too far off to complain in person or press claims for refunds.
    He worked, on an average, fourteen hours a day, having no inter ests outside the mill apart from the embellishment of his new home. The word “embellishment” played no part in his commercial life, where he was concerned exclusively with facts and figures, but it featured largely in his domestic background and even his pliant young architect had been astonished when Sam told him to add a third storey to the Lodge, then decorate the south-facing frontage with four Gothic turrets. After that he added a castellated balus trade to the top of the portico, and then a row of arrow-slits to the buttresses between the windows, so that when it was finished the building looked like a top-heavy mediaeval fort balanced, none too securely, on a squashed red box. He then knocked twenty-eight per cent off the architect’s fee and brought in a landscape gardener to cut back the encroaching GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 16
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    timber, lay down an acre of lawn, excavate a large duckpond complete with an islet populated by roughcast herons, and raise the small hill so that he might have a convenient perch from which to survey his handiwork.
    Nobody ever discovered whether it pleased him or not, but in his limited spare time he went on looking at it as though it did. He had no friends, other than old Goldthorpe, the ground landlord of the area in which Seddon Moss Mill was situated, and even Goldthorpe, a notorious miser and rentier, had been heard to say that Rawlinson would dry, process, and sell the skin of a grape if he could find a market for the end product. Men of business in the area came to respect him, however, as by far the biggest employer of unskilled labour hereabouts. His small team of executives, locally known as “The Strappers,” tolerated him, if only because he could be abso lutely relied upon to back them against the operatives on every occa sion. In the men, women, and boys who formed his labour force he inspired a compound of hate,