MUSPRATT, Max
Type
3rd February 1872 to 20th April 1934
Occupation
Biographical Text
Max Muspratt was a director of the United Alkali Company and subsequently of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).
Muspratt was born at Seaforth, Lancashire, on 3 February 1872. His father, Edward Muspratt, had combined the family chemical business with around forty other small firms in the north of England to create the United Alkali Company in 1891. The firm held a near monopoly on the production of industrial alkali in England. Muspratt was educated at Clifton College and then studied chemistry at Zürich Polytechnic before joining United Alkali in 1892. He became a director in 1901 and chairman in 1914. He married Helena Ainsworth in 1896.
Muspratt entered politics in 1904, when he was elected as a Liberal Party member of Liverpool City Council. In January 1910 he was elected as Liberal MP for Liverpool Exchange, but he lost his seat in the subsequent election of December that year. He stood again for parliament in the Bootle by-election of 1911, but was unsuccessful. He continued in Liverpool city politics, serving as Lord Mayor of Liverpool from 1916-17. He was created a baronet in 1922. He left the Liberal Party in 1926 and joined the Conservatives.
During the First World War, Muspratt was an advisor on chemical supplies to the Ministry of Munitions. However, he does not seem to have engaged in any form of government service after the war, devoting himself instead to the affairs of industry. He later served as a director of the International Automatic Telephone Company. He was vice-president of the Society of Chemical Industry from 1904-6 and again from 1921-4. In 1924 he was elected chairman of the Association of British Chemical Manufacturers, and from 1926-7 was president of the Federation of British Industries. Earlier in his career, Muspratt was also a director of the Liverpool Self-Propelled Traffic Association, the first motoring club in the northwest of England.
As chairman of United Alkali, Muspratt was one of the driving forces behind the merger with three other firms – Brunner, Mond and Co., Nobel Industries and British Dyestuffs Corporation – to create Imperial Chemical Industries in 1926. He became a director of ICI and remained so until his death in Liverpool on 20 April 1934.
Muspratt produced no publications of note. His intellectual outlook can inferred from his early career with the Liberal party, though by the time of his lecture in 1921 he was already beginning to drift towards the Conservatives.
Muspratt’s lecture, ‘How far is increased production desirable in the interests of the workers: the employers’ standpoint’, is companion to a lecture on the same subject giving the worker’s point of view, delivered by Arthur Greenwood. Muspratt begins his talk rather warily, admitting he had no idea what kind of conference he was coming to, and clearly concerned about an ambush by the representatives of the working classes. He argues that no one can seriously deny that increased production is good for society as a whole; no one wants to go back to the primitive past. But he agrees that it is essential that all should share in the increase in prosperity that new production methods bring, and concedes at once that workers may be losing out.
The problem as Muspratt sees it is that workers and employers fundamentally misunderstand each other. For workers, the most important thing is wages; how much they receive for the time they commit to work. For the employer, however, the most important thing is production. A good employer, says Muspratt, doesn’t care whether the worker receives £3, £4 or £5 a week, so long as the wages are accompanied by full or increased production. He is in effect re-stating Harrington Emerson’s dictum that the workers sell time, but employers buy output, and this is a cause of much misunderstanding between them.
Four factors prevent these misunderstandings from being overcome, says Muspratt: the ‘individual inertia of mankind’, the tendency of human beings to be self-centred, class antagonism and, on the workers’ part, the fear of unemployment. The last, he says, is far and away the most important. Workers tend to spin work out to make it last as long as possible, not realising that the resulting inefficiency actually puts jobs in jeopardy. While Muspratt accepts that workers are afraid of losing their jobs, he is against such measures as the dole, or companies paying workers to stand idle. Wages, he says, are both a measure of productivity and its reward. The best solution is to be as productive as possible, for only then is there surety that the enterprise will continue and grow, thus creating future employment.
The paper is an interesting one, and probably resonated with at least some of his audience. Like many employers who spoke at these conferences, however, Muspratt failed to take account of the fact that greed, laziness and self-interest exist among employers just as surely as among workers, and the barriers he spoke of work both ways.
Bibliography
Biographical Database of the British Chemical Community, 1880-1970, http://www.open.ac.uk/ou5/Arts/chemists/person.cfm?SearchID=5260
‘Former Mayors and Lord Mayors of the City of Liverpool’, http://liverpool.gov.uk/Council_government_and_democracy/Town_Hall/formermayors/index.asp#1900
‘Max Muspratt’, Grace’s Guide to Industrial History, https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Max_Muspratt
Obituary notice, The Times, 21 April 1934.
Williams, T.I., ‘Muspratt, James Sheridan’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Who Was Who.
Original Source
‘How far is increased production desirable in the interests of the workers: the employers’ standpoint’, 12 February 1921, York