THE PROCESS OF UNCOVERING WHERE exactly the founder of the Manchester Guardian, John Edward Taylor, and his associates were importing cotton from was a lengthy and difficult one. At the start, in autumn 2020, I was given the names of the 11 original funders of the Manchester Guardian, and how much each of them had contributed. This was available in a large, yellow parchment, the “Manchester Guardian agreement”, written in 1821 and housed at the Guardian archives in the John Rylands library in Manchester.
The first step I took was to trace Taylor’s lineage back to the 1700s using Ancestry UK and antiquarian sources, to gain a clearer picture of his economic and social back-ground. Unsurprisingly, there was little mention of Taylor’s cotton business or his source of
