John Kennedy

Who was John Kennedy?

John Kennedy was a Scottish-born textile industrialist in Manchester.

John Kennedy was born in 1769 in Knocknalling, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. In 1784 he moved to Chowbent, near Leigh in Lancashire, to be apprenticed to William Cannan, the son of a neighbour of the Kennedys. His training covered the manufacture of textile machinery including carding engines, jennies, and water frames. On the completion of his apprenticeship in 1791, he moved to Manchester and went into a long-lasting partnership with James McConnel, a nephew and former apprentice of Cannan, to manufacture textile machinery and undertake cotton spinning. Benjamin and William Sandford provided the financial backing. Kennedy was a skilled and inventive engineer and is credited with devising a crucial improvement to fine-spinning machinery, called double speed, which enabled much finer thread to be manufactured.

In 1795 McConnel and Kennedy, now financially independent, moved to a new factory in the same Canal Street, where they remained for six or seven years. Initially the firm made cotton-spinning machinery for sale, but this part of the business ended around 1800. Then they built the first of their three spinning mills in Union Street in Ancoats, Manchester which formed the basis of Kennedy's working life for the next thirty years. The Sedgewick Mill was eight stories high and the largest cast iron framed building in the world. The spinning of yarn, the most profitable activity in the cotton trade, became the company's sole activity and it became the largest such business in Manchester, concentrating on producing the highest quality yarn.