and banking families. Greg was active as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Hannah had completed her education at a Unitarian academy at Stoke Newington outside London, where she lived with her cousin Thomas Rogers, a close friend and an immediate neighbour to Richard Price. Richard Price was the "non-conforming minister of eminence" that Edmund Burke pilloried in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as the leading light of a circle of "literary caballers and intriguing philosophers" naïve and seditious in their embrace of the French revolutionary doctrine. It was in this same circle that Samuel's older sister Jane Greg moved, associating with John Horne Tooke of the London Corresponding Society (arrested, but acquitted, in 1794 of high treason) and Irish radical Roger O'Connor. Although the extent of her activities are unclear, in suppressing the Society of United Irishmen in advance of their rising in 1798, the British commander, General Lake, described Jane Greg as "the most violent creature possible" and as someone who had caused "very great [political] mischief" in her native Belfast. Hannah's religious and social views are credited with influencing Samuel's approach to the workers' welfare. A former director of the Quarry Bank Mill, and author of a book about Hannah Greg, provided this summary of her philosophy and work. She was liberal and compassionate by nature, and all her friends were active campaigners to stop the slave trade and to move forward the emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies and America ... In reality, Hannah Greg did not say anything publicly about this because, apart from anything else, Samuel Greg inherited slave plantations. She couldn’t be a public hypocrite so she kept quiet. Paternalistic employer With the death of Robert Hyde in 1782, Greg took over his uncle's interests in Manchester. Convinced of the prospects for mechanised textile production and the latest developments in water and steam power, Greg invested his wife's £10,000 dowry in building the Quarry Bank Mill in Styal on the bank of the River Bollin in Cheshire. The difficulty, in the rural setting, was labour. Hannah Greg's influence has been seen in what might otherwise be seen as a hard-headed, if unusual, decision to invest in improved conditions so as to make the new and regimented mill work attractive. In Styal Greg developed what came to be considered a "model village". Each family (average of