friend he began selling tea. He started with one pound of tea divided into two-pounce packets, and the business thrived while his health recovered. In 1868 he and his wife opened their first shop on the Oldham Road, followed in 1876 by a warehouse on Whitehall Street from where he started as a wholesale business. More shops followed, as did more warehouses: the second opened in John Street 1878, and the third in 1891. The business (which was popularly known as "Jimmy Duck's") continued to prosper and was incorporated in 1895 as a limited company formally called "James Duckworth Ltd", with his only son, also called James Duckworth, as vice-chairman. By 1900, when the company moved its operations to a new four-storey warehouse, it had 80 stores; and eventually it had 180 shops in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. The firm moved beyond grocery to include bakery, confectionery, general provisions, bookselling, and even hotel and coffee-house keeping. Duckworth attributed the success of his business to selling for cash at the lowest margins possible, and to selling goods "not because they were cheap but because they were good value". He claimed to be "the first to open shops in country districts and sell goods at the same prices as we sold them at in the town", and said that his methods reduced prices by between "five to seven-and-a-half per cent". He retired as chairman and managing director in 1905, but retained his seat on the board. On his retirement, he entertained the company's employees at the Town Hall, where he announced a plan to place £2,000 with the company to start a benevolent fund for the benefit of ill or injured employees, or those force to retire through old age. Duckworth's commercial involvement extended beyond his own family firm. He was a long-serving director of Boots Limited, and chairman of the National Tea Union, of Smallmans Limited in Manchester and of Belfield Limited in Rochdale. His other business interests included involvement in the cotton industry in the Stockport area, and to newspapers as proprietor of both the Manchester Weekly Chronicle and the Cheshire and County News He also bought the Rochdale Coffee House Company, partly for commercial gain but also in support of temperance and to create in each of the taverns a large room fitted with cubicles for the accommodation of working men who needed temporary lodgings. Political career Duckworth had