John Bright's family originated in Wiltshire, where in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries they were farmers, woolcombers and serge weavers. His great grandfather migrated to Coventry, where John's father Jacob was born in 1775. Jacob's parents died in poverty when he was young, and charitable Friends sent him to the Ackworth Quaker school, near Pontefract in Yorkshire. Jacob was at Ackworth from the age of nine to fourteen, this concern with education and the poor, especially those of their Society, being a particular interest of the Quakers. Jacob was then apprenticed to William Holme, a Friend who had a small farm and a few looms weaving fustian. Holme's sons set up a mill, at home in Derbyshire, before moving to Rochdale in 1802, where Jacob followed them. In 1809 two other Quaker businessmen, this time in Manchester, went into partnership with Jacob. They provided the capital, he the knowledge. Greenbank Mill was the result. Jacob's story is akin to the classic success story of the industrial entrepreneur, his route being from poverty through apprenticeship into partnership and success (complete to the last detail of this social narrative, Jacob marrying the daughter of his master). These are hardly the ways of the unrestrained market: at every step Jacob's career went forward through the agency of the Quaker connection.