| Description | Robert Hodges was a clerk to James Watt & Co., the Soho firm that made the copying presses invented by James Watt. The partners of this concern in 1805 were James Watt Jr. and Matthew Robinson Boulton. In March of that year they discovered that Hodges had been defrauding the business for some time, possibly as far back as 1801, and they sought the legal advice of their London attornies Ambrose and James Weston. The Westons felt that the case came within an act passed in 1799 to protect masters from robbery or embezzlement by their servants, but they advised that the case be treated as a breach of trust, as the terms of the act were very loose and the act itself had not been tried on many occasions.
Hodges absconded from Soho, and Watt Jr. estimated that he had defrauded James Watt & Co. of at least £600. Hodges’ mother-in-law, Mrs. Susannah Bond, offered to repay £500 to James Watt & Co., provided that the interest on the £500 was paid to her during her lifetime, as she had no other income. Watt Jr. and M. R. Boulton agreed to this. The money was actually advanced by John Hodges, M. R. Boulton’s partner in the Soho plate company, and Mrs. Bond mortgaged various houses in Birmingham to John Hodges. John Hodges’ bond for £500 was contested when he died in 1808.
The bundle of papers relating to Hodges’ case appears to have been kept with Boulton & Watt’s legal material rather than other records of the copying press firm James Watt & Co. |