Oh What A Time... - #125 The Super Rich (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!Let’s have a look at some of the most interesting self-made millionaires that history has to offer! This week we have Sarah Breedlove and her lucrative beauty revolution, Richard Crawshay’s Welsh ironmongery bonanza and, more recently, let’s discuss Apple’s main man Steve Jobs.Elsewhere, haircuts come and go - from center parting curtains to the mullet - but the medieval monk circular-shaved-bald-spot-at-the-back refuses to come back. Plus, what era of your life would you choose from for your ghost form? If you’ve got anything on this or anything else, you know what to do: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Keep people and pets safer. Always keep your dog on a leash in public. Learn more at toronto.ca slash leash your dog. A message from the city of Toronto. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle Three. Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible original series.

When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the Grandview shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in the supernatural thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Hi, and welcome back to part two of our episode on the super rich.

Just before I start, I think in a way it's quite useful to try and work out how rich these people are. So a million seconds is about 11 days. Yes. Okay. Okay. A billion seconds is almost 32 years. So if your wealth could be measured in billions, that's a lot, that's a lot of money. That is mind-blowing. 11 days to 32 years. That's just mad, isn't it? Good fact. Yeah. Very good fact. Yeah, so it's like 11 and a half days is a million seconds. Okay. So they're wealthy. They're mortgage free. So once you get into Elon Musk levels of wealth, you know, if a billion is 32 value of his company in like a day. It's like incredible, isn't it that?

How do you react to that? That's a genuine question. You've done a tweet, the tweet's gone wrong, you've wiped a billion dollars off your share price. Are you upset? Do you think, oh god, presumably he is upset, because I wouldn't be because I've got so many more billions left in the bank. Do you think if I start tweeting the opposite of that tweet, will I gain two and a half billion dollars in my business? Maybe that's what I should do. But that's also probably why I'm not a billionaire. Yeah. Because I mean...

Yet, Al. Yet. Let's talk. Yeah, yeah, of course. We need some more Row Water Time full-time and then we will become billionaires. The first podcast billionaires. Right, in 1799, at least 10 Britons, all of them were men, were recognised as millionaires. Now, their combined wealth stood at 24 and a half million pounds, the equivalent of 2.4 billion quid in today's terms. The top five in 1799 were made up of the landed aristocracy, Earl Grosvenor,

the Marquis of Bute, Lord Harewood, the Duke of Devonshire, and the Duke of Sutherland. But in at number six, with two million quid in his pocket was the Yorkshireman and ironmaster, Richard Crochet. Now, Crochet was born on the 1st of October, 1739 in Normanton, near Wakefield to parents William and Elizabeth. After quarreling with his dad

over whether he'd carry on the family trade on the land, Crochet left home and headed for London. He was 16 years of age. And as the story goes, he arrived without a penny, sold his pony to have some money in his pocket and was apprenticed to a Mr Bicklewith. It sounds like a Dickens novel this, doesn't it? It does. But where have those surnames gone?

Bicklewith. I always think this. Sounds great this. Yeah. What a pity. I love that. It's so quaint. What does he sound like to you, Mr Bicklewith? What does he sound like? I think he's quite a friendly teacher in a Victorian school. Runs the local neighbourhood watch. Or like a blacksmith who loves to read. Hasn't got a telly. Always hitting his thumb by mistake.

Ow! Oh, Mr Bicklewith. So, Mr Bicklewith owned an ironware house in Thames Street and he was a very diligent worker at J'Crochet. So, he not only gained the confidence of Bickwith, but he was also appointed Bickwith's business heir on the latter's retirement in 1763. Now that's the little bit of luck that millionaires always need, right?

This gave crochet the head start he needed to succeed in the iron trade. So within a decade, he'd got involved in the flourishing iron manufacturing businesses of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. And he first the London agent then the business partner of Anthony Bacon, a former West Indian plantation owner turned iron master Who operated the Kvartfa ironworks in Merthyr And there were four ironworks in the town the Dowlice ironworks, the Penadarron ironworks and the Plymouth ironworks Now Merthyr was the place to be, okay, so Britain was the first industrial

country. That's amazing isn't it? Four ironworks in one town, it's just remarkable isn't it? Yeah, Wales was the first industrial country where there were more people working in industry, heavy industry, than on the land. Oh really? And Merthyr was the first industrial town in the world, it was the iron capital of the world in the 19th century. That's so interesting. Just because of the sheer scale of its iron production. So the world's first steam-powered railway journey happened in Merthyr. You know, Wales was the world's first industrial nation,

which is one of the important things for saving things out of the Welsh language, because there was lots of work in South Wales. So if you were a poor farmer in North Wales or West Wales, you would move to South Wales, to the valleys, rather say, unlike the Irish experience where you would move to South Wales, to the valleys, rather say unlike the Irish experience where you'd have to leave. So was Murfurt and places like that, was there a point where there were particularly wealthy places to be? Were they really like, was it money pouring into them?

There was a lot of money there and you were better off as a working-class person there than say, you know, like a poor tenant farmer. But you know they were still working class people you know but there were there were some extremely rich people in Merthyr. Yeah the heads of industry with people who were psychiatric. Yes. Fascinating. So Kvartha, the Kvartha ironworks, partly specialised in making cannons for the Royal Navy and the army for which Bacon had secured a government contract during the American Revolutionary War. So when Bacon entered parliament in 1782, he had to give up those contracts, but his death in 1786

and Crochet's purchase of the works meant that Cavalca could go back to making money from war. And there's another little bit of good luck. It just so happened that Britain would be at war with France for most of the next 30 years. Right? So, bingo. Yeah, brazzers. Yeah, brazzers. He was rolling in it. Yeah. Now contemporary portrait of Richard Crochet describing verity as a tyrant, as a patron of the arts,

particularly the theater, deeply hostile to the various nonconformist denominations that filled Mirth with chapels. Like there were big, there was an awful lot of conflict between working people who were working in these ironworks and steelworks and in the mines Mirth with chapels. Like there were big, you know, there's an awful lot of conflict between working people who were working in these ironworks and steelworks and in the mines and the heads of industry because they were just so culturally different, right? And there's almost the image, the prototype of Joseph Conrad's silver magnet, Charles Gould, in his novel Nostromo from 1904.

He was the archetypal sort of top hat wearing, you know, industrialist. So this is one travel writer visiting Mirth in 1803, 1804. This is a description of his house. His house is surrounded with fire, flame, smoke and ashes. The noises of the hammers, rolling mills, forges and bellows incessantly din and crash upon the year. The machinery of this establishment is gigantic and the part of it worked by water, among

the most scientifically curious and mechanically powerful to whom modern improvement has given birth." It was like the Klondike. That was where it was at. Yeah. It was all this industry. That would drive me bonkers, that sound, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I lived in Cardiff, I lived in a flat above Cardiff Central Station which happened to be at the bend of a rail track, so as the trains entered the station their wheels would scrape against the metal. Oh I remember that flat. Yes, I nearly lost my mind in the next month or so. And that is just strange. Because trains don't stop. They keep coming. They keep coming.

People love to travel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're not just coming from London, they're coming from Bristol, they're coming from all over the place. He was to be sure a zealous businessman determined to be, in his words, the perfect iron master, so he invested in the construction of the Glamorganshire Canal, for instance, which would bring iron products more rapidly to the docks at Cardiff. Because Cardiff docks, huge. You know, there was so much stuff being imported and exported from Cardiff docks.

So he tried to muscle out his fellow investors, including his fellow iron masters, by claiming that he had precedence due to the size of his investment. So to get their own back on this man, they felt was overbearing in his manners. His competitors would turn to the railway and to the prospect of the steam locomotive, which would then free them from his temper. So you've got investment

in the railway system. South Wales was fucking brilliant. Markable, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Do you feel sad that you couldn't have seen it in its pomp in this era? Wouldn't you love to have a look? Oh, it must have been incredible. And also such a fascinating working class popular culture coming out of that part of the world. Because like those towns, they were all new. They were all, a lot of them had been small like farming villages. And then suddenly there's just all this where you've got people coming from, you know, all over Britain, all over

Europe to work this. It's real melting pot. What a vibe. So another aspect of Crochet's character was his pride, his reverence for the sheer size of his works. My blast furnaces are 60 foot high, he boasted to a visiting Russian client in 1793. Each furnace produces 1,400 tonnes per annum. So by the time Crochet died, Kavothford had six furnaces

and a workforce measured in the thousands. Like for him, size was everything. Now as a self-made man at the forefront of industrialization and the shift of wealth away from land and agriculture to manufacturing, from the farming of his father to the iron making of his sons, Crochet's spending exemplified his efforts

to acquire the status that befitted his enormous wealth. So he commissioned art, notably a set of the leading iron founders in Britain in 1796, brought property, played the political game, used his weight in influence, and obviously you would imagine some of his money to convince parliamentarians not to slap a tax on iron in 1797, money that the government needed to pay for its wars against France. But, at heart, he was a bloody arch-man. And he never really aspired to be a social climber. His motto, I mean it doesn't scream him being a laugh, his motto was perseverance. That's a terrible, that's a terrible motto.

Yeah, nowadays he'd have it tattooed on his calf. He would have been hostile, it was his son William to the pretentiousness of his grandson, also called William, why did people do that then, who commissioned a large, massive house to be built in Merthyr, his very own castle full of art and artifacts. Cavalfer Castle was a product of later social climbing that came later on in his family. And Cavaughan Castle's incredible. It would go on to have its own staff, its own band, prize winning apples.

It wasn't finished until 1825. But Richard Crochet, the one that started it all, his one nod to climbing, or social climbing, wasn't to have his grave in Yorkshire or London, or even Merthyr, but in Llandaff Cathedral. So he was far from perfect, far from the perfect iron master in Chacrochet. And he wasn't really the model of self-made wealth,

but in his own way, he transformed Britain and helped make it the world's first industrial nation. Incredible. Like it was, it just, it's an amazing story. Carvathocastle's still there, you can still visit it as a museum now. You are right there, Chris. It's that thing of what it musttho Castle is still there. You can still visit it as a museum there. Will Barron You are right there, Chris. It's that thing

of what it must mean to live through points of transition. Chris McDonnell Yeah, absolutely. Will Barron Points where the world really is shifting from, in this case, the countryside to industry, growing cities, all that sort of stuff. Must be, I don't know, just exciting, unsettling. The emotion of people must have been experienced from that point. A remarkable thing to have lived through. Amazing. I found I lived through that period, I would have guessed. It's going to be like this forever now. Do you know what I mean?

Yes. I'm such an optimist. I would have gone, well, this is us now for eternity. In 1801, myth had a population of 7,700. By, Myrth had a population of 7,700. By 1851, it had a population of 46,000. Wow. Wow. And it just kept growing because there was just so much work there. Like even by 1831, it had a population of 22,000.

So it was just this amazing, there was coal there, there was steel. Can you imagine the bars or the working men's club? The pubs? Yeah. So in the mid 1700s it was a small farming village and then it was the biggest town in Wales by the 1800s. Yeah. Great if you owned property there just before the boom as well. That's how you become a millionaire yourself. By the 1820s, Merthyr was the source of 40% of Britain's iron exports. Wow. Remarkable.

I mean, him owning a massive ironworks and having the contract for the Royal Navy with Britain being at war with France for 30 years, that's the 1800s equivalent of investing in Zoom a day before lockdown. Good on him. So to wrap up this episode on the super rich, I'm going to tell you both an incredible story. Okay. This is the story of America's first female self-made millionaire, a remarkable woman by the name of Sarah Breedlove. You heard of Sarah Breedlove? No, I haven't. Well, you're about to hear all about her. Sarah Breedlove, she's born on the 23rd of

December 1867 in the Louisiana village of Delta, and this is in the wake of the American Civil War, and at the time of her birth, Louisiana, like the rest of the American South, is under military government following the North's victory. Her family have had an unbelievably difficult history, so all of Sarah's older siblings, as well as her parents Owen and Minerva, were born into slavery and worked on the plantations in the South. And Sarah was the very first of the Breedlove family to be born after the Emancipation Proclamation Act,

which was made by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. She's the first of a family to be born free, okay? However, this doesn't mean she avoided a difficult childhood herself. Her mother Minerva died in 1872, probably of cholera. Her father Owen died just two years later, so she's seven and she's an orphan. So it's a difficult background. With no chance of education, Sarah started working as a domestic servant in Mississippi before age just 14, marrying a man called Moses McWilliams. But by the time she's 20, Moses has died. She's already a

widow. Okay, this is 20. She's been through all this stuff. She's now working as a laundress in St. Louis in Missouri. It's incredible what people have to live through, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. There's so much packed into that first 20 years of her life, which is just unfathomably awful. I think it's worth saying as well, when I started reading and learning about the American Civil War, I only really saw it from the Union perspective, the Northern perspective, like the victors perspective. I never thought really about the losers perspective. And there's a film which I think really brings this to life.

Have you seen Cold Mountain? No, I haven't. No. It's got Jude Law in it. It's got Ray Winston in it. And it kind of paints the picture of how the South was left after the American Civil War. And also the way these communities were just

torn to shreds, because obviously the men had to go to fight, and many of them are gone. So to grow up in that era in the South and go on to achieve anything, I just think is immediately remarkable. This sums up my viewing habits. I will watch that once I've finished my documentary about the Tour de France. Cold Mountain. It's actually, I would honestly say it's one of the best films I've ever seen. You've got to watch it again. my documentary about the Tour de France. Absolutely. Cold Mountain. You've got it's actually, I would honestly say it's one of the best films I've ever seen. You've got to watch it again.

Yeah, Tour de France and Chained Cold Mountain. Ellis James in a nutshell. So she lands this job as a laundress in St. Louis. She's a widow. As a laundress, she makes less than a dollar a day. It's not paying well. However, what's interesting is this job has

the unexpected consequence of sort of starting her on her journey towards huge fortune. Okay. Sarah, like many of the women who worked in the steam rooms suffered from dandruff, skin complaints, all as a result of the chemical cleaners they're having to use in the laundry and the wash houses. Okay. So they're using these cleaners, it's giving them terrible skin, giving them pains, blisters, all sorts of stuff. So she asked her brothers, who were both barbers in Salui, for advice, first of all, on how to care for her hair, which also is getting ravaged by all the stuff that's been used in these rooms. And although her brothers were only able to provide very basic advice, it sort of triggered an interest in her in cosmetic

care, especially for this community of women, mainly black women, who were not being cared for and not having their cosmetic needs listened to or even thought about. They're a disregarded part of society almost. So she's thinking about this. Already she's interested in this area. Then she splits with her second husband in 1903 and her fascination at last finds a home after this divorce. She's forced to find a better paid job because she's now alone again and she manages to land a job as a salesperson for Annie Turnbo Malone. So Annie Turnbo Malone is an African American entrepreneur from Illinois who specializes in cosmetics and other beauty products for her community.

Products including hair straighteners, hair oils, growth creams, had one called the Wonderful Hair Grower, which she sold door to door. Yeah. Incidentally, I was thinking about this, I think selling beauty products door to door and not offending people must be quite a tricky job. Very very good point. Knocking on the door and saying, now can I sell you this hair product? I've never met you but you look like someone who really needs some hair.

Also what was that product called? Wonderful Hair Grower. In those days, if you had a product, the name it had really was just the thing it did. They really Ron sealed it, didn't they? I wonder whether this is an effective sales strategy. You knock on someone's door, they answer it, and you just go, whoa, look at you! Jeez, your hair!

What? Christ, and your skin! I bet you're glad I knocked on your door. Is your granddaughter in? I'd like to spend a year. How dare you? I'm too young for that. Are you? You're fucking joking! May I introduce you to this? So, Sarah starts selling these products and she does fantastically.

She's got real talent for it. She's found her calling. So much so that she begins to sort of like take in all the knowledge she can. She's fascinated about how these things are made and starts thinking about what she can do for her community that would kind of provide things that aren't out there already. And she starts developing her own product line, at which point things go sour. Malone accuses Breedlove of stealing her secret formula, even though it wasn't that different to readily available pomades at the time. Sarah leaves the company to set up her own before marrying her third husband, this time a St Louis based

newspaper advertising salesman called Charles Joseph Walker. Once again, want to guess how that marriage goes? Oh my god. Does it work? Ends in divorce again. Oh okay, I thought you were going to say he was going to die. I thought he was going to say he was going to die like the sort of drummers in Spinal Tap. This time she's just not into it. It says here, but he, unlike the drummers in Spinal Tap, he remained healthy a long life. the drummer's in spinal cap, he remained healthy a long life. So they divorce, but it provides her with something crucial, which is a new business moniker. She becomes Madam C.J. Walker. And this

is a name that will become incredibly famous indeed. In 1908, she opens her first beauty parlor and training college with techniques and products, all focuses on the needs and requirements of an African American clientele. In 1910, the Madame C.J. Walker manufacturing company is officially established and headquartered in Indianapolis, where incidentally it would remain until 1981. And it grows rapidly. Get this. Now, just to give you some context, okay. She's 20 in 1892, as we said. She's working to launderess. She's already a widow. Okay.

So this recently, it's now only 1910. Her company in that short period, she's gone through this work, she set up a company in 1910, she's already employing a thousand agents. Wow! Bearing in mind the background she's come from, a thousand agents are employed by the summer selling the product. They also had a network of over 200 beauty training schools. By 1913, she's opened a further main outlet in Harlem and New York and she started a booming mail order service. It's all really starting to quicken. By the time Sarah Beedlove died in 1919, she was quite young,

she transformed the hair and beauty market for African American women and made a name for herself not only as the first female self-made millionaire in America, but as one of the first self-made African American millionaires as well. And she was able to enjoy the lifestyle of the very richest white Americans, men and women, which included the purchase of cars, houses. And of course, she also turned toward philanthropy. Okay. She didn't go down the Steve Jobs route. I'm going to put my money back into society. And what distinguished the Madam C.J. Walker business aside from this philanthropy was also its emphasis on the employment of women, not only as beauty stylists and salespeople, but also in management roles. So often only the lawyers in Breedlove's boardroom were men. Everyone else in the boardroom

was a woman. So this is incredibly progressive, isn't it? Yes, it's amazing. It's really setting forward and going, no, this is how I want it to run. It's amazing. It's a real sort of FU to the kind of the traditional state values of the time. Her most significant employees were her daughter, Alia, who succeeded her as a company president, and also Marjorie Joyner, who started out in sales, became the national supervisor of Breed Loves Hair and Beauty Training Schools, and then went on to establish her own business

as the inventor of a type of permanent wave machine. Here's a fun fact, Joyner, herself the granddaughter of slaves was to be one of the first African-American women to ever receive a patent for her inventions. And this was for straightening, sort of a permanent wave machine for your hair that she invented. And as for her philanthropy, this is great.

Her money did incredible things, including giving the largest gift ever to the NAACP to enable the organization to fight against the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan. So she used her money to put it back into the community and really change the life of people. And it's amazing really, isn't it? Considering just the horrors of the first 20 years of her life, the racism of the time, every hurdle that she had to overcome. That's before the fact, you account for the fact that she's a woman at a point where, you know, in management roles invariably it would have been men at

the time. It's just amazing the fact that she... I wonder, because I'd never heard of her, I wonder if she's more famous in the US. Because she deserves to be on the back of a $10 bill or something. She really does. So that's Sarah Breedlove. You're right, if you want to find more about her, do have a Google because she's an incredible person, a remarkable lady who achieved amazing things. Well that's it for this week, thank you so much for listening but don't forget if you're yearning for even more Oh What A Time you can have that dream come true for you by becoming

an Oh What A Time full-timer where you get access to our bonus episode archive, two bonus episodes every month. That archive is filled to the brim with book reviews and extra correspondence episodes and loads of other good stuff. If you want to go check it out, head over to owhatatime.com where you can subscribe via Wondery Plus and via another slice. But if you wanna wait, you can also wait because we're back next week and we'll see you then. Bye. See you guys. Goodbye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. So Follow Oh What A Time on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. And before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.