Robert Scott

Robert Scott (1822 – 2 February 1904 ) was a Manchester businessman who was one of the founders of the Tootal Broadhurst Lee cotton company.

Scott was an early example of a successful manager in the textile industry, achieving significant wealth within the largest company of the time, despite being neither self-made nor from a textile family. Born the son of a farmer at Abbey Holm in Cumbria, he was working as a salesman by the time of his 1845 marriage to Maria in Cheetham Hill, north Manchester. and which, by the 1880s, had become the largest cotton manufacturer in Lancashire. Henry Tootal Broadhurst's son, Edward Tootal Broadhurst, would go on to become company chairman. Scott became 'cashier', or finance director, of Tootal Broadhurst Lee in 1854 By the 1881 census, he was described a spinning manufacturer. to the designs of the architects Clegg & Knowles. Scott was recorded in the 1881 census as living at Denzell with his wife and a staff of nine. the architectural critic Pevsner described it as a luscious but "very bad" mixture of debased Jacobean, Gothic, and Italianate styles. Scott's son Henry predeceased him, and at Scott's death in 1904, the house was sold to the Lamb family.