‘What immediately strikes the stranger is the substantial and comfortable appearance of the mill and its surroundings. At Bessbrook each house consists of from three to five rooms, according to the size of the family occupying it. Every arrangement necessary to promote cleanliness and health is resorted to. As you pass up, some of the first buildings you come to are the schoolrooms, which are for girls and boys, and for lads in the evening who are engaged during the day. The infant-school attached is the most interesting feature; but you will be pleased with the clean appearance of the boys and girls—with their intelligence and readiness to learn. The staff of masters and mistresses employed is evidently superior…Every householder has to send his children there, or whether he sends them or not he is charged a penny for the schooling of each child. £100 is subscribed annually, I believe, by the mills, and there is, besides, a Government grant. The playground attached to the school is an extensive one, and the view from it very fine.
A few doors further on, and we come to the Dispensary. There are ills to which all flesh is heir, and to remove which the services of a medical man are required…All here are expected to subscribe to a medical club, and the Firm supplement the subscription with a handsome one of their own. Thus a doctor is secured, who comes to his Dispensary on certain days of the week, and who also, of course, visits the serious cases in their own homes.
Further on, we come to a building which we ascertain to be the Temperance Hotel. This is the club and newsroom of the place. In the winter-time it is highly popular. Many Irish papers and a few English ones are taken in, and, I may add, most diligently perused. Here also are Punch and Zozimus, or the Dublin Punch. There also chess and draughts are played, and smoking is permitted. Boys are here indulging in games, while the advanced politician has his favourite organ—Conservative or Liberal; and those who care for neither, discuss matters connected with the neighbourhood, and the state of affairs at home.’
Extract from Bessbrook and its Linen Mills by J. Ewing Ritchie (London, 1876)

As seen today, Bessbrook, County Armagh dates from the mid-19th century when it was developed as a model village by the Quaker businessman John Grubb Richardson. From the second quarter of the 17th century to the end of the 19th century, the land on which the village stands was owned by the Caulfeilds, later Earls of Charlemont. Taking advantage of the river Camlough, a linen mill with bleaching green was established here in 1760 by the Pollock family, and in 1802 this business passed into the hands of Joseph Nicholson; the village’s name derives from that of his wife Elizabeth, or Bess. Following a fire in the scutching mill in 1839, the complex went into decline before being acquired by Richardson who had previously worked in his family’s successful family linen export company, JN Richardson Sons and Owden. It was Richardson who transformed the existing settlement into a model village for the workers in his linen mill which lay a short distance to the south and came to employ around 2,000 workers. A precursor of the better-known Bournville established by another Quaker family, the Cadburys, near Birmingham in England, by the end of the 19th century Bessbrook accommodated some 3,000 persons in 700 houses, many of them living in two-storey houses of rubble granite with red brick dressings. Two large squares – Charlemont Square and College Square – were linked by Fountain Street with a number of other streets running off this. All major Christian denominations, Church of Ireland, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian, were provided with plots on which to construct a place of worship and as a Quaker Richardson provided a meeting house for members of his faith. As was noted by J. Ewing Ritchie in 1876, Richardson established a school for boys and girls, and built houses for its teachers, along with providing very many other facilities for the town’s residents: a dispensary, savings bank, orphanage, convalescent home, allotment gardens, gas lighting and hydro-electric tramway.He paid for a large building, called the Institute but known as the Town Hall, where meetings and recreational activities could be held. And, as also noted by Ritchie, he built an hotel where no alcohol was served. Richardson’s principles were based on the ‘Three P’s’: that there should be no public houses, no pawn shops and, as a result, no need for police. His son, James Nicholson Richardson wrote ‘From far-famed model Bessbrook/Where Bacchus is unknown/Where lack of public-houses/Has starved him off his throne/(Police, pawn-shop, nor publican,/Come nigh this realm of ease/The envious call it in their wrath/“The city of three P’s”)’. Many people were deeply impressed with Richardson’s philanthropic enterprise, but not everyone delighted in the place. After visiting it in 1879, George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘Bessbrook is a model village where the inhabitants never swear or get drunk and look as if they would like very much to do both.’ 

The decline of linen production from the middle of the last century onwards eventually led to the closure of the Richardson’s mill at Bessbrook in 1970. Around the same time, owing to the onset of the Troubles, the British Army needed a substantial base in South Armagh and therefore requisitioned the buildings, which were converted into a major military base. For a period thereafter, seemingly the former mill became the busiest heliport in Europe, with army helicopters taking off and landing low over Bessbrook every few minutes. Inevitably, the consequent security issues had consequences for the village which suffered economic decline. The army finally left in June 2007, and in recent years work has been undertaken to restore the centre of historic Bessbrook, although more still needs to be done (the former Temperance Hotel, on the corner of Fountain Street and Charlemont Square, for example, sits empty and disconsolate). As for the vast old mill complex, since the departure of the British army, this site has sat largely empty. However, in the autumn of 2022 plans were announced by Farlstone Construction, a company based elsewhere in County Armagh, for a £60 million redevelopment of this area, with the buildings being converted into apartments, offices and retail units. Whether this scheme comes to fruition remains to be seen.