John Swire’s first recorded imports in 1816 are of quercitron bark (used in textile dyeing) and raw cotton from America and he built his business almost exclusively on imports from North America (flour, animal hides, turpentine and tar) and the West Indies (coffee, spices, sugar and rum). In 1822, he married Maria Louisa Roose, Jonathan’s daughter, and the couple went on to have five children, three of whom — Maria Louisa, John Samuel and William Hudson — survived to adulthood.
Inevitably, the financial ruin that had overtaken his forefathers had a profound effect upon John Swire of Liverpool and shaped his approach to business. He was prudent, hardworking, and risk-averse. From 1840, his business was largely weighted towards working as a shipping agent, which carried less risk than trading goods in his own right. In that year, he bought a share in a new sailing vessel, the 194-ton Christiana. This ship was lost off Haiti in 1841, perhaps confirming John Swire’s views on the hazards of such investments, as he made no further essays into ship owning.
John Swire died in 1847. He left his two sons capital of £1,000 each to carry on his business (close to £80,000 apiece in today’s terms). John Swire of Liverpool had built a successful, if small, business from nothing and his efforts left his family secure and comfortably off. However, he never forgot the hard lessons of the family losses he had left behind in Yorkshire, writing: ‘One word of advice to my dear children. Be steady, careful … & moderate in your expenditure, for if once you lose what I have worked hard to leave you, you may then perhaps know, like many others have done, the stings of poverty’.