No story can ever be told fairly without some knowledge of the background to it and, while the story of the birth of the cotton trade in Lancashire, forming, as it did, a major part of the birth of the industrial age itself – the Industrial Revolution – is well known, I think, that in a very condensed form, it is sufficiently interesting and relevant to our main story to be worth repeating here.
The production of wool textiles had existed in England for hundreds of years, wool indeed had formed a massively important part of the economy from the middle ages and indeed still did in the early eighteenth century. It had though been carried out very much as a cottage industry.
The United Kingdom textile trade then was based on wool and it was not until dyed and printed cottons were sent back to Britain by the East India Company in the mid 17th Century that cotton cloths were available. They were originally exported from the port of Calcut hence their general description as calicos. Being lighter and more easily washed than wools they rapidly created a demand and such was their threat to the woollen industry that in 1712 an excise duty was placed upon them and a total ban on printed cottons some years later.
It was natural therefore that the production of these fabrics should be started in this country. But as this became successful and as the inventions which created the huge demand for raw cotton that I am about to describe began to have an impact during the latter half of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, it was not India that benefited but the southern states of America where huge plantations, manned by slaves, grew up to provide the cotton that Lancashire needed.
At this stage though I must describe the process of producing woven fabric. Textile manufacturing is one of man’s earliest and most basic occupations. It is also one of the simplest. To spin a yarn one has to lay the fibres parallel to one another, draw them out to the required thickness and twist them in order to hold them together. To prove this, take any single thread of cotton or wool, twist it in the direction required to take out the existing twist and it will pull apart with no effort.
A fabric is simply a structure in which these threads are held together in a stable fashion, which is usually achieved by either knitting or weaving. Weaving is a process in which a weft thread is passed across warp threads going – at its simplest – over and under alternate threads. Originally this was done by literally threading the yarn over and then under the next thread, but by the beginning of the 18th Century it had been found that if every other warp thread was passed through the eye of a wire which in turn was attached to a frame – called a heald – by lifting one of these and depressing the other carrying the alternate threads, a gap could be formed through which the weft yarn could be passed more quickly and simply than by threading it. It further followed that if the tops of these two healds were joined by straps over a roller they made ideal counter balances to each other when their positions were reversed after the insertion of every pick. After a weft thread, – called a pick – was inserted, it was pushed up against the previous pick by a comb like mechanism, called a reed, and the repetition of this process formed the fabric.
The first person to challenge the way weaving had been carried out for centuries was John Kay. Kay came from Bury and was apprenticed to a heald maker, where he replaced the natural materials through which the warp yarns were threaded with wire. He set up in business on his own and might have continued in relative affluence and obscurity making his wire healds if he had not turned his inventive mind to other parts of the loom, particularly the process of weft insertion with the shuttle.
Before Kay’s inventions the loom required two operatives, one at either side throwing the shuttle to each other after they had reversed the position of the two healds. Kay considered the problem and realised that if the shuttle containing the weft yarn could be kept on a straight course there was surely no reason why mechanical hands could not replace human ones to throw the weft back and forth. There was already a heavy wooden batten on which the reed was mounted to push each succeeding pick up against the previously woven one, so he mounted the shuttle on wheels and put boxes at either end of this batten to catch the shuttle after its journey across the warp threads. He then put a wire “hand” at the back of these boxes, which, if jerked by the weaver, would propel the shuttle back across the cloth again. The productivity of every weaver was doubled at very little extra cost.
Kay took out a patent on these inventions but fortune was not about to come his way. His inventions were pirated and copied illegally by other manufacturers and in 1753 his home was attacked and his loom broken by weavers frightened of the implications of his invention. He died disillusioned in France in 1781.
Increased productivity in weaving was all very well but as, even before Kay’s invention, it took on average 5 spinners to produce enough yarn to keep one weaver busy and one spinner could only produce one thread at a time, it was the lack of productivity in the spinning process that was causing the real bottleneck at this time.
In 1761 The Society of Arts put up a prize for a machine that “ would spin six threads of wool, hemp, flax or cotton at one time and would require but one person to work and attend it”. James Hargreaves, in response to this, produced his spinning jenny, which allowed a spinner to produce up to eight threads at a time. As news of his invention spread, so did concern among the spinners grow and like Kay before him, his house near Accrington was attacked in 1768 and he was forced to flee to Nottingham and continue manufacturing yarn there by his new methods for the hosiery industry.
Both these inventions, while they increased productivity, did not threaten the traditional cottage nature of the industry as they were both able to be carried on in the home. This was emphatically not the case with the next great invention that was made by Richard Arkwright and which could qualify him to be called the true father of manufacturing in factories and of the Industrial revolution. Arkwright was a barber and wig maker in Leigh when he began to work on his invention in the early 1760’s but, being aware of what had happened to both Kay and Hargreaves, left for Nottingham in 1769 with a model of his invention, the water frame.
There, supported by two hosiery manufacturers, Arkwright developed and then built an enormous mill by the standards of the time of six stories high to house his spinning frames powered by water from the adjoining stream. He chose a small village, far from any traditional spinners or weavers, and not only built the mill but all the cottages round about to house his operatives to a very high standard – living quarters for the family on the ground and first floors and room for hand looms on the second to weave the cloth that would use the yarn he produced. This was the birth of the factory age, for workers could no longer work at their convenience. When the mill was working so were they and when the great water wheel stopped so perforce did they too. Having seen the way the previous pioneers were treated both by their competitors and by the workpeople, who felt endangered by their discoveries, Arkwright was determined that he would benefit in a way they never had. He was secretive, the mill was closely guarded and closed to all but a very few visitors, he controlled the lives and conditions of all his employees in the most feudal manner and employed mostly children of between seven and twelve working a thirteen hour day. But he was successful to the extent that he left an estate worth at a minimum £600,000 at his death in 1792 and he had set the pattern for the evolution of not only the Lancashire Textile Industry but future industrialisation throughout the world.
From his day forward mills were built at an amazing rate, initially confined to areas where there was available water power but from the 1790’s on, when the steam engine proved a reliable source of power capable of driving mill machinery, in the middle of existing towns where the labour was already available. At the time of his death there were 100 mills in existence, forty years later – 1000.
Two other pioneers of the industry deserve mention before we close this section. Samuel Crompton, another of this seemingly inexhaustable supply of Lancashire entrepreneurs, invented the Spinning Mule – so called because it was a hybrid of the Jenny and the Water Frame and capable of spinning counts finer than the latter could achieve. So successful was this invention that mules were still in use in the fine count mills when I began my textile apprenticeship in the 1950’s. With the mechanisation of the spinning process it was inevitable that the loom would follow suit. Pioneered by a former Professor of Poetry at Oxford and as a result, it was said of a conversation over the dinner table while he was the Rector of Goadby Marwood, The Reverend Dr. Edmund Cartwright first built a loom and then had a weaving shed near Doncaster. Unfortunately it too closed down leaving the good Professor heavily in debt. But it was a sign of things to come and notwithstanding the mysterious burning down of one of the first large scale weaving sheds, the way was set by the early nineteenth century for the production of the Lancashire spinning mills to be woven on power looms in similar conditions of employment to those pervading in the spinning mills. Such was their joint commercial success that they were consuming 572 million lbs. per year of cotton by 1840, 80% of which came from America and most of which went on to Empire markets. As an American commentator put it at the time “There is not a battle that England has fought in India, Afghanistan or China…. that did not extend the consumption of cotton.”
The Industrial Revolution was a revolution not only in the methods of production of materials but a social revolution as well. Prior to Arkwright the vast majority of manufacturing was undertaken in the home or in small workshops and the ambitions of the working people seldom went beyond a desire to feed their families and live similar lives to those they had seen their families and communities live in the past.
With the birth of the mill all this changed. Every invention they saw or heard of appeared to threaten their livelihood and when, in 1779, the American War of Independence brought a temporary hiatus to the growth of the trade, thousands of Lancashire textile workers marched on the spinning mills and attacked and destroyed the machinery. A new one, just built by Sir Richard Arkwright, was one of those destroyed.
The reaction to the manufacture of fabric by mechanical means was also violent. The first example of this was among the knitters of Nottingham and Leicester. Bands of knitters went out at night heading for a particular workshop. Guards were posted outside and the rest went in armed with axes and hammers and destroyed the machinery. It was all carried out like a well planned military operation even to the participants taking assumed names and following their leader who had named himself General Ludd.
Whether Luddism represented a mindless reaction to progress itself or was a justified reaction to the practices of certain manufacturers is, I suppose, a moot point but it spread widely and went on for the best part of twenty years. The general unrest and distrust at this time was not helped by the relatively new phenomenon of successful manufacturers moving away from the mills and building large houses in more remote and affluent parts of town, giving the impression that their interests were no longer those of their workpeople and the gap between rich and poor was becoming ever wider, in other words that the new riches of the employers were being bought by the miseries of the working man.
This then was the world into which James Nelson was born, a world of industrial and social upheaval. As he grew up and became a power loom weaver himself, he was to see the cessation of violence but the growth of a Trade Unionism born of bitterness and distrust, suspicious of employers and governments alike – a trade unionism which felt, with some justification perhaps, that the majority of manufacturers were motivated by no other consideration than their short term profit. As with most things in life though, it is adversity that causes the highlighting of troubles and once the factory system was established the prosperity and growth of the industry resulted in these problems, with certain exceptions such as the great Preston strike of 1853, assuming less significance and it is not until the pressures upon the industry in the 1920’s that the problems re-emerge as bitterly as before.
In the family history that follows, the first chapter deals with the growth of the firm itself and the reasons for its unusual success. The next two chapters are concerned with Amos’s dealings with the unions and his fellow employers in the troubled times between the wars and the fourth follows his private life. The fifth and final chapter covers the last 30 years of the firm’s existence coinciding with the contraction and demise of Lancashire as an important area for the production of textiles.
I am grateful to Anthony Burton’s book “The rise and fall of King Cotton” for many details in this chapter.
