The Coat Route

by Meg Lukens Noonan

  “This valley was the perfect place for textiles,” Bryan says. “It had the sheep and the soft water in the hills, and when the industry switched to steam it had the coal.”

  The cottage hand weavers and spinners, who sensed, correctly, that their jobs and their way of life were in jeopardy, did not welcome the machines. As Charlotte Brontë wrote in Shirley, the novel set in her native West Yorkshire during the dawn of the industrial age, the changes wrought by the new technology were nothing less than “the throes of a sort of moral earthquake … heaving under the hills of the northern counties.”

  Between 1810 and 1812, mills came under siege by mobs of angry textile workers, who came to be known as Luddites after a Robin Hood–like character named Ned Ludd, who had smashed two knitting machines in an unexplained huff in 1779. In Huddersfield and other mill towns, protesters ransacked factories, torched buildings, and raged against the machines.

  “What loomed before them was not merely the factory but a whole factory system … with its long hours and incessant work and harsh supervision that reduced self-respecting artisans, with long traditions of autonomy and status, to dependent wage slaves,” Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution.

  By the time the Luddite movement petered out, one mill owner and forty workers had died, fifty dissidents had been imprisoned or hanged, and dozens more had been exiled to Australia as convicts. And the machines marched on. Entire families, whole villages, walked down out of the hills and went to work in the factories. Children, some as young as four, who could fit into the tight, dangerous spaces behind and inside the machines to clean and service them, labored from five in the morning until seven-thirty or eight at night, sometimes later. When they showed signs of being tired, they were often beaten with a strap or hit on the head with a steel rod. Toxic dust fouled the air, and the rivers ran blue with dye.

  “It was not our finest hour,” Bryan says.

  In the 1830s, child-labor laws came under scrutiny. Experts on both sides weighed in on the issue. One Scottish economist felt that factory life was not only suitable for children but beneficial. The mills were the children’s “best and most important academies,” he said, apparently with a straight face. “Besides taking the children out of harm’s way, they have imbued them with regular, orderly and industrious habits.”

  But the grim facts suggested otherwise. The streets of Huddersfield were filled with boys and girls who had been crippled or made ill.

  “Cooped up in a heated atmosphere, debarred the necessary exercise, remaining in one position for a series of hours, one set or system of muscles alone called into activity, it cannot be wondered at—that its effects are injurious to the physical growth of a child,” P. Gaskell wrote in The Manufacturing Population of England. “Any man who has stood at twelve o’clock at the single narrow door-way, which serves as the place of exit for the hands employed in the great cotton-mills, must acknowledge, that an uglier set of men and women, of boys and girls, taking them in the mass, it would be impossible to congregate in a smaller compass.”

  There were some reforms made. The Factory Act of 1833 made it unlawful for children between the ages of nine and thirteen to work more than nine hours a day. But there was no going back: the factories were beasts that had to be fed.

  “It is too late now to argue about the unwholesome nature of manufacturing employment. We have got a manufacturing population, and it must be employed,” said John Charles Spencer, Lord Althorp (an ancestor of Princess Diana’s), who fought against labor laws. “This is an evil that cannot be remedied.”

  By the mid-1800s, there were more than a thousand mills in West Yorkshire. To get the goods to the ports and the raw materials to the mills, train tracks had been laid and canals had been dug from Liverpool to Hull, following the valley floor or boring through the hills. Bleach and dye works were established to provide the chemicals needed to finish the goods. Engineering firms sprang up to fill the factories with machines and motors. Brick manufacturers churned out the blocks needed for houses, tunnels, viaducts, and more mills—always more mills.

  When British sheep could not grow enough fleece to keep up with demand, buyers turned to Australia and New Zealand. And when plain wool seemed too ordinary, they looked to distant lands and more exotic creatures. Yorkshire winds carried cirrus wisps of fluff from Kashmir and Turkey and Peru, and in the mills spinners and weavers puzzled over how best to turn these odd, finicky fibers into cloth.

  Some were young tinkerers who would go on to build empires. There was Joseph Dawson, a Bradford mill owner who, after a trip through India, where he had seen women using their hands to painstakingly separate coarse guard hairs from the valuable down of raw cashmere, went home and began experimenting with a machine that could perform the operation without damaging the fibers. Once he’d perfected the machine, he started the world’s first commercial cashmere dehairing plant and launched the company that would dominate the cashmere industry for the next 150 years. His process was a secret known only to a few European cashmere processors until the 1970s.

  Then there was mill owner Titus Salt, also of Bradford, who at the age of thirty found dozens of dusty bundles of alpaca wool in a Liverpool warehouse. The bales, which may have arrived as ballast, had been ignored because no one knew what was in them or what to do with it. On a hunch, Salt bought the bales and went to work. After a year of trial and error, he discovered that weaving the alpaca onto a cotton warp created wonderfully soft cloth. When Queen Victoria wore a dress of Salt-woven alpaca and Prince Albert donned an alpaca coat, demand exploded. Salt built four mills to keep up with orders and quickly became very rich—he even owned a private steam train.

  The poor living and working conditions endured by textile workers and the foul air and filthy water in the factory valleys, however, had always bothered Salt. In 1851, he, by now sporting a long Father Time beard, bought land in the hills outside Bradford and began building a model village that he called Saltaire. A precursor to modern urban planning, the village had good housing, schools, a hospital, a concert hall, a library, and parklands. At its center was a palatial Italianate factory, the largest in Europe at the time, which at its peak employed some three thousand workers who wove eighteen miles of alpaca cloth a day.

  Fortunes were made up and down the valley. Rolls-Royces clogged the broad cobbled streets of Huddersfield; every mill owner had one, with custom body and trim work done by Rippon of Yorkshire, the local coach maker, who could barely keep up with demand. For a time before World War I, there were more millionaires in nearby Bradford than anywhere else in the world. The fires of industry burned around the clock in this valley and the valleys beyond it, then spread to Europe, and America—in the riverside cities of the Northeast and the hill towns of the South—then to Russia and Japan.

  “Here … in the Huddersfields of the north, our modern world was born,” wrote James Morris (who would later become Jan Morris) in The Road to Huddersfield: A Journey to Five Continents, commissioned in 1963 by the World Bank. “These horny, stocky, taciturn people were the first to live by chemical energies, by steam, cogs, iron and engine grease, and the first in modern times to demonstrate the dynamism of the human condition. This is where by all the rules of heredity, the sputnik and moon-rocket were conceived. Baedeker may not recognize it, but this is one of history’s crucibles.”

  Crucible or not, on this gray morning Huddersfield and its outskirts just look bleak. The yellowish grit stone used for most of the buildings gives off a jaundiced cast. Along the boggy river there are massive old mills capped with sawtooth rooflines. Some are abandoned and bombed-out-looking, their interiors scorched by arsonists and stripped bare by metal thieves. Others have been restored and converted into balconied apartments or offices, but even power-washed and propped up, the titanic Victorian mills still emanate a certain spectral gloom.

  Yorkshire’s reign as the wool-weaving capitol of the world lasted about a
hundred years. By the mid-1900s, cheaper imports made by poorly paid and unskilled workers in Asia and Eastern Europe were flooding the market. At the same time, synthetic, petroleum-based fibers such as acrylic and polyester were promising better living—and less ironing—through chemistry.

  “Cumbersome baggage will be a thing of the past, and businessmen carrying only briefcases will return from three-week trips looking as fresh as when they left home,” raved a 1952 Popular Science article about state-of-the-art suits made of DuPont’s wrinkle-free Dacron.

  Meanwhile, the British mills were sitting on their hands, failing to update their technology, and fell further and further behind.

  “The U.K. was a bit arrogant,” Bryan says. “We thought we’d rule the world forever.”

  We pull into Slaithwaite—“Sla-wit,” Bryan says, in the local dialect—a district in Huddersfield, with Victorian terraced houses and a navigable slot of canal running through the middle of town. Among people involved with the making of luxury clothing, Slaithwaite is known for one thing: it is the home of Spectrum Yarns, one of the world’s premier wool spinners and the last such business left in the United Kingdom. Spectrum occupies a hulking hundred-year-old former cotton mill on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal.

  “Here we are,” Bryan says, still sunny, as he pulls up and parks in front of the five-story building, which is etched with soot and anchored by a tapered smokestack. Inside, I am introduced to Paul Holt, Spectrum’s director of sales, who is clean-shaven and crisp in a yellow silk tie and a blue-and-white striped shirt. Under low ceilings hung with pipes and bars of fluorescent lights, Paul leads us through the factory. Spectrum specializes in yarn for worsted, the napless, tightly woven cloth that is used in apparel, especially fine men’s and women’s suits. (Bulkier and more textured “woolens” are made from fuzzy, loosely spun yarn.)

  The cleaned and combed wool goes through eight separate processes before it emerges as spools of weavable yarn. On one floor, we pass wooden bins full of pillowy coiled wool “tops.” On another level, dozens of industrial barrels are loaded with combed wool ropes called “rovings,” which are waiting to be fed into machines that will draw the wool into ever-finer filament. On each floor, a few workers in blue coveralls and orange kneepads patrol the machinery.

  Premium spinners like Spectrum do much more than shepherd wool into usable strands. They also develop complex, top-secret recipes of hues for yarns that will be exclusive to certain weavers and clothiers. In the high-stakes world of spinning and dyeing, blue cannot simply be blue. One of Spectrum’s best navies, for instance, has seven different shades in it. Grays are twisted with bits of yellow and red. The blends give the final product richness and depth, but, equally important, they also make things difficult for would-be copiers.

  “In China, there are huge mills with new machinery that is so sophisticated you don’t need years of experience to operate it,” Bryan says. “There is a green button and a red button. But they don’t have the design skills, so they’ll copy everything. These blends we make give them a big problem. We like that.”

  Still, China needs only about a month to decode and turn around a knocked-off design.

  “We get one clear season,” Bryan says.

  To combat counterfeiting, some fabric makers, including Dormeuil, impregnate DNA into their fabrics to create a genetic fingerprint. A simple swab test shows if it is the real Yorkshire-made deal or a cheap imitation.

  Paul takes us to a room full of spinning frames, which are winding dark-blue yarn onto hundreds of bobbins. Bryan walks over to one machine, flips a lever, pulls a spool off its holder, and studies it. Spectrum’s machines look high-tech to me, but their technology, according to Paul, is intentionally less than state-of-the-art. Slower machines allow them to handle the most delicate fibers—even vicuña—and make single pieces for high-end clients.

  “It takes time to make quality,” Paul says, as he makes some adjustments to a reel. “Anyone can make the rubbish.”

  We stand and watch in silence for a while. I have no clue what is going on in the dark, unseeable reaches of these whirring machines, but there is something very pleasing about the way the spools are fattening up. On the way to the elevator, we pass a paned window, flecked with dirt. I stop and look out at a scene that, over the years, thousands of workers must have peered at. The mist has turned to rain, darkening the sepia walls of nearby mill buildings and creating brown puddles in the parking lot next to the old canal. Except for a single red truck and the green hills visible beyond the rooflines, the scene is as monotone and moody as a tintype.

  Once we are downstairs, Paul says, “I have something you might want to see.” He unlocks the door to an office. In the middle of the small room, on a worn cement floor, there is a giant clear plastic trash bag filled with what looks like brown stuffing.

  Paul unties the top knot and opens the bag.

  “Just got this in,” he says.

  I recognize the warm cinnamon color and airy clumps. It is a bag of vicuña fleece—nearly fifty pounds of it, Paul says, just arrived from Peru.

  “That’s about forty thousand dollars’ worth. We’ll use that up in about a year.”

  Bryan reaches in and pulls out a handful, and tells me I can do the same. I dip in with two hands and lift up a nest-size puff, being careful not to let any escape.

  “When were you in Peru?” Bryan asks after we put the clumps back. He has picked up a tag attached to the bag.

  “July,” I say.

  “Hmm,” he says, studying coded information on the label. “Probably not.”

  That’s okay. This may not be my vicuña, but I know the road it has traveled.

  After Slaithwaite, we head north to Keighley—“Keethley”—an old mill town set cinematically at the confluence of the Rivers Aire and Worth. Above it is an amphitheater of gray-green moors, windswept and bleak enough to bring a lump to the throat of every English major, including me, as she passes through on her way to the Brontë sisters’ homestead, just three miles away. Since the 1780s, this valley has been dominated by Dalton Mills, a sprawling stone complex with turrets and arched gateways, which, depending on the viewer’s mood and the density of the cloud cover, could look like either a grand hotel or an asylum for the criminally insane. At its height in the mid to late nineteenth century, Dalton was Keighley’s biggest employer, with two thousand people on its payroll. If you didn’t work there, you worked at one of the thirty other mills or textile machine makers in the valley—or in the pubs and brothels that provided distraction from the monotony of the looms and the pervasive stink of privies and slaughterhouse offal.

  By the 1980s, most of the mills had either been abandoned or demolished. Every now and then, a BBC or Bollywood film crew would show up to use the Dalton Victorian façades and loading docks to lend authenticity to their period productions, but for the most part the things that got attention in Keighley were not things to feel good about. There was the shuttering of Woolworths and the House of Books. There were the tensions between the locals and the growing population of Pakistani immigrants. There were gang wars over control of the heroin trade. And there was the disheartening, but not altogether unexpected, news that Keighley had been featured in a book of England’s top fifty “crap towns.”

  Recently, though, there have been some signs that a pulse beats yet in old Keighley. The Dalton complex is being developed into residences and offices. (Abacus Bouncy Castle Hire and Premier Telecom Solutions have both set up shop there.) The clock in the mill’s high tower is working again for the first time in twenty-five years. An ambitious master plan has been presented by investors, who envision transforming Keighley by 2020 into a town with a walkable and fully restored historic core.

  And then there is the remarkable Pennine Weavers—the only working mill left in Keighley—and the reason we are here.

  Bryan parks in front of a low building on the banks of the narrow, foliage-obscured North Beck. No one would guess that in this 130-yea
r-old mill, which also houses a paintbrush manufacturer and a Royal Mail warehouse, some of the world’s most valuable fabric is being woven—or that Gary Eastwood, a tall, square-jawed forty-two-year-old former local cricket champ and the mill’s managing director, is a major player in haute couture and bespoke tailoring.

  Pennine Weavers was founded as a small-commission weaving operation in 1970 as the town’s traditional vertical worsted mills were closing down. Gary bought the company in 2003. From his small office, we can see through a window to the factory floor, where thirty automated looms produce about thirty-five thousand meters of fabric every week. This is superb cloth, destined for Burberry, Ralph Lauren, and Armani, among others—and for the cutting tables of the world’s best tailors, including John Cutler and every top Savile Row artisan. Pennine does one hundred labor-intensive loom changes every week, prepping the machines to make short runs of expensive, niche fabrics, including cloth that is woven with twenty-two-karat gold and platinum. Dormeuil commissions half of the mill’s output. This is where Vanquish II, the firm’s delicate wool, musk ox, and vicuña concoction is woven.