Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  No duties were levied on fustian under the 1721 law, since it was not a calico. In fact the strict interpretation of that law, and whether it should be used to stop native production of cotton, was never fully tested; people wanted cotton and so long as the correct duty was paid on printed cloth (which depended on whether local excise men were assiduous) then home-made fustian was allowed. Some were willing to flout the restrictions on imported cotton; the actor David Garrick ordered a ‘chintz bed and curtains’ from India, which was impounded by customs in 1775. He used his influence to liberate his goods, and the bed is now in the V&A Museum in London.

  The development of the cotton industry in Lancashire was dictated by the changing technology that we will examine in the next chapters, but it was growing demand in Britain, Europe and North America that led to its expansion. The effect on Lancashire itself can be seen in the family histories of the time. When Samuel Bamford (1788–1872) traced his ancestry he discovered that:

  It would be about . . . the year 1716, that my father’s grandfather, James Bamford, lived in Hools Wood, in Thornham, keeping a small farm, and making cane reeds for weavers of flannel and of course cotton . . . My grandfather was Daniel Bamford . . . He came to reside at Middleton, and was a small farmer and weaver . . . My father was a weaver of muslin, at that time considered a fine course of work, and requiring a superior hand; whilst my mother found plenty of employment in occasional weaving, in winding bobbins or pins for my father, and in looking after the house and children.14

  In three generations the Bamfords had gone from farmers making reeds for weavers to first part-time and then full-time weavers. During that time the villages of Thornham and Middleton became part of the growing Manchester conurbation and cotton weaving moved from the cottage to the factory. Early factories were not pleasant workplaces but if weaving in cottages sounds idyllic, in reality it was a hard life. Country cottages were little more than hovels with earth floors, tiny windows and little enough space, much of it taken up by the loom. The family home might in addition have to accommodate a simple carding device, a spinning wheel and some tubs for washing the cotton. As one loom could handle four spinning wheels, several families sometimes worked together in large sheds where banks of looms and spinning wheels were run. Some weavers became master artisans, training apprentices and putting out work to spinners.

  The putting-out system developed to a high degree of efficiency in the wool industry in West Yorkshire, but it was more effective still in south Lancashire. Merchants knew where to come to for good-quality cloth, while clothiers knew how to get the best deals, how to adapt to changing needs and how to keep their workers supplied with materials. The cotton industry grew steadily if unspectacularly until the 1770s. Lancashire had the advantage of a port, and mechanical expertise in the watchmaking industry; it was also a stronghold of Nonconformists embracing industrial and commercial enterprise. When mechanisation came, Lancashire was ready to adopt it at speed. But the first great technological advance was actually a false dawn, or more properly a delayed take-off.

  In 1733 John Kay, a weaver from Bury, patented the flying shuttle. Kay had already invented an improved metal reed (the large comb-like device for keeping warp threads separated on a loom) and patented a cording and twisting machine for use in the worsted trade. He was clearly a gifted inventor and his flying shuttle was a stroke of genius. By mechanically ‘throwing’ the shuttle, which carried the weft thread, across the loom, it saved the weaver from stopping at every pass to manhandle the device. It also removed limitations on the width of cloth, which had previously been dictated by how far one or two men could stretch across to pass the shuttle back and forth. In hindsight it seems astonishing that the device was invented at such an early date, forty years or so before mechanisation really began to take hold. But while this reveals that small improvements to spinning and weaving were taking place in the Lancashire industry from the 1720s, the initial fact of Kay’s invention shows that the external conditions were still not quite right for the flying shuttle to have an overwhelming impact; there were still obstacles to change.

  Kay had problems convincing weavers of the reliability of his device, while those who took it up often reneged on the royalty payments of fifteen shillings per shuttle. Kay took some to court but his awards were less than the costs of the lawsuits – in fact a ‘shuttle club’ was formed to defend users against Kay’s actions. Some weavers, fearful of losing their jobs because of the greater efficiency of his machines, attacked the devices, while others petitioned king and Parliament to have them banned. It was only in the 1760s that the flying shuttle became widely used in the Lancashire cotton industry, with weavers and clothiers keen to produce cloth more quickly for a growing market.

  Once the flying shuttle spread through the industry, it became clear that spinning with traditional wheels could no longer keep pace with looms running at two, three or four times the previous speeds. By the end of the 1760s both Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (invented around 1765), and Arkwright’s frame (patented in 1769) had solved the problem, followed in the next decade by Crompton’s mule – all three invented in Lancashire. These devices could all be driven from external power sources, meaning that the laborious tasks of turning and drawing the thread were no longer carried out by human hands. The logical development was for the machines now to be grouped together in buildings with central power sources – first waterwheels then steam engines – and it was Richard Arkwright who took the first crucial steps.

  But the cotton mill was only the culmination of a wider process that transformed every Lancashire town and village, as William Radcliffe looking back on the 1780s described:

  The mule-twist now coming into vogue, for the warp as well as the weft, added to the water-twist [Arkwright’s machine] and common jenny yarns, with an increasing demand for every fabric the loom could produce, put all hands in request, or every age and description. The fabrics made from wool or linen vanished, while the old loom-shops being insufficient, every lumber-room, even old barns, cart-houses, and outbuildings of any description were repaired, windows broke through the old blank walls, and all fitted up for loom-shops.15

  By the end of the century, in the eastern part of Lancashire and adjacent parts of Cheshire and Yorkshire, there were close to 300 towns and villages whose principal income came from producing cotton in factories.

  Mechanising spinning was like taking a cork out of a bottle. In the 1770s Arkwright lobbied successfully for the repeal of the 1721 Act, since cotton production was now a British industry, exporting to every part of the world. The figures are startling: in the 1750s cotton exports were worth an annual average of £86,000; by the 1770s that had increased to £248,000, and by the 1780s to £756,000. In eight years from 1775 production of British calicoes rose from 57,000 to 3.5 million yards.

  But that was just the beginning. As more mills were built, the cotton gin (invented in 1793) and the powered loom (which became effective around 1800) increased productivity such that by the 1820s British cotton exports were worth £28.8 million, comprising an astonishing 62 per cent of all the country’s exports. By the 1840s the world had been turned on its head and India was now the biggest export market for Lancashire cotton cloth. (Cotton remained the country’s most valuable export until the 1920s when its export value reached £192 million per annum.) Imports of raw cotton which was processed by the British cotton industry rose from an average of 2.8 million pounds in the 1750s, to 173 million in the 1820s; at its height just before the First World War the figure reached 1.8 billion pounds per year. 16

  Cotton made fortunes for some. In 1837 Leonard Horner, a factory inspector, described a meeting with a cotton baron:

  On Friday I went to Hyde, a large and densely populated village, and visited a very large mill belonging to a Mr Horsfield, a man nearly 70 years of age, who is said to be worth at least £300,000 and can hardly write his own name . . . He told me that at 18 he had not five shillings in the world beyond his weekly wages
of fifteen shillings. Out of his wages he saved £28, bought a spinning jenny and made £30 the first year. In 1831 he made £24,000 of profit. He employs 1,200 people. He is not a solitary case; there are many not unlike him in this part of the country.17

  In the eighteenth century raw cotton was brought in from India, the Ottoman Empire and from new plantations in the Caribbean and the colonies of North America. But the first half of the nineteenth century saw a significant change in supply. The coastal colonies of Virginia and North and South Carolina had grown wealthy on a mix of tobacco, coffee, rice and cotton. Most was produced on family plantations worked with slave labour. Pioneers of the newly independent United States pushed west towards the Mississippi, establishing settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase of a vast swathe of territory west of the Mississippi, opening the way for the settlement of the Deep South and the establishment of new states on both sides of the river. Settlers soon discovered that the conditions in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were ideal for the cultivation of cotton, which became the ‘wonder crop’ of the American South. While the Atlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807 by Britain and the United States, this period saw the beginning of the biggest forced transportation of slaves in history. From 1810 to 1860 more than a million slaves were officially recorded as crossing state boundaries, with millions more moving within states to work on cotton plantations. In 1802 the United States exported $5 million worth of raw cotton; by 1830 this had risen to $30 million and by 1860 to $192 million, by which time the nation was producing 75 per cent of the world’s raw cotton – with most of the crop going to the mills of Lancashire.18

  The British cotton industry also benefitted from the trade networks opened up by the global dominance of the Royal Navy and the nation’s mercantile fleet. Lancashire cotton was cheaper and better than any produced elsewhere in the world, including the Americas and Europe, where populations were growing exponentially. Improved shipping meant that global markets could be reached more reliably and more cheaply.

  The prodigious and sustained growth in the British cotton industry both relied on and fostered continual technological innovation. As the market continued to grow, faster production, better quality and labour-saving all brought rewards. And the innovations spun out into surrounding industries – Manchester became the world centre of engineering and machine-tool manufacture and its chemical industry worked on new methods of dyeing, starching, sizing and printing cloth. The cotton trade encouraged innovations in ventilation systems for factories, transport technology and cleaning products, while rapid turnover of fashions in clothing and furnishings meant that textile design was at the heart of British industry.

  Cotton was the first globally traded commodity and British industry benefitted from a growing market combined with technical ingenuity. But the opportunities for expansion did not diminish the difficulties faced by innovators. Men like John Kay, Thomas Highs, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton and Edmund Cartwright had to overcome problems that had defeated everyone else; they had to be inspired, then turn their ideas into working machines, and finally make them reliable and profitable. We might believe that building a machine to spin cotton would be a simple affair, but a deeper understanding of the process gives us a further insight into the technical ingenuity, commercial competitiveness and individual determination that characterised the Industrial Revolution.

  11. Spinning and Weaving

  SPINNING YARN OUT of cotton, wool, flax, hemp or silk is among the oldest human skills: yarn is known to have been spun in Egypt as early as 7,000 BC. The process involves two distinct movements: twisting and drawing. The raw material, usually in the form of fibres, has to be twisted to give strength and cohesion, and then pulled out or drawn to give length and fineness.

  For most of human history spinners used either a drop spindle or a spindle and distaff. Using a drop spindle the spinner allows the spindle to drop down, drawing out the yarn with its weight, while at the same time rolling it between the fingers to give the thread the necessary twist. Alternatively the unspun yarn is held on a distaff and the spindle is drawn away with one hand. Once a length has been drawn out, the spinner picks up the spindle and winds the length on to the reel of spun yarn. Then the cycle starts again.1 The drawback with these methods is their slowness; the advantages are that the devices are completely portable, and at the highest levels of skill spinners could produce threads that were both extremely fine and sufficiently strong.

  The first major change in spinning technology came with the development of the spinning wheel, which appeared in Mesopotamia and China around the eleventh century AD and in India and Europe in the thirteenth century. In the traditional wheel the spindle is mounted at an angle and is turned by a so-called great wheel, which allows the spinner a free hand to feed the unspun yarn on to the spindle. The yarn is given its twist by being held at a slight angle to the spindle and continuously slipped over the end of the spindle as it turns. As with the spindle and distaff, the spinner draws out the thread while it is being twisted. Once a full length is drawn out, a section of the thread is coiled out towards the end of the spindle. This needs to be uncoiled and recoiled on to the main reel of thread, together with the drawn-out section. The spindle is therefore put into reverse spin, until all the unreeled thread is drawn out, then put back into ‘forward’ motion so that all the twisted and drawn thread can be reeled on to the main reel at the bottom of the spindle – it is crucial to keep in mind this last part of the operation. The wheel is obviously less portable and more expensive to set up than the simple drop spindle, but it produces thread up to ten times faster.

  Using wheels and spindles, skilled hand-spinners were able to produce cotton threads of extraordinary fineness for weaving into cotton cloths and muslins. The Bengal region of India became particularly renowned for the fineness and high quality of its cotton thread and cloth. The measure of fineness was indicated by the number of hanks to a pound: in the 1740s twelve-thread (coarse thread at twelve hanks to the pound) sold at 1s 6d a pound, while sixty-thread was 14s and eighty-thread was 20s 6d. Indian thread was usually around sixty, but could be as high as eighty. To reach this level of strength and fineness required great dexterity from the spinner: they had to use their fingers to even out the thread as it was being drawn, while feeding just enough to give the finest thread. Imitating this delicate manual skill was the biggest challenge for anyone seeking to mechanise the spinning process.

  Spinning wheel spindle: The spindle is turned via the so-called great wheel, which is turned by hand or a foot treadle. The spinner simultaneously draws out the thread and imparts a twist by slipping the thread continuously over the end of the spindle.

  During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adaptations were made to the basic spinning wheel. A foot treadle for turning the great wheel gave better speeds and freed both the spinner’s hands. More intriguingly a new device called a ‘flyer’ was developed – this was described by Leonardo da Vinci in 1519, although we don’t known how much influence he had in its development. Certainly by the 1550s it was in widespread use in a device known as the Saxony wheel.

  The flyer is a U-shaped device that turns around the spindle (now more correctly a bobbin for simply reeling the thread). Both devices rotate, which gives a twist to the yarn which is being fed through a hole in the axis of the flyer, but the flyer turns slightly faster than the bobbin, thereby reeling the cotton on to the bobbin as they both turn. This ingenious system allows the yarn to be twisted and reeled at the same time. This was a considerable advance, instantly overcoming the need to reverse the turn of the spindle in order to re-reel the thread. However, getting the right tension in the thread was difficult and the flyer system was used mainly for spinning coarse thread.

  Flyer and spindle: The thread is fed onto the flyer from the top. The flyer turns at a slightly different speed to the spindle or bobbin, and this gives the thread a twist as it is wound on.

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bsp; The relative complexity of the spinning cycle explains why its mechanisation was such a difficult task. In fact, before the eighteenth century there was no real need for mechanisation. In most countries a craft economy had developed where one or two spinners in a household could supply enough thread to keep a loom busy. In India there was no shortage of labour to produce enough cotton thread to keep weavers supplied, while in Europe the cotton market was small and only slowly growing, compared to that for wool and linen, where ‘traditional’ methods were well established and jealously guarded from change.

  Two things happened to alter this. Firstly the popularity of cotton cloth, combined with restrictions on imports, fostered a growing domestic spinning industry. Secondly John Kay’s 1733 invention of the flying shuttle made weaving, particularly cotton weaving, much faster. Once this new shuttle became widely adopted in the 1760s one loom could devour thread from at least half a dozen spinning wheels. Weavers needed more yarn than they could get hold of and created an urgent need for a faster method of spinning.

  The first attempts to mechanise spinning focussed, naturally enough, on the flyer system.2 With the Saxon wheel the final stage of spinning the thread while maintaining tension was achieved by the flyer and bobbin system; but the drawing out of the unspun thread, known as the roving (or the sliver in the wool mills of Yorkshire), was done by hand. The major challenge was to devise a system that would allow the roving to be drawn out to give a consistent fineness while maintaining the correct tension in the thread. In the same decade that Kay patented the flying shuttle, John Wyatt from Lichfield devised a system for drawing out the roving using a series of pairs of rollers through which the unspun yarn would pass, with each pair running at a slightly different speed. This was a simple though ingenious idea but it was too complex to get it to work satisfactorily. Nevertheless by 1738 Wyatt’s partner Lewis Paul had taken out a patent ‘for the spinning of wool and cotton in a manner entirely new’. Their patent application stated: ‘As the prepared mass, rope, thread or sliver passes regularly through or betwixt these rowlers, cillinders or cones, a succession of other rowlers, cillinders or cones, moving proportionately faster than the first, draws the rope, thread or sliver in any degree of fineness which may be required.’