THE 1983 WILFRED SPENCER LECTURE

[Stanley]

THE 1983 WILFRED SPENCER LECTURE

'Growth in the East Lancashire cotton industry. Barnoldswick as a microcosm of single industry urban development'. This lecture was given by Stanley Graham as the Wilfred Spencer Memorial Lecture at Pendle heritage Centre on March the 9th, 1983.
(I reprinted this in its original form after finding it had been hijacked and edited before being re-published and put in the local library losing its original point.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, when I was approached by the Civic Trust and asked whether I would give the Wilfred Spencer Memorial Lecture for 1983, my first feeling was one of pleasure because of the honour that had been done to me. The second was one of trepidation as the full measure of my responsibility bore in on me. This paper had to be worthy of the occasion. I had to start from first principles.
My first instinct was to write a defence of the local historian, who is often seen by other historians as a poor relation. This wouldn't do though, as Wilfred Spencer himself, by his life's work, has amply justified his field of research. Dr. Marshall, in his Memorial Lecture of 1979 reinforced this justification and expanded the theme to point out the importance of the Industrial Heritage in any study of Local History.
It was whilst reading John Marshall’s lecture again that a possible answer to my predicament occurred to me. Dr. Marshall has been a formative influence in my career as a historian and was one of my tutors at Lancaster University. It was he who gently directed my efforts into research into technology of the cotton industry. Wilfred Spencer's collections have provided many of the research tools I needed to pursue the work. My subject became clearer. What follows therefore has links with both Wilfred Spencer and previous memorial lectures. I proffer it as evidence that the work of Wilfred Spencer lives on in the next generation of historians and that not only the paper I am about to give you, but the whole body of work behind it, is a memorial to Wilfred Spencer and his brethren. And so, the invitation to present this paper concentrated my mind and forced me to review the progress of my research over the last eight years. The broad area of research has been Growth in the East Lancashire Cotton Industry. The particular subject is ‘Barnoldswick as a microcosm of single industry urban development’.
At the beginning of the 19th Century Barnoldswick was a typical upper Pennine village with a population of just under 1000 in the township itself and about 2000 thinly scattered over what was the old Barnoldswick Urban District Council area. The main industry was agriculture, associated with domestic hand-loom weaving organised by local spinning masters using water power.
The sphere of influence of these spinners was surprisingly wide. We know from references in Wadsworth and Mann that pieces were carried from Grindleton near Clitheroe to Barnoldswick. We also note from the same source that pieces were carried from Blacko to Clitheroe, so it would appear that spheres of influence of spinners overlapped. The governing factor which decided which putting out master you worked with was the availability of credit rather than ease of access.
The spinners operated from water powered mills in the town itself. There were three of these: Gillians, Old Coates and Mitchell’s Mill. There was also a saw-mill and bobbin turnery at Ouzledale and a corn mill in the centre of the town. All these water powered sources used run-off from Weets Hill which lies to the West of the town. There was a fall of 500 ft. in half a mile from Weets to the valley floor in which the town lies. It was this availability of water power which helped the town become a spinning centre.
Domestic weaving was carried on in the farms and dwellings of the area and cannot now be easily located as there were no specialised loomshops with long windows such as are found in other locations. It is not clear why this was so. The most likely explanation seems to be that Barnoldswick was not a centre of concentration in weaving. The single loom seems to have been the rule, set up in an existing building. The spinners served a widely scattered weaving industry rather than drawing the weavers in to the town itself.
The spinning mills were not the only service the town provided for the area. There was a church, retail shops, a weekly cattle market and a communication function based on the meeting of the ancient roads. However, transport was difficult owing to the terrain and there were no local coal resources. On the face of it, this was not a likely venue for industrial growth. One could very easily have expected to see the town regress as its population was drawn off by the attractions of the new textile towns of Colne, Nelson and Burnley and the disadvantages of a declining domestic industry.
However, this was not what happened. On the contrary, the town virtually exploded after 1845 and by the early 20th Century, with 25,000 looms to 12,000 people, had one of the highest concentrations of looms per head of the population that the industry has ever seen. How did this happen? What were the forces unleashed in 1845 which led to this situation? In the answer to these questions lies the reason why Barnoldswick is a microcosm of the East Lancashire Industry. The patterns of investment, migration and growth with the implications these had for management, technology and social effects can be directly equated with those which prevailed in the industry as a whole.
The first discontinuity was at the end of the 18th Century when the Leeds and Liverpool Canal reached the town. The immediate effect of this was the stimulus to the area caused by the construction itself - the influx of itinerant workers, the opening of Rainhall Rock Quarry and perhaps more important, the psychological shock of change. At this distance of time, we cannot precisely assess the impact of this disruption to the even tenor of life of the town but it seems this could have been at least as important as the improvement which the canal brought in terms of bulk transport. A population which had never seen a man-made hole in the ground bigger than a small quarry, and that over a period of many years, suddenly saw a great gash cut across the countryside by an army of men. Cuttings and tunnels were dug and bridges thrown up almost overnight. The largest load that could be moved by horse transport must have seemed puny compared with the 40 tons which a broad canal barge could carry. Even the largest modern diesel wagon is limited to 20 tons payload. In relative terms this was a stupendous leap forward and must have had its effect on the minds of men as well as the local economy.
Economically and practically the canal was an instant improvement. Earlier in the 18th Century it had been calculated that it cost as much to move heavy bulk goods 15 miles by road as it did 300 miles by water. The advent of the canal meant that there was economical access to the Burnley coalfield. Perhaps just as important, East Lancashire now had access to the non-bedded gritstone of the Upper Hill quarries at Barnoldswick which were to become famous for their high quality road setts and sawn stone.
It was some time before another potent effect of the canal became apparent. It is not generally realised that a steam powered factory needs a water supply just as much as a water mill did. In this case the limiting factor is not the fall of the water but its volume and temperature. Large supplies of cold water were needed to cool the condensers which gave the engines their efficiency. This was especially important in summer. There was a limit as to how many engines could use one water course and there are many instances in Barnoldswick of complaints because the mill above on a water course was discharging hot water and so lessening the efficiency of the mill below. The canal was an unlimited supply of condenser water and so had important effects on the siting of power mills once the urban water sites were used up.
The crucial factor in this use was that water used for condensing could be returned to the canal. In the words of one noted steam engineer in Barnoldswick “We were only borrowing it!” Industries such as dye-works and paper mills could not do this because of pollution and were forced out into the countryside in search of other water resources. Think of the effect on the urban development of Lancashire if the later steam mills had not had the advantage of canal water. The industry would have been scattered over the countryside and the large conurbations would not have grown up as we know them because the mills would have taken their associated housing and services with them. However, we overrun ourselves, this was in the future. The canal was to have only limited local economic impact until the advent of steam mills in the town in the mid 19th Century.
So, by early in the 19th Century Barlick was a moderately prosperous village which had taken advantage of the early textile inventions. The spinners were using water frames and produced yarn to support a domestic weaving industry which apart from the flying shuttle had seen no advance since pre-historic times. However, change was on the horizon and was brought about by complex factors which we should take some account of before proceeding.
The putting out system had certain basic advantages for the spinner. He did not have to supply much capital as, apart from his spinning machinery, his workers provided fixed capital for premises and equipment. The demands on the spinner's capital were further eased by the fact that he could obtain credit from the merchant (usually in London) who supplied his staple and took much of his cloth. London was the main entry port for raw cotton until the late 18th Century. There were however disadvantages. The spinner had very little control over quality or quantity of output. The demands of hay harvest on a weaver's time and his family's labour meant that weaving took second place. The weavers tended only to weave for subsistence and when this was provided for, would take leisure rather than increased earnings. This made it difficult for the spinner to keep to delivery dates. The yarn put out usually remained the property of the spinner, the weaver was in effect a piece worker. Any yarn he could embezzle from the spinner was a bonus to him and this was a constant drain on the spinner. Transport of yarn and cloth was difficult and further exacerbated the spinner's problems.
The answer to these disadvantages was to come after 1830 when the second major wave of textile inventions hit the industry. These were the perfection of the rotative steam engine, the self acting mule, the power loom, the tape sizing machine and the use of cast iron in power transmission and mill construction. The combined effects of these advances were to make it possible to concentrate all the processes of manufacture under one roof. The combined mill had arrived.
All the factors we have described so far have been exogenous, they came from outside the town. The next important step was not possible without an impetus from within, this endogenous factor was local capital.
The spinners gained an advantage from the impact of the new technology as they could achieve complete control of output but there was a price to pay for this advance. The use of the new technology meant that large amounts of fixed capital had to be sunk into entirely new mills and machinery. It is a good indication of the scale of the earlier water powered industry in the town that some of the putting out masters were able to take on this task. Two of them, Mitchell and Bracewell, started to build and opened the first steam mills. Mitchell modernised the old Mitchell's water spinning mill and opened it as Clough Mill in 1845. Bracewell built Butts Mill on a green field site and commenced manufacture in 1846. Both mills combined spinning and weaving under one roof.
The opening of these two mills and Bracewell's second mill, Wellhouse, in 1854, were major events in themselves but possibly more important in terms our thesis was the effect they had on the town. As employment rose, the demand for labour, housing and services rose also. We should take note here of one of the basic characteristics of the Lancashire cotton industry which has often escaped the notice of historians. The early water powered industry had relied on small power sources. This had limited the size of a spinner's operations and had tended to encourage specialisation. A man concentrated on what he knew best and put other work to outside service industry. This trend carried on into the steam driven textile factories and one of the concomitants of growth in industrial production was the rise of the textile service industries. There were opportunities for independent reed makers, heald knitters, slay makers, shuttle and bobbin manufacturers, tape sizers and cloth finishers. The textile industry stimulated small scale local enterprise and consequently, employment in other locations than the mills. This general growth in employment and opportunity encouraged in-migration from the surrounding areas, growth in the construction industry and allied trades and a general increase in the demand for services ranging from retail shops and entertainment to transport and sanitation. Population in surrounding townships began to fall as workers flowed to the centre. The town grew physically and put pressure on local government administration. Social expenditure on education, health and transport rose. By 1871 a branch railway had been financed by local capital to connect the town to the Midland Railway at Earby and a further extension (never to be completed) to join the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway at Gisburn had been mooted.
This prosperity was based on three steam mills and two entrepreneurs. In many ways it is analogous with the Country Mill type of development such as Gregs at Styal or Salts at Saltaire, in that the major capital was concentrated in few hands. This produced stability but at the expense of any direct opportunity in the industry for diverse sources of local capital. It is difficult to forecast what would have been the eventual development of the town had these conditions prevailed. As it was, the situation was to change drastically in the late 19th Century. Mitchell sold out to a silk weaver from Galgate near Lancaster in 1867 after the Cotton Famine and Bracewell's empire collapsed in the late 1880's.
The major event of the two was the collapse of Bracewell's interests. This left a vacuum in the town with three quarters of the manufacturing capacity idle and on June 23rd, 1888 a report in the Craven Herald described the town as being ‘in a low state’. On September 8th the same paper reported 200 or 300 houses empty as the labour force moved out of the town to seek employment elsewhere.
This could have been the death blow to future development had it not been for the intervention of those diverse sources of capital who had been smothered under the Bracewell hegemony. In 1887 and 1888 two groups of local capital holders got together to finance the building of two new steam-weaving sheds to be let out to manufacturers in small units with Room and Power provided.
The 'Room & Power' system was not new. Multiple tenancy was an old concept in the textile factory system. Arkwright himself was a tenant at one time and there is a record of multiple tenancy at Gillians Mill in Barnoldswick in the late 18th Century. However, these were as a result of partnerships.
It was the repeal of the 1720 Bubble Act in 1825 which opened the way for the new joint stock companies. Small entrepreneurs with relatively limited stocks of capital were quick to recognise the opportunity available to them to participate in the new steam driven cotton industry. This influx of diverse capital combined with the fact that by simply providing the premises, the promoters could take advantage of the security offered under law to landlords, encouraged the growth in North East Lancashire of the system whereby a syndicate built the mill and ran it to provide room for a manufacturer's looms and power to drive them. The beauty of this system was the low threshold of entry cost to the shareholders in the shed company and the manufacturer. It also encouraged the manufacturers to specialise in weaving alone and so further stimulated the growth of the service industries with even further opportunities for small capital holders. The gateway was opened to a flood of small investors.
These investors were extremely diverse. The Calf Hall Shed Company in Barnoldswick included in its founders a jeweller, a physician, a joiner, a farmer and a gentleman. The first auditor was the postmaster, the secretary was a house furnisher and the chairman of the public meeting which launched the company was the local parson. 38 people gave their names as stock-holders at this meeting and within a month £6,000 out of the £10,000 needed had been subscribed locally. This investment by small capital holders who had a direct stake in the prosperity of the town launched the Room and Power system and provided a framework in which the actual manufacturers could work. They were so successful that by the end of the 19th Century some of them had outgrown the system and built their own mills in order to expand and take advantage of the buoyant trade in textiles. This secondary boom resulted in seven new mills and 12,000 looms being put into the town between 1900 and 1920.
The reasons for this growth are complex and important. As we have seen, the capital of the shed companies was very diverse. There seems to have been a special cachet in owning shed company shares and the existing small shareholdings were further dispersed by partiple inheritance. By the 1930's a stage had been reached where many of the dividend payments were less than the cost of posting them to the shareholders. This wide dispersion of shares and attractiveness of ownership meant that very few ever came on to the market. The effect of this was that the manufacturers could not get any significant holding in the shed companies which would enable them to share in the profits generated by their efforts. It also prevented them from influencing the companies to expand so that they could install more looms. In the buoyant trade in the early 1900's it was a sound commercial decision to expand. This could not be done inside the existing system and so the new generation of mills were built. In almost every case, these mills were financed by profits earned in the Room and Power system.
The importance of this development can hardly be minimised. I have tried to avoid statistics but the significance of this growth is best conveyed by some simple figures. Between 1887 and 1913 the number of looms in Lancashire as a whole rose from 582,500 to 786,200, a rise of 35%. The increase in Barnoldswick for the same period was from 3,000 to 20,000, 550%. This was an amazing burst of industrial activity for a town which had a population of only 6,000 in 1900. I earlier described it as an explosion and don't think this is an exaggerated metaphor. The town must have been like an ant-heap, one vast building site, for not only had the mills to be constructed but the workers' housing and all the amenities and services that went with it. If ever evidence of the power of King Cotton were needed, surely it is demonstrated here and in the balance sheets of the shed companies and manufacturers.
So, by 1920 Barnoldswick was a fully fledged single industry cotton town of 12,000 inhabitants. It was also sliding into decline, together with the rest of the industry after the trauma of the Great War, but we are concerned with growth in this paper, not decline.
We must now move into the second stage of an historian's work. Having catalogued the growth of industry in the town, we must now fill out the picture with an assessment of what the effects of this growth were. Some of these are evident, some are hidden.
The most evident change was physical. There had been very little topographic change in the area for the hundred years preceding 1800 and even less before that. The biggest single piece of evidence to be seen in a bird's eye view of the town in 1800 would have been the immense scar of the canal cut and its associated workings. This healed for 40 years until in 1845 the mill building started. Clough Mill in 1845, Butts Mill in 1846 and Wellhouse in 1854 together with their associated housing and public works filled in some of the blanks on the landscape and the eleven subsequent mills created the solid block of buildings which now stretches from Upper Hill to Brogden Lane and Monkroyd to Coates.
This rash of building deepened the scars of the Upper Hill and Salterforth Quarries and led to the building of a brick works below Bracewell's quarry which used the offal from the workings and coal from Ingleton. Tramways were built down to the canal to facilitate the transport and loading of the stone which was shipped out into Burnley and beyond. The boilers of the mills provided ashes which, when ground with lime in mortar pans powered by the line shaft provided the characteristic mortar of any building erected after 1850.
This construction stimulated the growth of building and allied trades. Services had to be constructed and provided. Water works were built on Whitemoor. The gas works started as a private venture by Bracewell to light Wellhouse Mill but was in the process of expansion on a new site near the Corn Mill when Bracewell & Sons collapsed in 1885. This site became the municipal gas undertaking eventually and supplied the whole town.
Churches, chapels, schools, retail shops and banks were built to provide for the needs of the community. By 1920 there were three orchestras in the town, a dramatic society, two choirs, a country club at Bracewell and a purpose built leisure complex containing a cinema, ballroom, billiard room, gentleman's club, indoor market, retail shops and office accommodation. This last was the Majestic, built by the Hartley family, surely one of the first developments of its kind in the country.
The social life of the town was completely altered. The weather and season-controlled cycles of agriculture and domestic industry of 1840 had by 1855 been changed by the three steam mills with their factory discipline and emphasis on the employment of women and children. Timekeeping became important. This led to situations such as that which faced the Calf Hall Shed Company in 1890 when it was asked by its tenants if it would please run to post office time as opposed to railway time. There were only two public clocks in the town, one at the post office and one at the railway station. The shed company was using the railway time which was five minutes in advance of post office time which was used by the workers who were consequently always late for work.
As the industry grew it produced its own social ethos, that tight-knit sense of community which is particularly evident in single industry towns and is a product of common experience. There was a tremendous bond between people because this shared experience had its effects on other facets of their lives. Workers at one mill tended to live in one area, use the same chapel and frequent the same pubs. This shared experience extended beyond their own class. James Nutter's workers may have cursed him at times but had a sneaking regard for the fact he had started his career as a doffer in Bracewell's New Mill, had sold Blackie’s Bibles to make some money and had started in the Room and Power system as a junior partner in a set of 200 looms. By 1920 his descendants controlled almost 5,000 looms in the area. It was comforting to the workers to know that this had happened and held out the chance to them to do the same. By 1900 this was largely a myth as the threshold of entry had risen too far, but myths can be powerful sociological forces.
The availability of work and the comparatively high standards of housing, services and amenities were a magnet that drew migrants into the towns from the rural areas of the Dales. Many families moved to the town because of the possibility of employment for children and women which was almost non-existent in rural areas. This factor gave rise to the concept of the family income in the cotton trade which is the reason why the industry always paid such a relatively low rate to adult workers, it was always assumed that the whole family were working. This was often the case and explains the comparatively high incidence of owner-occupied housing in the town, the wage may have been low but if a wife and three children were working as well it was possible to live well and buy your own house.
We come now to the third phase of a historian's thinking when looking at Barnoldswick. We have seen what happened and what connection there was between it and the life of the town. We should now ask why did it have this effect? How was it possible for such advance to be made in such a short time?
My assessment of this is that the growth was so rapid, particularly after 1890, because of the innovative nature of the system of management and funding in the mills which allowed entry at low cost thresholds to all who could pay the premium and had the will to succeed. This was predominantly a result of the advantages of the Room and Power system but was also seen in the relative ease with which men set up in ancillary trades. Briggs & Duxbury progressed from small joiners to the largest builders in the town. John Pickles started as a mechanic and became the owner of Henry Brown Sons and Pickles who were the area's master mill wrights and engineers. At one time this firm had over 200 mill engines under their care. There were literally hundreds of openings for able men in trades such as tin smiths, blacksmiths, joiners, masons, reed makers, transport, retail trades and other small services. There was even a toy-maker in the town operating in his front room with a gas engine for power and the local Maypole shop supplying his raw material in the shape of margarine boxes.
It was this ethos of reward for effort and relatively low expectations which produced the participation of diverse capital sources and allowed such rapid growth. The whole of the modern town of Barnoldswick was financed by the profits of the cotton industry. True, there were exogenous factors such as the industry's seemingly impregnable hold on export markets due to technological supremacy, but we are primarily examining forces at work at local level. The results were, by any measure, quite amazing. Certainly nothing had been seen like this before.
This then is a broad outline of how I see Barnoldswick after ten years of research. The work still goes on and will never end, I fill in small threads of patterns of this rich tapestry each day.
Is this the end of the historian's brief? I don't think so. I believe that the historian is allowed to make one more assessment in the light of his specialised knowledge. He or she is allowed to compare what he has learnt from his study of the past with what he sees in contemporary life. The story we have been looking at is one of grasped opportunity. This opportunity was grasped because of the rewards that were possible. It may be that in our present difficulties, simple concepts such as locally based, small scale enterprise with multiple tenancy and low thresholds of entry, coupled with the possibility of reward and social advancement may be the incentives we need to create employment now. We have seen in recent years how the aerospace industry of the area can generate its own network of sub-contractors in much the same way as the cotton industry did. The flaw in both these systems is that if the major industry collapses so does the subsidiary industry. Perhaps we should be thinking in terms of small, non-related enterprises such as those which are filling the small work shops being created in many towns by the subdivision of redundant textile mills and the letting out of such premises to multiple tenancy. This is the modern Room and Power system which will provide the launching pad for the next phase of growth in our area. I would suggest to you that these are, at the very least, worthy subjects for consideration.
The work of such men as Wilfred Spencer lives on. I do not feel the need to justify his work or mine either. My main purpose this evening has been to demonstrate to you that the tide of enquiry into our local history still moves on. It is proper that it should. It may be that in such studies we may find an increased sense of place in our community and environment. It may be that the lessons we learn may help us to tackle present difficulties. One thing is certain, it is a most pleasurable and satisfactory pursuit. If I have done nothing more tonight than convey to you the pleasure and satisfaction I gain from the study of local history, it is enough. I am sure that in this respect, Wilfred Spencer and I had something in common. Thank you.

Stanley Graham. 6th of February, 1983.