BANCROFT SHED (2)

[Stanley]

BANCROFT SHED (2)

23 March 2001

It’s been pointed out to me that it might be a good thing to describe what actually happened in the cotton mills in Barlick as there are so many people nowadays who never worked in a mill. It must be hard for young people nowadays to realise how important cotton was to Barlick at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1920, Barlick and Salterforth had 14 mills, almost 25,000 looms and about 12,000 inhabitants. Allowing for the old and the young and those not engaged in the cotton industry, there was a permanent shortage of weavers which was made up by people who lived in lodgings in the town during the week but went home at weekend. Agriculture and Cotton were the bedrock of the local economy, everything else depended on them for cash flow.
By 1900 Barlick was purely a weaving town. In the early days of the industry the mills spun raw cotton as well and produced their own yarn but as the South Lancashire industry grew more efficient and transport improved it became cheaper to buy in yarn than produce it. The local mills concentrated on what they knew best, weaving cloth. This specialisation increased output and profits and it was on this basis that the shed companies prospered and spawned the profits that paid for the great expansion in Barlick between 1890 and 1920.
These weaving sheds are what people remember nowadays. There is nobody alive who can remember when Barlick was a spinning town as well. One small point here, you might have noticed that some cotton factories are called mills and some are called sheds. This is a hangover from the days of spinning. Generally speaking, any factory that is old enough to have been in spinning is called a mill, the ones that were always purely weaving are called sheds. So Clough, Butts, Wellhouse and Old Coates were always called mill, the later factories were called sheds. This convention has got eroded a bit nowadays, I have heard Bankfield and Long Ing called mills, but originally they were weaving sheds.
Right, we’ve got a town full of weaving sheds and I suppose even the youngsters will know that they took in cotton yarn and turned it into cloth. Two questions, what sort of cloth and how did they do it?
There are more different sorts of cloth than you can poke a stick at. Everything from the flimsy gauze that Johnson and Johnson wove for their surgical dressing business to heavy, complicated, patterned brocades used in furnishings and curtains. The latter were never woven in Barlick, towns like Blackburn used to specialise in them. The great proportion of Barlick cloth was plain cotton which was intended for bleaching and printing outside the town. When it came off the loom it was always described as ‘grey cloth’ or ‘loomstate’ because it was unbleached. In actual fact it wasn’t grey, it was the colour of the natural cotton that had been used to weave it, this could vary from almost white to a lovely warm cream for some of the higher quality Egyptian yarns. Just because this cloth was plain it shouldn’t be assumed it was rubbish. 'Plain' describes anything from fine shirtings to interlinings and funnily enough one of the best cloths I ever saw woven at Bancroft was for industrial use. We used to weave a lot of it, it was a heavy twill woven from the best Egyptian super combed yarn and was made into industrial polishing mops. It had to be the finest material or it wouldn’t have stood up to the job demanded of it.
One thing that often surprises people is that some of the cheapest cloths had gold wire woven in. This was intended for the Indian trade and was for saris and turbans. It was a very cheap construction but every so many rows of weaving, a band of gold had to be put in. Very little of this was done in Barlick but I have a gold wire shuttle which held a spool of the precious wire in the middle instead of the usual cotton yarn package. As far as I can make out, to avoid temptation, the weaver had to buy the gold wire and look after it but was paid an enhanced price for the cloth to make up for the cost. Once woven, the cloth could be finished and dyed in the usual way, the gold wasn’t affected by any of the processes.
So, we know what they were weaving, the next question is how did they actually do it and what was it like working on the different processes. How did the industry actually work?
The first stage was getting the cloth orders. Every mill had a ‘Manchester Man’, often a partner in the business, and his job was to go to Manchester each day and stand on the Cotton Exchange where he received orders, bought yarn to make the cloth and negotiated prices. In those days the first post was delivered to the mills just after seven in the morning and after sorting any orders out the office boy was sent down to the station where the Pioneer store is now to hand the orders to the Manchester Man before he got on the train for Earby, Colne and Manchester. He would be on the ‘Change shortly after nine in the morning and be doing business.
One curious thing about the word ‘Manchester’. I was surprised when I first went into a big department store in New York to find that the drapery department was called ‘The Manchester Department’. This is a recognised term in the States but I was never sure whether it was called after Manchester in Lancashire or Manchester in New England which was also a cotton town. As Manchester in New England was named after our Manchester I don’t suppose it made much difference!
Once on the ‘Change our Manchester Man would talk to his contacts and by the end of the day would have received orders for cloth and would also have worked out what yarn they needed to weave it and ordered that from the spinners who also stood on the 'Change. This was a very efficient system, after the Great War when road transport was taking over from rail, it wasn’t uncommon for the yarn ordered that day to be delivered to the mill in Barlick before the Manchester Man got home at night.
It was very efficient in another way. All the trading on the floor of the exchange was done verbally and sealed with a handshake, the paperwork followed by post later. All cloth and yarn orders were executed using standard contracts, these contracts contained coal and labour clauses which ensured that if, during the term of the contract, coal or labour charges changed, so did the price of the yarn or the cloth in proportion. This security enabled the spinners and manufacturers to work on very small margins of profit and be very competitive. This was very good in the hey day of the trade when there was an abundance of orders but in later years, between the wars, when overseas competition reduced output and there was over capacity in the industry these small profit margins contributed to the death of the industry because they couldn’t make a profit unless the mill was full of work and working at peak efficiency. More about this later.
Once the Manchester Man had brought the order to the mill, the weaving manager had to look at the specification of the cloth and work out the most economical way to weave it. This was one of the most important jobs in the mill. The trick was to weave a cloth that satisfied the customer's specification using the cheapest yarn and the smallest quantities possible.
One of the most important qualities of cotton fibre is staple length. Cotton plants don’t grow thread, they grow short fibres which have to be twisted together in the course of spinning to make a strong thread. The longer the staple the better the yarn and the more expensive it is. So, one of the first decisions to be made was what was the lowest quality yarn that could be used. Two factors came into play here, the skill of the operatives and the humidity of the shed. The skills go without saying in a town like Barlick but the humidity was another matter. Ideally, a weaving shed would be built into a hillside like Bancroft was, this ensured that the flags and walls were permanently damp, cotton weaves best at about 70% humidity. In winter the natural moisture was usually enough but in summer when the air was drier you would often see weavers cover the warps in their looms with damp cloths or fents before they went home at night or for the weekend. This helped to keep the yarn on the beam supple and made for better weaving. I’ve heard of sheds in Barlick that were flooded with water at weekend to get the humidity up.
Another consideration was shrinkage during weaving. As the loom weaves it tends to pull the warp in and make the finished cloth narrower. There were little devices on each side of the cloth in the loom called ‘temples’ which stretched the cloth out sideways and counteracted this but even so some contraction occurred and the count of threads in each side of the finished cloth was denser than the specification which was a waste of yarn. The cure for this was a ‘Bastard Reed’. The reed was the large heavy comb in the loom that all the warp threads went through and normally had so many spaces or ‘dents’ to the inch across it. A bastard reed had fewer dents for about four inches on each side so that when the cloth contracted there was exactly the right number of threads per inch in the construction. In other words, the ‘count’ of the cloth was right. Sorry for getting technical with you but I want to be sure I leave you in no doubt as to the levels of skill involved in the processes.
So, we’ve got an order for cloth, we’ve decided how we’re going to make it, all we have to now is get on with it. I’ll start on the different processes next week and we’ll follow the cloth right through to the warehouse. I promise I won’t get too technical but I want to leave you young ones looking at your grandma or granddad with a fresh eye if they worked in the mill. We tend to lose sight of the fact that just because someone is old, it doesn’t mean they are stupid and unskilled. If you’ve got a relation who worked in the mill, ask them about what they did. I promise you’ll get a surprise.

23 March 2001