More cotton

Spinning mules                

My visit to Manchester and Cheshire last week renewed my interest in the cotton industry in which so many  of my ancestors - and other people's - were employed. The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester is one of my favourites, and I particularly enjoy visiting the textiles gallery. This time I was lucky enough to arrive in good time for a demonstration of some of the machines, illustrating the processing of raw cotton into thread for weaving. They even gave out samples of cotton at various stages.

Raw cotton, sliver and spun yarn

The basic principle behind turning raw cotton into thread is actually quite simple, and at Quarry Bank Mill you can see demonstrations of all these processes being carried out by hand, as it was in the days when weaving was done by hand-loom weavers working at home. First the raw cotton was carded, or combed to get the fibres to lie in the same direction. Quite young children were capable of doing this work. The fibres would be twisted together to make thread, originally by hand, but then on spinning wheels, and the resulting thread was woven into cloth.

The work would be put out to the weavers, but hand-loom weaving on a domestic scale had its drawbacks, one of which was speed. Even with a spinning wheel a spinner could only spin one thread at a time, and a hand-operated loom could only work as fast as the human operator. And the width of the material woven was limited by the reach of the weaver, who had to propel the shuttle back and forth across the loom.

Spinning and weaving moved from the home to the factory when machines powered first by water, and later by steam, were invented that could work much faster. The carding and spinning machines could handle much larger quantities of cotton than a weaver's family could process by hand, but the principle was still the same; fibres were twisted together and drawn out to make thread that was wound onto bobbins. The difference was that of a single process from carded cotton to thread, the cotton went through a series of machines, becoming thinner and stronger at every stage. The resulting thread was of a more consistent quality than a hand-spinner could produce, and of course there was much more of it.

The raw cotton was carded by machine to produce a roll called a lap, which looks an awful lot like the kind of polyester wadding that quilters use today.  This was then fed through a succession of machines to produce a thick soft rope-like substance called sliver, and eventually spun into thread that was strong enough for weaving, though not for sewing, which would have required some further spinning. The factory floor would be filled with as many machines as could be packed into the space, and because they were water- or steam-powered, the people had to keep up with the machines, and not the other way round.

The same went for the looms, and they no longer required the skills of the old hand-loom weavers. Each operative would look after a set of looms, and had to keep them supplied with yarn, which had to be threaded into the shuttles. They were called 'kissing shuttles' because they did this by sucking the thread through, a very hazardous practice. Sucking in cotton fibres mixed with machine oil gave many of these women lung diseases, and they had to work very fast, so a moment's inattention could mean that they knocked out their teeth with the metal ends of the shuttles.

Some of the worst jobs were done by children, who were small ans nimble enough to get under the machines while they were running, to clean away the accumulation of grease and cotton dust.  If they were not fast enough, they could lose fingers, limbs, or even their lives. Many of the children were orphans, and their survival rate was not good.

Although the factory system was bad news for most hand-loom weavers, they did not disappear altogether. There was still a demand for some kinds of fancy cottons that required their skills, but many skilled men had no work, while their wives and daughters found lower-paid jobs in the factories.

Cotton, lots of it

I have spent the last few days in Lancashire and Cheshire, and in particular places to do with the cotton industry. I have no direct ancestral interest in this part of the country, but many of my ancestors were spinners, spoolers, weavers or otherwise involved in the textile trade in Glasgow and the surrounding area. So I always feel an affinity with these places - Lancashire, Lanarkshire, they even sound similar.

On Sunday I visited Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, Cheshire, my favourite National Trust property. I often visit if I am in the area, and I have lost count of the number of times I have been there in the last 25 years or so. There is always something new to see, and the things you've seen before are worth seeing again. It is an 18th century cotton mill on the River Bollin, in the Cheshire countryside, dating from the time when mills were powered by water, not steam. Later steam-powered mills were in towns, and Quarry Bank Mill itself was later converted to steam power. It was a working mill until as recently as 1959. Both the spinning and weaving of cotton were carried out there, and now it is a museum to the cotton industry.

It is interesting to visit for a number of reasons. You can see demonstrations of cotton production through the ages, including hand-spinning and hand-loom weaving, that were never carried out in the mill itself but in the weavers' homes, before power-looms, water frames, mules and the other technological innovations that led to large scale cotton production under a single roof.

But of course it is the people who lived and worked there that are particularly fascinating to the genealogist, and the community at Styal is very well recorded.

Throughout its entire working history this mill was in the control of a single family, the Gregs. The founder was Samuel Greg 1758-1834 and I bought a copy of 'From smuggling to cotton kings - the Greg story' by Michael Janes, a Greg descendant. I'm looking forward to reading that.

But it is not just the Greg family who are well-recorded. The mill kept detailed records of the workers there, and in particular the child apprentices who lived in the Apprentice House. Detailed records were kept of the children, their daily routine (long and arduous), their education and health care, the accidents they had and punishments administered for . It's not a life you would want to live, or have your children live, and this is bearing in mind that the Gregs were among the more enlightened employers. Conditions for children and adults in most mills were much worse. I was also able to buy a book 'What Became of the Quarry Bank Mill Apprentices?' by the mill's interpretation manager, Keith Robinson. He consulted parish registers, census, birth and marriage certificates, the mill's own archives, but mainly the Greg Collection, now at Greater Manchester Record Office (with Manchester Archives).

For me the most evocative part of the visit is walking through the floors when the machines are running. There are only a few of them, but the noise is deafening - quite literally. The guides who work there have ear defenders, and visitors only spend a short time there, but for the mill workers of a century or two ago there was no protection, and they often lost their hearing. There is also space between the machines these days, but in a working mill they would be much closer together, like the power-looms in the picture at the top. This maximised production, but was very dangerous for the workers.

I know this before, but there's nothing quite like seeing and hearing the machines to bring home to you what the working lives of your ancestors in the textile mills must have been like. So the next time I see the occupation of 'cotton operative' 'cotton piecer' 'bobbin-winder' or a host of others, I will stop and think for a minute about just what that meant.