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.

Mappy Monday - with extra detail

This is one of the maps in 'Philips Handy Volume Atlas of London' which has no publication date, but a hand-written inscription in the front is dated 1922. The pages are not very big - as you'd expect for a 'handy' volume, but they are beautifully detailed, and in colour, too. It has some of the usual maps that you sometimes find in London atlases, like railway maps, small scale maps of London environs and birds-eye views. This is one of the ordinary pages, showing part of the City of London, including St Paul's Cathedral, and part of Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames.

But this atlas also has some extra detail, which you do not find in most street atlas volumes; it has ground plans of London's two great cathedrals, St Paul's and Westminster Abbey. They also qualify as maps, because they show the surrounding streets too. Here is the plan of St Paul's to complement the map above.

Census day - has it really been 10 years?

Yes, of course I have completed my census form, but to be honest, I am much more at home with the Victorian and early 20th Census than with the ones where I am enumerated. So anyone looking to me for pearls of wisdom on the subject will be disappointed (and just a little desperate, I think). However if you really want to know more about the current census and future ones, if any, there is an interesting article at the Warwick Knowledge Centre

I was particularly interested in the last census, in 2001, because I was engaged by the Office For National Statistics (ONS) as their official historian. Not as grand as it sounds, but great fun all the same. much of what I had to do was to find interesting examples, with a good geographical spread, and I had a pretty free hand with this. There were a few specific individuals and buildings whose census returns I was asked for, but most of the Census Area Managers (CAMs) had no special requests, so I could do what I liked. Some of those who did make requests had an imperfect grasp of history and time-scales. I'm pretty good at this game, but I wasn't able to come up with a census return for John Milton, for example! I worked with the some people in the ONS public relations department, and was asked to do some press, radio and TV interviews. I like to think that I contributed some ideas, too. I suggested that it might help to get coverage in some long-established local newspapers if I could find their founders in the census. I have no idea if this worked, but I still think it was a good idea!

I did come up with one practical solution to a problem, though. They wanted to get colour scans, ie images from the original documents and not from the black and white film. These were to be printed and sent to the appropriate areas. Unfortunately there were far more images required than the image library at the (then) Public Record Office could supply in the time available. So I suggested that I  should obtain the best quality prints from the films, and the they could superimpose the images on a coloured background that looked like an old document. This worked remarkably well, and I still have a few copies. They are very convincing, but if you look closely, no matter what page and what census year you are looking at, the background is exactly the same colour, with exactly the same flaws round the edges.

I particularly enjoyed finding the odd and the quirky entries, the unusual occupations and the funny remarks in the census returns. I looked into the background, too, and found out a lot about how the census was organized, and how it was received by the population at large. There are some really interesting letters and editorial matter in the newspapers. Lots of newspapers have been digitized online now, so it is quite easy to search in them using 'census' as a key word, and find some real gems.This is a good reminder of just how much has changed in the relatively short time since I did my research ten years ago. There is so much that we can do online now, that it is easy to forget that searching the census then meant using microfilm, with a few surname indexes, if you were lucky.

Just for fun, you might like to read one of the items put out by ONS at the time, in the form of an 'interview' with me and my friend and former colleague, Dave Annal. It never actually took place, of course, but was put together from some of the notes we made an conversations we had with ONS back then. It is still out there on the internet, if you know where to look, and is called 'The Phantoms of the Forms - by Dusty Graves, census publicist'

Happy Census Day
  

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.

Tuesday's Tip - using The National Archives online Catalogue

The Catalogue search page

It would take an awfully long time to describe the Catalogue of The National Archives in detail, and how to get the most out of it. I'm not going to attempt to give a comprehensive description of the Catalogue, you'll be relieved to know, but here are a couple of tips that I hope you'll find helpful. The first thing to remember is that it's completely free to access whether you are on-site at Kew or at home using your own computer.

It's big. REALLY big
Hardly surprising, with more than 900 years of documents to cope with. At the last count there were more than 11 million catalogued items, and more than 100 miles of shelving. If you are accustomed to using sites like Ancestry, Findmypast , FamilySearch or even Google, you might put a name or keyword in the search box and expect to get a result. But an archive catalogue isn't like that. It is only in recent years that archives have attempted to index what is written on all the paper and parchment documents; and where this kind of detailed cataloguing has been done, it only applies to a small proportion of the holdings. Most catalogue descriptions are fairly brief, and although there are lots of projects going on, with a few centuries' backlog, it'll take a while.  This is one of my favourites - I photographed the cover of the document just to prove it

Catalogue description for NDO 3/49

Downloading your search results
If you search the Catalogue and get a list of results, you might want to note them down for reference. This is easy enough if there are only two or three, you can make notes in pencil, or print out the results page. But if there are dozens of them that's not so easy, and wastes a lot of paper and printer ink. There is a better way. When you have a page of results you will see a button 'download results'. Hit this and you will be given a choice of HTML or CSV, depending on whether you want to print out your results or save them. In either case you will get all of the results, not just the ones you can see on the screen at once.

The HTML option is useful - it effectively gives you the printer-friendly version - but I use the CSV option much more. Provided you are using a computer where you can save files, you can save your download as a spreadsheet, and then do what you like with it. You can re-sort the results, delete the ones you don't want, and even combine several sets of downloaded search results. I sometimes add another column, or highlight particular entries to indicate the documents I have looked at, or that I wish to flag up for future use. There are many possibilities, it's up to you to come up with your own ideas.  

Help?
It is possible to do quite advanced and sophisticated searches, and if you want to learn how to do this, the little '? Help' in the top right corner of any Catalogue page links to lots of detailed information.

There are some changes coming to the Catalogue, which should make it easier to use, and more closely integrated with other elements of the website, such as DocumentsOnline. Happy searching.