There are also several other institutions of the same class, amongst others Salford, Ancoats, and Miles Platting Auxiliary Mechanics’ Institutes.
The Athenæum constitutes a kind of literary club for the middle classes, who are provided with a good library and reading-room in a very handsome building.
The Manchester Library contains 10,000 volumes, the Manchester Subscription Library, established 1765, has the most extensive collection of books in the city.
A Concert Hall in Peter Street, exclusively used for the purposes indicated by its name, is supported by 600 subscribers at five guineas each.
The Chetham Society has been founded for the purpose of publishing ancient MSS. and scarce works connected with the history of Lancashire.
The Exchange has upwards of two thousand subscribers.
By way of helping the body as well as the mind, in 1846 the inhabitants of Manchester formed by subscription three public parks, called Queen’s Park, Peel’s Park, and Philip’s Park, in three different parts of the suburbs.
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THE FREE GRAMMAR SCHOOL was founded by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, in the early part of the sixteenth century. It was originally founded for the purpose of furnishing simple and elementary instruction to the poor. This design is sufficiently proved by the language of the foundation deed, which describes those sought to be benefited as persons who had been long in ignorance “on account of the poverty of their parents.” The present income of the school is upwards of £5000 a-year, leaving a considerable income over its expenditure, notwithstanding that the operations of the school have been extended by a decree of the Court of Chancery. In the year 1833 the Court authorised the erection of a new building to include a residence for the master. There are two schools, called the Higher and Lower. The instructions given embrace the Greek and Latin, and the French, German, and other modern languages; English literature, mathematics, the modern arts and sciences, etc. A library is attached to the school for the use of the pupils. There are twelve exhibitions, of the annual value of £60 each, for four years, in the gift of the Warden and High Master, who, however, respect the recommendations of the Examiners. These gentlemen are three in number, being Masters of Arts and Bachelors of Law of two years’ standing, two of them appointed by the Professor, and one by the High Master. They each receive £20 for their services. In addition to the twelve exhibitions mentioned above, there are fifteen others connected with the school, the bequest of a merchant named Hulme. These are appropriated to under-graduates of Brasenose College, Oxford. Their value is to be fixed by the patrons, but cannot exceed the sum of £220 a year. They are to be held for four years from the thirteenth term after matriculation. There are sixteen scholarships to the same College; and sixteen to St. John’s, Cambridge, varying in value from £l8 to £26, stand in rotation with the pupils of Marlborough and Hereford Schools, and six scholarships of £24 to Magdalen College, Oxford, Manchester pupils having the preference. The Examiners have also the power of making awards of books or mathematical instruments, to the value of £25, in any cases of great merit.
The High Master’s salary is fixed not to exceed £600, with house-rent and taxes free. He is also allowed to take twenty boarders. He has the assistance of an Usher (salary £300, with house and fifteen boarders); an Assistant (salary £200, with house and twelve boarders); an Usher’s Assistant (salary £150, with house and ten boarders). There are, in addition, a Master of the Lower School, a Writing, and a Mathematical Master, a teacher of English literature, and another of foreign languages; all, with the exception of the last, having houses, and their aggregate salaries amounting to £800.
Four hundred scholars attended in 1850.
MANCHESTER NEW COLLEGE is an institution belonging to the Unitarian body, on the plan of King’s College, London, and was opened for the reception of students on the 5th October, 1840. The curriculum of instruction embraces every department of learning and polite literature.
THE LANCASHIRE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE is one of the affiliated Colleges of the London University, and was established for the education of candidates for the Christian Ministry amongst Congregational dissenters. There are three resident Professors, the principal being the Rev. Dr. Vaughan, formerly Professor of History in the University of London.
OWEN’S COLLEGE has recently been opened on the testamentary endowment of a Mr. Owen, for affording an education on the plan of University College, London.
CHETHAM’S HOSPITAL, or, as it is more properly termed, “College,” was founded by Charter in the year 1665, by Humphrey Chetham, a Manchester citizen and tradesman, who had, during his lifetime, brought up, fed, and educated fourteen boys of Manchester and Salford. He paid a heavy fine to Charles I. for persisting in his refusal of a baronetcy, and in 1634 was appointed Sheriff of his county. By his will Chetham directed that the number of boys he had previously provided for should be augmented by the addition of one from Droylsden, two from Crumpsall, four from Turton, and ten from Bolton; and left the sum of £7000 to be devoted to their instruction and maintenance, from six to fourteen years of age, and for their apprenticeship afterwards to some trade. The funds having since increased, 80 boys are now received, in the following proportions, from the several places mentioned in the founder’s will, viz.:—Manchester, 28; Salford, 12; Droylsden, 6; Crumpsall, 4; Bolton, 20; Turton, 10. They are clothed, fed, boarded, lodged, and instructed in reading, writing, grammar, and arithmetic. The boys are selected by the Feoffees in annual meeting at Easter, within six days before the Monday in which week an application must be sent in to the Governor, accompanied by a printed note of recommendation, signed by the overseers and churchwardens of the place in which the candidate resides.
THE COLLEGE LIBRARY is situated in the same old building in which accommodation is found for the College, and is a fine collection of upwards of 25,000 volumes. The germ of this library consisted of the books bequeathed by Humphrey Chetham, many of them of great scarcity and value. The collection contains comparatively few volumes of modern date. The library is open to the use of the public without charge or restriction, and a small, but convenient, reading-room is provided for their accommodation. Books are not allowed to be removed from the premises, and every reader is obliged to make an entry of each volume he wishes to obtain. Notwithstanding the immense population of Manchester and Salford, this valuable institution is comparatively little used, the number of readers averaging less than twenty per day.
SWINTON SCHOOL.—In connexion with the Workhouse an Industrial House and School has been erected at Swinton, five miles from the City, which affords so admirable an example for imitation by all manufacturing or crowded communities, that we are glad to be able to extract the main facts concerning it from a graphic description in the first volume of Dickens’sHousehold Words:—
“Swinton School cost sixty thousand pounds, and is a handsome building in the Tudor style of architecture, with a frontage of 450 feet, containing more than 100 windows. Pleasure grounds and play grounds surround it, and it resembles more a nobleman’s palace than the Home of Pauper Children. The inmates consist of 630 children, of whom 305 are orphans, and 124 deserted by their parents, under charge of a Chaplain, a Head Master, a Medical Officer, a Roman Catholic Priest, a Governor, a Matron, six Schoolmasters, and four School-mistresses, with a numerous staff of officials, Nurses, and Teachers of Trades, receiving salaries and wages amounting to £1,800 a-year, besides board. Some in the institution are as young as one year and a half.All are educated, and those who are old enough are taught trades and domestic employments. When they leave they are furnished with two suits of clothes. The character of the Institution stands so high, that the public are eager for the girls as domestic servants. If it has not already been done, we hope that the cultivation of land on the system of market gardens will be added to the trades, as affording a more certain, and, in some respects, more generally useful employment. Educated agricultural labourers are rare, much prized, and soon promoted to be overseers and bailiffs.The education at Swinton is conducted on the modern plan, which prevails in the best schools under Government inspection. The children are taught to love and look upon their masters and mistresses as friends, to be consulted and applied to as they would to kind parents.For instance take this bit, familiar to visitors of Infant Schools, but still new to many:—The children under six years of age, summoned by the sound of a whistle from the play ground, trooped in glad groups to an anteroom, and girls and boys intermixed, at a signal from the Master marched into the schoolroom singing a tune.Then followed such vivâ voce instruction as too many better endowed children do not get for want of competent teachers. Indeed a better education is now given in Workhouses than can be obtained for children under twelve years of age at any paid school that we know of. For instance:—“What day is this?”“Monday.”“What sort of a day is it?”“Very fine.”“Why is it fine?”“Because the sun shines, and it does not rain.”“Is rain a bad thing, then?”“No.”“What is it useful for?”“To make the flowers and the fruit grow.”“Who sends rain and sunshine?”“God.”“What ought we to do in return for his goodness?”“Praise him.”“Let us praise him, then,” added the Master.And the children altogether repeated, and then sang, a part of the 149th psalm.”
“Swinton School cost sixty thousand pounds, and is a handsome building in the Tudor style of architecture, with a frontage of 450 feet, containing more than 100 windows. Pleasure grounds and play grounds surround it, and it resembles more a nobleman’s palace than the Home of Pauper Children. The inmates consist of 630 children, of whom 305 are orphans, and 124 deserted by their parents, under charge of a Chaplain, a Head Master, a Medical Officer, a Roman Catholic Priest, a Governor, a Matron, six Schoolmasters, and four School-mistresses, with a numerous staff of officials, Nurses, and Teachers of Trades, receiving salaries and wages amounting to £1,800 a-year, besides board. Some in the institution are as young as one year and a half.
All are educated, and those who are old enough are taught trades and domestic employments. When they leave they are furnished with two suits of clothes. The character of the Institution stands so high, that the public are eager for the girls as domestic servants. If it has not already been done, we hope that the cultivation of land on the system of market gardens will be added to the trades, as affording a more certain, and, in some respects, more generally useful employment. Educated agricultural labourers are rare, much prized, and soon promoted to be overseers and bailiffs.
The education at Swinton is conducted on the modern plan, which prevails in the best schools under Government inspection. The children are taught to love and look upon their masters and mistresses as friends, to be consulted and applied to as they would to kind parents.
For instance take this bit, familiar to visitors of Infant Schools, but still new to many:—
The children under six years of age, summoned by the sound of a whistle from the play ground, trooped in glad groups to an anteroom, and girls and boys intermixed, at a signal from the Master marched into the schoolroom singing a tune.
Then followed such vivâ voce instruction as too many better endowed children do not get for want of competent teachers. Indeed a better education is now given in Workhouses than can be obtained for children under twelve years of age at any paid school that we know of. For instance:—
“What day is this?”“Monday.”“What sort of a day is it?”“Very fine.”“Why is it fine?”“Because the sun shines, and it does not rain.”“Is rain a bad thing, then?”“No.”“What is it useful for?”“To make the flowers and the fruit grow.”“Who sends rain and sunshine?”“God.”“What ought we to do in return for his goodness?”“Praise him.”“Let us praise him, then,” added the Master.
And the children altogether repeated, and then sang, a part of the 149th psalm.”
Now all this is very fine, and a wonderful improvement on the old dog-earedRedinmadeasy, but better follows. After a time the children grew tired and sleepy, one fell asleep. Did the Master slap them all round and pull the ears of the poor little fatsomnus? No. He marched them all out singing and beating time to play for a quarter of an hour.
We commend Swinton to the consideration of the credulous disciples of the firebrand school of economists, who believe that Manchester men devour little children daily, without stint or mercy for their poor little bodies or souls.
Manchester obtained a municipal corporation under the provisions of the general act for that purpose, passed in the reign of his late Majesty William IV. Gas works, established in 1817, are the property of the town, and produce a surplus income amounting to between three and four thousand pounds a year, which are devoted to public improvements. The corporation have recently obtained power to establish water works, and to purchase up the plant of an existing company.
The guardians of the workhouses of Manchester have a most difficult task to perform, especially in times of commercial depression, as thousands are thrown upon their hands at once. Among the most troublesome customers are the Irish, who flock to Manchester through Liverpool in search of work, and form a population herding together, very ignorant, very poor, and very uncleanly.
It is quite impossible to give the same sort of sketch of the manufactures of this city as we gave of Birmingham, because they are on so much larger and more complicated a scale. One may understand how a gun-barrel or a steel-pen is made at one inspection; but in a visit to a textile mill, a sight of whizzing machinery, under the charge of some hundred men, women, boys, and girls, only produces an indefinable feeling of confusion to a person who has not previously made himself acquainted with the elements of the subject. To attempt to explain how a piece of calico is made without the aid of woodcuts, would be very unsatisfactory. Premising, then, that the cotton in various forms is the staple manufacture of Manchester, and that silk, mixed fabrics of cotton and silk, cotton and wool, etc., are also made extensively, we advise the traveller to prepare himself by reading the work of Dr. Ure or the articles on Textiles in thePenny Cyclopædia.
A visit to the workshops of the celebrated machinists Messrs. Sharpe, Roberts, & Co. would probably afford a view of some parts of the most improved textile machinery in a state of rest, as well as a very excellent idea of the rapid progress of mechanical arts. Improvements in manufacturing machines are so constant and rapid, that it is almost a proverb—“that before a foreigner can get the most improved machinery which he has purchased in England home and at work, something better will be invented.”
A Manchester manufacturer, on the approach of a busy season, will sometimes stop his factories to put in new machines, at a cost of twenty thousand pounds.
Of equal interest with Messrs. Sharpe, Roberts, & Co., are the works of Messrs. Whitworth, the manufacturers of exquisite tools, more powerful than any elephant, more delicately-fitted than any watch for executing the metalwork of steam-engines, of philosophical instruments, and everything requiring either great power or mathematical nicety. Some of these tools for planing, boring, rivetting, welding, cutting iron and other metals, are to be found in great iron manufactories. Indeed, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Whitworth are of a class of men who have proved that the execution of almost all imitations of natural mechanics are merely a question of comparative expense. If you choose to pay for it, you may have the moving fingers of a man, or the prehensile trunk of an elephant, perfectly executed.
From the manufacture of machines, the next step lies naturally to some branch of cotton manufactures.
COTTON.—The rise of this manufacture has been wonderfully rapid. In the time of Henry VIII., the spinning wheel came into use in England, superseding the spindle and distaff, which may still be seen in the south of France and Italy, and in India, where no other tools are used. In the same reign Manchester became distinguished for its manufactures.
In the seventeenth century, Humphrey Chetham, whose name has already been mentioned as the founder of a splendid charity, was among the eminent tradesmen.
The barbarities of the Duke of Alva on the Protestants of the Netherlands, and the revocation of the edict of Nantes, by which the persecutions of the French Protestants was renewed, supplied all our manufacturing districts with skilful Artisans and mechanics in silk and woollen.
In 1786, the importation of raw cotton only amounted to nineteen million pounds weight, obtained from the West Indies, the French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies, and from Turkey and Smyrna. Two years previously an American ship which imported eight bags was seized, on the ground that so much cotton could not be the produce of the United States!
So early as 1738, one Charles Wyatt, of Birmingham, took out a patent for spinning yarn by machinery, which he tried at Northampton, but reaped no profits from the invention, which was discontinued and forgotten. In 1767, James Hargreaves, an illiterate weaver residing near Church, in Lancashire, who seven years previously had invented a carding machine, much like that in use at the present day, invented the spinning jenny,—by which eighty spindles were set to work instead of the one of the spinning wheel. Hargreaves derived no benefit from his invention; twice a mob of spinners on the old principle rose and destroyed all the machinery made on his plan, and chased him away. In 1769, Richard Arkwright took out his first patent (having Mr. Need of Nottingham and Mr. Strutt of Derby as partners,) for spinning with rollers.
Arkwright was born in the humblest class of life at Preston in Lancashire. At “Proud Preston” he first followed the business of a barber, then became a dealer in hair, travelling the country to collect it, and selling it prepared to the wigmakers. Having accumulated a little money, he set about endeavouring to invent perpetual motion, and, in the search, invented, or sufficiently adapted and improved, a cotton spinning apparatus to induce two practical men like the Messrs. Need and Strutt to join him. His claim to original invention has been disputed. That he was not the first inventor is clear, and it is equally clear that he must have been a man of very considerable and original mechanical genius.
With Arkwright’s patent, the rise of the cotton trade began.
In 1786, Mr. Samuel Crompton’s invention came into use, called the mule jenny, because partaking of the movements of both Hargreaves’ and Arkwright’s inventions, by which, for the first time, yarn fine enough for muslins could be spun. Crompton did not, probably could not, afford to take out a patent, but worked his mule jenny with his own hands in an attic at Bolton, where he carried on a small spinning and weaving business. Already, in 1812, there were between four and five million spindles on this principle, but the inventor continued poor and almost unknown. Mr. Kennedy (author of a brief memoir of Crompton), and Mr. Lee, raised £500 for him by subscription, and he afterwards received a grant of £8000 from Parliament, which his sons lost in business. Mr. Kennedy again exerted himself and raised an annuity of £63, which the unfortunate inventor only lived two years to enjoy.
The spinning machines threatened to out-travel the weaving powers of the country, when, in 1785, Dr. Cartwright, a clergyman of Kent, with no previous knowledge of weaving, after an expenditure of £40,000, invented the power-loom, for which he afterwards received a grant of £10,000 from Parliament. To supply our cotton manufactures, there were imported in 1849 1,900,000 bales of 330lbs. each. Of this quantity, 1,400,000 bales came from the United States.
The Manchester manufacturers have lately raised a small fund by subscription, and sent out Mr. Mackay, a barrister, author ofThe Western World, to examine and report on the prospects of obtaining cotton from India; and the son of the late Mr. John Fielden, a great manufacturer, has embarked a considerable sum at Natal in the cultivation of cotton. The dependence on the United States for such a staple has begun to render our Manchester men uncomfortable. They have not, however, displayed the spirit and energy that might have been expected either from their usual political vigour or from the tone of their advice to the farmers in distress.
The successive improvements in weaving by machinery we shall not attempt to trace. To use the phrase of a Nottingham mechanic, “there are machines now that will weave anything, from a piece of sacking to a spider’s web.” But fine muslins and fancy goods are chiefly woven by hand.
The power-loom has recently been adapted, under Bright’s patent, to weaving carpets, which are afterwards printed.
With respect to spinning; fine yarns which cost twenty guineas a pound have been reduced to four shillings by improved machinery, and in the Great Exhibition of Industry Messrs. Houldsworth exhibited as a curiosity, a pound of cotton spun 2,000 miles in length.
Arkwright, among the early improvers, was the only one who realized a large fortune, which his patience, his energy, his skill, his judgment, his perseverance well deserved, whether he was an original inventor or not.
The large supplies of cheap coals by canal soon made Lancashire the principal seat of the manufacture.
Among the many who realized great wealth by the new manufacture, was the first Sir Robert Peel, who began life near Bolton as a labouring man, by frugality accumulated enough money to commence first with a donkey a small coal trade, and then to enter on a cotton mill, which eventually placed him in a position to become a Member of Parliament and a baronet, and to give his son that starting place in education and society of which he availed himself so wisely and so patriotically, to his own honour and the permanent benefit of his country.
There are several mills and factories in Manchester in which the most perfect productions of mechanical skill may be seen in operation; but it is a trade which will be seen under much more favourable circumstances in some of those valleys near Manchester, where the masters of the mill provide the cottages of their “hands,” or where the cottages are held in freehold by the more frugal workmen themselves, with little gardens attached, in pure air in open situations.
There are many cotton lords, and the number is increasing, who take the warmest interest in the condition of the people in their employ, and who do all they can to promote their health, their education, and their amusements. A visit to one of these establishments, will convince those who have taken their ideas of a manufacturing population from the rabid novelettes and yet more rabid railings of the Ferrand school, that there is nothing in the factory system itself, properly conducted, opposed to the permanent welfare of the working classes. On the contrary, in average times, the wages are sufficient to enable the operatives to live in great comfort, and to lay by more than in other trades; while between the comfort of their position and that of the agricultural labourer there is no comparison, so infinitely are the advantages on the side of the factory hand. There have also been a series of legislative and other changes during the last twenty years, all tending to raise the condition of this class. At the same time, it is impossible not to observe that, quite irrespective of political opinions, there is a wide gulf between the great mass of the employers and the employed. There is dislike—there is undefined distrust. Those who doubt this will do well to investigate working-class opinions for themselves, not at election time, and in such a familiar manner as to get at the truth without compliments. Probably in times of prosperity this feeling is not increasing—we are strongly inclined to think it is diminishing; but it is a question not to be neglected. Manchester men, of the class who run at the aristocracy, the army, and the navy just as a bull runs at a red rag, will perhaps be very angry at our saying this; but we speak as we have found mobs at fires, and chatty fustian jackets in third class trains on the Lancashire and Yorkshire line; and, although a friend protests against the opinion, we still think that the ordinary Manchester millhand looks on his employer with about the same feelings that Mr. John Bright regards a colonel in the guards. We hope we may live to see them all more amiable, and better friends.
Manchester during the last seventy years, has been peopled more rapidly than the “Black Country” which we have described, with a crowd of immigrants of the most ignorant class, from the agricultural counties of England, from Ireland, and from Scotland. These people have been crowded together under very demoralising circumstances.
But we do not dwell or enter further into this important part of the condition of Manchester, because, unlike Birmingham, the Corn Law discussions have, to the enormous advantage of the city, drawn hundreds of jealous eyes upon the domestic life of the poor; and because men of all parties, Church and Dissent, Radicals and Conservatives, are trying hard and as cordially as their mutual prejudices will allow them, to work out a plan of education for raising the moral condition of a class, who, if neglected in their dirt and ignorance, will become, in the strongest sense of the French term,Dangereuse!
But to return to the Manchester of to-day; it has become rather the mercantile than the manufacturing centre of the cotton manufacture. There are firms in Manchester which hold an interest in woollen, silk, and linen manufactures in all parts of the kingdom and even of the continent.
From a pamphlet published last year by the Rev. Mr. Baker, it appears that there are five hundred and fifty cotton manufactories of one kind or other in the cotton district of Lancashire and Cheshire. Of these, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Dukinfield, and Mosley, there are fifty-three mills, Blackburn fifty-seven, Bolton forty-two, Burnley twenty-five spinning manufactories, at Heywood twenty-eight mills, Oldham one hundred and fifty-eight, Preston thirty-eight, Staley Bridge twenty, Stockport forty-seven mills, Warrington only four, Manchester seventy-eight.
The following is a brief outline of the stages of cotton manufacture which may be useful to those who consider the question for the first time.
When cotton has reached Manchester from the United States, which supplies 75 per cent. of the raw material; from Egypt, which supplies a good article in limited quantity; from India, which sends us an inferior, uncertain, but increasing, quantity, but which with railroads will send us an improved increasing quantity; or from any of the other miscellaneous countries which contribute a trifling quota—it is stowed in warehouses, arranged according to the countries from which it has come. It is then “passed through thewillow, thescuthing machine, and thespreading machine, in order to be opened, cleaned, and evenly spread. By thecarding enginethe fibres are combed out, and laid parallel to each other, and the fleece is compressed intosliver. The sliver is repeatedly drawn and doubled in thedrawing frame, more perfectly to strengthen the fibres and to equalize the grist. Theroving frame, by rollers and spindles, produces a coarse loose thread, which the mule or throstle spins into yarn. To make the warp, the twist is transferred from cops to bobbins by thewinding machine, and from the bobbins at thewarping machineto a cylindrical beam. This being taken to thedressing machine, the warp is sized, dressed, and wound upon theweaving beam. The weaving beam is then placed in thepower loom, by which machine, the shuttle being provided with cops with weft, the cloth is woven.”
Sometimes the yarn only is exported, in other cases the cloth is bleached, or dyed, or printed, all of which operations can be carried on in Manchester or the surrounding auxiliary towns.
The best mode of obtaining a general idea of the trade carried on in Manchester will be to visit two or three of the leading warehouses in which buyers from all parts of the world supply their respective wants. For instance, Messrs. J. N. Phillips and Co., of Church Street; Messrs. Bannermans and Sons, York Street; Messrs. J. and J. Watts and Co., of Spring Gardens; and Messrs. Wood and Westhead, of Piccadilly. Next, to go over one of the leading Cotton Mills, say Briley’s or Houldsworth’s; then Messrs. Lockett’s establishment for engraving the plates used in calico-printing, and Messrs. Thomas Hoyle and Son’s print works. This work completed, the traveller will have some idea of Manchester, not without.
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SILK.—The silk trade of Manchester and of Macclesfield, which for that purpose is a suburb of Manchester, arose in the restrictions imposed upon Spitalfields, at the request of the weavers, by successive acts of Parliament, for the purpose of regulating employment in that district. In 1830 there were not 100 Jacquard looms in Manchester and its neighbourhood, whilst at the present time there are probably 12,000 employed either on silk or some branch of figure weaving. The most convenient silk manufactory for the visit of the stranger is that of Messrs. James Houldsworth of Portland Street, near the Royal Infirmary. This firm was established by a German gentleman, the late Mr. Louis Schwabe, an intelligent German, who introduced the higher class of silk manufacture with such success as to enable him to compete with even the very first class of Lyons silks for furniture damasks.
In addition to the extensive application of the Jacquard loom, Mr. Schwabe introduced, and Mr. Henry Houldsworth improved and perfected, the embroidering machines invented by Mr. Heilmann of Mulhausen. The improvements are so great that the original inventor cannot compete with them. Rows of needles elaborate the most tasteful designs with a degree of accuracy to which hand labour cannot approach.
Messrs. Winkworth and Proctor are also producers of high class silks for ladies’ dresses and gentlemen’s waistcoats.
Manchester is particularly celebrated for plain silk goods of a superior quality at a moderate price. There are also manufactories of small wares, which include parasols and umbrellas. A parasol begins at 4½d. wholesale.
In Manchester the tastes and costumes of every country are consulted and suited. The brown cloak of the Spaniard, the poncho of the Chilean, the bright red or yellow robe of the Chinese, the green turban of the pilgrim from Mecca, the black blanket of the Caffre, and the red blanket of the American Indian may all be found in bales in one Manchester warehouse.
In passing through the streets, the sign “Fents” is to be seen on shops in cellars. These are the odd pieces, of a yard or two in length, cut off the goods in the manufactories to make up a certain even quantity; and considerable trade is driven in them. Selections are sometimes bought up as small ventures by sea captains and emigrants.
Paper-makingis carried on extensively in the neighbourhood of Manchester from cotton waste. This was formerly thrown away; scavengers were even paid to cart it away. After a time, as its value became quietly known among paper-makers, parties were found willing to take on themselves the expense of removing it. By degrees the waste became a regular article of sale; and now, wherever possible, a paper-mill in this part of the country is placed near, or worked in conjunction with, a cotton-mill. The introduction of cotton waste has materially reduced the price of paper. No doubt, when the excise is abolished, many other articles will be employed for the same purpose.
To describe the railroads, which are every hour departing for every point of the compass, would take up too much space. But the railway stations, several of which have been united by works as costly, and almost as extensive, as the Pyramids of Egypt, are not among the least interesting sights. At these stations barrels of flour will be found, literally filling acres of warehouse room, and cucumbers arrive in season by the ton.
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THE CANALS must be mentioned, and remind us that at Worsley, near Manchester, the Duke of Bridgwater, “the Father of Inland Navigation,” aided by the genius of Brindley (another of the great men, who, like Arkwright and Stephenson, rose from the ranks of labour, and directly contributed to the rise of this city) commenced the first navigable canal constructed for commercial purposes in Great Britain.
At the present day the construction of a canal is a very commonplace affair, but it is impossible to doubt the high qualities of the mind of the Duke of Bridgwater, when we consider the education and prejudices of a man of his rank at that period, and observe the boldness with which he accepted, the tenacity with which he adhered to, the energy and self-sacrifice with which he prosecuted the plans of an obscure man like Brindley.
A disappointment in love is said to have first driven the Duke into retirement, and rendered him shy and eccentric, with an especial objection to the society of ladies, although he had once been a gay, if not dissipated, young gentleman, fond of the turf. He rode a race at Trentham Hall, the seat of his brother-in-law, the Marquis of Stafford.
When he retired from the pleasures of the fashionable world, his attention was directed to a rich bed of coal on his estate at Worsley, the value of which was almost nominal in consequence of the expense of carriage. He determined to have a canal, and, if possible, a perfect canal, and who to carry out this object he selected Brindley, who had been born in the station of an agricultural labourer, and was entirely self-educated. To the last he conducted those engineering calculations, which are usually worked out on paper and by rule, by a sort of mental arithmetic. Brindley must have been about forty years of age when he joined the Duke. He died at fifty-six, having laid the foundation of that admirable system of internal commerce which is better described in Baron Charles Dupin’sForce Commerciale de la Grande Bretagnethan in any English work.
One often-told anecdote well illustrates the characters of the nobleman and his engineer, if we remember that no such works had ever been erected in England at that time. “When Brindley proposed to carry the canal over the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, by an aqueduct 39 feet above the surface of the water, he desired, for the satisfaction of his employer, to have another engineer consulted. That individual, on being taken to the place where the intended aqueduct was to be constructed, said, that ‘he had often heard of castles in the air, but never was shown before where any of them were to be erected.’” But the Duke had faith in Brindley, persevered and triumphed, although, before the completion of all his undertakings, he was more than once reduced to great pecuniary difficulties.
The canal property of the Duke of Bridgwater, with the Lancashire estates, are now vested in the Earl of Ellesmere, a nobleman who well knows, and conscientiously works out, the axiom, “that property has its duties as well as its rights.” A visit to Worsley will prove what an enlightened and benevolent landowner can do for a population of colliers and bargemen.
The educational and other arrangements of a far-sighted character show that there are advantages in even such large accumulations of property as have fallen to the share of the present representative of the Duke of Bridgwater.
Those who desire to pursue closely the state of the operative population in Manchester, will find ample materials in the annual reports of factory inspectors, and school inspectors, under the Committee of the Council of Education, and of the municipal officers of health.
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FIRES.—Dreadful fires occur occasionally in Manchester. If such a catastrophe should take place during the stay of a visitor, he should immediately pull on an overcoat, even although it be midnight, and join in the crowd. An excellent police of 300 officers and men renders the streets quite safe at all hours; and a fire of an old cotton factory, where the floors are saturated with oil and grease, is indeed a fearfully imposing sight. It also affords an opportunity of some familiar conversation with the factory hands.
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In taking leave of Manchester, which is indeed the great heart of our manufacturing system, we may truly say that it is a city to be visited with the deepest interest, and quitted without the slightest regret. On our political railroad we are under deepest obligations to the Manchester stokers; but Heaven forbid that we should be compelled to make them our sole engineers.
MIDDLETON.—And now, before taking a glance at the woollens and hardware of Yorkshire, we suggest, by way of change from the perpetual hum of busy multitudes and the whizzing and roaring of machinery, that the traveller take a holiday, and spend it in wandering over an agricultural oasis encircled by hills, and so far uninvaded by the stalks of steam-engines, where the air is comparatively pure and the grass green, although forest trees do not flourish.
The visit requires no distant journey. It is a bare six miles from the heart of Manchester to Middleton. Nine times a-day omnibuses ply there. These original, if not primitive vehicles, are constructed to carry forty-five passengers, and on crowded market-days may sometimes be seen loaded with seventy specimens of a note-worthy class.
Middleton, lately a dirty straggling town, of 15,000 inhabitants, a number at which it has remained stationary for ten years, built without plan, without drains, without pavement, without arrangements for common decency, stands on the borders, and was the manorial village, of the Middleton and Thornham estates, which had been in the family of the late Lord Suffield for many hundred years. In the village, land was grudgingly leased for building, and no steam-engine manufactories were permitted. The agricultural portion of some 2500 acres of good land for pasturage and root crops, celebrated for its fine supplies of water and for its (unused) water-power, was divided into little farms of from twenty to seventy acres, very few exceeding fifty acres, inhabited by a race ofFarmer-Weavers, who, from generation to generation, farmed badly and wove cleanly in the pure atmosphere of Middleton. They were, most of them, bound to keep a hound at walk for the Lord of the Manor.
Now the old Lords of the Manor and owners of the estate of Middleton (the Harbords, afterwards Barons Suffield), were proud men and wealthy, who despised manufactures and resisted any encroachment of trade on the green bounds within which their old Manor House had stood for ages. So when the inventions of Crompton, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Cartwright began to coin gold like any philosopher’s stone, for well-managing cotton manufacturers, speculators cast their eyes upon the pleasant waters of Middleton and Thornham, proposing to erect machinery and spin the yarn or thread, and otherwise to use the abundant water-power. But the Lords of Middleton would have none of such profits, (and if they could afford to reject them, we will not say that up to a certain point they were not wise), and so they gave short answers to the applicants, who went away and found, half-a-mile off, on the borders of Yorkshire, similar conveniences and more accessible ground-landlords in the Byrons, Lords of the Manor of Rochdale. And when, some time afterwards, a like application met with a like answer, other manufacturers went away to another corner, and built Oldham.
So the Middleton farms continued very pretty picturesque farms; Middleton village grew into a miserable town, and was passed over in 1830, when every population was putting forth its claims to a share in making the laws of the United Kingdom; while Oldham, with 30,000 inhabitants, was allotted two members, (an honour which cost the life of one of them, our best describer of English rural scenery, in racy Saxon English, William Cobbett); Rochdale, with 24,000, obtained one, and eventually made itself loudly heard in the House, in the person of John Bright, a gentleman of pluck not without eloquence, who has done a good deal, considering the disadvantages he has laboured under, innothaving been brought to his level in a public school, andin havingbeen brought up in the atmosphere of adulation, to which the wealthy and clever of a small sect are as much exposed as the scions of a “proud aristocracy.”
A few years ago, the late lord, who had occasionally lived on the estate, died. His successor pulled down the Manor House, became an absentee, always in want of ready money, and introduced the Irish system into the management of his estate. That is to say, good farming became a sure mode of inviting an increase of rent—for indispensable repairs no ready money was forthcoming, so tenants who had an indisputable claim to such allowances, received a reduction of rent instead; they generally accepted the reduction, and did no more of the repairs than would just make shift. The land in the town suitable for building was let at chief rents to the highest bidder, with no consideration for the mutual convenience of neighbours, or the welfare of future residents.
Thus mismanaged and dilapidated, the estates were brought into the market, and purchased for Messrs. Peto & Betts, by their land agent, Mr. Francis Fuller, for less than £200,000; and the lands of the aristocracy of blood passed into the possession of the aristocracy of trade. Here was a subject for a doleful ballad from “A Young Englander,” commencing—
“Ye tenants old of Middleton ye cannot need but sigh,Departed are the traces of your own nobility,The Locomotivocracy have gone and done the trick,And England’s aristocracy’s obliged to cut its stick.”
“Ye tenants old of Middleton ye cannot need but sigh,Departed are the traces of your own nobility,The Locomotivocracy have gone and done the trick,And England’s aristocracy’s obliged to cut its stick.”
A visit to Middleton, however, will show that on this occasion the tenantry have no reason either to sigh or weep, and the visit is worth making, independently of the pleasantness of a change from town to country, because it affords an opportunity of seeing what can be done with a neglected domain when it passes into the hands of men of large capital, liberal views, and a thorough determination that whatever they take in hand shall be done in the best possible manner.
Messrs. Peto & Betts are managing this estate on the same principles that they have conducted the undertaking by which, in a very few years, they have acquired a large fortune and an influential position. Not by avariciously grasping, and meritlessly grinding all the subordinates whose services they required; not by squeezing men like oranges, and throwing them away when squeezed; but by choosing suitable assistants for every task they undertook, and making those assistants, or advisers, feel that their interests were the same, that they were prepared to pay liberally for services strenuously rendered. By this system servants and sub-contractors worked for them with all the zeal of friends, and by this system the tenantry of Middleton will attain a degree of comfort and prosperity hitherto unknown, while the estate they occupy will be largely increased in value.
It is most fortunate that, at a time when so much landed property is passing into the hands of men of the class of which these gentlemen may be considered the intellectual leaders, an example has been set, by them, of liberal and judicious management.
For this reason we do not think these rough notes on Middleton will be considered a useless digression.
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DRAINS AND REPAIRS.—Instead of the ordinary system of bit-by-bit repairs and instead of arrangements for the tenants to execute drains, as the first step after the change of proprietorship, a complete survey was made of the defects and of the value of all the holdings. On this survey the rents were fixed, with the understanding that while no increase of rent would be imposed on a good tenant, lazy slovenly farming would be forthwith taxed with an additional ten per cent.
The landlords have themselves undertaken to execute a complete deep drainage of the whole property at a cost of £20,000. For this they charge the tenants five per cent. on the outlay per acre occupied. Farm buildings and farm houses are being put in thorough repair, and tenants are expected so to keep them.
In the course of these repairs farm houses were found in which the windows were fixtures, not intended to open! While as to the farming, it is scarcely possible to imagine anything more barbarous. It is not a corn-growing district, and what corn is grown these weaver farmers, indifferent apparently to loss of time, firstlashagainst a board to get part of the grain out, and then thrash the rest out of the straw!
Market garden cultivation, stall feeding, and root crops would answer well, but at the time of the survey only two gardens were cultivated for the sale of produce in the unlimited markets of Oldham, Rochdale, and Manchester; and little feeding except of pigs.
Orchard trees are now supplied by the landlords, free of cost, to all willing to take charge of them.
It will be very difficult to induce these people to change their old slovenly style of farming, for their chief pride is in their weaving, which is excellent, and many of them are in possession of properties held for two and three generations without change. But the system of encouraging the good, and getting rid of the lazy, will work a reformation in time, especially as there are some very good examples on the estate. For instance, Benjamin Johnson, who, paying the highest rent per acre, has creditably brought up ten childrenon nine acres of land, without other employment.
Middleton is a district especially suited for small farms, so much so that it has been determined to divide one or two of the larger ones.
Altogether it is a very primitive curious place, with several originals among the tenantry, and some beautiful natural scenery, among whom a morning may be spent with profit and pleasure.
With the town and building land an equally comprehensive system has been adopted.
The defects of the existing buildings are to be cured as soon as, and in the best manner, that circumstances will admit; while all new houses are to be built and drained on a fixed plan, and all roadside cottages to have at least a quarter of an acre of ground for a garden.
It will take some years to work out complete results; it is, however, gratifying to see a landowner placing himself in the hands of competent advisers, planning not for the profits of the hour, but for the future, for the permanent health, happiness, and prosperity of all dwelling on his property.
The pecuniary results promise to be highly satisfactory; it is already evident that increased rents will be accompanied by increased prosperity, and it is thought in the neighbourhood that in the next ten years, the property will, from the judicious expenditure of £30,000, be worth at least £300,000.
So much for employing a scientific and practical agriculturist as land agent, instead of a fashionable London attorney.{193}
From Manchester to Leeds is a journey of forty-five miles, and about two hours. We should like to describe Yorkshire, one of the few counties to which men are proud to belong. We never hear any one say, with conscious pride, “I am a Hampshireman or an Essex man, or even a Lancashireman,” while there are some counties of which the natives are positively ashamed.
But we have neither time nor space to say anything about those things of which a Yorkshireman has reason to be proud—of the hills, the woods, the dales, the romantic streams,—above all, of the lovely Wharfe, of the fat plains, the great woods, the miles of black coal mines, where we have heard the little boys driving their horses and singing hymns, sounding like angels in the infernal regions, the rare good sheep, the Teeswater cattle, that gave us short-horns, of horses, well known wherever the best are valued, be it racer, hunter, or proud-prancing carriage horse; hounds that it takes a Yorkshire horse to live with; and huntsmen, whom to hear tally-away and see ride out of cover makes the heart of man leap as at the sound of a trumpet; foxes stanch and wily, worthy of the hounds; and then of those famous dalesmen farmers, tall, broad-shouldered, with bullet heads, and keen grey eyes, rosy bloom, high cheek bones, foxy whiskers, full white-teethed, laughing mouths, hard riders, hard drinkers, keen bargainers, capital fellows; and besides those the slips, grafts, and thinnings from the farms, who in factories, counting-houses, and shops, show something of the powerful Yorkshire stamp. Everything is great in Yorkshire, even their rogues are on a large scale; in Spain, men of the same calibre would be prime ministers and grandees of the first class; in France, under a monarchy, a portfolio, and the use of the telegraph, with no end of ribands, would have been the least reward. Here the honours stop short between two dukes, as supporters arm in arm; but still we are obliged to own that no one but a Yorkshireman could have so bent all the wild beasts of Belgravia and Mayfair, from the Countess Gazelle to the Ducal Elephant, to his purpose, as an ex-king did. Our task will be confined on the present occasion to a sketch of Huddersfield and Leeds, centres of the woollen manufacture, which forms the third great staple of English manufactures, and of Sheffield, famed for keen blades.
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HUDDERSFIELD, twenty-six miles from Manchester, is the first important town, on a road studded with stations, from which busy weavers and spinners are continually passing and repassing. It is situated in a naturally barren district, where previously to 1811 the inhabitants chiefly lived on oaten cake, and has been raised to a high degree of prosperity by the extension of the manufactures, a position on the high road between Manchester and Leeds, intersected by a canal, uniting the east and west, or inland navigation, and more recently by railroads, which connect it with all the manufacturing towns of the north. An ample supply of water-power, with coal and building stone, have contributed to this prosperity, of which advantage has been taken to improve the streets, thoroughfares, and public buildings. The use of a light yellow building stone for the houses has a very pleasant appearance after the bricks of Manchester and Liverpool.
TheHuddersfield Canal, which connects the Humber and Mersey, is a very extraordinary piece of work. It is carried through and over a backbone of hills by stairs of more than thirty locks in nine miles, and a tunnel three miles in length. At one place it is 222 yards below the surface, and at another 656½ feet above the level of the sea.
When we examine such works, so profitable to the community, so unprofitable to the projectors, how can we doubt the capability of our country to hold its own in any commercial race? Men make a country, not accidents of soil or climate, mines or forests. For centuries California and Central America have been in the hands of an Iberian race,fallow. A few months of Anglo-Saxon rule, and land and sea are boiling with fervid elements of cultivation, commerce, and civilization. With time the dregs will disappear, and churches and schools, cornfields and fulling-mills, will supersede grizzly bears and wandering Indians.
All the land in Huddersfield belongs to the Ramsden family, by whom the Cloth Hall was erected. Six hundred manufacturers attend this hall every Tuesday.
The principal manufactures are of broad and narrow cloths, serges, kerseymeres, cords, and fancy goods of shawls and waistcoatings, composed of mixed cotton, silk, and wool.
The neighbourhood of Huddersfield was the centre of the Luddite outbreak, when a large number of persons engaged in the cloth manufacture, conceiving that they were injured by the use of certain inventions for dressing cloth, banded together, traversed the country at night, searching for and carrying off fire-arms, and attacking and destroying the manufactories of persons supposed to use the obnoxious machines.
Great alarm was excited, some expected nothing less than a general insurrection; at length the rioters were attacked, dispersed, a large number arrested, tried, and seventeen hanged. Since that period not one but scores of mechanical improvements have been introduced into the woollen manufacture without occasioning disturbance, and with benefit in increased employment to the working classes.
The case of the Luddites was one of the few on which Lord Byron spoke in the Upper House, and Horace Smith sang for Fitzgerald . . .
“What makes the price of beer and Luddites rise?What fills the butchers’ shops with large blue flies?”
“What makes the price of beer and Luddites rise?What fills the butchers’ shops with large blue flies?”
The population is about 30,000, and returns one member to the House of Commons.
About half a mile from the town is Lockwood Spa, of strongly sulphurous waters, for which a set of handsome buildings have been provided.
LEEDS, seventeen miles from Huddersfield, is the centre of five railways, by which it has direct connection with Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, on the east, and Carlisle on the west coast, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby, and Birmingham, in the Midland counties, possesses one of the finest central railway stations in the kingdom, and has also the advantage of being in the centre of inland navigation (a great advantage for the transport of heavy goods), as it communicates with the eastern seas by the Aire and Calder navigation to the Humber, and westward by the Leeds and Liverpool to the Mersey. The town stands on a hill, which rises from the banks of the river Aire. Leeds has claims to antiquity, but few remains. When Domesday Book was compiled it appears to have been an agricultural district.
Wakefield was formerly the more important town. Lord Clarendon, in 1642, speaks of Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford, “as three very rich and populous towns, depending wholly upon clothing.”
The first charter was granted to Leeds by Charles I., and the second by Charles II., on petition of the clothworkers, merchants, and others, “to protect them from the great abuses, defects and deceits, discovered and practised by fraudulent persons in the making, selling, and dyeing of woollen cloths.”
The principal manufacture of Leeds is woollen cloth. Formerly the trade was carried on by five or six thousand small master clothiers, who employed their own families, and some thirty or forty thousand servants, and also carried on small farms. But the extension of the factory system has somewhat diminished their numbers. There are still, however, in connection with Leeds, several small clothing villages, in which the first stages of the operation are carried on, in spinning, weaving, and fulling.
Large quantities of worsted goods are brought to Leeds to be finished and dyed, which have been purchased, in an undyed state, at Bradford and Halifax. The dye-houses and dressing-shops of Leeds are very extensive. Goods purchased in a rough state in the Cloth Halls and Piece Halls are taken there to be finished. There are also extensive mills for spinning flax for linen, canvas-sailing, thread, and manufactures of glass and earthenware. In connection with Messrs. Marshall’s flax factory, the same firm are carrying on extensive experiments near Hull in growing flax.
Cloth Halls.—Previous to 1711, the cloth market was held in the open street. In 1755, the present Halls were erected, and in them the merchants purchase the half manufactured article from the country manufacturers.
The Coloured Cloth Hall is a quadrangular building, 127½ yards long, and 66 broad, divided into six departments called streets. Each street contains two rows of stands, and each stand measures 22 inches in front, and is inscribed with the name of the clothier to whom it belongs. The original cost was £3. 3s. This price advanced to £24 at the beginning of the present century; but it has now fallen below its original value—not owing to a decrease in the quantity of manufactured goods, but owing to the prevalence of the factory system—in which the whole operation is performed, from sorting the piece to packing the cloth fit for the tailor’s shelves—over the domestic system of manufacturing. An additional story, erected on the north side of the Coloured Cloth Hall, is used chiefly for the sale of ladies’ cloths in their undyed state. The White Cloth Hall is nearly as large as the Coloured Cloth Hall, and on the same plan. The markets are held on Tuesdays and Saturdays, on which days alone the merchants are permitted to buy in the Halls. The time of the sale is in the forenoon, and commences by the ringing of a bell, when each manufacturer is at his stand, the merchants go in, and the sales commence. At the end of an hour the bell warns the buyers and sellers that the market is about to close, and in another quarter of an hour the bell rings a third time, and the business of the day is terminated. The White Cloth Hall opens immediately after the other is closed, and the transactions are carried on in a similar manner.
The public buildings of Leeds are not externally imposing, and it is, without exception, one of the most disagreeable-looking towns in England—worse than Manchester; it has also the reputation of being very unhealthy to certain constitutions from the prevalence of dye-works.
The wealthy and employing classes in Leeds (we know no better term) have a reputation for charity, and good management of charitable institutions. Howard the philanthropist visited the workhouse, and praised the management, at a period when to deserve such praise was rare. The subscriptions to public charities are large, and there is an ancient fund for pious uses, said to amount to upwards of £5000 a-year, managed by a close self-elected corporation, about the distribution of which they do not consider themselves bound to give any detailed information. Dr. Hook, the Vicar of Leeds, has organized a system of house-to-house visitation, for the purpose of affording aid, in poverty and sickness, to the deserving and religious, and educational instruction to all, which has effected a great deal of good, and would have done more, had not well known circumstances shaken the confidence of the Leeds public in the honesty of some of the teachers. All parties agree, however differing in opinions, that Dr. Hook himself is a most excellent, charitable, self-sacrificing man.
A New Grammar School—first founded in 1552 by the Rev. Sir William Sheafield, and since endowed by several other persons—is lodged in a building of ample size, with residence for the head master, and enjoys an income of £2000 a-year; and there are four Exhibitions of £70 a-year to Magdalen College, Cambridge, tenable till degree of M.A. has been taken; one Exhibition of £100 a-year, tenable for five years, at Queen’s College, Oxford, open to a candidate from Leeds school; and four of £50 each, at Oxford or Cambridge, for four years. There were 174 scholars in 1850. It is open to the sons of all residents in Leeds, without any fee to the masters, who are liberally paid. The elements of mathematics are taught. The Charity Commissioners reported it to be satisfactorily and ably conducted.
The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, the Leeds Literary Institution, and the Leeds Mechanics Institute, are all respectable in their class. The Mechanics Institute forms the centre of a union of Yorkshire associations of the same kind.
Three newspapers are published in Leeds, of large circulation, representing three shades of political opinion.
TheLeeds Mercury—which has, we believe, the largest circulation of any provincial paper—was founded, and carried on for a long life, by the late Mr. Edward Baines, who represented his native town in the first reformed parliament, and for some years afterwards—a very extraordinary man, who, from a humble station, by his own talents made his way to wealth and influence. He was the author of the standard work on the cotton trade, as well as several valuable local histories. TheMercuryis still carried on by his family. One son is the proprietor of a Liverpool paper, and another, the Right Honourable Matthew Talbot Baines, represents Hull, and is President of the Poor-Law Board.
Among the celebrated natives of Leeds, were Sir Thomas Denison, whose life began like Whittington’s; John Smeaton, the engineer of Eddystone Lighthouse, the first who placed civil engineering in the rank of a science; the two Reverend Milners (Joseph, and Isaac, Dean of Carlisle), great polemical giants in their day, authors of “The History of the Church of Christ;” Dr. Priestly, inventor of the pneumatic apparatus still used by chemists, and discoverer of oxygen and several other gases; David Hartley, the metaphysician whom Coleridge so much admired that he called his son after him; and Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso. Nor must we forget Ralph Thoresby, author of “Ducatus Leodiensis, or the Topography of the Town and Parish of Leeds”—a valuable and curious book, published in 1715; and of “Vicaria Leodiensis, a History of the Church of Leeds,” published in 1724.
Wool Growing, and Woollen Manufactures.—Yorkshire is the ancient seat of a great woollen manufacture, founded on the coarse wools of its native hills; but coal and cheap conveyance, with the stimulus mechanical inventions have applied in the neighbouring counties to cotton, have given Yorkshire such advantages over many ancient seats of manufacture, that it has transplanted and increased a considerable portion of the fine cloth trade formerly carried on in the west of England alone, besides engrafting and erecting a variety of other and new kinds of textiles, in which wool or hair have some very slight part.
It is quite certain that woollen garments were among the first manufactured among barbarous tribes. We have seen this year, in the Exhibition in Hyde Park, specimens of white felted cloth from India, equal, if not superior, to anything that we can manufacture for strength and durability, which must have been made with the rude tools, of the form which has been in use for probably at least two thousand years.
English coarse wools have been celebrated, and in demand among foreign nations, from the earliest periods of our history. In the time of William the Conqueror, an inundation in the Netherlands drove many clothiers over, and William of Malmesbury tells us that the king welcomed them, and placed them first in Carlisle, where there are still manufactories, and then in the western counties, where they could find what was indispensable for their trade—streams for washing and plenty of wood for boiling their vats. Very early the manufacturers applied to restrain the exportation of English wool. In the time of Edward I., we find a duty of twenty shillings to forty shillings per bag on importation. Edward III. prohibited the export of wool, at the same time he took his taxes and subsidies in wool, which became a favourite medium of taxation with our monarchs, and sent his wool abroad for sale. Under his reign, Flemish weavers were encouraged to settle here and improve the manufacture, which became spread all over England thus—Norfolk fustians, Suffolk baize, Essex serges and says, Kent broadcloth, Devon kerseys, Gloucestershire cloth, Worcestershire cloth, Wales friezes, Westmoreland cloth, Yorkshire cloth, Somersetshire serges, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Sussex cloth: districts from a great number of which woollen manufactures have now disappeared. We have Parliamentary records of the mutual absurdities by which the woollen manufacturers, on the one hand, sought to obtain a monopoly of British wool, and the wool growers endeavoured to secure the exclusive right to supply the raw material. Act after act was laid upon everything connected with wool, so that it is only extraordinary that, under such restrictive trammeling, the trade survived at all.
“Odious! In woollen! ’twould a saint provoke!Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.”
“Odious! In woollen! ’twould a saint provoke!Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.”
In 1781, when, the price of wool being low, the Lincolnshire woolgrowers met under the chairmanship of their great landowners, and resolved on petitions praying “that British might be exported and that Irish wool might be excluded from England;” thereupon the Yorkshire manufacturers met and resolved that “the exportation of wool would be ruinous to the trade and manufactures of England,” that the manufacturers would be obliged to leave the kingdom for want of employment, and that the importation of Irish woollen yarn ought to be interdicted.
The manufacturers were under the impression that no other country than England could produce the long wools suitable for the manufacture of worsted.
Some time afterwards the woollen manufacturers thought themselves likely to be ruined by the introduction of cotton cloth, “to the ruin of the staple trade of the kingdom,” and succeeded in placing an excise duty upon the new fabric.
The contention between sheepowners and manufacturers continued until, in 1824, when the influence of Mr. Huskisson’s opinions on trade were beginning to be felt in Parliament, and to the disgust of both parties, a compromise was effected by a reduction of all wool duties to a uniform duty of ld. per lb. on the export of British and importation of foreign wool. The last step was a total repeal of all duties.
English wools may be divided into long and short staples. The long is used for worsted, which is finished when it leaves the loom; the short for cloth, which is compacted together, increased in bulk and diminished in breadth,by fulling; that is, so beating as to take advantage of the serrated edges of the wool which lead it to felt together.
Foreign wool, known as merino, has been used from an early period. In the time of the Stuarts, an attempt was made to monopolize all the Spanish wool exported.
Wars and bad government in Spain have destroyed the export trade in merino wool, but the breed, transplanted into Germany, has multiplied and even improved. Our finest wool is obtained from Silesia, and the breed is cultivated with more or less success in many parts of the European continent. In England, all attempts to cultivate the merino with profit have failed. Next to Germany in quality, and exceeding that country in quantity, we obtain our greatest supply of fine wool from Australia, where, in the course of twenty-five years, the merino sheep has multiplied to the extent of twelve or thirteen million head, and is still increasing; thus doubling our supply of a fine article, not equal to German, but, at the low price at which it can be furnished, helping to create entirely new manufactures by intermixing with our own coarse wools, which it renders more available and valuable. We also obtain wool from the Cape of Good Hope, from India, from Egypt, and from South America.
Besides pure wool, our manufacturers use large quantities of goat’s hair, called mohair, from the Mediterranean, of camel hair, of Thibet goat’s hair, of the long grey and black hair of the tame South American llama and alpaca, and of the short soft red hair of the vicuna, a wild animal of the same species. Indeed, almost every year since the repeal of all restrictions on trade, has introduced some new raw material in wool or hair to our manufacturers.
The alpaca and vicuna, now an important article of trade and manufacture, although well known to the native Peruvians at the time of the conquest by the Spaniards, has only come into notice within the last twenty years. The first article of the kind that excited any attention was a dress made for Her Majesty from a flock of llamas belonging to Her Majesty, under the superintendence of Mr. Thomas Southey, the eminent wool broker.
The stock from the small flock of merinos taken out by Colonel Macarthur to what was then only known as Botany Bay, now supports 300,000 souls in prosperity in Australia, and supplies exports to the amount of upwards of a million and a half sterling per annum.
The Great Exhibition afforded an excellent display of the variety and progress of Yorkshire woollen manufactures, proving the immense advantage they derived from choice and mixture of various qualities and materials. In several examples the body was of stout English wool, with a face of finest Australia,—in some cases, of mohair,—and, in one instance, a most beautiful article was produced by putting a face of vicuna on British wool.
As at present conducted, the process of a woollen factory up to certain stages of machinery is the same as that of a cotton factory. But it will be seen that a great deal depends on an ample supply of water of good quality.
Cloth Manufacture.—(1.) The first operation is that of sorting the wool. Each fleece contains several qualities,—the division and arrangement requires judgment; the best in a Silesian fleece may be worth 6s. a pound, and the rest not worth half the money. After sorting, wools are mixed in certain proportions.
(2.) The mixture is first soaked in a hot ley of stale urine and soap, rinsed in cold water, and pressed between rollers to dry it.
(3.) If the cloth is to be dyed in that operation, next succeeds the scouring. Supposing it dyed,
(4)wyllyingfollows, by which it is subject to the operation of the spikes of revolving wheels, for the purpose of opening the fibres and sending it out in a light cloud-like appearance, to where a stream of air driven through it, clears away all impurities by a sort of winnowing process, and sends it out in a smooth sheet.
(5.) If any impurities remain, it is hand picked.
(6.) It is laid on the floor, sprinkled with olive oil, and well beaten with staves.
(7.) The operation of thescribbling machinefollows, by which it is reduced to a fleecy sheet and wound on rollers.
(8.) Thecarding machinenext reduces it to hollow loose short pipes. These are joined
(9) in theslubbing machineinto a weak thread, and here we see the use of the young hands, boys and girls, who piece one of these pipes as they are drawn through the machine by a slow clockwork motion, bending one knee every time as they curtsey sideways toward the machine. They earn very good wages and look healthy; but, where the wool is dyed, what with the dye and what with the oil, the piecers are all ready toileted to sing to a banjo; and sometimes, with rubbing their faces with their dirty hands, they get sore eyes.
(10.)Spinninghardens the thread.
(11.)Weavingis done by hand or by power-loom. The power-looms are becoming more common. After weaving, it is washed in soap-water and clean water by machinery,—then stretched on tenterhooks and allowed to dry in a smooth extended state:
(l2) then examined for all hair and impurities to be picked off by “burlers.” After this follows
(13)fulling, or felting, which gives woollen goods that substance which distinguishes them. Every hair of wool is saw-edged, and this by beating will mass together. Superfine cloth with a thick solution of soap spread between each layer, and, folded into many piles, is exposed to the long continued action of revolving wooden hammers on wheels, three separate times, for four hours each time. This process diminishes both breadth and length nearly one half.
After “fulling” cloth is woolly and rough; to improve the appearance it is first
(14)teazled—that is, raked with cylinders covered with the round prickly heads of the teazle plant. Many attempts have been made to invent wire and other brushes for the same purpose, but hitherto nothing has been found more effective and economical than the teazle. To apply them the cloth is stretched on cloth beams, and made to move in one direction, while the teazle cylinders turn in another. When the ends of the fibres have been thus raised, they are
(15)shearedor clipped, in order to produce the same effect as clipping the rough coat of a horse. Formerly this operation was performed by hand. The introduction of machinery created formidable riots in the west of England. At present the operation is performed with great perfection and rapidity, by more than one process.
When the cloth has been raised and sheared once, it is in the best possible condition for wear; but in order to give superfine cloth beauty, it is sheared several times, then exposed to the action of steam, and at the same time brushed with cylinder brushes. Other operations, of minor importance, are carried on for the purpose of giving smoothness and gloss. It may be observed that a brilliant appearance does not always, in modern manufactures, betoken the best cloth. An eminent woollen manufacturer having been asked what cloth he would recommend for wear and warmth to a backwoodsman, answered quickly, “Nothing can wear like a good blanket.” The small manufacturers generally dispose of their cloth in the rough state.
The progress of machinery has called into existence a great number of factories, especially in worsted and mixed stuffs, has given value to many descriptions of wool formerly valueless, and, coupled with the repeal of the duty, brought into the market many kinds unknown a few years ago. “Properties once prized,” Mr. Southey remarks in his Essay on Wools, “have given way to some other property upon which machinery can better operate, and yield more desirable results. Spanish wool, once deemed indispensable, is now little sought after. It is supplanted by our colonial wool, which is steadily advancing in quality and quantity, while angora goat, and alpaca wools are forcing their way into and enhancing the value of our stuff trade.” . . . “Machinery has marshalled before its tremendous power the wool of every country, selected and adopted the special qualities of each. Nothing, in fact, is now rejected. Even the burr, existing in myriads in South America and some other descriptions of wool, at one time so perplexing to our manufacturers, can now, through the aid of machinery, be extracted, without very material injury to the fibre.” . . . “In no description of manufacture connected with the woollen trade has machinery been more fertile in improvements than in what may be termed the worsted stuff trade.”
“The power-looms employed, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the worsted stuff trade, increased from 2,763 in 1836, to 19,121 in 1845 (and are probably not far from 28,000 at the present time). Worsted goods formerly consisted chiefly of bombazets, shalloons, calamancoes, lastings for ladies’ boots, and taminies. Now the articles in the fancy trade may be said to be numberless, and to display great artistic beauty. These articles, made with alpaca, Saxony, fine English and Colonial wools, and of goats’ hair for weft, with fine cotton for warp, consist of merinoes, Orleans, plain and figured Parisians, Paramattas, and alpaca figures, checks, etc.”