Cotton Trade

One of the Long Gone Cotton Mills Hand Loom Weavers Cottages

In Bury, Lancashire, England.

This section will give you some history of the cotton industry, and also has a small write up on - The cotton mill workers, Women workers in the mills, as well as a piece on the Children who worked in the mills. I do hope that you find this section of the site interesting.

Employment in the Lancashire cotton industry, 1801 to 1861

Date	Number of workers in industry	% of Working Population
1801	242,000	35.9
1811	306,000	36.9
1821	369,000	35
1831	427,000	31.9
1841	374,000	22.4
1851	379,000	18.6
1861	446,000	18.3

The Cotton Industry developed in three main districts: North West England, centred on Manchester, the Midlands, centred on Nottingham, and the Clyde Valley in Scotland, between Lanark and Paisley.

By 1802 the industry accounted for between 4 and 5 per cent of the national income of Britain.

By 1812 there were 100,000 spinners and 250,000 weavers working in the industry. Production had grown to 8 percent and had now overtaken the woollen industry.

By 1830 more than half the value of British home-produced exports consisted of cotton textiles.

For centuries 'handloom weaving' had been carried out on the basis of the shuttle carrying the yarn being passed slowly and from one hand to the other. There had been approximately 75,000 handloom weavers in Britain in 1795. The number of handloom weavers continued to increase, reaching 240,000 by 1820 before the long, slow decline set in. By 1829, the number had dropped to 225,000 who were earning little more than 5s a week, while there were now 60,000 power looms in operation. By 1833 there were just 213,000 left and, as more and more gave up the unequal fight, two years later the total was 188,000.

John Phillips Kay, secretary to Manchester's Special Board of Health, described the weavers' plight in 1832, "The handloom weavers still continue a very extensive class, and though they labour 14 hours upwards daily, earn only from five to seven shillings a week."

The biggest drop in handloom weaving numbers came in the 10 years from 1835 - in this period, they lost more than two thirds of their number and were down to 60,000. By 1861 it was all but over: just 7,000 handloom weavers remained, none able to scrape even the most meagre living despite toiling up to 15 hours a day.

In 1733 John Kay (John Kay was born near Bury in Lancashire in about 1704) patented his 'flying shuttle' that dramatically increased the speed of this process. Kay placed shuttle boxes at each side of the loom connected by a long board, known as a shuttle race. By means of cords attached to a picking peg, a single weaver, using one hand, could cause the shuttle to be knocked back and forth across the loom from one shuttle box to the other.
Kay's 'Flying Shuttle' was the first true mechanization of the textile weaving process. The success of Kay's invention greatly increased the demand for spun cotton, as weavers could now produce finished cloth far more quickly than they could be supplied with the spun thread. The knock-on effect of this shortfall was for other inventors such as James Hargreaves and Samuel Crompton to mechanize the spinning process later in the 18th century.

His son Robert continued the Kay family tradition by inventing the 'drop-box' in 1769, allowing rapid interchange of multiple shuttles with different coloured threads on one loom.

As for John Kay, greedy manufacturers refused to pay him royalties for his invention and machine-breakers raided his Bury home in 1753. He left England for France shortly afterwards and is thought to have died in poverty.

In 1850, calico printer, handloom weaver and bobbin-winder John Mercer perfected a technique for giving cotton a silk-like lustre by treating the material with caustic soda. Britain's economic confidence was bolstered by the Great Exhibition of 1851, but such self-assurance was misplaced as its biggest industry would discover within a decade. The dyeing of textiles was greatly advanced by William Perkins discovery of mauve aniline, the first commercially produced synthetic dyestuff.
With the power of the factory seemingly assured and the numbers employed in cotton factories ever greater, it is ironic that the cotton industry was about to receive its first wake-up call in the form of the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861 - 1865.
The American Civil War was a crucial event in the history of the Lancashire cotton industry. The blockade of the southern ports by the Federal navy cut off the supply of raw cotton on which Lancashire's mills depended. Mill closure, short time working and mass unemployment resulted. The crisis reached its peak in 1862/3. Recent histories have changed the interpretation of events. Industrial depression would have resulted despite the Civil War due to excessive production and speculation in the late 1850's. Stocks of raw cotton remained in Lancashire throughout the period but were held in warehouses by merchants gambling on a further rise in prices. Lancashire was not wholly sympathetic to the cause of the Northern states, even demanding British government action to break the blockade. Cotton operatives did not suffer in silence to free the Southern plantation slave. Riots broke out in 1863 leading to Government intervention to fund public works in order to give paid work rather than relief to the unemployed. As with most historical narratives, that of the Lancashire Cotton Famine is a complex one.
In the early 1860's, the Lancashire cotton industry, which dominated the mid-19th century British economy, was devastated by a political event beyond its control, the Civil War in the United States of America. In April 1861, President Lincoln ordered a blockade of the Confederate southern ports, the outlet for the raw cotton on which Lancashire's mills depended. Attempts to find alternative sources of supply from India or Egypt had little success. The short stapled Surat cotton proved no substitute for the medium stapled American variety. Deprived of essential raw material, spinning mills and weaving sheds closed down or resorted to short time working. Unemployment mounted rapidly.

By November 1862, three fifths of the labour force, 331,000 men and women were idle. Many operatives, their savings exhausted, were forced to apply for charitable handouts or for relief from the despised poor law system.

As for the working population, their suffering was undoubted, but their peaceable conduct was not unbroken. There was resentment at the controlled, minimalist nature of charitable relief; at the fact that more generous donations appeared to come from outside Lancashire than from its wealthy cotton masters, and at the poor law system which set degrading work tasks for those who applied for relief, making no distinction between respectable unemployed and drunken ne'er do well.

In March 1863, serious riots broke out in the towns of Stalybridge, Ashton and Dukinfield, Triggered by an attempt to reduce scales of relief and impose harsher conditions on recipients of it. This spread panic amongst the local magistracy who feared a return to the Chartist disturbances of the 1840's. "To riot or to rot" appeared to be the gloomy forecast of the future of Lancashire's demoralized cotton workers. In response the Government passed a Public Works Act in 1863 which provided money for local authorities to fund schemes of urban improvement which would provide paid work for the unemployed. This "knee jerk" legislation proved to be too little and too late. By the time it was implemented, unemployment and relief rolls were falling. Town councils eagerly accepted the opportunity to improve their towns, and several Alexandra Parks were laid out in honour of the new Princess of Wales.
As the cotton industry recovered from the Cotton Famine, other sources of raw cotton were sought in order to ensure that never again would the industry be solely reliant on a single source of its valuable raw material. But the seeds of the industry's destruction had already been sown. The lifting of restrictions on the exportation of textile machinery in 1843 had led to the growth of Indian, Brazilian and Japanese cotton industries. Whilst competition from European cotton companies was not a particular worry, the low wages paid to workers in Asia, South America and the Far East meant that cotton could be produced in these countries far more cheaply than was possible in the United Kingdom.
In 1873, raw cotton ceased to be Britain's largest import for the first time since 1825. These problems were exacerbated by the slowness of British cotton industry to adapt new technologies. Although the Lancashire cotton industry did continue to grow, depressions in the cotton industry and the effects of the trade cycle took their toll. Nonetheless this was a period of optimism when trade followed the flag and Britain's Empire grew, and Lancashire's cotton empire with it. But the cotton industry's last hurrah was surprisingly close at hand.

The very peak of British cotton cloth production came in 1913, when the combined output of the British industry reached 7,075,000,000 (7 billion) square yards of cloth. But within a few short years, the world would be a very different place, and the British cotton industry would begin its rapid decline.

Cotton Mill Workers

From the middle of the nineteenth century the wages of cotton factory workers increased and they were regarded as one of the better-paid industrial occupations. The majority of factory workers were paid on piece rates, so that their wages were determined by how much yarn was spun or cloth woven, with the result that the take home pay of individual workers varied.
There were also important differences between and within the different sectors of the industry. Strippers and grinders were among the highest paid operatives in the carding sector. In spinning the spinner was the highest paid operative. He was responsible for paying other members of his team (the big piecer and the little piecer). Wages also depended on the type of spinning done.
In the weaving sector the wages received by male and female weavers were the same in theory, an unusual feature for the Victorian period, though in practice male weavers usually received slightly higher wages. Even so this did not stop female weavers from being among the highest paid female industrial workers. Weavers were also vulnerable to a system of fining whereby their wages would be reduced if they produced unsatisfactory cloth. As many members of the same family worked in the mill the overall living standards were determined by the family wage rather than that of the adult male wage earner.
Many mill workers were paid via the 'truck system'. This meant they were paid 'in kind' with meat, groceries and fuel from the mill owner’s own warehouse where the prices for such goods were way above that in the market place. Mill owners often built a number of small cottages close to their mill and rented them out to their own workers at the 'going rate'.

The working day for adults usually began around 5am and finished about 7pm. For children it was slightly shorter. There was a break of half an hour for breakfast at 8am and an hour for dinner at noon. Many workers did overtime in their breaks to carry out maintenance or cleaning jobs, which could not be done while the machinery was in motion. The spinning sheds were usually too hot; the weaving sheds too cold. The air was thick with cotton dust and the noise was deafening. Mill workers suffered from chest complaints, headaches, and stomach ailments.

Women Workers in the cotton mills

Some ladies working in the Spinning Room of a cotton mill

Before and during the early part of the Industrial Revolution the main occupation for men was in agriculture, for women in domestic service. By 1830 this was still the case with working in cotton mills a joint second most common occupation for both sexes. A third of all cotton mill workers were children because their labour was so cheap. Of the rest a large number were women because their labour was cheaper than that of a man.

In the days when the textile industry was cottage based, women did the spinning, children carded and wound the yarn while the man of the house did the weaving. In the cotton mills the job of the spinner was given to the men since it was now seen as one of the most responsible jobs and many of the other mechanical and repetitive tasks were considered beneath him. The foreman of each shed or department was always a man, many of whom were prepared to use physical threats or violence towards their workers in order to achieve targets.
Women worked the same hours in the mills that men did but when they got home they could not relax. Men expected to go to the pub or the music hall or perhaps to a union meeting or an evening class. Sharing the household chores was not on their agenda and male leisure was bought at female expense. Women were expected to take sole responsibility for cooking, cleaning, washing and caring for their family. They would do a ten or twelve hour day in the mill, come home, bake bread, pies and cakes, prepare an evening meal, tend to their children, tidy their home. Activities such as ironing and sewing were viewed as relaxation.
In the mills women workers had no privacy. There were no rest rooms or wash rooms set aside for females. They got no special treatment even when they were pregnant. Paid maternity leave was still in the future. Women were expected to just have their babies and go straight back to work, a fact graphically illustrated by The Factory Act of 1891, which had to prohibit employers from employing women workers within four weeks of giving birth. Many working women survived the harsh conditions and hard work meted out to them by male management through female bonding and friendships, and a shared sense of humour, all of which remained evident until the final decline of the cotton industry in the 1960s.

Children

Two youngsters at work in the cottoon mill, about 1905 A group of children who worked in the mills in the late 1800's

Here are two photo's of some young children that used to work in the cotton mills

In Victorian times, children were expected to work for a living, with most children starting their first full time job at around the age of seven. Wages were very low and children needed to work so that their families would not starve. Mill owners saw children as cheap labour and sometimes mills employed more children than adults. Children had no rights and their masters in the mills could punish them cruelly for anything they did wrong. The hours at work were long and conditions hard. Most children had little free time to play and many did not receive any education at all. The only future available to them was to spend their lives working in the mills.
Children were given the dirtiest and most boring jobs in the mills. Many worked as piecers, tying yarn threads together when they broke. They also had to carry large cans of cotton yarn slivers from the carder to the drawing frame. The job of scavenging (picking up pieces of loose cotton from underneath textile machinery) was given to children because they were smaller and more nimble than adults. There were no safety guards and machinery was not stopped for cleaning since this would take time and cost money. Spinning mules in particular were heavy and fast moving. Many children were badly injured and some were killed. Few received any compensation.

Children worked from Monday to Saturday, starting work at six in the morning and finishing at seven in the evening, with an hour for dinner between twelve and one. If children were late they were fined. If children made a mistake or fell asleep on the job they were beaten. Children's wages were very low, sometimes just a few pence for working sixty hours a week!
Working in textile mills was completely different from working at home in the textile industry. In the textile mills, there were rules and regulations. All workers had to arrive at the mill by a set time. Lateness was punishable with a fine. Everyone worked a set number of hours and no one was allowed to leave before a certain time. All this was a new experience for both children and adults.
The mills were built on a huge open plan scale so that the foremen could see every worker. If they thought that workers weren't working hard enough or absent they were punished. The rules for working in the mill were posted on walls. Many children were not educated and could not read them. Child workers had no rights and sometimes missed their dinner breaks because the foreman ordered them to keep on working.

Robert Owen (Born on 14th May 1771 & Died 17th November 1858) had purchased four textile factories in New Lanark, now when he arrived at these factories that he had bought, he found that children from as young as five were working for thirteen hours a day in the textile mills. He stopped employing children under ten and reduced their labour to ten hours a day. The young children went to the nursery and infant schools that Owen had built. Older children worked in the factory but they also had to attend secondary school for part of the day.

Robert Owen believed that a person's character is formed by the effects of their environment. Owen was convinced that if he created the right environment, he could produce rational, good and humane people. Owen argued that people were naturally good but they were corrupted by the harsh way they were treated. For example, Owen was a strong opponent of physical punishment in schools and factories and immediately banned its use in New Lanark.

Please visit the page that I have added to this site, where you can view more history about Robert Owen.

In 1833, a new Factory Act was passed which stated that children aged 9-13 could only work nine hours a day. Those that were aged 13-18 were allowed to work a maximum of 10½ hours per day.

In 1844, the Factory Act limited the hours worked by those aged 8-13 to 6½ hours day.

The 1847 Factory Act introduced a 10 hour working day, or a 60 hour working week, for everyone over the age of 13 (longer hours were worked Monday- Friday so workers could have Saturday afternoons off).

The Children's Employment Commission also instigated a regular system of factory inspection to ensure children were not exploited.
The tide had now turned and in 1870 Gladstone's Education Act became law. This provided compulsory education for all children up to the age of twelve and meant that all children must attend school full time. Children now had the chance of a proper education.
The school leaving age was raised to fourteen in the early 20th Century and enforced labour of children in the mills was finally at an end.

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