Silk Throwing

caution !! this is an initial draft ... these notes are on my server for safe keeping !!

 

 

 

 

The First Manufactories

Congleton, along with Stockport & Macclesfield played a crucial part in the birth of modern industrial Britain ... you could even suggest that some of the world's first factories were built there on the fast flowing streams from the Pennines. In the 18th century, silk entrepreneurs powered their mills with these streams, mills that were the forerunners of all the great mills of the cotton industry, and ultimately of factories the world over ...

There are many species of silk moths but they are fussy and feed exclusively on the leaf of the mulberry bush. The moths use an excretion, fibroin, cemented in place by a gum, a protein called sericin, to spin a closed cocoon to protect the larvae.

Silk throwing was the first process in the manufacture of the raw reeled silk. It corresponds to the carding, combing & spinning of cotton and wool into yarn. In silk manufacturing it is called throwing. When the silk arrives at the throwing mills it can be as the raw cocoons of the silkworms or as a mass of tangled fibres or skeins, just as it arrived from China, Japan or Italy. Throwing does not include the common processes of carding and combing because the silk is already in the form of threads. The good news is that the sericin gum is readily soluble in hot water and the fibres easily released, the only difficulty is that the fibres are too fine and delicate for use. Throwing is essentially the process of cleaning, twisting and doubling the single fibres into usable thread. The process requires about a dozen steps, most of which used to require different machines ... 

Silk processing skills was established in England by French Protestant Huguenots refugees after they had been kicked out of France following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. They prospered in Spitalfields, outside the bounds of the City of London, where they avoided the restrictive legislation of the City Guilds. However hand throwing of silk skeins produced a thread which was only strong enough for the fabric wefts, the stronger warp threads required machine throwing, expertise which had developed primarily in Italy. The Genoese and Venetians had been immersed in the silk trade with China from way back, ever since Marco Polo's silk road was superseded by the sea routes ...

Significantly for industrialisation, the spinning of wool & linen by hand was straightforward if slow but silk was different ... it was the girls who demanded the fine quality of silk, after they had experienced the exotic imports from the east ... does the photo of a young Carole explain industrialisation in Cheshire? ... the allure of fine silk on bare skin ... feeling is believing? ... crucially the quality now demanded by the Spitalfields craftsmen required the fine quality of thread which could only be achieved with machines ... messing in the back parlour with distaffs was not good enough ...

Around 1700 imports of silks from Europe & Asia were prohibited to protect the Spitalfields enterprise. This was the spark which ignited the silk throwing industry in England.

Six significant men with intertwined fortunes were involved in the initiatives which culminated in the successful industrialisation of this ancient craft in England ... Sir Thomas Lombe, John Guardivaglio, Nathanial Patterson, John Clayton, Rev Joseph Dale and Charles Roe ... a progression of profitable enterprise led from the first mill in Derby (1721), to the silk throwing enterprise at Logwood Mill in Stockport (1732), and then the Burton Mill was erected in Macclesfield (1744) and then fourthly Old Mill was built in Congleton (1753). These three Cheshire towns became established as the centres of the English silk throwing industry. Tony Boson tells of the significance of this network of entrepreneurs, partners and centres of activity in Stockport, Macclesfield & Congleton in his book 'Driven by the Dane', ... 'these partnerships and the new methods & techniques were to prove immensely significant for the development of the towns and for the whole process of industrialisation in the country' ... the industrial revolution was under way ...

In 1717 John Lombe (1694-1722), sponsored by his father Sir Thomas, travelled to Italy intent on industrial espionage and contrived to copy the local designs for silk throwing machinery. John had been involved as an apprentice in an earlier failed initiative with Dutch machinery in a mill on the River Derwent in Derby. On his return to England, with the help of Sir Thomas's money, the Lombes obtained a patent on the machine designs, took over the failed mill and went into production.

George Sorocold (1668-1738) had engineered the first silk mill in Derby for Thomas Cotchett, who had worked with the silk weavers of Spitalfields, and realised the benefit of applying power to the spinning process. He copied Dutch machines but the project failed. The idea was taken up by the Lombes who engaged Sorocold to build a new, larger mill, based on the Italian pattern, on the site of the old one.

Thus the first successful manufactory in the world was recognised as John & Thomas Lombe's new silk mill in Derby, constructed in 1721 to house new patented silk throwing machines. The patent claimed -

'three sorts of engines never before made or used within this our Kingdom of Great Britain, one to wind finest raw silk, another to spin and the other to twist the finest Italian raw silk into organzine (the strong warp thread) in great perfection which was never before done in this our Kingdom, by which means many thousand families of our subjects may be constantly employed in Great Britain, be furnished with silks of all sorts of the manufacture of our subjects, and great quantities exported into foreign parts by being made as good and cheap as any foreign silk can be'. All the machines were powered by an external undershot waterwheel, 7m in diameter and 2m in width. The axle entered the mill through a navel hole at first floor level and drove a vertical shaft which was 0.45m square & a horizontal lay shaft that ran the length of the mill.

The Lombes were not alone ...

Stockport commanded an important strategic position in North East Cheshire on the confluence of Goyt & Tame into the Mersey and was a fortified burg in Anglo Saxon times. The chief road from Manchester to London ran through Stockport. Unsurprisingly Stockport became an important town, 2nd only to Chester in the Cheshire Shire.

When Lombe's patent ran out in 1732, the idea was quickly was taken up in Stockport. Silk spinners from towns including Stockport & Macclesfield successfully petitioned parliament to stop renewal of the patent. There was money to be made supplying the London silk weavers in Spitalfields. Eventually the Lombe family were paid off with a £14,000 cash award, and in 1732 Stockport's first silk mill (the first water powered textile mill in the north west of England) was erected on a bend on the Mersey confluence by the ancient corn mill. The partnership, effectively a joint stock company, was a model for the future which included many recurring elements of success -

removal of government restrictions, in this case the expiry of a patent, more often tax reductions

existing land owners seeking increasing returns from their assets

investors, financiers and providers of capital from London

innovative technology & organisation from inspired individual risk takers

availability of skilled managers, artisans, apprenticeships & trainable labour to keep the wheels turning, the Italian machines boasted 45,000 motions ...

The partnership proved resilient over the years as a vehicle for cementing the cooperation of differing interest groups with 'shares' bought & sold as individuals died, retired or moved on ensuring continuity of production.

Tony Bonson tells the story of the Stockport textile entrepreneurs who recruited Lombe's mate from Italy, John Guardivaglio to manage the technology in their new mill. John Clayton was the mayor of Stockport at the time and was the partnership leader actively promoting silk throwing in Stockport ... in 1769 Defoe confirmed the industrial revolution there was well underway ... silk was in Stockport long before cotton, the first cotton mills did not appear in Stockport until 1775 ... water power, buildings and a trained labour force were readily switched to cotton ...

On July 21st, 1784 Samuel Oldknow (1756–1828) was one of the first to join the great cotton boom in Stockport. Silk was in decline and a succession of technical advances had made cotton production profitable ... Hargreaves, Crompton, Arkwright ... and the steam of James Watt ... cotton, and especially fashionable muslin for the girls, became all the rage ... Oldknow opened a warehouse on Hillgate and recruited cottage weavers to turn his purchased cotton yarns into cloth. The spinning of the yarn was done in the mills but weaving was still a domestic industry. This was the putting out system. Soon Oldknow had recruited 100 weavers in the Stockport district and two years later he had become the foremost muslin manufacturer in Britain employing over 3000 trained weavers who possessed among them at least 500 looms. Oldknow's profit was £17,000 in each year of production and his status grew to such an extent that he moved into the factory manufacture of muslins and calicoes ... the putting out system was under pressure, this was mass production ... more and more of the weaver's trade was slowly moved into the factories - bleaching, printing, warping, sizing, trimming, cutting, winding ... and eventually in 1790 Oldknow built a cotton spinning mill of his own in Stockport ... Oldknow employed the first Boulton and Watt steam engine in Stockport for turning his winding machine and he started his factory supervised 'loom house' ... it was not all plain sailing and his grand new Mellor Mill Marple broke the bank and his was forced into an ignominious bailout by Richard Arkwright ... nevertheless Samuel Oldknow was a successful pioneer of the ubiquitous factory system of mass production ...

... and eventually weaving itself moved into the factories with Cartwright's power loom ... interestingly William Ratcliff who had been a supplier yarn to Oldknow worked hard to improve the power looms when he took over Oldknow's Mill around 1800 ... but his own mercantilist views compelled him to support the cottage weavers and delay the introduction of fully mechanised weaving in factories ...

Productivity improvements from factory weaving were interrupted by a traumatic sequence - Stockport's favourable location, close to water power & imports of American raw cotton through Liverpool, was eroded as exports & imports collapsed and jobs were destroyed during the Napoleonic troubles from 1795 - the situation was exacerbated by The Corn Laws which pushed up the price of food leading to the Luddite assaults on Ratcliff's machines in 1812 and eventually the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 ... significantly it was Stockport's MP, Richard Cobden, who promoted trade recovery with his Anti Corn Law rhetoric which eventually bore fruit with the repeal in 1836 ... only then could the factories take full advantage of mechanisation and mass production which benefitted everyone ...

Congleton was on the pure flowing Dane, a beautiful spot, in the parish of Astbury, in the Northwich Hundred and the diocese of Chester. Sheltered by large local woods, but far from the sea and the south, it hosted only six houses at Domesday, maybe forty folk. Its reputable church at Astbury was close by. Congleton land was fertile and when cleared, like most of Cheshire was enclosed for pasture. Hugh Lupus and his mob controlled operations from Chester and by 1282 Congleton had an enviable charter with immunities for its freemen. Now the freemen were enabled for arts, manufactures and commerce. Far away from Welsh intrusions and political convulsions in London there was relative tranquillity for hard work. A weekly market on Saturday and an annual, three day fair held on the Festival of Holy Trinity encouraged local endeavours. Things went well with a grammar school founded in 1589 ... but unexceptionally well ... in 1642 the town was depopulated by plague but escaped the ravages of the civil war ... for sure, like most places there were linen & wool weavers and tanners & glove makers but the only specialisation of note was of tag leather laces or 'Congleton Points'. The 'points' were made from tough white leather cut into small thongs and pointed at the ends with tags of tin or silver, they were very fashionable ... and functional, all men's garments were tied with them ... and the girls too, until the advent of buckles & buttons ... unexceptional ... that was until the auspicious & prosperous era of enterprise & adventure in silk ...

In 1752 John Clayton (-1758) left his silk throwing enterprise in Stockport and formed a partnership with Nathaniel Pattison (1726-84), a silk merchant from London who was well aware of the profits made by his friend, Sir Thomas Lombe, and arranged for his son, Nathaniel, to be trained in the celebrated mill in Derby. The Clayton Pattison duo built The Old Mill at Mill Green, Congleton, for water powered silk throwing, at a cost of over £5,000. Hoping for economies of scale the five storied mill was far larger than the previous silk mills. James Brindley, a local millwright from nearby Leek who later became the most famous of the canal engineers, designed the state of the art machinery and included many of his own improvements ... there was much excellence to copy in the Congleton Mill as other future textile manufactories proliferated around Manchester ...

Significantly the Derby Corporation did not support the renewal of the Lombe patent on the dubious grounds that it both undermined employment in the wool industry and stopped the exodus of the poor thus increasing the poor rate costs! Short sighted anti-business sentiment was rife right from the start of the industrial revolution, achieving nothing but the destruction of productive potential and unintended assistance to competitors elsewhere ... on the other hand the Congleton authorities were supportive of Clayton & Pattison ...

John Corry in his history of macclesfield described how John Clayton & Nathaniel Pattison secured the essential water rights for their throwing mills in Congleton in 1752 and guaranteed that their workers from other towns would not become a burden on the corporation. The Rev Joseph Dale, also from Stockport, was a silent investor in the venture, he had some insight into the profits that could be made as his son-in-law Samuel Lankford was a business partner of Charles Roe who had been throwing silk in Macclesfield since 1844 (see below).

Once again a reduction in taxation spurred development. A reduction in duty on imported raw silk in 1749 helped John Clayton put Congleton on the map. The original town specialisation in gloves and 'Congleton points' gave way to silk. In 1834 it was said, 'the first silk mill was established here in 1754, and the trade has wonderfully increased since'.

This success induced others to engage in the same business, and in a few years others erected their silk mills, although on a smaller scale, on the Dane and the local tributary Howty Brook ... the weaving of silk ribbons became an new Congleton speciality ... by 1771 The Old Mill employed over 600 and by 1790 it dominated employment in the town. Immigration followed and the industrial revolution had begun ... without doubt Congleton was now on the map ...

Yates's history of congleton described the elaborate technology at The Old Mill in 1820 ...

Not only silk but also cotton spinning; the earliest cotton mill was on the Dane, Shaw Mill, at Buglawton which was owned by Richard Martin (1760-95) and started up in 1784 ...

A quaint & interesting article on the mills of Congleton has been written by Karen Briddock.

After the Napoleonic wars the silk industry declined and the Pattison family sold the Mill to Samuel Pearson in 1830. Steam was introduced and there was hope for a return to the halcyon days but Chartist riots started and many mills closed. Economies of scale kept the Old Mill going but it never recovered its former pioneering glory 'comparative advantage' in silk had been lost ...

Of course fortunes ebbed and flowed and in 1836 Sandbach was expanding production.

Congleton was at the centre of the demise of silk & cotton and working folk didn't like it, who can blame them, they lost their livelihoods and they had a wife and two kids to support. By the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 'down with free trade' was the slogan of the Chartist mobs who ransacked the mills and blamed the powers that be for their reckless abandonment of protective import tariffs. But the corrupt & extravagant powers that be had no choices; without their earnings from English imports, strange foreigners would have nothing to exchange for the output of the mills ... the Congleton economy was a complex adaptive system, physically impossible to manage & control ... taxes & tariffs were mirages ... but 'comparative advantage' was very difficult to explain and nobody in Congleton believed David Ricardo. The manufacturing expertise in Congleton remained second to none but the bankers in London were earning much more money financing manufacturing projects overseas ... it was just too difficult & too depressing to understand ...

Inevitably, eventually the terminal decline of the silk industry followed the free trade agreement of 1860 between the United Kingdom & France, the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty ... the Congleton silk industry could not compete with French imports, real wages were too high. Unsurprisingly the advantages of free trade were little understood as unemployment rose and Congleton lost its glorious silk industry.

But Richard Cobden was a smart cookie -

'The progress of freedom depends upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of cabinets and foreign offices'.

Macclesfield also had a proud tradition of Royal patronage as the host of one of Cheshire's extensive hunting forests. Gaining a Charter in 1261, the first of several favours from English Sovereigns which bestowed on the town considerable peculiar immunities. Yet in spite of these advantages the town continued in relative obscurity until stirrings as the 18th century approached. A flash of enterprise did occur in 1502 when Sir Jon Percival founded his 'Free Grammar School'. Henry VIII suppressed the school during the Reformation but it was re-endowed by Edward VI in 1552.

John Corry told the story of the innovations of the freemen of Macclesfield who established a trade in silk buttons around 1650 ... and by 1744 charles roe (1715-81) had erected the first silk throwing mill by the side of the fast flowing Bollin, at Park Green, inspired by the profits earned by the Lombes from their mill in Roes' native Derby which used the machinery model from Italy. Particularly enterprising was Macclesfield's use of low taxes/costs to attract entrepreneurs and investment ... pioneered by Liverpool ... there must be a pattern here, it seems trade and technology prosper through synergies of specialisation & scale and not from protective laws and prohibitive taxes ...

Unbelievably Charles Roe succeeded in introducing Anglesey copper ore into Macclesfield for smelting and fabrication which lasted from about 1750 to 1800 ... but the transportation economics were impossible ... a canal connection to the Weaver and on to Liverpool was Roe's dream but the Duke of Bridgewater opposed the scheme (surprise!) ... 

Macclesfield certainly welcomed commerce & industry and cotton manufactories followed in 1785 ... Stella  Davies suggested the textile industry 'invaded' the agricultural town, 'The number and extent of the industrial encroachments, the development of Macclesfield as a textile centre and the character of the award indicate the dominant motive for enclosing the commons was to regulate the existing  building development and to provide room for its extension' ...

Silk weaving followed in 1790 with an influx of skilled men from London & Dublin. Silk handkerchiefs, shawls and other kinds of broad silk became the staple trade of Macclesfield. The influx of new wealth did not amuse the locals who noted it seemed to be accompanied by moral decay ...

Silk fell on hard times after the Napoleonic wars because of a dramatic increase in taxation and free trade encouraged imports ... cotton became all the rage ... from around 1775 effort & investment went into cotton ...

Northwich was quick to get in on the act as William Cockshott from Macclesfield set up his cotton mill on the Weaver as early as 1780 ...

In 1860 a treaty with France allowed its silk to be imported duty free and the English silk trade began its terminal decline ... and the industry suffered accordingly ... the fortunes of the Cheshire textile industry were revived temporarily when fustian and velvet cutting were introduced in 1867 ... artificial fibres followed ... but the mills were closing as the services grew ... especially financial services ... ?

 

Any corrections and additional information gratefully received contact john p birchall

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