Richard Arkwright, the father of the factory system, was born in Preston on 23 December 1732. He became obsessed with the idea of spinning yarn mechanically. This was with reason, for a single loom could absorb the output of a half dozen spinners. Two centuries later a Preston engineer was chosen by Vickers-Armstrong to manufacture thousands of aircraft for the coming war.
Preston, like much of Lancashire, had a long history of spinning and weaving wool and flax, with the spinner or weaver based in his own cottage surrounded by his family most of whom helped in the enterprise. The coming of cotton initially simply added another raw material, but, as I described in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World (HBSTMW), it soon created its own revolution.
Hargreaves had speeded up the spinning process with his spinning jenny and Crompton had added his 'mule'. Arkwright wanted more and worked tirelessly through much trial and error risking both being copied by competitors and the anger of the mob who saw in mechanisation the loss of jobs. Arkwright, in partnership with John Kay, at last succeeded and took their invention to Nottingham when Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt provided finance. However, more power was needed to drive the new spinning frame and the business moved to Cromford where there was water power a plenty.
Spinning had been mechanised and, as I described in my blog on Manchester, now outpaced the weaver. To begin with, in the Preston district this was good news for the many handloom weavers now had a good supply of cheap yarn to weave and sell providing a good living. As I suggest in HBSTMW the collapse of the market with the Napoleonic wars drove prices down and now the answer was to mechanise weaving as well.
Blackburn’s Joseph Harrison was said to be producing ‘superb power looms’ in the 1840s and in Burnley where the focus moved from spinning to weaving a number of loom manufacturers emerged. John Lowe tells in his book, Burnley, that the five main loom makers were Butterworth and Dickinson, Harling and Todd, Cooper Brothers, George Keighley and Pemberton Brothers. The growth of Burnley as a cotton town seems to have been more controlled than that of Preston with the Weavers Triangle clustered round the Leeds Liverpool canal with mills, houses, warehouses, wharves, shops and inns all together. The canal was the life blood of the town linking it as it did to America and the Mississippi cotton fields. It also cemented the shift from the use of wool as the raw material to cotton.
In his book, A History of Preston, David Hunt writes of the two major Preston spinning businesses which emerged into the nineteenth century: John Watson and Sons and John and Samuel Horrocks. Watson was very much the trail blazer and regarded as 'the leading spirit of his day in the founding of the Cotton Industry of Preston’ for his championing of new technology. Watson did become bankrupt, but his mills were bought and traded successfully well into the future. The influence of Horrocks was perhaps more enduring. Hunt quotes some figures that in 1865 the Horrocks company then run by Thomas Miller 'operated ten mills, 155,970 spindles, 2,856 looms, 12 steam engines and employed 3,000 people to spin 104,000 lbs of yard and weave 227 miles of cloth each week'.
Watson and Horrocks had been preceded by Livesey, Hargreaves and Co which, rather ahead of its time, combined a mill with bleaching grounds, a calico printing works and its own coal pit at nearby Standish. It was claimed that when the company crashed in 1788 some 20,000 people were economically dependent upon it in one way or another. The future though rested with Horrocks.
Preston grew at an alarming rate, with more mills and also a need for more housing. The lack of regulation and town planning meant that much of this was squalid, with open sewers. The absence of regulation combined with economic forces meant that child labour was rife with dreadful conditions. All of this combined with low wages led to industrial and political unrest and it was only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that matters improved. Dickens novel Hard Times is reputedly based on Preston and speaks vividly of the awful living and working conditions.
The story of Oldham is perhaps a little different with the advantage the town took of the Joint Stock company following the passing of the Limited Liability Acts. These were intended to encourage third party investment in businesses, but in Oldham they were used to encourage the participation of the workforce in the company for which they worked. In his book Oldham Past and Present, James Middleton suggests that the idea ‘prevails more in books than in practice’, yet there were examples of mill companies being owned in this way, the Sun Mill of 1860 being just one.
Preston's boom years of cotton were probably those from 1830 to 1860 when the American war and consequent cotton famine induced caution toward mill extensions. For Oldham the ending of the war sparked what is termed the ‘floating mania’ as dozens of companies where formed with investment from all sections of their stakeholders. Writing in 1903, Middleton gives some figures: in the Oldham district 270 cotton mills containing twelve and a half million spindles and eighteen thousand looms. These mills absorbed about one quarter of all the cotton imported into the country.
Oldham’s proficiency at spinning fine yarn was such that the cotton industry in Burnley focused on weaving, buying in yarn from Oldham.
Bolton was another town focused on spinning, not least that it was there that Crompton perfected and operated his 'mule' for the last years of his life. In his book The Cotton Mills of Burnley, James H. Longworth points to the Ashworth family as an employer placing emphasis on the cleanliness and moral welfare of their 1,000 employees. Ashworths operated both spinning mills and dye works and were one of the founding companies of the English Sewing Cotton Company. Of possibly greater note than Ashworths were Chadwicks which invested heavily in their community. Their Eagley mills were powered by a single cylinder horizontal steam engine named the ‘Iron Duke’, turning a 24 ft flywheel weighing 75 tons at 60 rpm. In 1950, the mills were still run by Chadwicks in association with United Thread Mills both then part of J.P. Coats Ltd.
Key to Preston's commercial success were communications. The town had long been well linked, but by inadequate roads; it was also a port bedevilled by silt. The coming of first the canals greatly enhanced its ability to access raw materials, coal to power the engines in its mills, but also to take its finished product to market. For canal lovers a point of interest was that the link to the Leeds and Liverpool canal was completed by means of a tram way, the proposed canal route being too expensive. Of greater long term significance were the railways which arrived in 1838. As with so much of railway mania, the town was served from time to time by a number of different railways. It was its place on the London to Glasgow line that endured. Preston boasts an astonishing viaduct which cut dramatically journey times to Wigan (for coal) Liverpool (for cotton) and Manchester to take its finished goods.
Certainly toward the turn of the century British pre-eminence in cotton began its decline. The world wars injected a surge in demand for uniforms and much more. As I write in Vehicles to Vaccines, even in 1951 the British textile industry was viewed with optimism, but by the mid sixties overseas competitors with lower costs had captured the market. Horrocks was acquired in 1919 by the Amalgamated Cotton Mills Trust and this was bought by Viyella in 1963.
For Preston, cotton was a long way from being the whole story. As was the case elsewhere, the demands of the mechanisation of the textile industry led to the growth of engineering skills and it was these that came to the fore. Joseph Foster & Sons had been formed in 1835 and manufactured heavy industrial plant at its Soho Foundry including mill engines and boilers and some of the largest rotary printing machines. Fosters also ran the Bow Lane Iron works in Blackburn.
Preston had ‘fifteen firms of millwrights and engineers, four boiler makers and three other foundries’. Interestingly, a major project to provide a full scale port on the river Ribble, built between 1884 and 1892, provided a site for Dick, Kerr of Kilmarnock to establish their first factory in the town.
Dick, Kerr's factory on the east side of Strand Road produced locomotives including tramcars for Preston itself. These were first powered by imported engines, but the establishment of the English Electric Manufacturing company on the west side of Strand Road enabled the production of complete trams. The First World War saw Dick, Kerr produce many tons of shells and then the first aircraft. The year after the armistice saw the formation of the English Electric Company through the merger of Dick, Kerr with five other companies about which I write in HBSTMW. Aircraft production resumed in the twenties but then closed until re-armament in the mid thirties.
Dick, Kerr's aircraft production came into its own in the Second World War with a contract for the assembly of bombers and fighters; employee numbers grew from 1,000 in 1938 to 13,000 in 1942. In 1939 English Electric built a shadow factory at nearby Salmesbury which manufactured Handley Page Halifax aircraft. BAE Systems now have an advanced manufacturing plant there. In 1947 English Electric moved its design and experimentation activities to nearby Warton Aerodrome. After the war, aircraft production included the Canberra jet bomber and the Lightning jet fighter. The factory became part of BAC in 1963 and is now run by BAE Systems.
Siemens Brothers in 1923 set up a factory to produce light bulbs. Good fortune brought a talented chemist, JN Aldington, to join the small work force where his influence far outweighed the size of the establishment. He explored alternatives to the incandescent bulb and importantly both taught evening classes at the Harris Technical College and encouraged young bright scientists into the business.
Another famous Preston name came from neighbouring Leyland and was the bus and commercial vehicle company of that name. Leyland under the leadership of the Spurriers was a force to be reckoned with. The subsequent story of British Leyland is well known and I write about it in Vehicles and Vaccines. A significant employer for some years, Courtaulds set up a factory in Preston for viscose yarn production.
Further reading
David Hunt, A History of Preston (Preston: Carnegie Publishing, 1992)
James H. Longworth, The Cotton Mills of Bolton 1780-1985. (Bolton: Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, 1987)
John Lowe, Burnley (Chichester: Phillimore, 1985)
James Middleton, Oldham Past and Present (Rochdale: Edwards & Bryning Limited, 1903)
https://www.baesystems.com/en-uk/heritage/english-electric
The Lancashire Cotton Industry, Mary B. Rose (ed.) (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996)