1. W. Gardiner, Music and Friends (1838), I, p. 43. See also M. D. George, England in Transition (Penguin edn 1953), p. 63.
2. T. Exell, Brief History of the Weavers of Gloucestershire, cited in E. A. L. Moir, ‘The Gentlemen Clothiers’, in (ed.) H. P. R. Finberg, Gloucestershire Studies (Leicester, 1957), p. 247.
3. Emmerson Tennant, M.P. for Belfast, in House of Commons, 28 July 1835. See also (for the Spitalfields silk-weavers) Thelwall’s account, above, p. 157.
1. Introduction by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner to F. Engels. Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1958), p. xiv.
1. Cited by E. A. L. Moir, op. cit., p. 226. For the West of England industry, see also D. M. Hunter, The West of England Woollen Industry (1910) and J. de L. Mann, ‘Clothiers and Weavers in Wiltshire during the Eighteenth Century’, in (ed.). L. S. Presnell, Studies in the Industrial Revolution (1960).
2. The M S. copy in Leeds Reference Library is transcribed by F. B. in Publications of the Thoresby Society, XLI, Part 3, No. 95, 1947, pp. 275–9; there are extracts in H. Heaton, Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (1920), pp. 344–7. Professor Heaton’s book remains the standard authority on the domestic industry in Yorkshire in the eighteenth century.
1. Frank Peel, ‘Old Cleckheaton’, Cleckheaton Guardian, January–April 1884. Peel, a local historian of accuracy, was writing about the 1830s in a region of the West Riding where the master-clothier lingered longest.
2. See A. P. Wadsworth and J. de L. Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire (Manchester, 1931), p. 348.
1. Ibid., pp. 366–7.
2. W. Radcliffe, Origin of Power Loom Weaving (Stockport, 1828), p. 65.
3. J. Aikin, A Description of the Country… round Manchester (1795), p. 262. Note the early use of ‘working class’.
1. Radcliffe, op. cit., p. 167.
2. See S. J. Chapman, The Lancashire Cotton Industry (Manchester, 1904), p. 40. There are indications of widespread reductions commencing in about 1797. An Association of Cotton Weavers, based on Bolton, claimed that wages had fallen by a third between 1797 and 1799; Rev. R. Bancroft, 29 April 1799, P.C. A.155; A. Weaver, Address to the Inhabitants of Bolton (Bolton, 1799); Radcliffe, op. cit., pp. 72–7. But wages seem to have reached a peak of 45s. to 50s. a week in Blackburn in 1802; Blackburn Mail, 26 May 1802.
1. J. Smith, Memoirs of Wool (1747), II, p. 308.
2. See Wadsworth and Mann, op. cit., pp. 387 ff.
3. Aspinall, op. cit., p. 271.
1. Weavers’ petition in favour of a minimum wage bill, 1807, signed – it is claimed – by 130,000 cotton-weavers: see J. L. and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, p. 74.
1. Howell’s State Trials, Vol. XXXI, pp. 1–98; Prentice, op. cit., p. 33.
2. For the events leading to Luddism (1812), see below, 591.
3. Hammonds, op. cit., pp. 109–21. The Home Office papers on the 1818 strike, drawn upon by the Hammonds, are now available in full in Aspinall, op. cit., pp. 246–310.
1. Similar processes can be seen in the Spitalfields silk-weaving industry in the eighteenth century, where no power was involved. See M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, p. 187.
2. Hammonds, op. cit., p. 123. See also the impressive statement of the Manchester weavers in 1823, in the Hammonds, Town Labourer, pp. 298–301.
1. For accounts of the strike see J. Burney, History of Wool and Woolcombing (1889), pp. 166 ff.; J. James, History of the Worsted Manufacture (1857), pp. 400 ff.; Trades Newspaper, June–September 1826; W. Scruton, ‘The Great Strike of 1825’, Bradford Antiquary (1888), I, pp. 67–73.
1. W. Scruton, Bradford Fifty Years Ago (Bradford, 1897), pp. 95–6.
2. Frank Peel, op. cit. The plight of the combers in the 1840s is described in J. Burney, op. cit., pp. 175–85; their sudden extinction by improved combing machinery in Bradford in the late 1840s is described by E. Sigsworth in C. Fay, Round About Industrial Britain, 1830–1850 (1952), pp. 123–8; for their extinction in Halifax in 1856, see E. Baines, Yorkshire Past and Present, II, p. 145.
1. Cited in W. Cudworth, Condition of the Industrial Classes of Bradford & District (Bradford, 1887).
2. Political Register, 20 June 1832.
3. W. B. Crump and G. Ghorbal, History of Huddersfield Woollen Industry (Huddersfield, 1935), pp. 120–21.
1. This is a difficult technical argument. Witnesses before the Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers’ Petitions (1834) disagreed as to whether the average ratio of power to hand output in plain cottons should be estimated at 3:1 or 5:1. The dandy-loom, a species of hand-loom operated mechanically in so far as the movement of the cloth through the loom was concerned, to which the weaver must keep time by accelerated movements of the hand-thrown shuttle, was alleged to keep pace with the power-loom, but at great cost to the weaver’s health. In worsted, J. James, estimated 2,768 power-looms in the West Riding in 1835, as compared with 14,000 hand-looms estimated in the Bradford district in 1838: by 1841 there were 11,458 West Riding power-looms. Estimates in the Leeds Times (28 March, 11 April 1835) suggest that the worsted power-loom weaver (generally a girl or woman minding two looms) could produce two and a half to three times as much work as the hand-loom weaver. But in the next fifteen years the speed of shuttle movements of a six-quarter loom more than doubled (H. Forbes, Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Worsted Manufactures (1852), p. 318). The Crossley Carpet Power Loom, patented in 1851, could weave twelve to fourteen times the speed of hand (‘Reminiscences of Fifty Years by a Workman’, Halifax Courier, 7 July 1888).
2. See S.C. on Handloom Weavers’ Petitions (1835), p. 148 (2066).
3. Ibid., 1835, p. 60 (465–6).
1. An account of the strength of the Norwich Weavers’ Committee in its resistance to ‘that unclean thing called underprice work’ is given (from the master’s standpoint) in First Report of the Constabulary Commissioners (1839), pp. 135–46. See also J. H. Clapham ‘The Transference of the Worsted Industry from Norfolk to the West Riding’, Econ. Journal, XX.
1. Leeds Times, 7 March 1835.
2. R. Howard, Surgeon, History of the Typhus of Hepstonstall-Slack (Hebden Bridge, 1844).
1. J. Lawson, Letters to the Young on Progress in Pudsey (Stanningley, 1887), pp. 26–30.
1. R. Howard, op. cit., passim.
1.J. Greenwood, ‘Reminiscences’, Todmorden Advertiser, 10 September 1909; J. Hartley, ‘Memorabilia’, Todmorden and District News, 1903; W. Scruton, op. cit., p. 92.
2. See also J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living (1961), p. 45; and M. D. George, op. cit., p. 188 for the Spitalfields weavers Such traditions were also strong in the West Country, Norwich, and, most notably, among the Scottish weavers. In Spitalfields the Silk-weavers supported Mathematical, Historical, Floricultural, Entomological, Recitation, and Musical Societies: G. I. Stigler, Five Lectures on Economic Problems (1949), p. 26.
1. J. Harland, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire (1865), pp. 223–7.
1. A Domestic Winter-piece… by Samuel Law, of Barewise, near Todmorden, Lancashire Weaver (Leeds, 1772).
2. W. Heaton, The Old Soldier (1857), pp. xxiii, xix.
1. For Methodism and the weavers, see ch. 11 below. For post-war political radicalism, see pp. 704–8.
2. John Fielden declared before the Select Committee of 1835: ‘I think three-fourths of the manufacturers at least in the neighbourhood where I reside have been reduced to poverty.’
3. For Rushton, see pp. 439–40 below. For Ashton, various sources in Barnsley Reference Library. For Pilling, see Chartist Trials (1843). For Skevington, see J. F. C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leicester’, in A. Briggs, Chartist Studies (1959), pp. 130–31. For White and Rider, see Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leeds’, ibid., pp. 70 ff.
1. G.H. Wood, History of Wages in the Cotton Trade (1910), p. 112, offers averages for cotton weavers ranging from 18s. 9d. (1797); 21s. (1802); 14s. (1809), 8s. 9d. (1817); 7s. 3d. (1828); 6s. (1832). These probably understate the decline: a weekly average of 4s. 6d. was certainly found in many districts by the 1830s. The decline in most branches of worsted and woollens was much the same, commencing a little later and rarely falling quite so low. The statistically-inclined may consult the voluminous evidence in the Reports of the Select Committee and Assistant Commissioners: useful tables are in S.C. on Hand-loom Weaver’s Petitions, 1834, pp. 432–3, 446: and in J. Fielden, National Regeneration (1834), pp. 27–30.
2. Estimated cotton power-looms in England: 1820, 12,150; 1829, 55,000; 1833, 85,000. Estimated weight of twist consumed: 1820, 87,096 million lb.; 1829, 149,570 million lb. Estimated number of cotton hand-loom weavers in U.K.: 1801, 164,000; 1810, 200,000; 1820, 240,000; 1830, 240,000; 1833, 213,000 1840, 123,000. See N. J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), pp. 137, 148–9, 207.
3. In the parish of Halifax, where worsted was predominant, consumption of wool leapt from 1830, 3,657,000 lb. to 1850, 14,423,000 lb. Over the same period, worsted power-looms multiplied from some hundreds to 4,000. In Bradford worsteds the ratio of power-looms to hand in 1836 was still about 3,000 to 14,000.
1. S.C. on Hand-Loom Weavers’ Petitions, 1834, p. 381 (4901), p. 408 (5217).
1. Ibid., 1835, p. 188 (2686).
1. S.C. on Hand-Loom Weavers’ Petitions, 1834, pp. 283–8.
1. J. Harland, op. cit., pp. 259–61.
2. See N. J. Smelser, op. cit., p. 247. In fairness to Professor Smelser it should be added that his book, while ponderously insensitive in its general arguments, includes some valuable insights into the effect of technological changes upon the cotton workers’ family relationships.
1. S.C. on Hand-Loom Weavers’ Petitions, 1835, p. xv. I have quoted this section of the Report in order to correct the inaccurate accounts in Smelser, op. cit., pp. 263–4, and Clapham, op. cit., I p. 552
1. Journals of House of Commons and Hansard, passim; Reports of Hand-Loom Weavers’ Commissioners, 1840, Part III, p. 590; A. Briggs, Chartist Studies, pp. 8–9.
1. See the diary of W. Varley, a weaver, in W. Bennett, History of Burnley (Burnley, 1948), III, pp. 379–89; (February, 1827) ‘sickness and disease prevails very much, and well it may, the clamming and starving and hard working which the poor are now undergoing… The pox and measles takes off the children by two or three a house.’
2. Loc. cit., 1834, pp. 456–60.
1. Clapham, op. cit., I, p. 552.
2. Report and Resolutions of a Meeting of Deputies from the Hand-Loom Worsted Weavers residing in and near Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, &c. (1835).
1. Leeds Times, 25 April 1835.
2. S.C. on Hand-Loom Weavers’ Petitions, 1834, pp. 293 ff. The witness, R. M. Martin, was author of Taxation of the British Empire (1833).
3. E. Elliott, The Splendid Village, &c. (1834), I, p. 72.
1. Halifax Guardian, 8 October 1836.
1. Committee on the Woollen Trade (1806), p. 111 et passim.
2. T. W. Hanson, ‘Diary of a Grandfather’, Trans. Halifax Antiq. Soc. 1916.
3. J. Harland, op. cit., p. 253
1. See statement of the Manchester weavers (1823): ‘The evils of a Factory-life are incalculable, – There uninformed, unrestrained youth, of both sexes mingle – absent from parental vigilance…. Confined in artificial heat to the injury of health, – The mind exposed to corruption, and life and limbs exposed to Machinery – spending youth where the 40th year of the age is the 60th of the constitution…’ (Hammonds, The Town Labourer p., 300).
1.S.C. on Hand-Loom Weavers’ Petitions, 1834, p. 428 (5473), p. 440 (5618); p. 189 (2643–6).
2. Edwin Waugh, Lancashire Sketches (1869), p. 128.
1. J. Harland, op. cit., p. 253.
2. A. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), p. 481; J. James, History of the Worsted Manufacture, pp. 619–20; James, Continuation of the History of Bradford (1866), p. 227. The reports often under-estimate the juvenile labour force.
3. Ure, op. cit., p. 474.
1. J. Fielden, The Curse of the Factory System (1836), p. 68.
1. Wages noted here are those listed as average in 1832 by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce: see First Annual Report P.L.C., 1836, p. 331 and British Almanac, 1834, pp. 31–61.
2. Lawson, Progress in Pudsey, pp. 89–90.
1. Clapham, Economic History I, p. 565; F. A. Hayek in Capitalism and the Historians, p. 28; R. M. Hartwell, ‘The Rising Standard of Living in England, 1800–1850’, Econ. Hist. Review, 2nd Series, XIII, April 1961.
2. Clapham, op. cit., I, p. 179.
1. T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, p. 117.