Austen-era Fabrics

This week fellow Pen & Sword author Catherine Curzon has kindly invited me to write for her wonderful Madam Gilflurt blog on Georgian history, and you can read my post on fashionable Austen-era fabrics here.
Image: A morning dress on display at Jane Austen's home: Chawton Cottage, Hampshire. © Sue Wilkes.

The Lion Salt Works Re-opens!

Restored Stove House 5, with salt pan in foreground.

Last week I was lucky enough to enjoy a sneak preview of the Lion Salt Works' fabulous new visitor site at Northwich. Over £10 million has been spent on this mammoth restoration project, and the result is an outstanding new heritage attraction - unique in the UK.
The Salt Works, founded by the Thompson family in 1894, made salt by boiling brine in large open pans.

Open pan salt making, 1850.

The brine for the pans was pumped up from underneath the site, and you can still see the remains of the 'nodding donkey' pump. The site was in a very poor state of preservation prior to its restoration, but now visitors can explore two restored pan houses and three stove houses.


The former Red Lion pub at the site entrance has displays relating to the salt workers, and local artefacts, including a pretty salt ship.
The Salt Works will open to the public on Friday 5 June. There are lots of fun interactive exhibits for children in the museum, and a playground, and butterfly garden to explore. Entrance is free to the cafe and play area.

Huge salt crushing mill, Lion Salt Works.

There's a special offer, too, if you are a Salt. f you can show photo ID proof that your name is Salt, you can visit the museum free of charge. (This offer runs until 31 May 2016).

All author photos © Sue Wilkes. Video courtesy of West Cheshire museums.

Making Enough Rope

We recently enjoyed a very interesting visit to the Ropery at Chatham Historic Dockyard. Although it's now called the 'Victorian Ropery', rope has been made on this site since the early 17th century, and the Ropery itself dates back to the late 18th century.

The Royal Navy required lots of rope to equip its ships; a vessel like Nelson's flagship, the HMS Victory, (which is celebrating its 250th birthday this year) needed at least 20 miles of rope just for the rigging for its sails.

Laying a rope, and construction of a rope.

Ropes were usually made from Russian hemp. But first, the hempen fibres needed to be cleaned and straightened.
A man 'heckled' or 'hatchelled' the hemp strands by whacking them against a spiked semicircular wooden apparatus.

The cleaned fibres were far too short to make a rope, so they were spun into yarn - this was a highly skilled job. A trained spinner could make a thousand feet of yarn in 12 minutes.

The spun yarns were then treated with tar (so they didn't rot at sea), then twisted again ('registered') into strands. The strands were taken to the 'laying-walk' and 'laid' to make a rope. Three strands twisted together made a 'hawser' rope, and three hawsers twisted together made a 'cable'.

The strands were fastened to hooks attached to a rotating wheel at one end of a long room (the rope-walk), and then fastened to one hook, also attached to a wheel, at the far end of the room. The strands were threaded through a wooden block or 'top' to ensure that the rope was evenly tensioned when the two wheels were turned (in opposite directions). Turning the wheels twisted the strands together to make the rope. All this work was human-powered until Captain Huddart introduced steam machinery in the early 19th century (at Limehouse). I had a go at turning the wheel and I can tell you that it is hard work!

Although young children worked in ropewalks in the West of England and other places in the early 1840s, they do not seem to have been employed at Chatham at that date. In the 1860s hatchelling and spinning machinery, which could be operated by women (who were paid less than the men) was introduced at Chatham.
 
The women had their own entrance to the works - to stop them getting up to mischief with the male workers!

The Ropewalk, Chatham.

Women workers' entrance.

 Rope is still made by traditional methods at the Ropery at Chatham, although several different materials are used nowadays. 

All author photos © Sue Wilkes, and photo of me by Nigel Wilkes. All engravings from Charles Knight’s Pictorial Gallery of Arts, Vol. I, c.1862.
Video copyright Nigel Wilkes.

Here's one I made earlier; the rope I made is on the left. 

Nelson and Emma

My latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World looks at Emma Hamilton's affair with Lord Nelson. You can also find out more about Cheshire-born Emma Hamilton's early career here on my Jane Austen blog.

Image: Lord Nelson, Heroes of the British Navy, Frederick Warne & Co., c. 1900. Nigel Wilkes Collection.

Horsey Fun!

Gallop over to my Jane Austen blog for my latest post on horsemanship - an essential skill in Regency England.

A Strut(t) Around Belper II

The Gangway.

After you have explored the Strutts' North Mill at Belper, you can walk under the Gangway, a stone arch which once connected the North Mill and West Mill (no longer extant). The Regency era was noted for industrial unrest during times of hardship (most famously the Luddite attacks of 1812).  If you look at the arch (built 1795) you will notice some musket holes placed there in 1810 so that the millowner and his men could fire at anyone who attacked the mill.

Crown Terrace, Belper.

When the Strutts built their mills in Derbyshire, they chose sites with fast-flowing rivers to power the machinery. However, often these rural sites did not have enough local people who could work in the mills. So millowners like the Strutts and Richard Arkwright built new houses with gardens to attract people to come and work for them, and you can see millworkers' housing on Green Lane, The Clusters, Joseph Street etc. Many of the houses have their own pigsty and privy - a vast improvement on the town housing in places like Angel Meadow in Manchester.

Belper boy Samuel Slater was one of the child workers whose stories I told in The Children History Forgot. Samuel began his career as an apprentice to Jedidiah Strutt; Slater became one of the founding fathers of the American cotton industry. 

More millworkers' housing, Belper.

The mill workers in Belper were mostly women and children (their menfolk found employment in local workshops). In 1816 the Strutts employed nearly 1500 people, including over 700 children (just 100 were younger than ten). On average the children earned 2s 6d per week.None of the children who worked at the Strutt mills were parish apprentices like those at Quarry Bank Mill; they were 'free labour' and lived with their parents.

The factory hours were from 6am until 6pm, including dinner and tea-times. Most of the children could read; the Strutts funded a Sunday school and day schools in the town, and built a Unitarian chapel (1788). 

Nail Shop, Joseph St.

The Strutts told a parliamentary select committee (1816) that their mills had benefits for local families as well as providing them with work: ‘before the establishment of these works, the inhabitants were notorious for vice and immorality, and many of the children were maintained by begging; now their industry, decorous behaviour, attendance on public worship, and general good conduct, compared with the neighbouring villages, where no manufactures are established, is very conspicuous.’ 

East Mill, Belper.

Unitarian Chapel, Belper.

Belper was a working textile town from the late 18th century until the 1980s. The town is still dominated by the huge East Mill (1912), built for the English Sewing Cotton Co., which took over the Strutts' mills fifteen years earlier. But the East Mill now stands empty and silent.
However, if you visit the Memories of the Mills website you'll discover millworkers' memories and oral histories of life in the Derwent Valley factories during the twentieth century.

A Strut(t) Around Belper I

North Mill, Belper

My poor blogs have been neglected for a little while, as I've been working hard on my new book for Pen & Sword, Regency Spies, but I hope to be posting more regular updates now. Continuing my series of blog posts on some of the fabulous places in Britain which I visited last year, today's post is on Belper, a Derbyshire town with some amazing industrial heritage.

Belper nailmaker, North Mill.

Belper was traditionally home to the framework knitting and nail-making industries. North Mill, Belper has a wonderful collection of textile machinery, so do take the time to explore it if you can. 

The museum has many more machines than I've been able to show you here, and some social history displays.

Stockings were formerly knitted from silk on machines, but the Strutt family invented an improvement to the frame so that ribbed stockings could be knitted from either silk or cotton (the Derby rib). Ribbed stockings were more elastic and easier to wear than former designs.

Spinning Jenny, North Mill.

Good quality cotton yarn was needed to knit stockings, however, so Strutt helped to bankroll Richard Arkwright's initial forays into cotton spinning - Arkwright's waterframe was a great improvement on James Hargreaves' original spinning jenny.

Arkwright's first cotton-spinning mill was built at Cromford (1771);  Jedediah Strutt's own cotton-spinning mill (the South Mill) in Belper, powered by water, was founded in about 1776; the North Mill was completed about a decade later.

Stocking frame, North Mill.

Arkwright's waterframe, North Mill.

In my next blog post, I'll take a look at conditions in the Belper mills for their women and child workers.