EVERY working class home used to have a rag rug because folk couldn’t afford to buy floor coverings from shops. Today they are in demand as handicraft kits for people to make as a hobby.
What I never realised was that rag rugs – made by threading pieces of rag through a hessian weave – were actually once a small business enterprise.
Old chum Mike Shaw, former editor of the Colne Valley Guardian, tells me his grandfather, Allen Shaw, had such a business that he ran until the late 1800s from the top floor of his three-storey home at Nearfield, Manchester Road, just inside the Marsden boundary with Slaithwaite.
He employed a handful of women in the workshop, says Mike, and had an adjoining warehouse where the finished hearth rugs were stored.
“Very many years later, the Grade 2 listed building was made into two homes, which I believe, it still is today,” says Mike.
The entrance to the top floor that Mike knew as the garret was at the rear up an outside wooden staircase.
“I recall visiting the house regularly in my young days and finding it fun to run up and down the staircase into what, by then, was an empty garret,’’ he said. “But in my imagination I could visualise the women in shawls busily at work making rugs on stretched pieces of hessian.
“I would think it was a thriving business, but not much, if any, of the profits seemed to percolate down to our branch of the family!”
