Special report: Huddersfield still a textile town

Jun 1 2009 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

NEW town Milton Keynes once aroused the fury of Huddersfield people when an advertising company airbrushed an extra half dozen mill chimneys into a shot of Lockwood from Chapel Hill.

You don’t want to set up in dirty old Huddersfield, do you? Launch your business in our nice clean town, they were saying.

It’s true that in the good old days there was muck aplenty in Huddersfield, and there was brass too.

There’s an old story of there being more Rolls Royces per square mile in Huddersfield than in London at the height of the wool trade.

We had two great advantages: thousands of acres of land ideal for sheep rearing, and soft water: lots of it. The latter is actually two advantages, because the torrents that ran from the moors turned mill wheels, providing the mills with cheap power, and the water itself was ‘soft’, that is, with very little mineral and lime content, ideal for scouring or cleaning the raw wool and for the dyeing process.

The woollen ‘industry’ is 700 years old in this area and predates the Industrial Revolution.

Indeed, the woollen ‘industry’ goes back more than 2,000 years. No self-respecting Celtic roundhouse would be without its weaving frame.

These gave way to the handloom, on which women would work up ‘pieces’ or ‘kerseys’ which would be collected by yeomen clothiers, middlemen for selling on at markets, of which our own former Cloth Hall and Halifax Piece Hall are two.

Home weaving was a vital source of income for thousands. Our valleys are still littered with the cottages in which a whole top floor would be given over to weaving, with two or three families living below. These ‘weavers’ cottages, with their typical under-eave rows of windows for maximum daylight, are to be found all over Huddersfield today.

The Industrial Revolution brought larger, power-operated looms and the mills, and deep resentment from the rural population – Chartists, Luddites and the like. But mass production brought astonishing wealth. Virtually every grand house up Halifax Road through Edgerton is a former mill owner’s home.

Where has the industry gone? Largely overseas, where goods can be produced more cheaply.

But while it might be a shadow of its former self – when some mills were turning out five MILES of quality worsted cloth a day – it is anything but moribund.

Huddersfield Textile Society (HTS) still boasts over 150 members whose activities cover the whole textile spectrum: engineers, spinners, weavers, dyers and finishers.