LEEDS.
LEEDS, seventeen miles from Huddersfield, is the centre of five railways, by which it has direct connection with Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, on the east, and Carlisle on the west coast, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby, and Birmingham, in the Midland counties, possesses one of the finest central railway stations in the kingdom, and has also the advantage of being in the centre of inland navigation (a great advantage for the transport of heavy goods), as it communicates with the eastern seas by the Aire and Calder navigation to the Humber, and westward by the Leeds and Liverpool to the Mersey. The town stands on a hill, which rises from the banks of the river Aire. Leeds has claims to antiquity, but few remains. When Domesday Book was compiled it appears to have been an agricultural district.
Wakefield was formerly the more important town. Lord Clarendon, in 1642, speaks of Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford, “as three very rich and populous towns, depending wholly upon clothing.”
The first charter was granted to Leeds by Charles I., and the second by Charles II., on petition of the clothworkers, merchants, and others, “to protect them from the great abuses, defects and deceits, discovered and practised by fraudulent persons in the making, selling, and dyeing of woollen cloths.”
The principal manufacture of Leeds is woollen cloth. Formerly the trade was carried on by five or six thousand small master clothiers, who employed their own families, and some thirty or forty thousand servants, and also carried on small farms. But the extension of the factory system has somewhat diminished their numbers. There are still, however, in connection with Leeds, several small clothing villages, in which the first stages of the operation are carried on, in spinning, weaving, and fulling.
Large quantities of worsted goods are brought to Leeds to be finished and dyed, which have been purchased, in an undyed state, at Bradford and Halifax. The dye-houses and dressing-shops of Leeds are very extensive. Goods purchased in a rough state in the Cloth Halls and Piece Halls are taken there to be finished. There are also extensive mills for spinning flax for linen, canvas-sailing, thread, and manufactures of glass and earthenware. In connection with Messrs. Marshall’s flax factory, the same firm are carrying on extensive experiments near Hull in growing flax.
Cloth Halls.—Previous to 1711, the cloth market was held in the open street. In 1755, the present Halls were erected, and in them the merchants purchase the half manufactured article from the country manufacturers.
The Coloured Cloth Hall is a quadrangular building, 127½ yards long, and 66 broad, divided into six departments called streets. Each street contains two rows of stands, and each stand measures 22 inches in front, and is inscribed with the name of the clothier to whom it belongs. The original cost was £3. 3s. This price advanced to £24 at the beginning of the present century; but it has now fallen below its original value—not owing to a decrease in the quantity of manufactured goods, but owing to the prevalence of the factory system—in which the whole operation is performed, from sorting the piece to packing the cloth fit for the tailor’s shelves—over the domestic system of manufacturing. An additional story, erected on the north side of the Coloured Cloth Hall, is used chiefly for the sale of ladies’ cloths in their undyed state. The White Cloth Hall is nearly as large as the Coloured Cloth Hall, and on the same plan. The markets are held on Tuesdays and Saturdays, on which days alone the merchants are permitted to buy in the Halls. The time of the sale is in the forenoon, and commences by the ringing of a bell, when each manufacturer is at his stand, the merchants go in, and the sales commence. At the end of an hour the bell warns the buyers and sellers that the market is about to close, and in another quarter of an hour the bell rings a third time, and the business of the day is terminated. The White Cloth Hall opens immediately after the other is closed, and the transactions are carried on in a similar manner.
The public buildings of Leeds are not externally imposing, and it is, without exception, one of the most disagreeable-looking towns in England—worse than Manchester; it has also the reputation of being very unhealthy to certain constitutions from the prevalence of dye-works.
The wealthy and employing classes in Leeds (we know no better term) have a reputation for charity, and good management of charitable institutions. Howard the philanthropist visited the workhouse, and praised the management, at a period when to deserve such praise was rare. The subscriptions to public charities are large, and there is an ancient fund for pious uses, said to amount to upwards of £5000 a-year, managed by a close self-elected corporation, about the distribution of which they do not consider themselves bound to give any detailed information. Dr. Hook, the Vicar of Leeds, has organized a system of house-to-house visitation, for the purpose of affording aid, in poverty and sickness, to the deserving and religious, and educational instruction to all, which has effected a great deal of good, and would have done more, had not well known circumstances shaken the confidence of the Leeds public in the honesty of some of the teachers. All parties agree, however differing in opinions, that Dr. Hook himself is a most excellent, charitable, self-sacrificing man.
A New Grammar School—first founded in 1552 by the Rev. Sir William Sheafield, and since endowed by several other persons—is lodged in a building of ample size, with residence for the head master, and enjoys an income of £2000 a-year; and there are four Exhibitions of £70 a-year to Magdalen College, Cambridge, tenable till degree of M.A. has been taken; one Exhibition of £100 a-year, tenable for five years, at Queen’s College, Oxford, open to a candidate from Leeds school; and four of £50 each, at Oxford or Cambridge, for four years. There were 174 scholars in 1850. It is open to the sons of all residents in Leeds, without any fee to the masters, who are liberally paid. The elements of mathematics are taught. The Charity Commissioners reported it to be satisfactorily and ably conducted.
The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, the Leeds Literary Institution, and the Leeds Mechanics Institute, are all respectable in their class. The Mechanics Institute forms the centre of a union of Yorkshire associations of the same kind.
Three newspapers are published in Leeds, of large circulation, representing three shades of political opinion.
The Leeds Mercury—which has, we believe, the largest circulation of any provincial paper—was founded, and carried on for a long life, by the late Mr. Edward Baines, who represented his native town in the first reformed parliament, and for some years afterwards—a very extraordinary man, who, from a humble station, by his own talents made his way to wealth and influence. He was the author of the standard work on the cotton trade, as well as several valuable local histories. The Mercury is still carried on by his family. One son is the proprietor of a Liverpool paper, and another, the Right Honourable Matthew Talbot Baines, represents Hull, and is President of the Poor-Law Board.
Among the celebrated natives of Leeds, were Sir Thomas Denison, whose life began like Whittington’s; John Smeaton, the engineer of Eddystone Lighthouse, the first who placed civil engineering in the rank of a science; the two Reverend Milners (Joseph, and Isaac, Dean of Carlisle), great polemical giants in their day, authors of “The History of the Church of Christ;” Dr. Priestly, inventor of the pneumatic apparatus still used by chemists, and discoverer of oxygen and several other gases; David Hartley, the metaphysician whom Coleridge so much admired that he called his son after him; and Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso. Nor must we forget Ralph Thoresby, author of “Ducatus Leodiensis, or the Topography of the Town and Parish of Leeds”—a valuable and curious book, published in 1715; and of “Vicaria Leodiensis, a History of the Church of Leeds,” published in 1724.
Wool Growing, and Woollen Manufactures.—Yorkshire is the ancient seat of a great woollen manufacture, founded on the coarse wools of its native hills; but coal and cheap conveyance, with the stimulus mechanical inventions have applied in the neighbouring counties to cotton, have given Yorkshire such advantages over many ancient seats of manufacture, that it has transplanted and increased a considerable portion of the fine cloth trade formerly carried on in the west of England alone, besides engrafting and erecting a variety of other and new kinds of textiles, in which wool or hair have some very slight part.
It is quite certain that woollen garments were among the first manufactured among barbarous tribes. We have seen this year, in the Exhibition in Hyde Park, specimens of white felted cloth from India, equal, if not superior, to anything that we can manufacture for strength and durability, which must have been made with the rude tools, of the form which has been in use for probably at least two thousand years.
English coarse wools have been celebrated, and in demand among foreign nations, from the earliest periods of our history. In the time of William the Conqueror, an inundation in the Netherlands drove many clothiers over, and William of Malmesbury tells us that the king welcomed them, and placed them first in Carlisle, where there are still manufactories, and then in the western counties, where they could find what was indispensable for their trade—streams for washing and plenty of wood for boiling their vats. Very early the manufacturers applied to restrain the exportation of English wool. In the time of Edward I., we find a duty of twenty shillings to forty shillings per bag on importation. Edward III. prohibited the export of wool, at the same time he took his taxes and subsidies in wool, which became a favourite medium of taxation with our monarchs, and sent his wool abroad for sale. Under his reign, Flemish weavers were encouraged to settle here and improve the manufacture, which became spread all over England thus—Norfolk fustians, Suffolk baize, Essex serges and says, Kent broadcloth, Devon kerseys, Gloucestershire cloth, Worcestershire cloth, Wales friezes, Westmoreland cloth, Yorkshire cloth, Somersetshire serges, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Sussex cloth: districts from a great number of which woollen manufactures have now disappeared. We have Parliamentary records of the mutual absurdities by which the woollen manufacturers, on the one hand, sought to obtain a monopoly of British wool, and the wool growers endeavoured to secure the exclusive right to supply the raw material. Act after act was laid upon everything connected with wool, so that it is only extraordinary that, under such restrictive trammeling, the trade survived at all.
“Odious! In woollen! ’twould a saint provoke!
Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.”
In 1781, when, the price of wool being low, the Lincolnshire woolgrowers met under the chairmanship of their great landowners, and resolved on petitions praying “that British might be exported and that Irish wool might be excluded from England;” thereupon the Yorkshire manufacturers met and resolved that “the exportation of wool would be ruinous to the trade and manufactures of England,” that the manufacturers would be obliged to leave the kingdom for want of employment, and that the importation of Irish woollen yarn ought to be interdicted.
The manufacturers were under the impression that no other country than England could produce the long wools suitable for the manufacture of worsted.
Some time afterwards the woollen manufacturers thought themselves likely to be ruined by the introduction of cotton cloth, “to the ruin of the staple trade of the kingdom,” and succeeded in placing an excise duty upon the new fabric.
The contention between sheepowners and manufacturers continued until, in 1824, when the influence of Mr. Huskisson’s opinions on trade were beginning to be felt in Parliament, and to the disgust of both parties, a compromise was effected by a reduction of all wool duties to a uniform duty of ld. per lb. on the export of British and importation of foreign wool. The last step was a total repeal of all duties.
English wools may be divided into long and short staples. The long is used for worsted, which is finished when it leaves the loom; the short for cloth, which is compacted together, increased in bulk and diminished in breadth, by fulling; that is, so beating as to take advantage of the serrated edges of the wool which lead it to felt together.
Foreign wool, known as merino, has been used from an early period. In the time of the Stuarts, an attempt was made to monopolize all the Spanish wool exported.
Wars and bad government in Spain have destroyed the export trade in merino wool, but the breed, transplanted into Germany, has multiplied and even improved. Our finest wool is obtained from Silesia, and the breed is cultivated with more or less success in many parts of the European continent. In England, all attempts to cultivate the merino with profit have failed. Next to Germany in quality, and exceeding that country in quantity, we obtain our greatest supply of fine wool from Australia, where, in the course of twenty-five years, the merino sheep has multiplied to the extent of twelve or thirteen million head, and is still increasing; thus doubling our supply of a fine article, not equal to German, but, at the low price at which it can be furnished, helping to create entirely new manufactures by intermixing with our own coarse wools, which it renders more available and valuable. We also obtain wool from the Cape of Good Hope, from India, from Egypt, and from South America.
Besides pure wool, our manufacturers use large quantities of goat’s hair, called mohair, from the Mediterranean, of camel hair, of Thibet goat’s hair, of the long grey and black hair of the tame South American llama and alpaca, and of the short soft red hair of the vicuna, a wild animal of the same species. Indeed, almost every year since the repeal of all restrictions on trade, has introduced some new raw material in wool or hair to our manufacturers.
The alpaca and vicuna, now an important article of trade and manufacture, although well known to the native Peruvians at the time of the conquest by the Spaniards, has only come into notice within the last twenty years. The first article of the kind that excited any attention was a dress made for Her Majesty from a flock of llamas belonging to Her Majesty, under the superintendence of Mr. Thomas Southey, the eminent wool broker.
The stock from the small flock of merinos taken out by Colonel Macarthur to what was then only known as Botany Bay, now supports 300,000 souls in prosperity in Australia, and supplies exports to the amount of upwards of a million and a half sterling per annum.
The Great Exhibition afforded an excellent display of the variety and progress of Yorkshire woollen manufactures, proving the immense advantage they derived from choice and mixture of various qualities and materials. In several examples the body was of stout English wool, with a face of finest Australia,—in some cases, of mohair,—and, in one instance, a most beautiful article was produced by putting a face of vicuna on British wool.
As at present conducted, the process of a woollen factory up to certain stages of machinery is the same as that of a cotton factory. But it will be seen that a great deal depends on an ample supply of water of good quality.
Cloth Manufacture.—(1.) The first operation is that of sorting the wool. Each fleece contains several qualities,—the division and arrangement requires judgment; the best in a Silesian fleece may be worth 6s. a pound, and the rest not worth half the money. After sorting, wools are mixed in certain proportions.
(2.) The mixture is first soaked in a hot ley of stale urine and soap, rinsed in cold water, and pressed between rollers to dry it.
(3.) If the cloth is to be dyed in that operation, next succeeds the scouring. Supposing it dyed,
(4) wyllying follows, by which it is subject to the operation of the spikes of revolving wheels, for the purpose of opening the fibres and sending it out in a light cloud-like appearance, to where a stream of air driven through it, clears away all impurities by a sort of winnowing process, and sends it out in a smooth sheet.
(5.) If any impurities remain, it is hand picked.
(6.) It is laid on the floor, sprinkled with olive oil, and well beaten with staves.
(7.) The operation of the scribbling machine follows, by which it is reduced to a fleecy sheet and wound on rollers.
(8.) The carding machine next reduces it to hollow loose short pipes. These are joined
(9) in the slubbing machine into a weak thread, and here we see the use of the young hands, boys and girls, who piece one of these pipes as they are drawn through the machine by a slow clockwork motion, bending one knee every time as they curtsey sideways toward the machine. They earn very good wages and look healthy; but, where the wool is dyed, what with the dye and what with the oil, the piecers are all ready toileted to sing to a banjo; and sometimes, with rubbing their faces with their dirty hands, they get sore eyes.
(10.) Spinning hardens the thread.
(11.) Weaving is done by hand or by power-loom. The power-looms are becoming more common. After weaving, it is washed in soap-water and clean water by machinery,—then stretched on tenterhooks and allowed to dry in a smooth extended state:
(l2) then examined for all hair and impurities to be picked off by “burlers.” After this follows
(13) fulling, or felting, which gives woollen goods that substance which distinguishes them. Every hair of wool is saw-edged, and this by beating will mass together. Superfine cloth with a thick solution of soap spread between each layer, and, folded into many piles, is exposed to the long continued action of revolving wooden hammers on wheels, three separate times, for four hours each time. This process diminishes both breadth and length nearly one half.
After “fulling” cloth is woolly and rough; to improve the appearance it is first
(14) teazled—that is, raked with cylinders covered with the round prickly heads of the teazle plant. Many attempts have been made to invent wire and other brushes for the same purpose, but hitherto nothing has been found more effective and economical than the teazle. To apply them the cloth is stretched on cloth beams, and made to move in one direction, while the teazle cylinders turn in another. When the ends of the fibres have been thus raised, they are
(15) sheared or clipped, in order to produce the same effect as clipping the rough coat of a horse. Formerly this operation was performed by hand. The introduction of machinery created formidable riots in the west of England. At present the operation is performed with great perfection and rapidity, by more than one process.
When the cloth has been raised and sheared once, it is in the best possible condition for wear; but in order to give superfine cloth beauty, it is sheared several times, then exposed to the action of steam, and at the same time brushed with cylinder brushes. Other operations, of minor importance, are carried on for the purpose of giving smoothness and gloss. It may be observed that a brilliant appearance does not always, in modern manufactures, betoken the best cloth. An eminent woollen manufacturer having been asked what cloth he would recommend for wear and warmth to a backwoodsman, answered quickly, “Nothing can wear like a good blanket.” The small manufacturers generally dispose of their cloth in the rough state.
The progress of machinery has called into existence a great number of factories, especially in worsted and mixed stuffs, has given value to many descriptions of wool formerly valueless, and, coupled with the repeal of the duty, brought into the market many kinds unknown a few years ago. “Properties once prized,” Mr. Southey remarks in his Essay on Wools, “have given way to some other property upon which machinery can better operate, and yield more desirable results. Spanish wool, once deemed indispensable, is now little sought after. It is supplanted by our colonial wool, which is steadily advancing in quality and quantity, while angora goat, and alpaca wools are forcing their way into and enhancing the value of our stuff trade.” . . . “Machinery has marshalled before its tremendous power the wool of every country, selected and adopted the special qualities of each. Nothing, in fact, is now rejected. Even the burr, existing in myriads in South America and some other descriptions of wool, at one time so perplexing to our manufacturers, can now, through the aid of machinery, be extracted, without very material injury to the fibre.” . . . “In no description of manufacture connected with the woollen trade has machinery been more fertile in improvements than in what may be termed the worsted stuff trade.”
“The power-looms employed, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the worsted stuff trade, increased from 2,763 in 1836, to 19,121 in 1845 (and are probably not far from 28,000 at the present time). Worsted goods formerly consisted chiefly of bombazets, shalloons, calamancoes, lastings for ladies’ boots, and taminies. Now the articles in the fancy trade may be said to be numberless, and to display great artistic beauty. These articles, made with alpaca, Saxony, fine English and Colonial wools, and of goats’ hair for weft, with fine cotton for warp, consist of merinoes, Orleans, plain and figured Parisians, Paramattas, and alpaca figures, checks, etc.”
The machines for combing and carding, of the most improved make, will work wool of one and a half inch in the staple, while for the old process of hand-combing four inches was the minimum.
But we must not enter further into these details, as it is our purpose rather to indicate the interest and importance of certain manufactures than to describe the process minutely.
The Yorkshire woollen manufacture is distributed over an area of nearly forty miles by twenty, occupied by clothing towns and villages. Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Dewsbury, and Wakefield, are the great manufacturing centres. Mixed or coloured cloths are made principally in villages west of Leeds and Wakefield; white or undyed cloths are made chiefly in the villages occupying a belt of country extending from near Wakefield to Shipley. These two districts are tolerably distinct, but at the margins of the two both kinds of cloth are manufactured. Flannels and baizes are the principal woollen articles made in and near Halifax, together with cloth for the use of the army. Blankets are made in the line between Leeds and Huddersfield. Bradford provides very largely the spun worsted required for the various manufactures. Stuffs are made at Bradford, Halifax, and Leeds, and narrow cloths at Huddersfield. Saddleworth furnishes broadcloth and kerseymeres. As a specimen of the variety of articles produced in one factory, take the following list, exhibited in the Crystal Palace by a Huddersfield manufacturer:—“Summer shawls; summer coatings; winter woollen shawls; vestings; cloakings; table covers; patent woollen cloth for gloves; do. alpaca do.; do. rabbits’ down do.; trowserings; stockingnett do.”
We may observe, that there is no more pleasant mode of investigating the processes of the woollen manufacture, for those resident in the south of England, than a visit to the beautiful valley of the Stroud, in Gloucestershire, where the finest cloths, and certain shawls and fancy goods, are manufactured in perfection in the midst of the loveliest scenery. White-walled factories, with their resounding water-wheels, stand not unpicturesque among green-wooded gorges, by the side of flowing streams, affording comfortable well-paid employment to some thousand working hands of men and women, boys and girls.