At Midsummer, 1801, on taking[322] stock very accurately we[323] found we had upwards of £11,000 in our concern; I had also a landed estate in Mellor, in which was comprehended Podmore, where my father was born, with a rent roll, and good tenants of upwards of £350 per annum, charged with about £1,800 on mortgage. Mr. Ross's father was a merchant and magistrate in Montrose, and rich, and, my partner being an only son, could at any time lend us a few thousands, which he afterwards did to the amount of £6,000, including the £2,500 paid down on the formation of our partnership. With this real capital—an unlimited credit (£5,000 with our bankers amongst the rest), an excellent trade, and every prospect of its continuing so for a time, we came to the conclusion of purchasing the premises in the Hillgate, from Mr. Oldknow and Mr. Arkwright, then standing empty, which I never should have thought of for a moment, but from what had passed at the Castle Inn, for the sole purpose of filling them with looms, etc., on some new plan, and just so much spinning machinery as would supply the looms with weft. But beyond the common warping, sizing, weaving, etc., all was a chaos before me; yet so confident was I, that with such assistance as I could call in, we should succeed, that before I began I laid a trifling wager with my partner, that in two years from the time I commenced, I produced 500 pieces of 7-8ths and 9-8ths printing cambrics, all wove in the building in one week by some new process, which I won easily. And as the price for weaving alone when we began was 17s. per piece, and had never been below 16s. at any time, we thought we were justified in what we were doing, even if little improvement could be found. And if the goods made abroad from the annually increasing export of twist, and their prohibitions of our goods in consequence, had not gradually reduced this price of weaving from 17s. (with a profit of 10 to 20 per cent. to the master), to 4s. to the weaver (and no profit to the master!), we should have been handsomely rewarded by our trade. But to return from this digression, we concluded our contract about Michaelmas with Messrs. Oldknow and Arkwright, for the premises above mentioned; and I brought my family to Stockport in the latter end of December, 1801. I must here observe that we had at that time a large concern in Mellor, that with its various branches for putting out work, employing upwards of 1000 weavers, widely spread over the borders of three counties, in a vast variety of plain and fancy goods, all of which had been raised (like a gathering snowball) from a single spindle, or single loom by myself, and was then upon such a system as apparently might go on without my personal attention.
I shut myself up (as it were) in the mill on the 2nd January, 1802,[324] and with joiners, turners, filers, etc., etc., set to work; my first step was some looms in the common way in every respect, which I knew would produce the cloth so much wanted, and in some degree cover our weekly expenses.
Before the end of the month I began to divide the labour of the weavers, employing one room to dress the whole web, in a small frame for the purpose, ready for the looms in another room, so that the young weaver had nothing to learn but to weave; and we found this a great improvement, for besides the advantage of learning a young weaver in a few days, we found that by weaving the web as it were back again, the weft was driven up by the reed the way the brushes had laid the fibres down with the paste, so that we could make good cloth in the upper rooms with the dressed yarn quite dry, which could not be done in the old way of dressing, when the weft was drove up against the points of the fibres, which shewed us the reason why all weavers are obliged to work in damp cellars, and must weave up their dressing, about a yard long, before the yarn becomes dry, or it spoils.
This accomplished, I told my men I must have some motion attached to either traddles or the lathe, by machinery, that would take up the cloth as it was wove, so that the shed might always be of the same dimensions, and of course the blow of the lathe always moving the same distance, would make the cloth more even than could possibly be done in the old way, except by very skilful and careful weavers.
This motion to the loom being at length accomplished to our satisfaction, I set Johnson to plan for the warping and dressing, suggesting several ideas myself. His uncommon genius led him to propose many things to me, but I pointed out objections to them all, and set him to work again. His mind was so teased with difficulties, that he began to relieve it by drinking for several days together (to which he was too much addicted) but for this I never upbraided him, or deducted his wages for the time, knowing that we were approaching our object; at length we brought out the present plan, only that the undressed yarn was all on one side, and the brush to be applied was first by hand, then by a cylinder, and lastly the crank motion.
The partnership being thus dissolved,[325] I proceeded in my business with a double prospect of success; first, by the real business I was doing weekly, of 6 to 700 pieces per week, of printing cambrics, mostly woven in the factory, and the other part in weaving-families in the neighbourhood, on the small looms I had furnished to them, delivering them dressed warps on the beam, and pin-cops for the weft. This system had now become practicable, and was so greatly approved of by the weavers, that, had I weathered the calm, which soon after came upon my credit, I might, in a short time, have had all my looms in the dwellings of the operative weavers on the plan I had been driving at from the first, and from the superior advantage of machine dressing. The evenness produced by this mode of preparation, and the working in my loom, not only rendered these goods of ready sale, but gave me a weekly profit of 90l. to 100l., which, along with the second branch of income that formed my double prospect, viz., the premiums of licenses under patent rights beginning to pour in from the first houses in the trade, to the amount of 1,500l., in the eight months from the first of July, 1806, to March, 1807, when my vessel became quite becalmed.
In the year 1770,[326] the land in our township was occupied by between fifty to sixty farmers; rents, to the best of my recollection, did not exceed 10s. per statute acre, and out of these fifty or sixty farmers, there were only six or seven who raised their rents directly from the produce of their farms; all the rest got their rent partly in some branch of trade, such as spinning and weaving woollen, linen, or cotton. The cottagers were employed entirely in this manner, except for a few weeks in the harvest. Being one of those cottagers, and intimately acquainted with all the rest, as well as every farmer, I am the better able to relate particularly how the change from the old system of hand-labour to the new one of machinery operated in raising the price of land in the subdivision I am speaking of. Cottage rents at that time, with convenient loomshop and a small garden attached, were from one and a half to two guineas per annum. The father of a family would earn from eight shillings to half a guinea at his loom, and his sons, if he had one, two, or three alongside of him, six or eight shillings each per week; but the great sheet anchor of all cottages and small farms was the labour attached to the hand-wheel, and when it is considered that it required six to eight hands to prepare and spin yarn, of any of the three materials I have mentioned, sufficient for the consumption of one weaver,—this shews clearly the inexhaustible source there was for labour for every person from the age of seven to eighty years (who retained their sight and could move their hands) to earn their bread, say one to three shillings per week, without going to the parish.