A Month in Yorkshire

by Walter White

Having found the factory of which I was in search, I had to wait a few minutes for the appearance of the principal. A boy, who was amusing himself in the office, remarked, when he heard that I had never yet seen shoddy made: “Well, it’ll cap ye when ye get among the machinery; that’s all!” He himself had been capt once in his life: it was in the previous summer, when his uncle took him to Blackpool, and he first beheld the sea. “That capt me, that did,” he said, with the gravity of a philosopher.

Seeing that the principal hesitated, even after he had read my letter, I began to imagine that shoddy-making involved important secrets. “Come to see what you can pick up, eh?” he said. However, when he heard that I was in no way connected with manufactures, and had come, not as a spy, but simply out of honest curiosity, to see how old rags were ground into new cloth, he smiled, and led me forthwith into the devil’s den. There I saw a cylinder revolving with a velocity too rapid for the eye to follow, whizzing and roaring, as if in agony, and throwing off a cloud of light woolly fibres, that floated in the air, and a stream of flocks that fell in a heap at the end of the room. It took three minutes to stop the monster; and when the motion ceased, I saw the cylinder was full of blunt steel teeth, which, seizing whatever was presented to them in the shape of rags, tore it thoroughly to pieces; in fact, ground it up into flocks of short, frizzly-looking fibre, resembling negro-hair, yet soft and free from knots. The cylinder is fed by a travelling web, which brings a layer of rags continually up to the teeth. On this occasion, the quality of the grist, as one might call it, was respectable—nothing but fathoms of list which had never been defiled. So rapidly did the greedy devil devour it, that the two attendant imps were kept fully employed in feeding; and fast as the pack of rags diminished, the heap of flocks increased. And so, amid noise and dust, the work goes on day after day; and the man who superintends, aided by his two boys, earns four pounds a week, grinding the rags as they come, for thirty shillings a pack.

The flocks are carried away to the mixing-house. As we turned aside, the devil began to whirl once more; and before we had entered the other door, I heard the ferocious howl in full vigour. The road between the buildings was encumbered with oil-casks, pieces of cloth, lying in the dust, as if of no value, and packs of rags. “It will all come right by-and-by,” said the chief, as I pointed to the littery heaps; and, pausing by one of the packs which contained what he called ‘mungo,’ that is, shreds of such cloth as clergymen’s coats are made of, he made me aware that there is shoddy and shoddy. That which makes the longest fibre is, of course, the best; and some of the choice sorts are worked up into marketable cloth, without a fresh dyeing.

Great masses of the flocks, with passage-ways between, lay heaped on the stone floor of the mixing-house. Here, according to the quality required, the long fibre is mixed in certain proportions with the short; and to facilitate the subsequent operations, the several heaps are lightly sprinkled with oil. A dingy brown or black was the prevalent colour; but some of the heaps were gray, and would be converted into undyed cloth of the same colour. It seemed to me that the principal ingredient therein was old worsted stockings; and yet, before many days, those heaps would become gray cloth fit for the jackets and mantles of winsome maidens.

I asked my conductor if it were true, as I had heard, that shoddy-makers purchased the waste, begrimed cotton wads with which stokers and ‘engine-tenters’ wipe the machinery, or the dirty refuse of wool-sorters, or every kind of ragged rubbish. He did not think such things were done in Batley; for his part, he used none but best rags, and could keep two factories always going. He had heard of the man who spread greasy cotton-waste over his field, and who, when the land had absorbed all the grease, gathered up the cotton, and sold it to the shoddy-makers; but he doubted the truth of the story. True or not, it implies great toleration among a certain class of manufacturers. Rags, not good enough for shoddy, are used as manure for the hops in Kent; so we get shoddy in our beer as well as in our broadcloth.

In the next process, the flocks are intimately mixed by passing over and under a series of rollers, and come forth from the last looking something like wool. Then the wool, as we may now call it, goes to the ‘scribbling-machine,’ which, after torturing it among a dozen rollers of various dimensions, delivers it yard by yard in the form of a loose thick cable, with a run of the fibres in one direction. The carding-machine takes the cable lengths, subjects them to another course of torture, confirms the direction of the fibres, and reduces the cable into a chenille of about the thickness of a lady’s finger. This chenille is produced in lengths of about five feet, across the machine, parallel with the rollers, and is immediately transferred to the piecing-machine, by a highly ingenious process. Each length, as it is finished, drops into a long, narrow, tin tray; the tray moves forward; the next behind it receives a chenille; then the third; then the fourth; and so on, up to ten. By this time, they have advanced over a table on which lies what may be described as a wooden gridiron; there is a momentary pause, and then the ten trays, turning all at once upside down, drop the chenilles severally between the bars of the gridiron. At one side of the table is a row of large spindles, or rollers, on which the chenilles—cardings, is the factory word—are wound, and the dropping is so contrived that the ends of those which fall overlap the ends of the lengths on the spindles by about an inch. Now the gridiron begins to vibrate, and by its movement beats the ends together; joins each chenille, in fact, to the one before it; then the spindles whirl, and draw in the lengths, leaving only enough for the overlap; and no sooner is this accomplished than the ten trays drop another supply, which is treated in the same expeditious manner, until the spindles are filled. No time is lost, for the full ones are immediately replaced by empty ones.

Now comes the spinners’ turn. They take these full spindles, submit them to the action of their machinery by dozens at a time, and spin the large, loose chenilles into yarns of different degrees of strength and fineness, or, perhaps one should say, coarseness, ready for the weavers. And in this way those heaps of short, uncompliant negro-hair, in which you could hardly find a fibre three inches long, are transformed into long, continuous threads, able to bear the rapid jerks of the loom. I could not sufficiently admire its ingenuity. Who would have imagined that among the appliances of shoddy! Moreover, wages are good at Batley, and the spinners can earn from forty to forty-five shillings a week. The women who attend the looms earn nine or eighteen shillings a week, according as they weave one or two pieces.

Next comes the fulling process: the pieces are damped, and thumped for a whole day by a dozen ponderous mallets; then the raising of the pile on one or both sides of the cloth, either by rollers or by hand. In the latter case, two men stretch a piece as high as they can reach on a vertical frame, and scratch the surface downwards with small hand-cards, the teeth of which are fine steel wire. Genuine broadcloth can only be dressed by a teazel of Nature’s own growing; but shoddy, far less delicate, submits to the metal. So the men keep on, length after length, till the piece is finished. Then the dyers have their turn, and if you venture to walk through their sloppy, steamy department, you will see men stirring the pieces about in vats, and some pieces hanging to rollers which keep them for a while running through the liquor. From the dye-house the pieces are carried to the tenter-ground and stretched in one length on vertical posts; and after a sufficient course of sun and air, they undergo the finishing process—clipping the surface and hot-pressing.

From what I saw in the tenter-ground, I discovered that pilot cloth is shoddy; that glossy beavers and silky-looking mohairs are shoddy; that the Petershams so largely exported to the United States are shoddy; that the soft, delicate cloths in which ladies feel so comfortable, and look so graceful, are shoddy; that the ‘fabric’ of Talmas, Raglans, and paletots, and of other garments in which fine gentlemen go to the Derby, or to the Royal Academy Exhibition, or to the evening services in Westminster Abbey, are shoddy. And if Germany sends us abundance of rags, we send to Germany enormous quantities of shoddy in return. The best quality manufactured at Batley is worth ten shillings a yard; the commonest not more than one shilling.

Broadcloth at a shilling a yard almost staggers credibility. After that we may truly say that shoddy is a great leveller.