[Note: References, in square brackets, are quoted at the end. You can go to the reference by pressing ' ctrl+f ' and input the reference you want e.g. [23] then pressing 'Enter', and return to your place in the text by simply pressing 'Enter' again].
Introductory Comment
The ‘cotton’ cloth originally woven in Lancashire was not made from pure cotton. The longitudinal threads – warp – were made of linen and only the transverse threads – weft – were cotton. This cloth was called ‘fustian’. The warp needed to be strong and until the invention of the water frame (see below) by Richard Arkwright this could not be achieved with cotton.
Origin of Cotton
Cotton is a natural fibre produced by small trees and shrubs of the mallow family (see Fig.), which includes the hibiscus and hollyhock. There are several commercial species of the plant and it is known to have been cultivated for at least 7,000 years. The flower develops into a fruit called the boll that splits open to show the white cotton fibre, called lint, rooted in dark seeds (see Fig.). The fibres vary in length from about ½ inch to 2 ½ inches and are now harvested by machine, but traditionally were picked by hand.
The crop requires a tropical or warm sub-tropical climate with a dry harvest season. Initially cotton came from the Levant – the area at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, including Turkey, Cyprus and Egypt – but the slave plantations of the West Indies soon provided Lancashire with its raw material. After the 1790s Lancashire acquired a new and virtually unlimited source in the slave plantations of the southern USA, which therefore became in the main a dependent economy of Lancashire. Today much cotton is grown under irrigation.
After picking, the raw cotton is processed to remove dirt, sticks, burrs, leaves and other debris. It is then passed through a machine called the cotton gin, invented in 1793 by Eli Whitney, an American, in which the seeds are removed. After that the cotton is tightly packed into large bales for transport to market.
Classification of Cotton
Cotton is classified and valued according to staple, grade and character. ‘Staple’ refers to the length of the fibres, ‘grade’ depends on colour, brightness and foreign matter, ‘character’ is determined according to strength, body, smoothness and other properties.
Summary of the Processes Required for Cotton Spinning and Weaving
In general terms the cotton wool received at the workshop or factory must pass through the following stages to ready it for the weaver:
The raw cotton must first be cleaned to remove any remaining foreign matter ('willowing' or 'scutching').
It is carded - a process that aligns the fibres parallel to each other.
The carded cotton is then rolled into a soft loose rope called a 'sliver' (rhymes with diver).
For hand spinning, several slivers are joined together by twisting end-to-end to produce a long loose 'roving'.
In the factory
- The roving is then stretched out again and given a considerable amount of twist to bind the loose fibres into a strong 'yarn' or 'twist'.
The yarn is wound onto a spindle or bobbin and readied for weaving.
Hand Carding
In any but the most primitive hand process, the raw cotton had to be carded before it could be spun. At the level of the cottage industry this was normally achieved by combing it in batches between two paddles ('cards') that each contained rows of wire hooks - rather like drawing two hair brushes repeatedly through each other. A single hand card of this type is visible on the Figure [1]. Each batch was then rolled out of the card by hand and twisted length-wise onto the end of previous batches to form a loose sliver that could be spun directly or wound onto a distaff for storage.
Developments in and Mechanisation of Cotton Spinning
(Useful references used: [2], [3]).
Until about 1770 cotton processing was done essentially by hand. In the most primitive process, the raw cotton (cotton wool) was pulled out by hand and could be spun with a drop-spindle. This was a casual occupation of the women-folk conducted while they chatted or even as the moved about.
The simple (or 'great') spinning wheel (see Fig.) appeared about 1300 and actually combined three functions in one. First the spinner would feed out a small amount of roving and then pull back her hand to draw out, or attenuate, it by making the cotton fibres slide past each other. Then she would feed it onto the end of the spindle, which would be rotating, at an angle of 45 degrees so that the thread would slip off the end at each revolution – this had the effect of giving one twist to the yarn for each revolution of the spindle [4]. When the yarn was drawn and twisted to a uniform degree the spinner would finally allow the spun length to wind itself onto the spindle by moving her arm so that the thread was at a right angle to the spindle and could not therefore slip off the end. The spinning wheel thus combined drawing, twisting and reeling into a single process and would have to be classed as one of the great inventions of civilization.
A significant technical improvement was achieved in the fifteenth century by the Saxony wheel which introduced the bobbin and flyer, allowing the drawing, twisting and winding operations to be conducted as a continuous process. However the Saxony wheel, though useful for long fibres such as linen and the longer sorts of wool, was not well suited to short fibres such as cotton, and fustian weavers faced a developing shortage of yarn. It was said that "it was no uncommon thing for a weaver to walk three or four miles in the morning and call on five or six spinners before he could collect enough weft to serve him for the remainder of the day" [6].
The difficulty of getting adequate supplies of yarn was only aggravated by the invention of the ‘fly shuttle’ in 1733 by John Kay of Bury [5]. This used a pull-cord to shoot the shuttle backwards and forwards across the loom and had the effect of speeding up weaving. As the demand for cotton cloth increased, the shortage of yarn became acute.
Hargreave's Jenny
The limitation of the great wheel was that it could produce only a single thread at once. This problem was first solved by James Hargreaves of Stanhill, two miles east of Blackburn, in 1764 who developed a hand-operated machine, initially said to have had six or eight spindles, that mimicked the process of the great wheel. Drafting (or drawing) was achieved by a moving frame that drew the rovings out as it retreated while at the same time imparting a twist. After the right amount of twist had been given the frame was allowed to move back inwards allowing the spun yarn to be wound onto the spindles, the whole process then being repeated - drafting and winding in consecutive operations [7]. He called his machine the 'spinning jenny' and as it was not patented it was soon copied, enlarged and improved. It was a great success and quickly spread across the cotton-working area such that from about 1770 ‘the hand-wheels were all thrown into lumber rooms’ to be replaced by ‘common jennies’ [8], built in their thousands by local joiners. By 1790 jennies with over one hundred spindles were being built. The jenny allowed one person to spin more in a day tha
n previously they had been able to spin in a year.
Arkwright's Water Frame
Richard Arkwright of Preston developed a spinning machine that worked more on the principle of the Saxony wheel. The idea is thought to have first been used by Lewis Paul in about 1738 but Paul could not get it to work properly. It took the genius and precise engineering of Arkwright to perfect roller-spinning so that it worked reliably. Drafting was achieved by passing the roving through consecutive pairs of rollers, the second pair revolving more quickly than the first. The twist was imparted by a flyer mounted on the spindle that allowed the process to operate continuously. Arkwright called his machine the 'throstle' or 'water-frame' and patented it in 1769. It was a heavier machine than the jenny and when batteries of throstles were mounted together it needed water power (hence the second name) or a gin turned by a horse to move it. It was really this that inaugurated the establishment of factories for cotton spinning, initially at the sites of water mills. Another advantage of the throstle was that it could produce a yarn strong enough to serve as warp, thereby, for the first time in England, allowing pure-cotton cloth ('calico') to be made, in place of fustian.
Crompton's Mule
A third successful spinning machine was invented by Samuel Crompton of Bury in 1779. He used the roller method of the throstle for initial drafting of the roving, but then the jenny method of a moving frame to further extend the yarn before allowing the frame to return and the yarn to wind onto the spindles. It was thus a development of the process used by the great wheel. Crompton was able to make both hard yarn strong enough to serve as warp and very fine yarn suitable for the weaving of fine muslins. As it used the principles of both the jenny and the throstle Crompton called his new machine the 'mule'. The mule lent itself to rapid enlargement and by the 1790s machines with hundreds of spindles were being built and installed in cotton factories (see photo below). The mule soon became the preferred spinning machine of the Lancashire cotton industry.
Cotton Preparation - the Carding Engine
Mechanical cotton spinning could not have developed successfully had not the processes of cotton preparation been mechanised. Carding would have become a hopeless bottle-neck. Although once again not the first-mover, it was Richard Arkwright who eventually devised a 'carding engine' and ancillary machines such as the lap former (to prepare a wide mat of loose cotton as feed for the carding engine) and the lantern frame (to form the carded cotton into roving ready for spinning on the water-frame). He installed batteries of these machines in a number of factories, starting in 1771 at Cromford in Derbyshire. As they were successful they were soon copied, either under license or in dispute or defiance of Arkwright's patents.
Handloom weaving
Weaving of cloth on the handloom is very ancient. The loom on which Penelope wove the shroud for Laertes is illustrated on Greek vases, and except that the loom is vertical instead of horizontal, the principles on which it worked are the same as those used in England up to 1733. Even after the perfection of machine spinning, cotton cloth was woven by hand, either in workshops attached to the spinning mills, or in houses or scattered cottages by outworkers. The 'golden age' of the handloom weaver was a few short years that ended about 1793 at the outbreak of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
The loom used in Englad was a four-poster construction (see figure) [9]. At the back was a warp beam from which warp was slowly unwound as the weaving progressed. The warp threads passed through at least two healds (or heddles) that were alternately raised or lowered by foot treadles (or pedals) to form a diamond-shaped space in the warp, known as the 'shed', through which the shuttle could be thrown, from one hand to the other, carrying the weft to make the cloth. The warp threads also passed through a reed (or comb), attached to a batten (or beater), that could swing against the newly-woven cloth to 'beat it up' tightly. As the cloth was woven it was wound onto a cloth beam for storage until ready to be taken to market in a 'bearing home', or collected by a supplier. Cotton cloth as woven on the handloom was typically up to a yard wide and in earlier times was twenty to thirty yards long. A finished length of cloth was called a 'piece' or an 'end'.
Various improvements were made to the simple handloom. An early one, already mentioned, was the fly shuttle, invented in 1733 by John Kay, closely followed by the drop-box invented by his son, which allowed rapid switching of shuttles to permit a change of colour in the weft. Later came the addition of more healds (and treadles to operate them) which allowed more complex patterns to be woven, as in the jack loom. The draw loom took complex weaving a stage further by using a boy (a draw-boy) on top of the loom who could raise and lower greater combinations of warp threads. Eventually the Jacquard loom (developed in France) was perfected and introduced into England in about 1820 by Stephen Wilson from Spitalfields [10]. The Jacquard replaced the draw-boy with a system of punched cards (not unlike those later used in early computers) and allowed more complex patterns to be set up quickly, woven easily and the cards stored for re-use. The Jacquard loom was in operation throughout Britain by the mid nineteenth century.
Baines' Description of Cotton Processing in 1835 [11]:
Advances rapidly followed so that by 1835, following mechanisation of the cotton mill by Boulton and Watt's steam engines, Baines wrote in admiration:
"The cotton is brought to the mill in bags, just as it is received from America, Egypt or India; and is then stowed in warehouses, being arranged according to the countries from which it may have come. It is passed through the willow, the scutching-machine, and the spreading-machine, in order to be opened, cleaned, and evenly spread. By the carding-engine the fibres are combed out and laid parallel to each other, and the fleece is compressed into a sliver. The sliver is repeatedly drawn and doubled in the drawing-frame, more perfectly to straighten the fibres, and to equalize the grist. The roving-frame, by rollers and spindles, produces a coarse and loose thread; which the mule or throstle spins into yarn. To make the warp, the twist is transferred from cops to bobbins by the winding-machine, and from the bobbins at the warping-mill [or frame] to a cylindrical beam [see photo below]. This beam being taken to the dressing-machine, the warp is sized, dressed, and wound upon the weaving beam. The latter is then placed in the power-loom, by which machine, the shuttle being provided with cops of weft, the cloth is woven."
"The various machines are proportioned to each other in regard to their capability of work, and they are so placed in the mill as to allow the material to be carried from stage to stage with the least possible loss of time. All are moving at once – the operations chasing each other; and all derive their motion from the mighty engine which, firmly seated in the lower part of the building, and constantly fed with water and fuel, toils through the day with the strength of perhaps a hundred horses. Men, in the mean while, have merely to attend on this wonderful series of mechanism, to supply it with work, to oil its joints, and to check its slight and infrequent irregularities; - each workman performing, or rather superintending, as much work as could have been done by two or three hundred men sixty years ago. At the approach of darkness the building is illuminated by jets of flame, whose brilliance mimics the light of day, - the produce of an invisible vapour, generated on the spot. When it is remembered that all these inventions have been made within the last seventy years, it must be acknowledged that the cotton mill presents the most striking example of the dominion obtained by human science over the powers of nature, of which modern times can boast. That this vast aggregate of important discoveries and inventions should, with scarcely an exception, have proceeded from English genius, must be a reflection highly satisfactory to every Englishman."
Description of Cotton Processing in the later Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Preparation of Cotton for Spinning – Cleaning, Carding and Drawing to make a Roving [12]
Cotton is extracted from the bale, which is almost solid, as hard matted lumps that still contain some seed and dirt. The bales are opened by the willow, a machine that tears the bale apart with revolving spikes, and by the use of powerful fans blasts it free from most of the extraneous matter. It then proceeds to the scutcher where it is beaten by metallic blades that rotate at several thousand revolutions per minute [13]. This completely opens the fibres and allows any remaining dirt to fall through a frame [14] & [15]. The figure shows manual opening of a cotton bale [16].
The clean and opened cotton is next spread onto a conveyor belt by a machine called a lapping or spreading machine that is designed to distribute an even weight of cotton over a given surface area and to form a band of raw cotton about a meter wide – the scutcher lap (see [17]).
For fine spinning, at this stage the cotton may be washed, or drenched and partially dried, to make the fibres cling. The lap then transfers to the carding engine.
Carding is designed to remove unsuitable short fibres and align the valuable ones. Mechanized carding was first applied successfully for coarser yarn but over time the machines were improved so that eventually carding became a continuous process. In essence, the scutcher lap is fed against a rotating drum, covered in wire bristles such that the cotton is dragged over other wire bristles against which the drum rotates (see figure, [18]).
The product of the carding engine is a lap which is stripped by a roller and channelled into a funnel that shapes it into a loose cotton rope called a rolag or carding sliver. It is run off into cans, typically about 30 cm wide and a metre high, which are often visible on photos of spinning rooms and were handled by a tenter. Other laps that could be produced in certain cases were a sliver lap or a ribbon lap, and after combing, a comber sliver. Much effort was put into producing slivers of constant thickness, therefore constant unit weight.
The sliver next has to be thinned and blended with other slivers to achieve a more uniform product. It is repeatedly drawn and doubled in the drawing frame, which has the effect of further straightening the fibres as they slide past each other. For example, four cans of different slivers are drawn out simultaneously and blended in the frame to produce four consecutive cans of a single sliver, and the process may be repeated such that the final sliver may represent over one hundred original carding slivers [19].
Mechanisation of Weaving
As early as 1745 John Kay, of the fly shuttle, took out a patent relating to mechanization of certain types of weaving but the inventor of the power loom is usually considered to be the Rev. Edmund Cartwright in 1785. Although this loom was not a practical success it formed the basis for further improvements and experimentation which eventually bore fruit. For example, in 1803 William Radcliffe introduced dressing machinery to size the warp (coat it in a starch solution to make it more resistent to mechanical handling in the loom) before the warp beam was mounted in the loom and this improved the efficiency of the power loom. (See [20] for this section).
From 1806 the power loom, later improved by William Horrocks, became a commercial proposition for the coarser types of weaving, to the serious detriment of the handloom weavers who were forced into progressively finer weaving. From the 1820s continuing improvements in the power loom meant serious encroachment on the remaining territory of the handloom weavers and reductions in their pay. Not only were power looms progressively quicker than handlooms, they could be worked or attended by women or children who worked much more cheaply than skilled handloom weavers and this contributed to unemployment, hunger, riots and loom breaking in the second and third decades of the century.
Notwithstanding handloom weavers’ willingness to retreat into finer cottons and silk (Ben Brierley was a silk weaver), from the 1840s onward the impact of power looms on handloom weaving became irresistible [21]. The very last handloom weavers hung on into the 1880s [22]. 
Later Developments
From the early decades of the nineteenth century onwards there was technical evolution, but no further revolution in cotton spinning and weaving [23]. Use of the power loom became generalized and the ‘mule’ remained the basis of British spinning. The mule was increasingly mechanized to become ‘self-acting’ and faster, and this further reduced the amount of labour needed.
An alternative form of spinning was developed in the 1840s in America, but was not widely adopted in Lancashire until the 1890s. This was ring spinning and was a development of Arkwright's water frame; it used rollers for drawing and a traveller for imparting the twist. It was technically superior, took up considerably less space in the mill and probably required less skill than mule spinning, but it has been asserted that for fine spinning the mule was superior. The flurry of mills built in the Oldham area at the beginning of the twentieth century, including the Regent Mill in Failsworth where Billy Dunkerley was overlooker, were mainly ring mills [24].
References
[1]. Rather like brushing a long-haired dog, if you’ve ever had the pleasure. We had a long-haired German Shepherd and you could have spun some lovely yarn out of her!
[3]. Wadsworth, Alfred P., and Julia de Lacy Mann, 1931, 'The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600-1780', Manchester University Pres.
[4]. A lot of people (including some who are quite clever!) have difficulty understanding this process. But if you take a tape, such as a flat shoelace, and wind it flat round your finger, then pull it off the end of your finger, you will see that there is a twist in the tape. This is what spinning does, except that it also attenuates the ‘tape’ (draws it) to make it thinner, and then winds it back onto the spindle at the end, to make up a cop of roving.
[5]. Guest, in Stamp & Beaver, op. cit. p. 498.
[6]. Not widely used until the 1760s.
[7[. The spinning jenny is demonstrated at the excellent National Trust property, Quarry Bank Mill, located at Styal in Cheshire. It is well worth a visit. Details at http://www.quarrybankmill.org.uk/.
[8]. Butterworth, Edwin, 1856 (p. 14), 'Historical Sketches of Oldham', reprint of 1981 by E. J. Morten, (Publishers), Manchester. ISBN 0 85972 048 9.
[9]. Figure taken from Quennell, Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell, Fifth Ed., 1950, 'A History of Everyday Things in England', pbulished by B. T. Batsford Ltd., London.
[10]. Benson, Anna and Neil Warburton, 'Looms and Weaving', Shire Publications Ltd. www.shirebooks.co.uk.
[12]. This description is taken from notes made on visits to Quarry Bank Mill (see reference [6] above). Even at Quarry Bank it is difficult to follow the overall progress of cotton through the various preparatory stages because the process is not set up continuously, but is split into sections in different parts of the mill. The big advantage, however, is that it is possible to actually see and hear the machinery working! There are also a water wheel and two steam engines. Give yourself a treat. Make a visit! Details at http://www.quarrybankmill.org.uk/.
[13]. It appears that the willow and scutcher are sometimes referred to as the ‘breaker scutcher’ and the ‘finisher scutcher’.
[14]. Before the invention of the willow and scutcher the cotton was opened by hand and placed upon a wooden frame where it was beaten by women with willow switches, rather as carpets used to be beaten by hand, an exhausting procedure. The scutcher came into use about 1808.
[15]. Woodruff, William, 2002, p. 76, 'The Road to Nab End', Abacus, ISBN 0 349 11521 4. In this autobiography, a contemporary writer describes the conditions that still, surprisingly, prevailed at a cotton mill at Blackburn as late as 1924-25 "Bridget finished up as a slubber, cleaning cotton, which was one of the dirtiest and least skilled occupations in textile manufacture. Slubbers or cardroom hands were looked down on. Coarse and degrading was how Bridet described the work." (‘Slubber’ is evidently another term for ‘scutcher’. Terminology varies from time to time and from place to place, leaving much scope for confusion).
[17]. Woodruff (op. cit, p. 161) continues: "I watched mother breaking up the bales of cotton, clean, blend, whirl and pound them until a continuous sheet of matted tufts called a lap emerged. This was called slubbing. The lap was then fed into the carder which had two rollers covered with fine wire teeth to break up the tufts and separate the individual fibres. From the carder the untwisted rope of cotton (a sliver) was coiled in tall cans. The sliver, about an inch in diameter, was then combed to remove the shorter fibres, drawn across smooth leather-covered rollers, twisted into a long, firm thread, after which it was wound onto large spinning bobbins. This was roving. The bobbins went to the spinner where the threads were blended, drawn and twisted some more. The resulting yarn, both warp and weft, came in all kinds of threadcounts, or thicknesses."
[19]. Terminology used for different machines in this process includes flyer frame, drawing or drafting frame, slubbing frame, intermediate frame, roving frame and jack frame. Different lengths of cotton fibre require different amounts of preparatory treatment.
[20]. Timmins, Geoffrey, 1993, (see p. 19) ‘The Last Shift – the decline of handloom weaving in nineteenth century Lancashire’, Manchester University Press.
[21]. Woodruff (op.cit) continues, (p 161): "My father was a weaver. He spent his life ‘kissing the shuttle.’ It was called ‘kissing the shuttle’ because he drew the weft thread from the cop by sucking it through a small hole at one end of the shuttle. The workers … took pride in explaining their work. It was like being admitted to a secret society. They were serious about it. When they talked about cloth, hilarity stopped. Problems that arose in the mill during the day, such as when the weave or pattern was varied, were discussed at night until a solution was found. Men or women were not judged so much by what they did at home but by what they did in the mill People respected skill. Pride of work meant a lot. Work was everything."
[22]. Timmins, op. cit., p. 185.
[23]. In the 20th century there have been a number of revolutionary developments.
[24]. The Cotton Mills of Oldham, by Duncan Gurr and Julian Hunt, Third Edition, 1998, Arts & Heritage Publications, Oldham Education and Leisure Services.
Written by Philip Dunkerley. This page was last modified on 01 March 2009 . Filename: Processes in the Cotton Industry