Bradford’s Textile Mills
On the Coat of Many Culturesyou will findthree former textile mills: Salts Mill, Manningham Mills and Moorside Mills.Many different kinds of textile mill were built during the nineteenth century; some simple and functional, others ornate and imposing. The first mills were in rural settings but later, mills dominated the urban environment.
In 1800, with apopulation of 13,000, Bradford had just one spinning mill. By 1850, the population had grown to 103,000, and the number of spinning mills had dramatically increased to 129.By 1900 the number of mills stood at 350.
Althoughhuge fortunes were made by larger-than-life mill owners,this success was set against a backdrop of misery, suffering and exploitation.Mill workers, some as young as five, worked long hours in dangerous conditions for poor wages.
Bradford's textile magnateswere often great businessmen, but also entrepreneurs, inventors, and sometimes philanthropists or political leaders. One of thegreatest was Samuel Cunliffe Lister (1815 - 1906) whose development of a combing machine in the 1840s made him a huge fortune.He went on to make a second fortune in the1850s by producing a machine to weave silk velvet from silk waste. In 1873 he opened Manningham Mills, the biggest silk mill in the world, which at its peak of production had more than 10,000 employees.
In sharp contrast to many textile tycoons,Titus Salt(1803 - 1876) was appalled by the terrible conditions in central Bradford.He began to realise that working conditions in the city were so bad that his workforce was often unable to function properly. Many of the workers were ill and they were unhappy with the dirt and noise in the factories. Living in slum conditions caused many people to die an early death due to disease.
Titus Salt wanted to consolidate his five textile mills and move his workers to a cleaner, healthier environment. In the 1850s, hebuilta massivenew mill at Saltaire 5 miles upstream ofBradford's heavily polluted city centre.The mill itselfwas unusual in that it hadseveral features designed to improve conditions for the workers. For example the chimney for this factory was much higher than most Bradford mills and had a filter on it to reduce the amount of smoke entering the air.
In addition to the mill, Salt built a new village with good quality, affordable houses, a school, hospital and entertainment facilities for his 3,000 employees.Salt's new village was very different tothe slums of Bradford. The roads were wide, the houses were not crammed on top of each other and there were many grassed areas built into the design of the village. Disease was less likely as the air was cleaner and sanitation was provided: Saltaire had gutters and much more hygenic lavatories than the city centre.
Many of theimprovements pioneeredby Titus Salt eventually became standard practice nationwide. For instance, Salt was the first Bradford employer to support a ten-hour working day for all his workers,when theusual working daywas 12 hours or longer.Other employers were brought into line by the 1874 Factory Act.
However, huge mills like Salt's and Lister's,were not the norm in Bradford. Much more typical were smaller places like Moorside Mills, with around 100 employees. The smaller mills would focus on just one part of the textile production process: spinning, weaving and finishingprocesses would each happen in a different mill.
Moorside was aworstedspinning mill, built in 1875 by John Moore. Over the next century the Mill was owned by a series of worsted spinners,many of whom expanded and improved the operation. It was common for a mill to change ownership quite frequently. The period around the First World War sawthe mostrapid expansion at Moorsidebecause worsted was needed in huge quantities for military uniforms. A new two-storey mill building was built in 1916, and further extensions in 1921 added two more floors.In 1919, a clocktower was added as a memorial to the employees killed in the Great War.
Today Moorside Mills houses theBradford Industrial Museum,a place to see machinery and processes used in all stages of textile manufacture.