Hand Loom Weaving in the 19th Century

Cotton has been a core business for Westhoughton since the mid 1600s, and the Lancashire cotton weavers and spinners considered themselves artisans. The books are full of fustians ; cotton manufacturers and weavers. They were, mainly outworkers, producing cloth on hand looms in their own homes and paid by the piece.

Hand loom weaving was historically and especially tough job, most hand loom weavers were men - mainly due to the strength needed to batten. They worked from home sometimes in a well lit attic room. The women of the house would spin the thread they needed, and attend to finishing.

Weaving remained unchanged until John Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1733. This doubled the speed of weaving and allowed a single weaver to make cloths of any width. By 1800 it was estimated that there were 250,000 hand looms in Britain ; In the 1760s James Hargreaves developed the spinning Jenny which allowed the jenny to spin a large number of threads at once, guaranteeing Handloom weavers a constant supply of yarn, and the capacity for full employment and high wages.

These two development allowed woman to take up weaving, they obtained their thread from the spinning mill, and working as outworkers on a piecework contract, it also led to an increase in the labour pool, allowing masters to reduce the price per piece. Although they were outworkers, paid by the piece, for a long time they had managed to maintain a modest and frugal lifestyle in which they had their own independence and other sources of subsistence, eg their own vegetable gardens, and a strong community ethic of mutual aid. This world is sometimes romanticised, and had already been destroyed to a considerable extent by the Enclosures.

In 1791 Edmund Cartwright invented a weaving machine which could be operated by horses, a waterwheel or a steam engine. He began using the power loom in a mill in Manchester, but it took a while to make an impact - by 1800 there were only a few hundred machines in Britain.

In the first 5 years of the the 19th century, news spread that an unskilled boy could weave three and a half pieces of material on a power loom in the time a skilled weaver using traditional methods, wove only one. Richard Guest in his History of Cotton Manufacture 1823 made a comparison of the productivity of power and hand loom weavers:

A very good Hand Weaver, a man twenty-five or thirty years of age, will weave two pieces of nine-eighths shirting per week, each twenty-four yards long, and containing one hundred and five shoots of weft in an inch, the reed of the cloth being a forty-four, Bolton count, and the warp and weft forty hanks to the pound, A Steam Loom Weaver, fifteen years of age, will in the same time weave seven similar pieces.

The Enclosure Acts (between 1750 and the early 1800s) had already driven portions of the population from the countryside - these acts closed open fields and waste to use by peasantry removing the prior rights of local people to rural land they had often used for generations and consolidating these indo individual and privately owned farms. This left the peasantry with three basic alternatives - work in a serf-like manner as a tenant farmer for large land owners ; emigrate to the New World ; Pour into already crowded cities where they increased the labour pool and pushed down each others wages by competing for a limited number of jobs.

So by 1806 power weaving became viable, there was a huge influx into the trade of unapprenticed workers, and the factory system, with its vast mills and steam-powered looms, its long hours of dangerous work and its cheaper cloth that undercut the cottage weavers, flourished.

The demand for cloth produced by handloom weavers fell dramatically. Those who still found masters willing to employ them had to accept far lower piece rate prices than in the past and they existed in increasing poverty. In 1807 over 130,000 weavers signed a petition in favour of a minimum wage. In 1802 the average wage of a handloom weaver was 21s per week. In 1817 it had fallen to 9s per week.

The overall conditions and status of artisans had been eroding for several decades, and this was the final straw. All these groups of artisans were resisting the ways in which the industrial system degraded the dignity of their trades, turning them into mere factory 'hands'. The perceived threat of the power loom has led to disquiet and industrial unrest. Well known protests movements such as the Luddites and the Chartists had hand loom weavers amongst their leaders. In 1803 the Westhoughton mill was established by Richard Johnson Lockett. In April 1812 the Luddites burned the Westhoughton mill ; four of the protesters were hung and 9 transported to Australia for 7 years