Friday 14 July 2023

Neglected stories ........ handloom weaving in Chorlton


Now if you have been on one of those history walks around town chances are that at some point the guide will enthusiastically point to a building with long windows on the upper floor which were “to give the maximum amount of natural light for a handloom weaver.”

And then there might follow an impassioned lecture on the noble life of the handloom weavers who were to be squeezed by the coming of the factory system.  All of which is true up to a point.  Some weaving families could command a very good standard of living into the 19th century and there is something quite attractive about a life where all the family were collectively engaged in all the processes of carding, spinning and weaving, working at their own pace and free to pursue other interests.  As Marx said “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.”

But there is also a lot of romantic tosh written about handloom weaving.  It was by the 19th century an increasingly unprofitable way of earning where the majority of weavers were competing against the industrialization of the different processes, were at the mercy of the middlemen and had to foot the cost of maintaining a workshop.

I doubt that many have seriously researched the extent to which the townships around the south of the city had their own weavers.  But there is evidence for them in Stretford, Urmston, Withington and Burnage and here in our own village.

In some places the records are fairly slim but in others the stories are rich and detailed.  Now I want you to read the book so I shall be outrageously selfish and limit myself to stating that the evidence is there in the census records in newspapers and in the oral testimony recorded just thirty years after the last remaining weavers were plying their trade in some of our townships.

In the June of 1832 20 cottages with their loom houses  at Barlow Moor, came up for auction, while just 25 years earlier here in Chorlton, George Jones who had described his occupation as weaver baptised his two children at the Methodist chapel on the Row*.  

Nor was he alone, because during the same period he was joined by another two weavers who had walked over from Stretford and another from Withington to baptise their children in the same chapel.

*The Row is today Beech Road

Pictures; Liverpool Road, circa late 18th century from the collection of Andrew Simpson, advert from the Manchester Guardian June 9th 1832

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