Thomas Mellodew, and an Oldham cotton business part two

The Mellodews were textile magnates who ran a successful business from mills in Moorside near Oldham for more than a century.

And I don’t suppose I would ever have heard of them if I hadn’t been asked to write a review of the book about them.*

This is a new venture for me and one that I am still getting to grips with.  First there is the task of reading it, and then the more difficult exercise of writing about it in the space of just 300 words.

Now the received knowledge is that you read it all the way through first and then start writing the comments, in just the same way that I was told in making notes from a book, you read it all, form an overall judgement and then make the notes, which usually means you write less because you have a sense of what is coming.

But this is the blog and part two of Thomas Mellodew, an Oldham cotton business which I first posted on March 21st.**

And the task I set myself is to write a series of regular updates on writing a review and in the process share a little of what the book is about, but dear reader not enough to be a substitute for parting with £14 and reading the story yourself.

Moorside in 1853

Thomas Mellodew set up his 30 looms on Sholver Moorside above Oldham in 1850 specialising in cotton velvet and prospered.

In time as the two maps show the business grew from just the one mill to two large cotton factories with interests in collieries, a brick works three pubs, workers cottages, and farmland.

The first half of the book is a fascinating insight into how a family from humble beginnings made good and along the way offers a good description of how cotton was worked.

And for me what marks the book out as different is that it is a departure from the story of those who worked the looms and fed the boilers to those who managed the capital and did the deals.  So there is little about factory conditions, or the quality of the life of the men, women and children who laboured in the mills.

Moorside in 1894

But then this is an account “primarily about a cotton firm and its owning family” and that does make it an area I know little about.

So here are descriptions of how a textile business got started, the means by which it was financed and the way the owners developed the enterprise and planned for the future.

So it’s strength is that we are dealing not in generalities but of one firm in an identifiable part of Lancashire.

This breaks new ground for me and does a little to redress my usual bottom up approach to history.

What is more I have now reached the point in the book dealing with the 20th century which is when textile manufacture seems to be running all downhill.

The optimism and sheer dynamism of the early firm has slowed down and faces the new competition from the USA and Japan and the slow demise of the whole industry to the point in the 1980s when the company put the two mills up for sale, and had to  withdraw them because they failed to get a buyer.

But that is for part three.

Pictures, front cover of An Oldham Velvet Dynasty, and Moorside from the OS map of Lancashire, 1841-53, and the oS for South Lancashire, 188-1893, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*An Oldham Velvet Dynasty, The Mellowodews of Moorside, by William M. Hartley, Palatine Books, 2009, £14

**http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/thomas-mellodew-oldham-cotton-business.html

Thomas Mellodew, an Oldham cotton business and a first for the blog

Now today I am going to be a little self indulgent, and copy one of those features of some blogs which post progress reports.

In my case it’s a review of a book which is a first for me and I hope an insight into the discipline of writing about someone else’s work and I hope in the process revealing something about the subject matter.

Of course I am bound to say that I am limited to what I can say after all it is one thing to review the book another to tell its story.

And I know there will be those who mutter how difficult is it to do a review?  After all, it is just a matter of reading it and then writing 300 words on what it was like and what you thought of it.

The book in question is An Oldham Velvet Dynasty, by William M. Hartley.* the publishers say that "the history of Thomas Mellodew and Company Ltd is a part of the history of Oldham. 

For over 100 years, the family owned firm was an important local business and employer, spinning cotton and producing high quality velvet – a material much sought after in Victorian England.”

It began in the 1830s and lasted till 1956 so nicely fits into one of the periods I often write about.
Our township was still very much a rural community when Thomas Mellodew set up his 30 looms on a “windswept Moorside above Oldham, employing 260 hands.”  And the growing success of his company was at a time when Manchester was at the centre of those new textile and commercial enterprises.

And the demise of the firm and the demolition of its mills were mirrored by the loss of the Bradford colliery and closure of the countless engineering and foundry works in the east of the city and beyond which are topics I regularly return to.

So, this is day one of the project.  I have successfully negotiated the introduction which gives an account of cotton spinning and weaving and in particular employment practices and moved on to chapter one describing Mellodew’s early life set against the backdrop of the first three decades of the 19th century.

There is much I have learned but remain intrigued by that phrase “260 hands.”  It is a term which neatly places the human workforce in the industrial process.  Here are not workers, with families, interests, and stories to tell but mere adjuncts to the textile machines.  They are no more worthy of a second glance than the oil can and the spinning machines which also help turn the raw material into the finished cotton velvet.

Such was the outlook of so many of those 19th century employers, but I do have to be careful for already my own prejudice towards them and the system they were developing has cast a shadow on what I think of Mr Mellodew.

Now this may be unfair given “his attention to the welfare of his workforce” so we shall see.

In the meantime I am on to chapter two in 1851 on Shover Moorside which according to the biographer was an inhospitable spot, three miles from Oldham where  the comminity were largely “engaged in cotton spinning and weaving, coal mining and agriculture”  and eagerly anticipating why  "just eight years after the Plug-drawing Riots of 1842 [he] was forced ....... to take his 30 looms to windswept Moorside."

But that will as they say be for part two.

Picture; front cover of An Oldham Velvet Dynasty

*An Oldham Velvet Dynasty, The Mellowodews of Moorside, by William M. Hartley, Palatine Books, 2009, £14