INDUSTRIES 



in the case of a man. Apprenticeship has now 

 died out, but useful training in the theory of 

 weaving is given to boys who care to learn upon 

 the hand-looms of the Stroud School of Art. 

 Elsewhere hand-looms have finally disappeared ; 

 the last, probably, being those worked by a few 

 old people at Uley and Dursley nearly twenty 

 years ago. The census of 1901 recorded six 

 ' persons engaged in woollen manufacture ' in 

 Gloucestershire as working in their own homes, 

 but these were probably not weavers, but 

 people engaged in some subordinate process of 

 the manufacture. 



Upon the whole, a general review of the 

 Stroud cloth industry inclines one to be hopeful 

 on its behalf. The number of hands that it 

 employs is undoubtedly diminishing, having fallen 

 from 6,589 in 1871 to 3,321 in 1901, but, 

 according to a belief general among the manu- 

 facturers, the district has now a larger annual 

 output of cloth than ever before, owing to the 

 labour-saving appliances of modern machinery. 

 It is a disappointing fact that such improvements 

 have not led to any really corresponding growth 

 in the volume of trade, but this, we have seen, 

 has been largely due to the trend of English 

 fashion in the direction of worsted cloths a 

 trend which is said, however, to have slightly 

 diminished in the last three or four years. 

 Gloucestershire woollen manufacturers have un- 

 doubtedly fallen behind in the race, but it is not 

 too late for them to recover. The broadcloth 

 manufacture, being one in which it is almost 

 impossible to scamp work or conceal faults, has 

 been so good an industrial education that its 

 makers have never lost their high reputation for 

 sound workmanship. And if the past twenty 

 years have seen the collapse of many old clothing 

 firms, they have also witnessed enormous im- 

 provements in mechanical plant, so that those 

 mills that survive are now as well equipped as 

 any in the country. The most hopeful sign of 

 all, however, is the manufacture of tweeds and 

 other rough coatings, taken up by the more pro- 

 gressive of the cloth firms. The extraordinary 

 and growing success with which this has been 

 attended affords, I think, strong ground for hope 

 that, should other manufacturers follow this lead, 

 the Gloucestershire woollen industry may yet 

 enjoy its own again. 



The manufacture of cloth is usually treated 

 as the woollen industry par excellence of the west 

 country, but there are two branches of Glouces- 

 tershire manufacture that must not be omitted 

 from the same category. The first of these 

 might seem akin to cloth-making, though, as 

 a matter of fact, it has no special connexion 

 with it. In the Brimscombe and Nailsworth 

 valleys is carried on the manufacture of flock 

 and shoddy products both made out of old 

 woollen rags. These are sorted, boiled (in the 

 better factories), and dried in a temperature of 

 300 Fahrenheit, after which they are passed 



through rollers studded with teeth, which tear 

 the rags into shreds. The best resulting material, 

 known as mattress wool, is not unlike freshly 

 carded wool ; the lower grades, formed out of 

 coloured rags, are less carefully shredded, and 

 look much more lumpy. The lowest grade, 

 known as flock, is prepared in a slightly different 

 way. And yet a third process is required for 

 shoddy, of which a small quantity is manufac- 

 tured annually for Yorkshire spinners and 

 weavers. The whole business in Gloucester- 

 shire is not large, the chief mills being those of 

 Mr. Richard Grist at Brimscombe and Chalford, 

 which turn out the more expensive kinds of 

 mattress material, and Mr. Selwyn's Toadsmoor 

 Mill, which produces the cheaper class of goods. 

 A large amount of the raw material employed is 

 carpet rags, imported from Holland for this 

 purpose. 



A more important sub-division of the woollen 

 industry is hosiery, in the production of which 

 some two hundred hands are now employed. 

 The earliest form of this manufacture was stock- 

 ing-frame knitting, which was invented in 1589, 

 and introduced into Gloucestershire in the 

 1 8th century. In 1779 Rudder wrote of it 

 as the chief occupation of Cirencester, Tewkes- 

 bury, Newent, and a few villages in that neigh- 

 bourhood. 1 In Cirencester, as early as 1727, 

 a charitable bequest had founded ' The Yellow 

 School,' where twenty poor boys were to be 

 taught stocking-frame knitting. By 1800 this 

 was a thriving industry, though it did not sur- 

 vive much longer.* At Tewkesbury, thirty 

 years later, some 800 frames (or looms) were at 

 work, and 1,500 persons, or one quarter of the 

 population, were employed in the stocking manu- 

 facture,' which consisted partly of silk and partly 

 of wool. The Tewkesbury hosiers entered 

 largely into the life of the old borough, and 

 were evidently a luxurious class, for a clause in 

 their apprenticeship indentures stipulated that 

 they should not be given fish more than three 

 times a week, as a consequence of the great 

 number of salmon in the Severn. 



The Tewkesbury Yearly Register of 1830 to 

 1848 gives interesting details as to the condition 

 of the hosiery trade at that period. In Novem- 

 ber, 1831, says this publication 



in consequence of a disagreement between the hosiers 

 and their workmen respecting wages, the latter, who 

 compose a large body of the lower class of the town, 

 assembled at the Cross in great numbers, and went 

 round to their masters with certain demands, which 

 were readily complied with. 



On the ensuing day they increased their de- 

 mands, and pressed them with such vehemence 

 that the military had to be called out, and 

 many special constables were sworn. Six years 



1 S. Rudder, op. cit. p. 63. 



* Hilt. ofCirencetteranJTeu-keibury (1800), 311-19. 



1 J. Bennett, Hitt. of Tewkesbury, 202. 



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