Nostalgia

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COTTON ... this picture from around 1935 shows flannel weaving at Kelsall and Kemp
COTTON ... this picture from around 1935 shows flannel weaving at Kelsall and Kemp
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Putting a different spin on things


31/ 5/2008

AS MOST people of a certain vintage will probably know, Rochdale was Britain’s first industrial boomtown – and its success was built on its burgeoning cotton industry.

By 1830 the town had 38 cotton mills employing 4,296 and the number of mills continued to increase, particularly after the cotton famine of the 1860s when supplies were interrupted due to the American Civil War.

By the turn of the century there was hardly a street or area of the town without a cotton mill, sometimes two or three in a line such as the Castleton Moor, Marland and Mars mills in Castleton, and the plethora of mills in and around Crawford Street, Wardleworth and Hamer, Spotland and Sparthbottoms.

One of the last cotton mills to be built in the country was in Rochdale – the massive Dunlop complex, but by the time it closed for good in 1979, King Cotton was dead and with it the hundreds of mills once Rochdale’s economic thread.

Nowadays little trace remains of what was the town’s most prosperous industry, employing thousands of people.

Some mills have been converted into modern offices or leisure centres, but most have been demolished and are now nothing more than a memory, so today we hope to revive a few memories by publishing a spinners’ vocabulary:

  • Bant: A circular, braided-cotton string.
  • Barring-over: Starting the engine ready for the machines to be coupled for driving.
  • Cop: A bobbin of spun thread, ready for fitting in a shuttle.
  • Counts: The numbering system to indicate the thickness of yarn, based on the amount of cotton per pound.
  • Creel: There are two creels to a mule, each carrying 120 roving bobbins.
  • Doffing: Removing the full cops from the mule.
  • Drafting: The process of drawing out the cotton by passing the rope of loose cotton (called a sliver) between a succession of fluter rolers geared to deliver a long, thin ribbon which then spun to make the yarn.
  • Ends down: The term used to indicate that the threads between draft rollers and the spindles are broken.
  • Minder or Big Piecer: The spinner’s first assistant.
  • Mule: A machine which draws out the soft cotton fibres to roving bobbins then, on the quick return of the carriage, winds the threads on to cops.
  • Piecing Up: Mending a broken thread.
  • Scavenger or Little Piecer: The spinner’s second assistant.
  • Slubs: Imperfections in threads.
  • Spinner: The person in charge of a pair of mules.

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