This book concerns a vanished world. From 1926 birth, the year of the General Strike in the UK, the life of, and significant influences on, a working-class boy. Industrial Lancashire location bordering the Yorkshire Dales. Family struggles in the cotton industry and a World War I diversion. Active participation in Trade Unionism and local Labour party by Father and Grandfather. Father, ex officio. Three siblings, all soon initiated into the connection between work and money, coupled with the necessity for food production from hens, allotments and the countryside. Parental marriage breakdown. Rescue by loving, extraordinary grandparents. Overcrowding and a nomadic lifestyle. Father, increasingly politically active. Secretary of local branch of Communist party. Author, soon a trusted messenger. Surreptitiously collecting correspondence officially considered seditious and earlier feared intercepted by 1930s Special Branch. Family habitually and totally committed to the open air and associated rural pursuits. Rambling, cycling YHA. And at a time long before total motorised domination and ecological concerns. Blessed with an above-average brain, selected at ten years for grammar school education, in a pioneering wave of local working-class children thus privileged. An educational system and atmosphere unprepared for and unwelcoming to the children of artisans.Enthusiastic sporting commitment, mirroring the wider family involvement. A stubborn adolescent, determined to resist family wishes and pressure to follow higher education, joining the war-time labour force aged sixteen.

A survey of the early textile mills of the famed English town, and work and life amid the Industrial Revolution, with photos and illustrations. In this fascinating survey, Vivien Teasdale documents the mills of Huddersfield—some now demolished, others repurposed, and a few still connected with the modern textile industry. Teasdale also recalls the people whose livelihood depended on the mills—the owners, the workers, and their families. Their combined efforts over generations created the prosperity and growth that gave birth to the town we see today, and this book gives a keen insight into their work and their lives. All kinds of mills are featured here—woolen, worsted, yarn spinners, and shoddy. The people who worked in them are brought vividly to life—where they lived, how much they earned, what their working conditions were like. Early union disputes are recalled, giving a glimpse of the organized labor for which Huddersfield is so rightly famous. Some of the names may live on mainly in the streets or buildings named after them; others have long been forgotten, despite their influence on the town in the early days. But the era in Huddersfield’s history that they represent, and the lost community of individuals and families who lives revolved around them, are well remembered here.

This well illustrated book is the first comprehensive study of the weaving sector of the Lancashire cotton industry to be published. The focus is on the development of weaving mills against the background of the economic development and organisation of the industry. Hand loom weaving was carried out in domestic premises or small workshops. Early power looms were installed in multi-storey mills combined with spinning, the characteristic form of single storey shed with north-light roof used solely for weaving developing later. The construction, power systems and layout of these mills are considered in detail. The book is based on original research looking at both the mills themselves and documentary sources, including plans and company records.

This is the first detailed study of the role of the Church in the commercialization of milling in medieval England. Focusing on the period from the late eleventh to the mid sixteenth centuries, it examines the estate management practices of more than thirty English religious houses founded by the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians and other minor orders, with an emphasis on the role played by mills and milling in the establishment and development of a range of different sized episcopal and conventual foundations. Contrary to the views espoused by a number of prominent historians of technology since the 1930s, the book demonstrates that patterns of mill acquisition, innovation and exploitation were shaped not only by the size, wealth and distribution of a house’s estates, but also by environmental and demographic factors, changing cultural attitudes and legal conventions, prevailing and emergent technical traditions, the personal relations of a house with its patrons, tenants, servants and neighbours, and the entrepreneurial and administrative flair of bishops, abbots, priors and other ecclesiastical officials.