This might be a long shot, but I wonder if anyone has come across anything similar to this before? I have been looking at estate rental ledgers for my home town, Great Harwood in Lancashire, and I have found something that puzzles me. The town relied heavily on handloom weaving until c. 1844 when the first power loom mill was built, but some of the entries for various farms have, for the same date in 1827, an entry stating that a certain sum paid was ‘an allowance for power looms’. These farms, though scattered, were roughly in the same area. This has me totally stumped and I would be grateful for any ideas – if only where to look for answers. Barbara

Barbara Could it be compensation for the switchover to power from hand, where this was to pieceworkers? Alternatively, an amount to purchase the new looms by the pieceworkers. Maybe they tested them out on the farms, before they started using them in the town factories. John ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barbara" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected] Com" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 8:11 PM Subject: [OEL] Power looms? This might be a long shot, but I wonder if anyone has come across anything similar to this before? I have been looking at estate rental ledgers for my home town, Great Harwood in Lancashire, and I have found something that puzzles me. The town relied heavily on handloom weaving until c. 1844 when the first power loom mill was built, but some of the entries for various farms have, for the same date in 1827, an entry stating that a certain sum paid was 'an allowance for power looms'. These farms, though scattered, were roughly in the same area. This has me totally stumped and I would be grateful for any ideas - if only where to look for answers. Barbara ==================================== WEB PAGE: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~oel/ ARCHIVES: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index?list=OLD-ENGLISH ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

No doubt someone will correct me but I believe that some weavers rented their looms rather than owning them. Who it was that hired them out, I'm not sure - possibly the large spinning mills who put out work to them. Audrey ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barbara" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected] Com" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 8:11 PM Subject: [OEL] Power looms? This might be a long shot, but I wonder if anyone has come across anything similar to this before? I have been looking at estate rental ledgers for my home town, Great Harwood in Lancashire, and I have found something that puzzles me. The town relied heavily on handloom weaving until c. 1844 when the first power loom mill was built, but some of the entries for various farms have, for the same date in 1827, an entry stating that a certain sum paid was 'an allowance for power looms'. These farms, though scattered, were roughly in the same area. This has me totally stumped and I would be grateful for any ideas - if only where to look for answers. Barbara ==================================== WEB PAGE: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~oel/ ARCHIVES: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index?list=OLD-ENGLISH ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Dear Barbara I have a copy of a privately published book by William Radcliffe called "The Origin of Power Loom Weaving" published in 1828. It is hard reading but, as far as I can tell, because he took exception to English and Scottish yarn being sold to European finishers to manufacture, i.e. handloom weave it, as he felt that English weavers should have the benefit of the yarn, decided to try and solve the trouble with the large amounts of spun cotton and too few weavers to make the finished pieces. This was partly because it was quicker to produce the yarn as it was then made by a mechanical process powered either by water or steam rather than the days when the yarn was spun by one member of a family in cottage industry situation and woven by another member of the family, with the children taking part by carding etc. He decided to first of all bring weavers and potential weavers together into his factory where he was already spinning yarn in order to train up as many men as he could to the trade of cotton weaving. He also began, with the help of others, to invent various other machines to perform some of the preliminary processes, e.g. warping and dressing. Then he invented a way of taking up the finished material by winding it onto a beam by means of what he called a "lathe" but may not have been quite what we understand as a lathe today. This was somehow able to be done mechanically as the handloom weaver wove the material by hand. In other words, he could also operate the winding process at the same time. This improved the finished article. There is a lot about how he had to patent machines and processes and what he had to go through in order to do it and how he felt the need, with others, to protect the English trade and workers against the theft of industrial secrets and it is not at all easy to select the wood from the trees. However, his idea seems to have been to train up the handloom weavers to work with what he called the power looms which they should then take back into their homes to use there. Clearly these are not the later power looms as only part of the process was mechanised and seems to have depended upon the action of the man to work it rather than power from water or steam. I don't know if any of this explains what you have found happening in your locality. Most of this was going on in Stockport and the areas roundabout as William Radcliffe was based in Stockport while he was doing this but he was putting out yarn and warps to the cottages over the three counties that border onto the countryside around Stockport - Derbyshire, Cheshire and Lancashire. This was, in effect, a transitional phase between hand operated looms and the fully powered looms in factory situations. Audrey ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barbara" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected] Com" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 8:11 PM Subject: [OEL] Power looms? This might be a long shot, but I wonder if anyone has come across anything similar to this before? I have been looking at estate rental ledgers for my home town, Great Harwood in Lancashire, and I have found something that puzzles me. The town relied heavily on handloom weaving until c. 1844 when the first power loom mill was built, but some of the entries for various farms have, for the same date in 1827, an entry stating that a certain sum paid was 'an allowance for power looms'. These farms, though scattered, were roughly in the same area. This has me totally stumped and I would be grateful for any ideas - if only where to look for answers. Barbara ==================================== WEB PAGE: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~oel/ ARCHIVES: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index?list=OLD-ENGLISH ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message