Spen Valley Magazine Spen Valley Magazine (draft) | Page 7

TEXTILES
in the Spen Valley
The Pennines have for long supported a
cottage industry of wool spinners and
weavers. The outbuildings at Gomersal’s
Pollard Hall were already equipped for
processing cloth when rented by William
Burnley in 1752. William was a “clothier”,
a merchant who bought cottagers’ hand-
woven cloth for “finishing” at Pollard Hall
to create various styles of fabric.
In 1843 William’s grandson, Thomas,
bought both Pollard Hall and the
nearby Cloth Hall Mill: having finally
evicted a sitting tenant, Thomas
moved his equipment from Pollard
Hall into the renamed “Gomersal
Mills”. for housing. In 1819, George
Anderton, a young apprentice
ironmonger from Bradford came
to Cleckheaton to view two weaving
looms. He bought the machines in
situ and George started trading as
worsted weaver at Upper Lane Mills.
Fire consumed the greatly enlarged
mill in 1913. The mill was rebuilt but
not the company’s finances: in 1916
the business was sold to “Willie”
Gaunt, an extrovert entrepreneur
with a permanent suite at the Savoy,
once engaged to Fred Astaire’s sister,
Adelle, owner of many London
theatres and many woollen mills in
Yorkshire. Struggling to cope with the
inconsistency of the available
worsted yarns, George quickly
realised that it would be more
profitable to produce high-quality
yarns for others to weave into
cloth. In 1825 George Anderton
patented a combing machine
which within 10-years had generated
the funds to build Moor End Mill
(soon renamed as Victoria Mill).
In 1919 W. C. Gaunt Ltd. purchased
the Government’s entire stock of
textiles - uniforms, bedding, etc. -
left over from WW1: an investment
which couldn’t survive the ravages
of the 1930 depression leaving the
Ramsey MacDonald Government
to declare that “…the consequences
of his [Mr. Gaunt’s] bankruptcy would
harm the national economy”: the
Treasury and a consortium of banks
were instructed to take-over Gaunt’s
empire - which they ran at a profit
for the taxpayer for over 30-years -
thus a Gomersal company became a
temporary member of a nationalised
industry!
Gomersal Mill was eventually
demolished in 2004 to make way
In August 1842 Victoria Mill was
attacked by the “Plug Rioters”.
Unusually, it was Andertons’
workforce that repelled the
intruders but two days later, young
James Anderton galloped to Bradford
to summon military assistance to repel
a similar attack on nearby St. Peg Mill.
By 1847 the Anderton family had
invested over £7,000 (today £750,000)
in the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway
Company to persuade it to the route
the Manchester to Bradford line via
the Spen Valley. In 1851 Andertons
employed 387: by 1896 the payroll
exceeded 700 and in 1912 George
Anderton & Son Ltd. built a second
large factory in Doncaster
William Peabody Cooke emigrated
from Kidderminster to Heckmondwike
in 1795 to start making carpets:
30-years later he divided his business
and gave half to his son Samuel who
sited his venture in Liversedge: he
bought a decrepit mill in Mill Bridge,
erected a new building around the
old structure and then disposed of
the redundant masonry through
the new windows!

In 1834 a Royal Commission
investigating childrens’ employment
in factories was informed that Cooke
employed twenty-seven people in
Millbridge included six children under
the age of thirteen. The youngsters
worked a 64-hour week, with 6-days
of unpaid annual holiday for a
maximum of 3-shilling per hour.
The 21 adults on the payroll excluded
“…. the weavers and winders who had
nothing to do with the mill”. Zero-hour
contracts are nothing new!
Samuel Cooke was recognised sees
as good employer: he was also a
workaholic. On retiring in 1877 to left
the business to his sons he soon
bored of leisure and purchased the
local corn mill to run as a successful
hobby! In 1926 Blackwood Morton
of Kilmarnock acquired a stake in
Cooke’s business and finally bought
a controlling interest in 1938. Under
pressure from the new new-fangled
process of “tufting”, BMK finally closed
the Millbridge factory in 1979.