The Last Good Year

The year 1907 was, by any measure, the peak. More spindles turning than at any point in the four-hundred-year history of Lancashire cotton. More cloth woven, more raw cotton imported, more workers employed. The Manchester Exchange, where cotton prices were set, had never been busier. The mill owners held their annual dinners and spoke of the trade's resilience, its deep roots, its future. The workers took home their wages, eighteen shillings for a plain weaver, thirty-five for a mule spinner, sometimes more in a full week, and put what they could by and spent the rest and trusted that the mills would keep going, because they always had.

Then 1908 arrived, and the margin collapsed.

The margin was what the trade papers called the gap between the price of raw cotton and the price of finished cloth. When it widened, it meant prosperity. When it narrowed, it meant short time and anxiety and men standing in small groups outside the union offices on Tuesday mornings. It had narrowed sharply. The American crop had been large. The Indian and Egyptian markets were soft. And at the same moment that prices at the Manchester end were falling, the mills on the other side of the world, in Bombay, in the Carolinas, in Japan, were growing in capacity and taking Lancashire's export markets with a patience that suggested they understood something that Lancashire did not yet fully believe.

Short-time working was the first sign. Not a stoppage: stoppages were dramatic, reported in the trade papers with blow-by-blow accounts of deputations and committees and men voting by show of hands in the Weavers' Institute. Short time was quieter and more pervasive: a three-and-a-half-day week, announced on a Monday, affecting a whole neighbourhood at once. The children doing their half-time schooling would see their fathers coming home for dinner in the middle of a Wednesday and know what it meant. The families with a margin absorbed it. The families without a margin went to the pawnshop on Monday and redeemed on Saturday, which they had done before and would do again, the shuttle of the pledge cycle running in its own rhythm below the shuttle of the loom.

The automatic loom question was the other preoccupation. The Northrop loom, American in design, could run with less operator attention than a plain Lancashire loom, or so the manufacturers claimed, and the mill owners' argument for introducing them rested on exactly that claim. The weavers' counter-argument was that the Northrop required more frequent adjustments, not fewer; that a weaver assigned four automatics earned less per hour than on four plain looms; that the promise of reduced labour was, in practice, a reduction in wages rather than in effort. This argument was conducted at length in the Cotton Factory Times, the operatives' paper, and in the union meeting rooms. It was correct. It made no difference. The automatics came in where the owners had decided they should come in, and the weavers either tended them or looked for work in a shed that still had plain looms, and the plain looms were not growing in number.

None of this was entirely new. Lancashire cotton had been going through the motions of a long, slow rearrangement for thirty years, the trade's centre of gravity shifting eastward while the trade itself told stories about its own invincibility. The difference in 1908 was speed. The slump of that year was not an ordinary downturn from which the margin would recover by spring. It was the beginning of something whose end could not be seen, though the people inside it did not yet know this. What they knew was that the mills were running short time, that the automatic loom notices were going up, that the Indian markets were quiet, and that the price of raw cotton was not where it ought to be. They knew this the way you know the weather when you work outdoors: not as abstraction but as fact about the morning you are standing in.

For the people on the street, the weaver coming off the Friday shift, the overlooker checking the list at the gate, the woman managing a household on twenty shillings a week, the trade's long-term trajectory was not exactly invisible, but it was not the primary question. The primary question was whether the mill was running a full week, and whether the margin between wages and expenses was positive, and whether the children's boots would last until Easter. In 1908, for a significant part of the Lancashire cotton workforce, these questions were being answered less comfortably than they had been twelve months before.

The Cotton Factory Times, the trade paper founded in 1885, deeply embedded in the union structures of the spinning and weaving districts, ran the news week by week with the fidelity of a paper that understood that its readers were affected by every column inch of mill trade reporting. Short-time notices were listed by shed name. Wage disputes were reported in detail. The margin was quoted with the seriousness of a cricket score. Men read it folded in their jacket pockets on the way to the dinnertime meeting. Women read the parts that mattered to the household and left the rest. Children were not expected to read it but absorbed its anxieties through the kitchen conversation of adults who could not quite keep the week out of their faces.

What the workers in 1908 could not see, what the trade journals could not quite articulate though the numbers were plainly there if you were willing to read them forward, was that the peak had passed and would not return. The expansion that had built the mill towns, filled the terraces, paid the knocker-uppers, supported the unions and the chapels and the Co-operative Societies and the travelling melodrama companies and the sixpenny-a-week lending libraries: all of it depended on an industry that was, in 1908, at its apex and beginning the long descent.

The mills kept running for another forty years and more, in various forms, in various states of repair, under various arrangements with the banks and the cotton boards and eventually the government. But the world that had made them possible was already shifting in 1908, and the people doing the ordinary work of it, mashing the tea, counting the coins, walking the route in the dark, had no particular reason to know this.

They woke when the tap came and went in to the shed and did the work, and the week was what it was, and the margin was what it was, and the morning came back again on Monday regardless.