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Following dad's footsteps into the cotton mill
When the late Arthur Nelson learned he was dying of cancer, back in 1991, he did not want his memories of his beloved Darley Abbey, where he had lived and worked all his life, to die with him. So he wrote them down for his family to preserve. Here, courtesy of his son, Peter Nelson, of Sunnyhill, Derby, we have reproduced some of Arthur’s vivid descriptions of life at the Walter Evans cotton mill where he started work, as a young lad, in 1919, following in his own father’s footsteps.
for the very last time.
Leaving the various crops I’d planted in the school allotment for others to harvest, I said goodbye to all my teachers and started to get to grips with the fact that, apart from evening classes, my school days were now at an end.
Within a few days of leaving the school gates behind, I reported for work at the Walter Evans mill, which manufactured sewing cotton, in Darley Abbey. At that time, it was owned by Mr John Peacock.
He had moved down from Scotland to manage the firm for Walter Evans and had taken over the business after Walter’s death in 1903.
My journey into the working world didn’t exactly get off to a flying start, however, as the two other members of staff in the office of the finishing department didn’t seem to have the time, or patience, for a new recruit who couldn’t be left to his own devices.
At that time, the ground floor of the old mill housed a number of printing and ancillary machines as the firm had, until recently, printed its own tickets, including labels for ends of cotton reels, wrappers etc.
Although this work had now been contracted out to other companies, my colleagues, who had previously work for a box- making firm, decided to teach the new boy how to strip gum from a supply of paper bands, calculating that it would keep him occupied for a few hours.
So, I was taken into the printing department, taught how to strip gum and then forgotten. It wasn’t until my father, who was one of my new work colleagues, got home for his dinner that he realised that no-one had checked up to see if I was all right, or to relieve me of my gum-stripping duties.
For the first year, the printing machines held a huge fascination for me and I would experiment with the hand-printing machine, the punching machine and the guillotine when, presumably, I was supposed to be stripping gum.
When he graduated to full- time employment, his first job was spool-polishing. There were various types of spools used; wooden barrels with ivory or bone flanges, wooden barrels with brass caps and just plain wooden spools, which were polished individually on a lathe with an iron tool.
His wage was just 6s (30p) per week for polishing a fixed amount of spools. He once told me that he and his fellow apprentice worked hard during the early shift, from 6am to 8.30am, not quite so hard during the morning shift, from 9am to 12-30pm and, having at this stage almost completed their quota for the day, did very little on the afternoon shift, from 1-30pm to 5-30pm. There was no incentive bonus at that time and the boys knew that, if they did more, then their quota would simply be increased with no increase in pay. He eventually became a manager.
At that time, the yarn was all spun at the factory, too, but this practice was later disbanded and, by the time I worked there, the yarn was purchased from Lancashire. The directors used to travel up to the Cotton Exchange to place their orders and obtain samples.
For many years, all the wooden spools were made in the bobbin shop in the turning department but, later, they were purchased from Scandinavia in large quantities. It was only during the Second World War that the skill was temporarily revived and small quantities were turned locally again.
The job of hand-polishing the spools had also came to an end by the time I started working at the mill, replaced by the quicker and cheaper tub method of polishing, in which the spools were tipped into a revolving tub containing lumps of wax.
My very first job title at the mill was “errand boy”, although, in later years, the new recruits would be honoured with far more dignified titles such as junior clerk or management trainee.
Our section of the mill, the finishing department, dealt with orders, production and dispatching, and was based in the haberdashery, which consisted of a central counter, flanked with large stock bins.
The staff desks were positioned at one end. It was generally called the haberdashery, or the Abbey haberdashery by some, because, at one time, it held stocks not only of cotton but items useful for the all the trades to which cotton was supplied.
These included the shoe trade, supplying laces, shoe eyes, hooks, needles, buttons, tapes, knitting yarns and so on.
My task as an errand boy was to carry massages to the foremen in the various departments, help with the transport of goods from all over the mill to the stock area, and then from stock to dispatch.
Occasionally, I had to assist in the main office taking parcels up the hill to the Post Office, for which I could use one of the lady clerk’s cycles.
As parcels increased we used a small two-wheeled truck, getting some of the boys in the village to give us a push up the hill by promising them a ride back down the hill. Later, of course, all parcels were taken by car.
Most goods, at that time, were dispatched by rail, collected daily by the dray-man with his horse-drawn dray. All the goods were packed in wooden cases and, if the cases were not quite ready when the dray-man called, he would help with nailing down the lids – an action likely to trigger unions into calling a strike in the 1960s and 70s.
Some of the cases for export were tin-lined, no doubt for protection against insects, atmosphere and thieves. In later years, all goods were packed in cartons, a much quicker method and easier to handle.
I also assisted with letter copying. Typewriters had been introduced but not carbon paper at that stage, so letters had to be copied into a book. The book contained plain leaves between which were placed the letters, each backed with a damp flannel, placed in a hand press and left for a short period of time before the letter was extracted.
If the dampness of the flannel was just right then the copy was perfect, but woe betide the boy who used to wet a cloth too much as the ink ran and the letter spoiled. The invention of carbon paper was a great boon.
Soon after I started work, some of the men who had fought and survived the horrors of the First World War, came to the mill. Captain Harry Peacock came to look after finance and Archibald Peacock took charge of the dye house.
Part of the haberdashery was partitioned off and used as a laboratory and a young chemist called Jack Donavon was employed to assist in improving the dyes and dyeing process.
At the time, dying of the cotton was done manually but gradually machines took over and, later, pressure dyeing was developed in 1lb and 3lb cheeses. The dye was forced into the cheeses under pressure.
Bleaching, mercerising and fast-dying was contracted out to firms in the Wirksworth and Matlock areas, the thread being sent out in bales weighing 200lbs. I can still picture the bales standing in the warehouse ready for loading.
I have good reason to remember. One day, I was working in this area and had a painful encounter with one of the young men who had fought in the war and was finding it difficult to adapt back into civilian life.
I was pushing a wicker basket through the warehouse, when one of the basket wheels accidentally caught his foot. I turned around, with the intention of apologising, but suddenly found myself at the other side of one of the bales, having received a blow under the chin which knocked me right over the bale in question.
At that time, around the 1920s, the firm was changing, having to adapt from the demands of wartime production to those of a country at peace. The main products were sewing cottons for a wide variety of uses, including the shoe and clothing industries, book binding, gloves, millinery, crochet cottons, knitting cottons, small cords, piping cords and so on.
Boar’s Head Brands, as our products were called, were known not only to some of the largest firms in this country but all over the world.
With the eventual introduction of machine dying, a bleaching plant and a mercerising department, embroidery lines were introduced and the scope of trade expanded. These changes were later to be joined by the addition of nylon and other man-made fibres. It was a gradual process of change.
Large bull spools were also used for export to Canada for the shoe trade. Gradually, the main trades began to use thread wound on paper tubes and cones, and so, as the spooling trade declined, the tube trade increased. They were much cheaper to produce.
We still had a variety of machines for producing spools. The semi-automatic machines had eight spindles and each had to be hand-fed, so, while one set of bobbins was filling, a cutter would remove the over-wind, nick the spool and insert the end of the thread.
Every spool needed to have a ticket stuck on each end. This was done by hand and the operator usually worked at quite a speed, using their tongue as a damping pad. Machine ticketing was introduced in later years.
For certain industries, the thread also had to be polished or glazed, a process which involved giving the cotton a coating of starch. Polishing machines could handle between 200 and 300 bobbins of thread at a time.
The thread was passed through a comb to keep the strands apart and then passed through a trough containing the starch mixture. Next, it travelled over revolving polishing brushes, grooved rollers and wooden beaters before being packaged for sale.
This whole process could take between a day and a week, according to the type of thread being polished and the weather conditions. The only way of increasing production was to increase the temperature of the room, but as the room was also used for hank winding, the operators on these machines objected to any increase in temperature above 70F degrees.
This was not an easy job. Each operator looked after 350 to 400 ends of thread and had to deal with breakages while the machines were in motion, which could be tricky. They were also responsible for controlling the speed of the machines according to any variation in temperature and finally “doffing” off the full bobbins.
Generally speaking, working conditions were fairly good and, over the years, were gradually improved, mostly because of compulsory legislation.
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