Vivien Teasdale - Tracing Your Textile Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians

S ince the day our cavemen ancestors discovered that life was more pleasant when wrapped up in a fur coat, textiles have been a part of our lives. Every country in the world has utilised its natural resources to provide fabric for clothes, to furnish houses, to wrap bodies in or to provide bags, baskets and belts, as well as countless other uses limited only by our imaginations and technical skills.

The first fabrics were constructed from either animal or plant materials, but nowadays there are many man-made fibres used either in conjunction with natural materials or on their own. Each has its own peculiarities and methods of production, though improvements in transport mean there is less emphasis on relying on local resources.

This section gives an overview of how the textile industry in England and Wales developed and moved from early times to modern times. The principal textiles looked at are wool, worsted, cotton, silk and linen, though the textile industry has always consisted of a great variety of fabrics, used in a range of ways, and other branches are also considered.

House of Eumachia, Pompeii. This was the headquarters of the dyers.

The related industries expanded too. Textiles needed chemicals for a variety of treatments, finishes and dyes. By 1844 John Mercer had discovered a process that improved the properties of cotton, making it stronger, with a shiny finish that absorbed dye more easily. This became known as mercerised cotton. In 1856 William Perkin discovered a synthetic dye aniline purple and other synthetic dyes soon followed, though Germany rapidly became predominant in this field.

Machines were needed for the growing textile industry, giving rise to the symbiotic development of engineering in many of the textile towns.

Nowadays man-made fibres must be considered too, though they are only briefly examined here. The textile industry in the twentieth century has been on something of a roller coaster. There was a downturn at the beginning of the era, which was boosted hugely by the need for cloth during the First World War, with many firms making considerable profit. Britain was one of the first countries to industrialise but this meant that many of the machines were in use for decades. As other countries began their own industrialisation, they were able to start with better, faster, more efficient machines, many of them copied from British ones or even bought in Britain and shipped abroad. British industry was slow to replace obsolete machinery and lost its competitive edge. With increasing globalisation, markets were lost to foreign trade and depression set in, being alleviated somewhat again by the intervention of war in 1939.

After the Second World War, textiles continued its long decline. For example, in 1950 the cotton mills in Lancashire employed 320,000 people, yet by 1982 they employed just 35,000. By 2005 this had fallen to about 7,200 (source: ONS Annual Business Inquiry, 2005).

The increased use of synthetics, such as polyester, nylon and Terylene, required large injections of capital to fund specialised machinery rather than large numbers of skilled workers. The material could be produced anywhere in the world, no longer relying on natural raw materials. Businesses either folded or amalgamated, giving rise to large, dominant companies such as Courtaulds, Viyella International, English Sewing Cotton Company and Carrington & Dewhurst. Wages were held down and in the 1950s there was an increase in immigrant workers, from the Caribbean, from Poland during and after the war and from India and Pakistan from about 1960.