ABSTRACT

Near the confluence of the rivers Colne and Holme and part of the Yorkshire textile district, inter-war Huddersfield was first and foremost a woollen and worsted centre and secondly an engineering and chemicals town. Settlement was established in Saxon and Norse times at the juncture of the above rivers while a parish church for the named parish of Huddersfield existed around the turn of the thirteenth century. From the late Middle Ages wool was the staple for the domestic cottage-based system of textile production of the district. The skills and independence of the local clothiers provided the basis for the further development of Huddersfield during the Industrial Revolution. As feudalism declined the West Riding became critical to England’s international trade. The town’s textile industry deepened over time and by the fifteenth century woollen cloth production along with the process of thickening or fulling had become well-established in Huddersfield. Natural advantage was provided by the soft water and by power from the plentiful fast-flowing streams flowing down from the moors. Millstone grit terrain covered with peat and clay proved suitable for the three-field systemof agriculture. By the seventeenth century Huddersfield was both a market centre for agriculture, a charter being secured in 1671, and remained an important centre of woollen textiles. Local agricultural production was increased and made more efficient by Land Enclosure Acts between 1789 and 1825.1

From 1780 to 1840 Huddersfield’s economy developed apace with improved transport links to the wider West Riding, Lancashire and the south. Communications had improved with the Huddersfield Broad Canal’s completion in 1780. This canal, also called the Sir John Ramsden Canal after its prime mover, provided Huddersfield with connections to the wool-weaving towns of the upper Colne valley (Golcar, Linthwaite, Slaithwaite and Marsden). By 1798 the Huddersfield Canal Company completed the Narrow Canal linking it to the Broad canal. This gave Huddersfield cross-Pennine links to the Lancashire towns of Saddleworth, Stalybridge, Oldham, Stockport and Manchester. Huddersfield’s canal and navigation system aided the process of industrialisation in the early nineteenth century. Local coal further aided rapid economic development of the town. Even before the canals, local coal in shallow pits made possible supplementary steam engines to waterpowered machinery in the mills. After canal construction, more plentiful and cheaper coal made possible the increasing switch from water to steam power. The canals, and from the mid-1840s onwards rail links, made possible the mass transport of coal, large textile loads, building materials and machinery, thereby furthering Huddersfield’s growth as a significant centre of industry by the mid-nineteenth century.2 Although the Manchester and Leeds Railway bypassed Huddersfield, horse buses conveyed passengers to Dunford Bridge between 1845 and 1850. A rail link connecting Huddersfield to Heaton Lodge was completed in August 1847, with later connections to Manchester and Stalybridge. This was built by the Huddersfield and Manchester Railway and Canal Company, afterwards

Dewsbury, Leeds and Morley in 1850, indirectly effecting a coast-to-coast connection. The involvement of the London and North Western Railway and its agreements with Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1849 further enhanced links, to Newcastle and Liverpool and indirectly to London Euston by 1889.4

Canal and rail links assisted further economic development and helped to establish Huddersfield’s specialisation, from its established worsted foundation, in the fancy goods trade. Here the use of unorthodox fibres, for example the combining of silk with wool, led to the town’s luxury trade in waistcoatings, fancy dress materials, soft furnishings of all kinds, shawls and table covers. The wardrobe and drawing room of middle-class Victorian homes were in part furnished by Huddersfield, as evidenced by the prizes for such products won by local firms at the Great Exhibition. The development of dyestuffs and the chemical industry aided this process of textile specialisation, especially in cords and velveteens, resulting in a lead in fancy goods that gave the town ‘a diversification within wool textiles, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which it never lost’. It needs emphasising however that chemicals and dyes became principle industries in their own right. Huddersfield lay at ‘the heart of a thriving chemical industry, and this did much to maintain the town’s reputation as a producer of the widest range of wool textiles incorporating all that was best in colour and design’.5