ABSTRACT
Situated by the river Blakewater, at the junction of the Calder and Darwen valleys, Blackburn developed as an important centre of cotton textiles after the Napoleonic Wars. Its initial breakthrough was in cotton spinning although weaving had been carried on since the thirteenth century. The nineteenth-century successes were erected on the base of the earlier domestic system and merchant manufacturers. Blackburn's plentiful supplies of water and later local coal aided the development of power looms and the weaving side of the industry. Excellent rail, canal and road communications ensured that the town was firmly in touch with the world market? By the late Victorian age weaving was its predominant activity and the spinning side of the cotton industry had shrunk to lesser importance. Blackburn was 'the cotton weaving capital ofthe world. By 1914 the town was at its peak both in terms of population and output'.3 In 1911 Blackburn had a population of over 130,000, but it had declined slightly to just over 120,000 by 1931, making it the thirty-fourth largest county borough. The town had lost 6,429 people between 1921 and 1931, and there was a further decline of 9 per cent in the years 1931 to 1939.4
By 1931 over 35,000 women and 11,000 men, just over 47 per cent of the labour force overall, were still engaged in the cotton textile industry. The town was thus ranked third in the top fifteen textile towns in that year and was the premier centre for weaving. Given the wage structure, P.F. Clarke's comment that here 'was a town .in which a whole family would work in the mill in order to secure a decent household income' probably still held good.5 Commerce and finance was the second largest employer in 1931, but engineering with 9.1 per cent of the male labour force, was also significant. Blackburn was thirteenth in the borough rankings in terms of the percentage of male workers in engineering. Here, even in the 1930s, the manufacture of textile machinery was important. Ironically the manufacture of the machines that underpinned Lancashire's supremacy in cotton was to help develop Britain's global competitors, especially
The landed class, who were in any case unimportant in Blackburn, declined sooner in this locality than elsewhere. From the nineteenth century, the political elite was largely drawn from the cotton industrialists. These 'masters' had substantial paternalistic influence, even control, over their workforces. By the last third of the nineteenth century, families like the Feildens, Sudells, Cardwells, Birleys, Chippendales, Maudes, and above all the Hornbys, were stalwarts of the local establishment. Forming an upper-middle class, these industrialists at first lived in large houses on or near the Preston New Road in St Silas's and StJohn's wards. These were both solid Conservative wards in the inter-war years, with a Liberal presence in StJohn's. By the twentieth century the cotton masters, joined by brewers like the Thwaites, and some engineering entrepreneurs, had moved out of the town and purchased country estates. John Walton refers to the early Victorian mill owners as 'squirearchical industrialists', a trait utilised politically for the rest of the century.6 Aping a country gentry lifestyle, this largely Tory elite had 'far reaching effects on Blackburn's social, political, educational, and cultural development'. 7
The Conservative Party dominated both parliamentary and municipal politics in Blackburn in the twenty years of this study, prolonging a long tradition. For Beattie the borough just after the Second Reform Act was 'the Gibraltar of Toryism' in mainly Liberal Lancashire.8 Trodd also portrays nineteenth-century Blackburn as 'the stronghold of working class Toryism where Liberalism was in an extremely weak position'.9 In parliamentary terms before 1918, Pelling makes the point that 'over the long term Blackburn's Conservatism, though not quite as
monopoly for Labour by winning one of the two seats in 1906 and 1910, but he failed to secure re-election after his refusal to support the war, a sign of the enduring strength of patriotic working-class Toryism. Between the wars the parliamentary seats remained mainly Conservative, though one seat fell to the Liberals in both 1923 and 1924, while Labour took both seats on its flood tide of 1929.
