Brighouse Silk Mills

When we first moved to Brighouse from Huddersfield, nearly 20 years ago, my husband and I bought a couple of framed vintage maps that showed our house on them. I noticed on these maps that a short distance from our house there was a building labelled as a silk mill (see Ganny Mill on the map below). Though this intrigued me, I assumed it was just an anomaly. As a local lass I knew the West Riding of Yorkshire was renowned for wool textiles, not silk. So I was astonished when I discovered from my current research that during much of the 19th and 20th century the majority of Brighouse’s mills were in fact silk mills, and that Brighouse was “the chief centre of the English silk spinning industry” (quoted from “The Silk Industry Of The United Kingdom : Its Origin And Development” by Frank Warner, published in 1921).

Records of how the silk industry began here are a little confused. In his Brighouse history book (published 1893) Horsfall Turner says that the Brighouse silk industry began circa 1843 when Mr Robert Newton and Mr James Burrow moved to Brighouse from Lancaster and set up business at the Little John Mill. This mill was originally a wool carding mill, and it appears that Newton and Burrow set up their silk spinning business there as sub-tenants. However, Victoria Mills had been built in 1837 as a silk spinning mill, and records show that Robert Newton worked there until 1848. The nearby Noble’s Silk Mill was also built sometime before or around 1838. So the exact origins of the Brighouse silk industry are somewhat unclear.

It is however certain that in 1850 James Burrow went into partnership with a Mr Monk from Macclesfield, where silk weaving and the production of silk buttons was a key industry. Initially Burrow and Monk were based at the aforesaid Victoria Mill, and Brighouse’s spun silk industry was entering its boom years.

From various sources I’ve identified at least 15 Brighouse silk mills, though some of them at times instead operated as cotton mills, or were shared by both silk and cotton spinners. Reference to vintage Brighouse maps can therefore be misleading, suggesting that cotton spinning was Brighouse’s main textile industry, whereas silk spinning was in fact predominant, as evidenced in this sobering excerpt from a Victorian newspaper:

The 15 silk mills were as follows. More details of the businesses conducted at many of these can be accessed from the alphabetical mills list in Malcolm Bull’s Calderdale Companion:

• Victoria Mill
• Prince Albert Mill
• Noble’s Mill
• Alexandra Mill
• Ganny Mill
• Spring Bank Mill
• Owler Ings Mill
• Brooksmouth Mill
• Clifton Bridge Mill
• Wilkin Royd Mill
• Calder Bank Mill
• Prince of Wales Mill
• Woodvale Silk Mill (there was a Woodvale Cotton Mill next door)
• Thornhill Briggs Mill
• Belle Vue Mill

The size of these mills varied, some relatively small, some huge. Wilkin Royd Mill operated 5,000 spindles, whereas Woodvale Silk Mill (the largest Brighouse silk mill) operated 40,000.

Here’s an advert from the the Woodvale Silk Mill’s founder:

Silk spun by Brighouse mills was used for a wide variety of purposes, eg woven silk cloth, sewing, embroidery, millinery, hosiery, etc. Of course, with my knitting interest I wanted to know if it was also used for hand knitting. My good friend Barbara Smith, publications curator for the Knitting and Crochet Guild collection, has very kindly sent me this image of an advert for silk yarn which proves that it was. The advert is from ‘Leach’s Newest Jumpers’, published in the early 1920s.

Cheetham’s of Calder Bank Mills also included knitting as one of the advertised uses for their silk yarn:

This has of course led me to wonder whether any of the Victorian and Edwardian knitters that I’ve researched knitted with yarns that were spun here in Brighouse? Given that Brighouse became England’s ‘chief centre’ of spun silk yarns it seems reasonable to suppose that in the mid-Victorian period Elizabeth Jackson would have sold Brighouse knitting silks in her York yarn emporium. In the 1870s Elizabeth Ryder of Richmond in Swaledale produced a set of knitting pattern cards titled ‘How To Knit Spun Silk Stockings’. Surely there were knitters who used Brighouse knitting silks to make these?

What about Yorkshire’s poverty-stricken rural Dales knitters though? We know they mostly knitted wool stockings for trade through hosiery merchants. However, we also know that in the late Victorian Period and the Edwardian period Mary Allen of Dent knitted both woollen and silk gloves for distinguished private customers. Though nearly 50 miles of steep hills lie between them, Dent and Brighouse are both situated in the West Riding. Were the silk gloves that Mary Allen made in Dent knitted with yarns made in Brighouse? It’s well within the realms of possibility that they were!