The English Sewing Cotton Company Scrapbook

The English Sewing Cotton Company was a very disparate company, with cotton mills in Lancashire, Derbyshire, Leicester and North Yorkshire among other places. In my mind, I've seen each of the mills as separate entities that had little to do with each other. So, it was interesting to glean from reports in the Craven Herald newspaper archive that during the 1920s, there seems to have been a social exchange between Dewhurst's mill in Skipton and the Ermen and Roby mill at Patricroft.  On 1st July 1927 the Herald reported on a recent match between Belle Vue Mills Bowling Club (Skipton) and ESCC Patricroft branch. The match was called off due to the unseasonal weather in Skipton that Saturday. Instead, everyone retreated to the Belle Vue Mills welfare hall - which was located where the car park for B&M Bargains is now. A social and tea was provided for 150 people, followed by dancing to the Craven Symphonic Band. A display of exercises on parallel bars was also given by members...

         A regular trawl through the many Sylko listings on ebay occasionally brings up something new to add to the online Sylko Cotton Colour Name Archive. Lately I've found these high numbered rarities - they must be fairly difficult to find as I've been collecting the names for well over a decade and not seen them until their recent ebay sales.

 I have a new book available to purchase in the following ways:  Amazon Kindle- £2.99  https://amzn.eu/d/dPZ4Xae Amazon Paperback - £5.99   https://amzn.eu/d/5mJjhFp Etsy pdf download -£3.59  https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/4375786566/english-sewing-in-the-20th-century-a Here's the blurb: The English Sewing Cotton Company was established in 1897, and brought together a combine of 14 major cotton producing companies. Household names such as Dewhurst's (the makers of the Sylko cotton reel), Arkwright of Cromford, Strutts of Belper and Ermen & Roby were among the members. Over the following 80 years, the fortunes and marketing of the English Sewing Cotton Company reflected the way that women throughout the country sewed. This short history looks at how the English Sewing Cotton Company worked, and at the peak and decline of domestic sewing. From fancy needlework competitions to visiting needlewomen, this book follows the thread of sewing in the 20th centur...

The Executive Committee minutes from the early years of WW2 reflects a sense of minor panic. A war emergency stock of Sylko Machine Twist was set up, with 13,000 gross of finished goods being set aside. The stock was stored in Belper, hopefully off the Luftwaffe's radar. They weren't so sure about the safety of storing it in Manchester - rightly so. In October 1940 a roof spotter was appointed to watch out for incendiaries landing on Arkwright House.  But there were also reports of a slackening off in the quality department.  In August 1940, the Committee declared themselves to be disappointed with the poor lustre of the Sylko samples. Earlier in the year, badly centred tickets were a cause for concern, and the issue of faulty ticketing also reared its head again in October.  But the company recovered from early panic due to the ongoing need for large amounts of thread for the war effort. Belper produced khaki fabric for the army and upholstery thread for Austin Motors wh...

 I made a second visit to the Manchester Archives to view some more of the English Sewing Cotton Company material. It is a huge archive and it's difficult to know what to choose to look at - which documents will hold the most information? There are no previews online - just a list of what the archive contains. This time around, I decided to view some meeting minutes. There are Directors' Minutes and Executive Committee Minutes for practically the whole of the life of the ESCC.  Too much to see all at once. Again - it's difficult to know what to select because there is no indication of the size of each item. In the end I selected one lot of Directors' Minutes and four lots of Executive Minutes. This did turn out to be too much - meetings were held very regularly and the books containing the typed sheets of notes were rather large. I was unable to do it all justice in the 3 hours I had at my disposal. However, I picked out a few snippets of information to bring away with ...

As the English Sewing Cotton Company, latterly English Sewing Limited, developed over the decades of the 20th century, so did the labels on their Sylko reels. It seems impossible to pinpoint when exactly Sylko labels were subject to often tiny changes and how many differences there are in existance. One end of the reels hardly altered - the red, white and blue logo end with the 3 shells branding. Not until the Tootal years did anyone dare mess with this branding.  It the blue and white ends stating the colour shade and number have myriad differences. And even after years and years of collecting  - for me it must be more than a decade now - those little surprises keep on popping up. Here's a new one, discovered in an antiques shop in Hebden Bridge this week: I have never before seen that wording "Fast to B.S. 3418-61". On all other reels that I have, the label simply states "Fast Dye". See the reel here with others for comparison: I would say that the Blue Crest ...