The English Sewing Cotton Company Scrapbook

One of the original members of the English Sewing Cotton company was Manlove of Chesterfield. The mill was at Holymoorside, now a salubrious suburb of the town. The location is skirted by the road to Baslow and the Peak District, making it a desirable spot. Among the green hills and trees, the River Hipper rushes its way through the village. This once fed a busy cotton mill, as the extract from an 1870s map below shows: Living not too far away, I was able to visit the site - of which very little remains. I approached from the Walton end, along a road called Cotton Mill Hill (the doglegged road on the map). Here is a view taken of the lane from by the chapel which is marked on the map: And the site of the mill and the river that powered it: The mill seems to have closed not that long after the ESCC was formed, and it has now been gone for more than a century. There is little information in the ESCC anniversary book that I have, except that the company had been established in 1829 and sp

  This advert for Woolies' sewing supplies dates from 1979. The Sylko bobbins are priced at 23p. It is also interesting to note that it is advertised that there are over 200 shades. This is a drop from the 350 shades advertised in the 1930s.  It demonstrates the ESCC's practice of discontinuing unpopular reels, which must be the reason why some are so difficult to get hold of today. The end of making your own clothes and soft furnishings reduced the demand for nuance. A 1960s price? Search Amazon for Sarah Miller Walters and Sylko to find my books.

  I'm unsure of the date of this advertisement for a representative to cover Northern Ireland. I would guess the 1960s as a car is provided. The P.O. Box also makes me think it is later. In the days of telegrams, the ESCC's address was "Stitching, Manchester ".

  This is an illustration from the 1947 book 'Through the Eye of a Needle" - a 1947 review of 50 years of the English Sewing Cotton Company. It shows the names and locations of all the companies that combined together in order to streamline and strengthen the English Cotton business. This happened as a direct response to the Scottish merger of Clarks and Coats. The root companies blossomed into those 8 outlets shown on the tree. Neilston, Glasgow was where the bobbins were made, while all the packaging was made in Hazel Grove. For a pdf download of the full book, visit my Etsy shop, SewSylko.

While studying the history of the Sylko cotton reel, it came to my attention that those colours numbered between 280 and 399 were likely to have been first introduced in the 1930s. An analysis of the basic colours strongly supports something that I already knew - that green was an incredibly popular colour in this decade. Between shade numbers D281 and D399, there are 15 types of green, compared to just 7 of red, 7 of yellow and 11 of brown. Only blue comes close to green, with 13 shades. Overall, blue is the most common Sylko shade over the 6 or 7 decades of the cotton brand's existence - D1 is a blue shade and this remains a popular and safe choice for clothing. I must add that there are some gaps in my list of colours, so there may be even more than 15 shades of green. It certainly had a boost in this period. This observation among the Sylkos was simply a reminder that I do associate the 1930s with the colour green. A darker shade a kind of bottle racing green. Or as Sylko dyers