Modern Day Views of the Belle Vue Mill, Skipton





 

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Ardern's Star Sylko

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 Over many years I have purchased and read old magazines from the 1920s through to the 1950s. I love the advice columns, wacky recipes, corny stories and most of all, the old adverts. Home Chat and the like are truly a portal into another world, one that both horrifies me and makes me titter in equal measure. And quite often you can pick them up for less money than a new magazine. Throughout these forays into the 20th century, I have often been puzzled by the advertisements for Ardern's Star Sylko thread. This was a brand of varying thicknesses of thread that you could use to embroider, crochet or knit with, and which came in balls. As it was always listed as Ardern's, I wondered how they continued to get away with using the Sylko name, which had long been adopted by Dewhurst's for their sewing cotton. My investigations into the English Sewing Cotton Company  have cleared up the mystery - here was the connection. Although Ardern's, based at Hazel Grove, were not origina...
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World War Two and the ESCC

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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...
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A Second Visit to the Archives

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 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 ...
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