The English Sewing Cotton Company Scrapbook

 My name is Charity Harding and I run my own little haberdashery shop. Somewhere in England, sometime in the 20th century, I place my tape measure around my neck every morning and oil my scissors. I wear my spectacles around my neck too, they hang on a golden chain which is dotted with pearls at regular intervals. It often gets tangled with my tape measure. The spectacles bounce off my ample bosom as I trot up and down my pockmarked wooden counter.  One morning, a young lady dressed in home-sewn gingham pulled her mother’s shopping list from the battered basket that she carried. All very 'Wizard of Oz' I thought. Where's your red sparkly shoes dear, I wondered. People are so impressionable these days. Her mother will have been watching that film while delirious on cherry brandy and Quality Street last Christmas and it will have given her ideas. Anyway, a reel of Sylko in Buckingham Lilac was at the top of the list. Oh dear, I thought, I bet mother has some lilac gingham lef...

Dewhurst's advertised that there were 280 Sylko shades in 1930, and 300 shades in 1932. I think that it is therefore reasonable to assume that D289 dates from this early 1930s period. When you look at the colour name, Lido Blue has 1930s written all over it. According to 1930s historian Juliet Gardiner, almost 200 lidos were built in the UK during the 1930s. It was a mania, and was closely tied to the Keep Fit movement that also took hold of the country during that decade. For an idea of what this entailed, you could do worse than watch Geroge Formby's 1937 film, "Keep Fit" - a send up of the whole thing.  These lidos were an expression of the fondness for anything nautical in this period. If you were wealthy, the thing to do was get on board a luxury liner and go sailing. If you weren't so rich, then the next best thing was to get into your bathing suits or sailor styled sundresses and go to the beach or lido. In 1936, Cecil Beaton writing for Vogue magazine note...

 The pages below were taken from Creative Needlework Magazine, March 1976. I accessed these via the British Newspaper Archive. I think that one of the main points of interest is the description of Mercerisation, which is the most detailed that I have come across to date. I didn't know that it had been named after an actual person. An exploration into this Mr Mercer needs to be launched in the future. But what a window into the times this phrase is: "Where labour is cheap, the cotton is picked selectively by hand." Imagine any firm today admitting to this  - we all know it still happens in the sweatshops making cheap clothes - but the High Street shops would never come out and say it. A reminder that though we all love our Sylkos, people were exploited in their making both at home and abroad. The ICI link and all that plastic does put one off the Trylkos too.  https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SewSylko

 This advertisement appeared in a newspaper in November 1880. The warehouse information interested me. These were places where the goods were put on show, and traders could visit and put their orders in. Manchester was particularly well known for its warehouses and had a great many in the area around Deansgate and Castlefields. The location of Arkwright House begins to make sense.  Albert Square is the location of Manchester Town Hall - a salubrious and magnificent part of the city to demonstrate the quality of the cotton. Bread Street is in the centre of wealth and commerce overlooked by St Paul's Cathedral. Neither of the warehouses remain. There doesn't seem to be a 1 Mount Street, Manchester anymore. Although 2 Mount Street, renovated and turned into offices, gives an idea of the look and feel of the place.  Bread Street was annihilated in the WW2 Blitz - a Gordon Ramsey Pizza restaurant seems to be on or very near the site now.

Ermen and Roby were another one of the major players to join the English Sewing Cotton Company. They represented the great "Cottonopolis", the location of their two mills being Pendlebury and Patricroft, Greater Manchester. These two place names are now given as being part of either Eccles or Salford, being located to the west of Manchester city centre. The mills were therefore worked by the people that L.S. Lowry painted and that Walter Greenwood wrote about in "Love on the Dole". In that context, you can perhaps paint a visual picture of how it all looked back in the early days of the ESCC. It's all different now. I have checked out the streets where these mills were located on Google Streetview - one has been replaced by a 1980s housing estate and the other by one of those streets that is made up of a mish mash of light industrial buildings. Ermen & Roby's roots went right back to 1837. Peter Ermen was born in Holland and developed a cotton spinning p...

  This shade of Sylko cotton dates from the early-mid 1930s. It follows on from other shades commonly referred to in 1930s sewing magazines - apple green, lime green and eau-de- Nil. They are what I would term wedding or boudoir shades, all in use for bridesmaids' dresses, trousseau and personal items of clothing. Leafing through sewing magazines from the early 1930s, this soft peachy shade would have been ideal for the cami knickers patterns. In 1932, 'Good Needlework' advertised underwear patterns named "Rosine" and "Amber". Sunrise shade would have been ideal to run a pair of those up. The name of sunrise also reminds of that trendy motif of the 1930s. I vaguely recall from my 1970s childhood those wooden garden gates topped with a stylised sunray design and front doors sporting similar in stained glass. But did I see them myself or is it a television memory? I can't think that they would have been common on the Sheffield Council estates that were...

 A poem inspired by the very 1970s Sylko thread colour, Indian Curry: Our burnt orange Maxi, beige velour seats Is the modern way of city driving A tartan blanket covers knees to feet A cushion pair will soon be arriving  Made of sumptuous deep yellow velveteen Seams disguised with an old gold silken fringe Perched on the parcel shelf, they will be seen And must not cause embarrassment or cringe The appointed hour of the power cut Is imminent, time for candles and dreams Eager to finish I run the gamut Of high speed needles spearing through seams Hands passing fabric through racing steel Fall short of the required expert touch The world blinks, lights go out, now only feel The machine stops in bloody-fingered clutch Blood seeps into Indian Curry thread A chilli jewel in a turmeric bed Click here to visit my Amazon page

Of the founding companies of the English Sewing Cotton Company, Strutt's of Belper was one of the oldest. The first mill was built in Belper in 1776, predating even Dewhurst's. Jedediah Strutt was born on a farm in South Normanton, located in that borderland of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire that specialised in hosiery. He invented a ribbing machine for stocking making and took it to Derby. Here, he met a man named Need and went into business with him. This turned out to be a successful venture and they decided to back a man named Arkwright...yes, THAT Arkwright! Obviously,  this was in turn a tremendous venture and between them they constructed the Derwent Valley mills at Cromford, Belper and Milford. Need retired, and in 1780, Strutt and Arkwright amicably went their separate ways, with Arkwright taking Cromford and Strutt taking Belper and Milford.  Strutt's business went to his 3 sons on his death, who built up a sound and respected company. Of course, the original mill...