Helmshore Mills Textile Museum

Helmshore Mills lie within Helmshore, a village in the Rossendale Valley, Lancashire. The village is 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Haslingden, broadly between the A56 and the B6235, approximately 16 miles (26 km) north of Manchester, and 3 miles (4.8 km) from the M65 motorway. Helmshore straddles the River Ogden, a tributary of the River Irwell. The village developed around the seven cotton and wool mills.

The Turner family had already been involved in textiles before the mills were built. Three of the six family members made their living from wool in Martholme, and three brothers from cotton in Blackburn. In February 1789, they paid £725 for land for a mill. The family built Higher Mill on a greenfield site in the parish of Musbury as a woollen fulling mill, but by 1792, three members of the family had dropped out of the enterprise.[5] It was the son of one of these original six, a William Turner (1793–1852), who built the larger wool carding and spinning mill in the 1820s. The wool went to Middle Mill on Holcombe Road for weaving, then returned to Higher Mill for fulling and finishing. Turner instructed in his will that the mill should be sold on his death, which occurred in 1852. This mill was destroyed by fire in 1857, and was rebuilt in 1860 by Edward Turner.

At some point after the end of the American Civil War and the return of cotton imports to Lancashire, the rebuilt mill started spinning cotton. When the mill was rebuilt, it was equipped almost but not completely by Messrs Walker & Hacking of Bury with machinery for processing raw cotton through to fine cotton spinning and (unlike in later years) weaving with power looms built by Dickenson of Blackburn. Due to later reconfigurations of the site, it is almost impossible now to see any evidence of this layout.

In the 1920s, the mill was bought by L.Whitaker & Sons who installed cotton condensing equipment and the mill continued in that business until November 1978. Higher Mill came to be operated by Lawrence Whittaker in 1875 still using Turner's machinery, and his descendants continued to run it as a fulling mill until June 1967. The two families may have been distantly related, but by the 1920s the Whittakers were a well-known local family while the L. Whitaker & Sons group no longer had any Whitakers working for them and were owned and run by the Hardman family. The freehold of both mills in the Helmshore Mills Estate was bought by Lawrence Whittaker's family.[1]

Exhibits

The museum divides its collections into three themed areas, representing the wool story, the cotton story and the spinning floor.

The wool story shows the water wheel and fulling stocks and clay pots used to collect urine from the local cottages, which produced the ammonia needed for fulling. It goes on to show the later box system. There is a tenter frame, with the tenterhooks to show how the cloth was dried without shrinking and how teasels were used to lift up the nap. This was of course later mechanised and there is a teasel-holding frame known as the teasel raising gig.

The cotton story illustrates firstly the hand weavers' cottage, with a frame loom with a hand-thrown shuttle; mannakins represent the weaver and two women spinning the yarn on different types of wheel. A child is shown hand-carding. It is here we see a 16-spindle spinning jenny that would have dated from about 1760, and a 50-spindle improved jenny. There is an original Arkwrights first carding machine. There is a complete sequence of machines that would have taken the bolls from the bales: opener, scutcher, breaker card, finisher card, draw frame and finally a complete Arkwright water frame dating from 1790. Sharing the floor at Whitaker's Mill is the equipment needed to prepare the waste cotton for the cards in the room above. There is a single cylinder picker for soft waste and a six cylinder devil for the hard waste.

Spinning floor

The spinning floor was one of two at this mill, and has all the equipment to breaker card the shoddy (recycled cotton) and to finisher card the slivers into rovings. These go onto the 714-spindle Taylor Lang spinning mules. Opening, scutching and mixing happened on the floor below. This is the only original and complete floor of its type left.

Spun yarn is sent to sister museum Queen Street Mill on the outskirts of Burnley to be woven.

The whole site is a Scheduled Ancient Monument; Higher Mill is also a Grade II listed building.[10] The associated chimney stack on the other side of Holcombe Road is also separately Grade II listed.[11]

The condenser spinning process (1920)

	Hard Waste		Soft Waste		Comber waste	-
	Jumbo		Single cylinder devil		Hopper opener		Blowing Room
	Six cylinder devil
	Breaker Scutcher
			Lap (Scutcher lap)		42lbs a time
	Breaker Carding						Carding Room
			Sliver
	Derby Doubler				Takes 88 slivers
			Lap (Sliver lap)
	Finisher Carding
			Roving		On bobbins or a beam
	Drawing
	Mule Spinning
	Yarn

Fine spinning produced a lot of waste, so naturally this was recycled. This waste was the raw material of a condensor spinning mill. It came in three forms: loose staple, unspun rovings and spun thread (hard waste) that had been pirned but rejected. No matter its source, it had to be devilled (broken down) to staple, then scutched and carded in the normal way. After these processes the staple was very short, and the processing of the lap was different – a Derby Doubler was used to mix slivers into sliver lap. A notable feature of the mule was that the rovings were on a beam rather than on individual bobbins. As the fine spinning of cotton contracted, so did the need for condensing.

Higher Mill and remote Whitaker Mill chimney

When the steam engine was installed in Whitaker Mill, Lancashire boilers were ubiquitous. For maximum efficiency they required air to be drawn over the coals, and this was the function of the mill chimney. As these mills are set in a valley the airflow was irregular, so the chimney was built on the hill opposite and the flue passed over the river and underground to reach the chimney, providing the required updraught. The first boilers in Whitaker Mill were built by B. Hick and Son of Bolton and were installed around 1855; at the 1868 auction the mill was equipped for fine cotton spinning with a number of power looms also on site. The later Lancashire boilers in Whitaker Mill, built by Yates and Thom of Blackburn, were taken out in the 1950s. The boiler for heating Higher Mill was of the Cornish type installed where the hub is now.

Clean water was needed for processing the cloth. This was captured from field drainage on the hillside opposite and stored in a lodge on the farther side of the river, piped across when required. The water wheel, and later the engine condenser, could use the then highly polluted water from the River Ogden: a weir was placed 800m upstream and the water diverted into a long canal-like lodge that finished at the mill. Having passed over the pitch-back wheel, the water passed through a culverted tail goit back into the Ogden.

• List of mills in Lancashire
• Listed buildings in Haslingden
• Cotton mill

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Helmshore Mills Textile Museum.

• Helmshore Mills Textile Museum – Lancashire County Council
• Friends of Helmshore