by Brian Spencer
It is wrong to suggest that the Industrial Revolution began in and around the Derwent Valley, but even so the new order was given a massive push forward by the innovations of two mill owners, Richard Arkwright and Jedediah Strutt. They were, as the saying goes, ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’.
Even though there is an older mill in Derbyshire, which operated as a silk mill in Derby (now used as the Museum of Making), in 1771, it was Richard Arkwright who built the first cotton mill in Derbyshire. From his previous knowledge of the district, he chose the safety of Cromford, well away from the danger of mobs intent on wrecking his invention that was to change the history of cotton spinning world-wide.
In order to fulfil the booming world-wide demand for woven cotton fabrics, it was necessary to develop a speedier method of spinning the raw material brought to England by sailing ships from India and America. As a young man, Arkwright worked as a barber and wig maker in Preston, his hometown. He had a keen eye for anything new or needed by the world around him and he soon realised that so far the only alternative to this laboriously slow method of spinning cotton on a hand and foot operated machine was by a slightly more efficient machine that had been developed by James Hargreaves, a fellow Lancastrian. Called the ‘Spinning Jenny’, but even though it was marginally faster than hand spinning, it didn’t completely answer the problem. The answer came to young Richard Arkwright when he watched iron-workers feed red hot iron into a system of rollers, each one running slightly faster than its neighbour in order to turn iron ingots into workable strips.
Arkwright experimented with a system which was based on a smaller and faster version of the machine used by the metal workers. With this he came up with the idea of a system of pairs of vertical rollers, each pair travelling faster than its neighbour. As anyone who has been in a cotton spinning mill knows, the noise of his machine was deafening, giving already suspicious hand spinners the idea that Arkwright was in league with the devil. Moving away from Preston, he opened a mill in Nottingham powered by horses, but he soon realised that he had to think on a much larger scale if he was going to gain the full advantage of his new invention. He needed to run his mill not by horse-power, but by water, giving him a far more satisfactory answer to his problem – which he found near Cromford. From his days as an itinerant barber and wig maker, Richard Arkwright was a regular visitor to the village; here was a plentiful supply of both water and a willing army of workers looking for work as an alternative to the declining lead mines.
The mill system he designed for Cromford was built in four stages over twenty years between 1771 and 1791, close to an existing corn mill. Ever fearful of coming under attack from those who spun the yarn by hand, his early mills were more like fortresses than work places. Walk down Mill Road from the A6, and the mill’s walls tower like something out of medieval history – there are no widows along the roadside on what will be level with the ground floor; the only entrance to the mill yard curves inwards to give ever watchful guards the ability to fire their muskets down onto anyone attempting to force the firmly shut gates. Overseeing all movement in and out, the mill manager lived directly opposite, watching the comings and goings of the workforce, especially anyone coming in late, when they would be fined a day’s pay unless they had a genuine excuse.
Water was the essential means of driving the mill and at first this was readily available from a pond behind the Greyhound Hotel. It was supplied by Bonsall Brook which flows down the Via Gellia and there was also another source of water power which came from beneath the ground. This was water from a sough which drained lead mines running beneath Cromford Hill. This water could be diverted or held back when necessary by a complex system of culverts filling what the locals call the Bear Pit. Unfortunately this was not very popular with the mining fraternity, because whenever the flow of water from the sough was allowed to build up, especially at times of drought, the result was that flooding occurred further back into the mines. The demand for water increased with the expansion of the number of spinning frames brought into operation. This was supplied by building a weir in the River Derwent behind what became Masson Mill alongside the main road. The extra water supply came from deepening the Derwent as far back as Matlock Bath. The only mill not requiring water power was the subsidiary mill Haarlem Mill at Wirksworth. Being one of the last to be built and away from an easy source of water, it was powered by another innovation – a steam engine.
Bringing water power to the mill was not all that was done to alter the appearance of what was originally a tiny village. Being so far from other areas of population, Arkwright decided to build homes for his employees, many of whom, like those in North Street welcomed the upper room. These allowed the male member of the family to follow their profession, as a hand and foot operated stocking frame worker. Arkwright’s sons and grandsons continued to develop Cromford; a school was built at the top of North Street and there was even a cosy lock-up for the occasional criminal. The Greyhound Hotel was built to accommodate the world and his son who came to learn how to train their operatives using spinning frames bought under licence from the by now wealthy and knighted Sir Richard Arkwright.
Mills sprang up around Cromford like chickens with a mother hen. Wherever there was water to power it, a mill would appear in villages up and down the Derwent, with the exception of Smedley’s Mill at Lea Mills across the river which keeps separate to the other mills and specialises in fine woollen fabrics. Mills sprang up all over Europe, each of them built to the same design as Cromford or Masson Mill; all have the symbolic cupola on their roof, a pure copy of Masson Mill. There was even a mill built in New Lanark on the Clyde whose trainee workers marched down to Cromford, encouraged by the skirl of a pipe band.
By the end of his life, Sir Richard Arkwright as he became, was an extremely wealthy man, able to give each of his ten children Christmas presents of £10,000 (£182,152,900 in today’s money!). When told the size of the National Debt, he immediately offered to pay the one billion pounds from his own funds. His plan in later life was to live in the grand style at Willersley Castle, near but out of sight of his mills. Unfortunately it came to nothing, the first attempt to complete his grand design burned down before completion and regrettably he died before a replacement could be built.
Arkwright was the friend and colleague of Jedediah Strutt. Like Arkwright he was also an innovator who designed a mechanism to make ribs on machine knitted stockings. His original South Mill built in 1776 sits beside the red-brick 1920s replacement, later owned by English Sewing Cotton, it towers beside the road into Belper. Strutt’s original mill was built with hollow bricks for lightness and following a disastrous fire is now used as a museum.
Strutts specialised in spinning fine threads and the operation ran as a self- contained entity with subsidiary works specialising in processes ranging from dyeing and finishing to making the wicker baskets used in the mill from willows growing near the river. Dame Helen McArthur, the champion long distance yachtswoman’s great grandfather was brought down from Strutt’s shooting estate on the Isle of Skye. He ran the fleet of rowing boats plying for hire on the river now flowing attractively beside Belper’s delightful riverside floral gardens. Housing for Strutt’s employees was better than that enjoyed by Arkwright’s workers, each cottage has a good size garden and several have a small workshop added at the bottom of it where the men of the family could follow the traditional Belper skills of nail making.
The now closed mill has an as yet, unknown future, but the towers at each corner of North Mill make an ideal nesting place for peregrine falcons to breed each year, feeding their young on the plentiful supply of Canada geese which have taken over the river from smaller birds.
Darley Mill was the last to use the power of the River Derwent before it reaches Derby, where the Museum of Making can be sub-titled as the Museum of Innovation.
