Conserving the looms and the endangered craft of silk weaving
All images with thanks to Daniel Hearn.
Mee-mawing and Women’s Town
Mee-mawing is a form of speech with exaggerated lip movements and miming that helped mill workers communicate over the whirr and clack of the shuttles on the loom, which would make conversation next to impossible.
It was later adopted by comedians like Les Dawson who had seen it being used by the women working in the Lancashire Mills where he grew up. He harnessed its comedic potential in sketches with his characters Cissie and Ada, played by himself and Roy Barraclough.
Women would have operated the power looms in the cotton mills in Lancashire and the silk power looms over the border in Cheshire. But, in Paradise Mill in Macclesfield the silk Jacquard hand looms would have been operated by men. It was unusual for women to operate the hand looms in the mill, with many weaving at home instead. Wandering around the town centre the weavers’ houses are still visible. Their garret roofs run along the top of the terrace and would be accessible to the neighbours. A production line and a cottage industry. Many women worked in the silk industry though, and although Macclesfield is known as silk town, it also has the colloquial name of women’s town, owing to the high ratio employed in the mills.
Silk Jacquard handlooms
The silk Jacquard handlooms produced this luxury fabric for high end retailers, such as Liberty of London. Once the world's largest producer of finished silk, with 5,000 looms and 71 mill factories Paradise Mill was the last operational mill using Jacquard handlooms. It is now part of the Silk Museum. The grade II listed space is recognised by Historic England for having one of the largest collections of Jacquard silk handlooms in their original setting.
The last workers downed tools in 1981 when the families of Cartwright and Sheldon, that ran the mill finally conceded that it was no longer feasible to operate. It largely remains as it was, with notes left on the looms and the odd betting slip tucked away for safe keeping. Not long after it closed a group of dedicated friends raised enough money to save it and it became part of the museum.
Restoring the looms
Stepping into the mill is a sensory experience. It has a distinct smell. The clocking-in machine ticks away, and the patina on the wood is tactile where hands have moulded the beams from years of work. The harness of the looms is a particular colour of time-worn linen, and the colours of the silk threads pop out on machinery. Everything is wonky. It is an analogue world of skilled handicraft. Yet it is the Jacquard mechanism of punch cards – a binary system used to programme the loom – that inspired Ada Lovelace to create the beginnings of computer programming, ultimately leading to a digital revolution. It feels somewhat ironic now that the silk hand loom weaving is on the endangered list of heritage crafts. Modern weaving is of course digital.
The museum is restoring two of the hand looms in the mill, with a plan to restore more, alongside this they are running graduate placements to begin designing and weaving here again, with support from The Radcliffe Trust. Tour guides at the museum, Daniel Hearn, and Trish Halloran, alongside Rebecca Faragher, who is a trained weaver, are painstakingly undertaking the conservation of the second 400-hook hand loom. Their work has been made possible by funding from the Association for Industrial Archaeology.
Daniel Hearn says: “This restoration involves considerable effort, especially the building of a new Jacquard harness. There is more work to do, and still more to learn. Establishing a strong foundation in acquiring these skills means we are taking the first critical steps in ensuring that this niche type of Jacquard handloom weaving remains operational within the extraordinary time capsule that is Paradise Mill.”
New Designs
Weavers and textile designers, Bea Uprichard and Ruth Farris who have graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manchester School of Art, Textiles in Practice course, have designed and woven a new silk – the first one to be created at the mill in decades.
Bea and Ruth were inspired by the museum's archives whilst also allowing their contemporary design personalities to shine through - this design brings the mill into the present tense and consolidates the mill in Macclesfield's current art scene.
Now they are working on a double shuttle design, a more complex pattern that requires even greater skill. The hand looms operate using punch cards, which employ a binary system of a hole or no hole to pass a set of instructions to the loom to tell it when to raise the warp. They have cut the set of Jacquard cards for their design using an incredible piece of kit, a Devoge piano card-cutting machine, which belonged to Cartwright and Sheldon.
Ruth says: “As described by John Holdsworth and Company Ltd in Halifax, the Devoge piano card cutting machine is like ‘typing on a keyboard, held upside-down, whilst riding a bicycle blind-folded’, which we found to be very true!”
The process for creating the design onto the Jacquard cards took over five days. Once created the cards are laced together to programme the restored loom. There are risks in the process. The handloom, although restored, is a Victorian machine and one that hasn’t been used regularly for almost 50 years. All the weavers are learning the process at pace. The average apprentice would have taken around five years to learn what Bea and Ruth have learnt in months.
Weaving the design requires an immense amount of coordination and it is physical work. To create the double shuttle design, they had to restore, attach, and learn how to operate a dropbox (a wooden mechanism that attaches onto the loom) to allow for multiple shuttles. It is such a joy seeing two young women on the looms in Paradise Mill, a place that was not traditionally accessible for them.
There are stories of women who have made a career here. The museum building next door to the mill was purpose built as the School of Art to train designers to create the textiles to supply the luxury market. There are records of female designers and the collections on display tell stories about their work.
A History of female textile designers and weavers
A project to sort through the archive of Jacquard cards has been undertaken at the mill and thanks to this process, designs by Kathleen Butler and the historic work of Nan Kurc, who worked in the silk industry in the mid 20th century in Macclesfield, have been discovered. The current team at the museum was unaware of these works until recently. And they are now developing the stories around these collections. Bea and Ruth have been to visit Kathleen Butler at her studio in Bournemouth.
Graduating from Winchester School of Art with a degree in woven textiles Kathleen went on to attain her MA at the Royal College of Art. After receiving a grant from the Worshipful Company of Weavers she spent three years (1987 - 1990) at Paradise Mill. Her aim was to produce a collection of designs. Like Bea and Ruth, she drew the design onto point paper, hand punching and lacing the Jacquard cards, and then with the help of technicians beaming a warp which is tied into the loom. Finally, her design was hand woven, and taken to show potential customers in London.
Kathleen secured a contract working with Glenanne Jacquard’s in Northern Ireland where she moved in 1994. The mill produced Jacquard and plain designs woven in natural fibres (wool, silk, cotton, linen) for the high-end interior decoration market with a customer base in the UK, Europe, and USA. In 2004 the mill closed, and Kathleen returned to England where she began working for Fox Linton, based in Chelsea Harbour. She is now a consultant for Rogers and Goffigan, based in the USA.
Nan Kurc was born Anna Neave. She was the daughter of Newman Neave, a wool felt hat manufacturer based in Macclesfield and Caroline Murray Neave. Her mother was American and Anna herself was born in New York in 1903. By 1935 her listed occupation in passenger lists for travel between the UK and US was a textile designer. She worked at Brocklehurst Whiston Amalgamated at Hurdsfield Mills designing for Jacquard looms at a time when this design work was dominated by men.
She donated several objects to the museum before her death on 15th June 1988 including outfits and wool hat manufacturing equipment belonging to her grandfather, John Henry Neave, a prominent quaker.
NEw Jacquard Studio
The Silk Museum will be opening a Jacquard studio in spring 2025 to display its unrivalled collection of pattern books and items relating to the Cartwright and Sheldon archive in a bespoke space, with environmentally suitable conditions for the historic items.
The pattern books are from many of the silk mills that existed across the region and show the detailed designs that were created here. The Cartwright and Sheldon archive materials are from the last families that ran Paradise Mill from 1912 until it closed in 1981, before it became part of the museum. The archive has been described by conservators and academics as a ‘unique social history resource’. The Jacquard Studio will provide a space for people to access these unique items.
The museum recently hosted a visit to welcome the iconic fashion designer Dame Zandra Rhodes, DBE, and her friend Janet Slee, who incidentally is the reigning Alternative Miss World. Dame Zandra showed a great interest in the work taking place at the Mill having made regular visits to Macclesfield since the late 1950s. She still comes to do business with RA Smart in Macclesfield, who produce digital silks on their looms.
Dame Zandra Rhodes, DBE, says: “I am always interested to see the work of young textile designers. We need to encourage and support the work that they are doing to ensure these skilled craftspeople can continue our heritage. We have a legacy of craftspeople here in the UK and the endangered craft of silk weaving needs to be upheld. The Silk Museum is an incredible place, doing just that and I enjoyed my visit very much.”
