THE end of the 175 years of weaving at Moscow Mills in Oswaldtwistle -- announced this month as production and jobs are transferred to the company's associate mill in Blackburn to enable expansion of its retail and leisure complex in the space once occupied by the looms -- marks the end of a remarkable era.
But their departure from Moscow Mills is notable, not just because, in an industry decimated in the post-war years, it housed one of the few remaining weaving sheds left in East Lancashire, but also because, ironically, efforts were made almost at the very outset to bring its looms to a halt.
For Moscow Mills, opened in 1824 by brothers Benjamin and Robert Walmsley, was one of the Lancashire mills attacked in the 1826 Power Loom Riots by mobs of handloom weavers who feared that mechanisation who rob them of their livelihoods and the Walmsleys had 20 of their power looms destroyed -- though they later received the then-considerable sum of more than £259 in compensation from the county authorities.
A generation on, when the power loom had come to dominate and the sons and daughters of the handloom weavers were drawn by the thousand into the factory system, the livelihood of those working at Moscow Mills was measured in gold -- in the sovereigns that made up their fortnightly wages. For Arthur Hargreaves, who began work as a half-timer there at the age of seven in 1862 and whose descendants today control the 550-employee Hilden textiles and leisure group that sprang from Moscow Mills, was later to recall how, back then, the wages for a group of around a dozen weavers would be paid to just one of them -- whose task it then was to get change for the sovereigns and pay the others.
At the time, a man called Cocker kept a greengrocer's shop in Oswaldtwistle -- at a site that was later that of the Palladium Cinema -- and it was to him that the weavers went for change, for which he charged commission of a penny in the pound.
Such deductions and those that weavers had to pay for their brushes, shuttles and oil were long gone from the wages system at Moscow Mills when its employees were pictured being entertained by the directors at Oswaldtwistle Town Hall in October, 1955, to celebrate the 21st birthday of Arthur's great-grandson, Peter, whose father was then managing director of the family firm.
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