AFTER his death, 19th-century mill owner Robert Hopwood, who became one of East Lancashire's wealthiest cotton magnates, was described as being "remarkably shrewd" despite not having had much education, writes Eric Leaver.

This testimony came in 1880 - nearly 30 years after he died - from another mill boss in a pamphlet about the origins in 1852 of the so-called Blackburn List .

This became a standard for the cotton industry when it set laid-down pay scales for piece-work weavers who, previously, were often in dispute with employers over the money they got - as frequent changes in the sorts of cloth they wove had a big influence on how much they could earn.

It was a big strike at Hopwood's giant Nova Scotia Mills in Blackburn that led to the list being established.

But it is from a small pile of Victorian business correspondence - that comes to 'Looking Back' from ephemera-collecting reader Mike Sumner - that we get another insight into the shrewdness with which Old Bob ran the business that made him rich.

For among the collection of letters and envelopes that - in the era of Penny Red stamps cut from unperforated sheets - made their way to the long-gone pit near Padiham of the the Altham New Coal Company, the oldest is a contract between the colliery and the business of Robert Hopwood and Son at Blackburn for the supply of coal to their mills for the whole of 1848.

Hopwood, it seems, was a canny customer. For though the contract shows his firm's agreement to paying seven old shillings a ton for the Altham coal, he wanted the best - both when it came to quality and quantity.

For the hand-written document shows that - on something similar to the "baker's dozen" principle - the "ton" his company negotiated contained two hundredweights more than the standard 20. Not only that, each one had to be of the best coal - as Hopwood and Son made plain with their proviso that "quality is kept up fully equal to what we have been receiving this last 14 days."

Plainly, if the deal had been smoothed by the colliery wooing the customer with its top-grade cobs and nuts beforehand, Hopwoods were not going to put up with inferior stuff once they had signed.

But the colliery company - which about this time was employing some 50 miners under the supervision of managers Henry and Richard Clegg after being formed early in the century by the Lords of the Manor - was far from a soft touch. For it had a condition in the contract, too.

And it insisted that if during the year, there was a freeze-up of the canal - along which its coal went in barges to Hopwood's still-standing Nova Scotia factory - then it would be up to the cotton company to pay for carting it there from the pit.

It is a good job that the canal was not ice-bound when, in a winter five years later, the colliery received a call for its coal to be shipped along it in the opposite direction - as folk at Skipton could have spent long winter nights waiting by candlelight for a thaw.

For also in the collection of correspondence is a letter, dated February 1853, from the Skipton Gas Light and Coke Company, which with the word "immediately" underlined in two instances and a plea for a reply by return post similarly stressed, related the fix the firm was in.

"If you can send us a boatload of coals immediately, we will thank you to do so. We want the best screened coal for making gas," it said.

"Please say per return whether we may expect them and at what price. We are just out - therefore we want them immediately."

And to this urgent request was added an incentive for the colliery. "If we like the coal, we may become regular customers," wrote the gasworks' Mr Francis Scowby.

But, it seems, he may have not had the same bargaining clout as old Hopwood who got his Altham coal for seven shillings per king-size ton.

The desperate gasworks was, according to a note apparently initialled by Richard Clegg, quoted a whole ten shillings a ton.

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