Hand carders for wool

You aren’t too late to book a seat at my lecture on Wednesday 11th July at 2pm – that is unless you are reading this on the 12th and have missed it.

The lecture is about deciphering those provocatively named cotton and wool textile mill jobs; scutcher, feckler, tackler, tenter, doubler and carder plus all those other weird and wonderful ways our ancestors earned a mill crust in the censuses.   My grandmother, by the way, was a reacher in the 1911 census. She was  13.

My father designed spindles for spinning machines until the bottom fell out of the textile industry (pun intended).  He travelled to Lancashire, Cheshire, India, Switzerland and possibly even North Korea (don’t ask – I’m still trying to prove it was North not South because he said the plane was hush hush, nobody had passports with them and the coach in Korea had boarded up windows… ).  But he never went to Yorkshire.  Why not?  Because Yorkshire was a wool county and his spinning machines were for cotton.

So I look forward to joining you next week to learn what this has in common with this.

Cromford Mill, Derbyshire