In the February 2014 issue, Nell Darby contributed an article on working from home in the past. She drew her examples from the Midlands and south-east England and concentrated on female employment. This article complements the earlier one by drawing its examples from northern England and investigating male employment in metalworking and wool and linen weaving.

Domestic metalworkers
Until the end of the 19th century almost every village in the western half of South Yorkshire and neighbouring north Derbyshire contained small workshops in which independent metalworkers toiled for long hours making not only cutlery but such things as nails, files, gimlets, shears and scissors. There is still a surviving fully-equipped nailmaker’s workshop in the village of Hoylandswaine. One of the last rural metalworkers, John Thomas Ridge, retired in 1970, aged 91, from his smithy in Ecclesfield where he made hand-forged gimlets. And Stan Shaw, now aged 89, divides his time between his domestic workshop in Deepcar and the Kelham Island Industrial Museum in Sheffield where he makes handmade penknives and pocket knives. He is the last of the tradesmen known locally as ‘little mesters’ – independent master craftsmen.

The numbers of rural metalworkers employed in some villages was surprisingly large in the past. For example, in one South Yorkshire village in 1841, no fewer than 138 out of the 182 heads of household in the census of that year were recorded as nailmakers and in another neighbouring village there were 119 nailmakers in 1841. And in the sparsely populated Whitley valley in Ecclesfield in 1841 there were 31 men working in the metal trades in workshops attached to their cottages – 11 were filemakers, ten were nailmakers, nine were forkmakers and one made knife, fork and spoon handles from stag antlers. All these workers were outworkers either working for ‘middlemen’, who provided the raw materials and organised the transport of the finished products to customers, or for firms that employed factory labour as well as outworkers.

The processes were relatively simple but required great skill and the work had no fixed hours. For example there were two sorts of nailers, nail chapmen and domestic nailmakers. The nail chapmen were middlemen who obtained supplies of rod iron from local forges, and distributed them to domestic nailmakers. The domestic nailmakers made the rods into nails and then they were collected by the chapmen who sold them on to wholesalers.

The basic nailmaking process was a simple one and easy to learn. The iron rods were heated in a fire, which was kept hot by means of a pair of bellows, and then cut into lengths on an anvil. In the West Riding the anvil was called a stythy or stithy and it stood on a timber base (usually part of the trunk of a large tree) called a stythy stock. The cut pieces were then placed in a hole in the anvil and hit with a hammer to form a head. This was done at great speed and there were numerous variations on the basic process to make different kinds of nail – horse nails, rose heads and flats, for example. What is important to realise was that the trade required little capital outlay. All that the nailmaker needed were a small smithy (usually attached to a cottage or in a backyard), an anvil, a pair of bellows, simple tools and a supply of coal or coke. A good proportion of nailmakers also grew crops and kept livestock on small holdings. For example, among the belongings of Joseph Yardley of Thorpe Hesley when he died in 1694 were “a pair of bellowes, two little stithies & certain Naylor tools… together with a cow, a heifer, a calf, fower ewes, three hoggs [young sheep] and a pig”.

Hand file cutting was also a simple but very skilled process. In his workshop, the hand file cutter sat on a stool and worked on his files on an anvil on a stock. The blank file rested on a block of lead and was held in place by leather straps that were held tight by putting a foot through a leather loop. Teeth were cut into a blank file with a chisel and a distinctive curved-handled hammer. The lead block was regularly handled, the thumb and index finger of the left hand were constantly licked to grip the chisel and so lead was ingested. The file cutters’ disease was lead poisoning.

The metalworkers worked late in the evening if it was hot during the day. And after a weekend’s hard drinking they often did not work on Mondays, which was known amongst them satirically as ‘St Monday’ and this even extended into ‘St Tuesday’ on occasions. In summer they divided their time between metalworking and looking after their smallholdings or helping neighbouring farmers with their harvests. William Steel, a filemaker and small farmer near Grenoside, north of Sheffield kept a diary in the 1870s and 1880s. The entries for the week beginning 19 July 1880 are typical. On Monday and Tuesday he was haymaking. On Wednesday morning he went into Sheffield on a milk cart with his files to deliver them to the filemaking factory and pick up more blanks. In the afternoon he was haymaking again. On Thursday he was at work in the morning in his workshop and helping a neighbouring farmer with his haymaking in the afternoon. On Friday he spent the whole day making files in his workshop. If he delivered finished files to the factory on Saturdays he often stayed in Sheffield for a few hours and periodically went for a Turkish bath!

The domestic woollen industry
Spinning yarn at home by women and girls has been well described, but what is not often mentioned is the weaving of wool and linen at home by men. And yet these were immensely important ‘domestic’ industries from the medieval period until well into the 19th century, the products of which found not only a large market throughout the country but also Internationally.

The production of woollen cloth was the pre-eminent industry of England in the medieval and early modern period when it was concentrated in East Anglia, the Cotswolds and that part of the West Riding of Yorkshire today called West Yorkshire. When you travel north along the A629 between Sheffield and Huddersfield you know more or less when you are leaving South Yorkshire and entering Kirklees in West Yorkshire simply by looking closely at the old cottages, almost exclusively built of stone. They contain the characteristic long upstairs windows indicating that the room behind the windows was once a well-lit loomshop where the men of the family wove woollen goods on a handloom.

And there is still evidence in the wider landscape of this region and on maps of the former importance of this domestic industry. You can follow the process from the beginning when a clothier would bring yarn to the weavers’ cottages to be spun by the womenfolk, its weaving on a handloom by the men, then its journey to a local fulling mill and then its stretching and finishing and finally its journey to a buyer.

At a fulling mill, in West Yorkshire usually worked by waterpower, the cloth was beaten to remove oil, dirt and other impurities and to make it thicker by matting the fibres together. Other names for fulling mills are walk mills (because originally women simply walked barefoot continually over the cloths) and tuck mills, hence the surnames Fuller, Walker and Tucker. After fulling the cloth was returned to the hillside properties of the weavers and stretched on frames called tenters by hooks, hence the phrase to be ‘on tenterhooks’. Street names containing the word ‘tenter’ such as Tenter Croft, Tenter Hill and Tenter Lane still abound throughout West Yorkshire. The finished cloth was then taken by packhorse to one of the neighbouring cloth halls as the wool markets were called.

With mechanisation of the industry during the late 18th and 19th centuries and its concentration in large mills the domestic woollen industry declined in West Yorkshire. In 1840 a local directory said that woollen manufacture still extended into some of the out-townships of the parishes but during the next three or four decades it died out almost completely.

Domestic linen weaving
Another important domestic weaving industry was linen weaving. This was also an important domestic industry wherever flax could be grown, not only in England but also in Scotland and Ireland. After the spinning of linen was mechanised in 1792 handloom weaving expanded to meet the increased production of the spinning mills. In the town of Barnsley in South Yorkshire in 1851, for example, it was recorded that there was the greatest concentration of linen handloom weavers in Yorkshire with over 4000 handlooms concentrated in the town. And as late as 1871 there were still 1200 handloom weavers in the town working outside the town’s powerloom mills.

The handlooms of the linen weavers were often located in cellars because a damp atmosphere meant less breaking of the yarn. In order to let light into the cellar loomshops their ceilings were above ground level, allowing a window to be inserted to let in light and some air (the windows were usually closed but with one pane missing). Because of the raised cellar roof, weavers’ cottages had a characteristic short flight of steps leading up to the front door.

Working in a damp cellar for long hours cannot have been very pleasant. One Board of Health report in the middle of the 19th century reported that sewage saturated the walls of one cellar and that in another the floor was so wet that stepping stones had had to be placed across the floor. The sub-commissioner of the report on Children’s Employment in Mines in 1841 described the effect of the working conditions on the linen handloom weavers of Barnsley in the following words “… the contrast is most striking between the broad stalwart frame of the swarthy collier, as he stalks home, all grime and muscle, and the puny, pallid, starveling little weaver, with his dirty white apron and feminine look…”