The block prints are on my Gandhi piece, the exhibition guide is off to the printers, i.e. no more agonising over all of this (see previous post) so I now have bit of headspace to start writing about my quest to trace the supply chain of Morris & Co’s famous cotton prints during William Morris’ lifetime..
My idea was to apply modern principles of responsible supply chain management to Morris & Co and see where it would lead. This would include: knowing your suppliers, traceability of raw materials along the supply chain, adopting standards (e.g. labour or environmental standards) that suppliers are expected to meet, assessing the risk of these standards not being met throughout the supply chain, monitoring key suppliers’ actual performance, and supply chain transparency .
Morris used three types of cotton cloth for his prints: a medium-grade plain weave cloth, a heavier twill weave called “Bolton cloth”, and equally heavier English cretonnes which he used instead of the Bolton cloth from about 1879. We know this from the Wardle Pattern Books, held by the Whitworth Art Gallery . A digitised version is normally published on the Whitworth website but has just been taken offline whilst the website is being redesigned. All of these were widely used types of cloth. You can read more about Morris’ print cloths and finishes here.
Having done trials with bleached and unbleached cloth Morris opted to use only unbleached or “grey” cottons for his prints. Although Morris does not talk about this in his correspondence, we can be pretty certain that this grey cloth was coming from mills in Lancashire – this was simply the largest and closest (hence most economical) source, with hundreds of spinning and weaving mills competing for business.
But is it possible to narrow the source down to specific mills, or perhaps a town? The Pall Mall Gazette reporter who visited Morris & Co’s print works at Merton Abbey in 1888 referred to the grey cloth as “Manchester cotton”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the cloth was woven or spun in Manchester, as “Manchester” was often used interchangeably with “Lancashire” to describe the region. One reason for this might be that most of the cloth merchants and agents were based in Manchester, and businesses like Morris & Co would typically order through them rather than directly from the mills. The agents and merchants would jealously keep their sources secret to prevent their customers from “cutting out the middle man”. For example, H.S Gibbs describes, in his 1887 Autobiography of a Manchester Cotton Manufacturer that the cloth warehouse he was running at some point of his career benefited from a second back street entrance, so he could get all the deliveries “away from inquisitive eyes”.
Then there was the matter of “Bolton cloth” – could that be cloth made in Bolton? Alas, no – the term “Bolton cloth” or “Bolton sheeting” denotes a type of cloth: a twill cotton fabric with a condenser waste weft, typically used for curtains or lining.
My next step was to check Hosking’s Guide to the Manchester Trade – a kind of yellow pages from 1877 – to get an idea how many companies could have potentially been spinning or weaving the grey Bolton cloth used by Morris & Co, and how many cloth agents might have sold it. Looking at the descriptions of companies’ business and products, I counted over 60 mills from all over Lancashire, and over 50 cloth agents (mostly in Manchester)! I did try and narrow it down for the weaving mills by looking for companies that listed more than one of my ‘key words’ in their activities, e.g “Bolton sheets”, “grey cloth”, AND “waste twills”, identified 4 companies that looked promising and tried to find out more about them, particularly anything related to the workers or working conditions – but to no avail.
In summary: No success in tracing the grey cloth used by Morris & Co to any particular suppliers or even a particular town in Lancashire, nor in finding information about working conditions at potential suppliers. Suppliers were plentiful and transparency was actively discouraged in the Victorian textile supply chain.
Morris was abhorred by the working and living conditions associated with industrial mass production in the Lancashire cotton towns. From the perspective of modern supply chain management, he should have been concerned that his products were depending on suppliers that most likely did not meet his own standards of “useful”, decent work. Was he? That will be for the next post….
