Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

 126 ARRIVAL OF THE WOOL. THE MANUFACTURE OF WOOLLEN AND WORSTED. IT may safely be said that every inhabitant of these islands—however ragged his habiliments—has some wool on his back. Among all peoples living in temperate climates, the wearing of wool fabrics of some sort is indeed practically universal. 1 he first fibre ever woven into cloth was probably goat’s hair or the wool of the primitive mountain sheep, and the term “ spinster ” carries us back to the time when it was the part of every maiden to hold the distaff and spin the yarn from which the clothing of the family was to be woven. Before the advent of the locomotive there WOOL SORTERS AT WORK. were two high roads from London to Scotland. They correspond pretty closely to the east coast and west coast railway routes of to-day, the one passing through Doncaster and York, the other through Warrington and Preston. Within the parallelogram formed by these four towns—roughly sixty miles by thirty—very nearly the whole of the two great textile industries is carried on. The great Pennine chain running north and south divides the counties of York and Lancaster, and cuts this limited area into two fairly equal portions, the Lancashire side being given up to cotton, the eastern or Yorkshire half mainly to wool. It is a land of high moorlands and rushing streams, and its people have many of the strenuous characteristics of hillmen all the world over. Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Batley, Dewsbury, Keighley are all large and important towns, almost united into one vast city by smaller towns and villages innumerable, every one of them engaged in some branch or other of the wool industry. According to the report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for 1889, the number of persons employed in the woollen and worsted industries was 297,053, of whom nearly 168,000 were