Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

i/6 BRITAIN AT WORK. and a depot devoted to Welsh handicrafts in London which is paying well. Quilting is laborious work ; a slightly one- sided stoop in consequence of the old frames being too low, and a curious “ crook ” of the left forefinger from feeling if the needle is through, are sometimes noticeable. Seven to nine clays, working six or seven hours daily, are required for a full-sized quilt. The average cost is slightly under that of an eiderdown cover, but, of course, varies with the material used. There are over 1,400 Welsh families employing their leisure hours in quilting. STOCKING STALL IN A WELSH MARKET. Thev turn quite naturally from cooking or washing to the frames, and in spite of hard lives and roughened hands the work is deli- cately clean and fresh. It is pretty to hear them singing their folk songs as they bend over the stitching. The art of knitting is the youngest of the important textile manufactures. Its peculi- arity consists in the use of a single thread for the entire texture, and the forming from that single thread of an especially strong yet elastic looped web. It was at one time as national a Welsh industry as weaving, but the introduction of the stocking machine has revolutionised it. Women knitting as they drive the kine, or trudge to market, and pedlars with long sticks of swinging hose over their shoulders buying up the stockings from cottage to cottage to sell at Merthyr and other “ works ” districts are no longer seen. The change has been, and still is, severely felt, but the Welsh knitters have taken not unkindly to the machine, and that it is not to be found in every cottage is due to its initial expense- Some manufacturers hire out machines to “ operatives,” a plan that seems to work well. Most of the domestic knitting machines now in use are of American origin. They are the narrow hand machines and the wide hand machines. These two are ex- clusively used in the houses of the “opera- tives.” Power rotary frames and power round frames driven by water power or steam are used in the factories; some of these machines require the attend- ance of only one female, and yet the sub-letting of domestic knitters remains a peculiar feature of the trade. The chief reasons which tend to keep up the hand-frame work are the diffi- culty of doing certain things by machinery, or of doing them as well as they would be clone by hand, and the great cost of the new factory frames, together with the fact that manufacturers have already property in the existing hand machines. The best hand-machine knitter cannot do more than 1,000 loops a minute of worsted and 1,500 of silk. The present power-frame makes 250,000 loops a minute. Women in their own cottages earn 8s. to los. a week. In factories they are employed in mending, stamping, turning and folding the hose, and earn rather more. On the hiring-out of machines system over 1,300 people are now employed. The Tregaron and Llandilo districts are flourishing stocking centres, and the click of