THE FOUNDATION OF THE WEAVING INDUSTRY
Now that we have the French Huguenots living around London and making most of the rugs, scarves and other cloth from wool, cotton or silk, we must think about this new industry which they had brought with them. They were very busy people, and they lived together and they had their own French Churches which kept their records, all in French. We have been through all of those records, and they form part of my story, but I have not found any record of the baptism of our Samuel Gilbert in about 1788, so we do not know in which suburb his parents, who were weavers, lived at this time.
In the new suburbs there were streets and streets of wooden houses, some of several stories, one floor being a factory, full of weaving frames which they had brought with them. In Bethnal Green, there were about 1,800 houses and about 15,000 people, most of them weavers. The Huguenots also made sure that their children went to their schools, for there were no Government schools at that time, and very few children learned to read or write.
Then a clever young Englishman, John Kay, invented a loom in 1733, and here is a picture of it:
You will see that it was a machine, with rollers and treadles, and you may be surprised with what it did. Instead of the weaver having to thread his ball of wool or cotton under and over each up and down thread, the new machine was able to lift each second thread up or down so that the ball of thread could be contained in a can or a block of wood and sent backwards and forwards through the tunnel between the two lots of threads. It was called a shuttle. And, when the other treadle was pushed by the foot, the top threads changed places with the bottom threads.
So, all the weaving frames could be put away, and the new looms were used. They turned out so much cloth or rugs or blankets that there were not enough threads being produced by the spinners who were using their spinning wheels which spun only the one thread. So the weavers had to stop work while they waited on the spinners. Then in 1764, another clever Englishman, James Hargreaves, a carpenter from Blackburn in England, made his first Spinning Jenny, which he named after his wife. It was able to work eight spindles at the same time, and in two years, he did better with another machine which operated 100 spindles at once.
So the weavers on the looms had more than enough threads for their work, and the weaving industry became very prosperous. Instead of earning wages of about £1 a week, weavers were soon on £5 a week. Some even made about £15 a week. In Spitalfields, there were some 12,000 to 15,000 looms, and the silk weaving industry at that time must have had about 30,000 workers.
But, then there was trouble. By the time that our Samuel Gilbert was a boy, the weavers were making so much cloth and other goods, that they they could not sell everything, and I will come to that when you read about Samuel Gilbert as a boy.
