Slump & Boom in Lancashire

"She's a bonny woman," said a mill girl as the red and black Rolls-Royce with the royal standard fluttering above its radiator crept through a Lancashire cotton town one sunny day last week. From the car window Queen Elizabeth II smiled at her loyal Lancastrians and waved a gloved hand. It was the Queen's first state visit to the grimy industrial county where 5,000,000 sturdy English folk spin the bulk of Britain's cotton textiles, mine a goodly share of its coal. She had come with her husband Philip to shed a ray of royal hope in the one region of prosperous Britain that is visibly and chronically depressed. "Dark, Satanic Mills." Lancashire is not the tourists' England. Forty miles wide by 60 miles long, it is bisected by the river Ribble into a northern rural section that merges into Wordsworth's Lake District, and a southern industrial coalfield choked with so many cities, slums, mining villages and cotton mills, greyhound stadia, slagheaps, canals and railroad sidings that it forms a single complex, something like the Ruhr. South Lanes, as Britons call it, is the most populous region of Britain outside London. Its people are a nubbly mixture of English yeomen, Welsh shepherds and Irish peasants, congealed into Lancastrians by the Industrial Revolution. With its deepwater port of Liverpool (pop. 790,000), its damp climate and plentiful coal, Lancashire was for a century the cotton clothier of half the world. Lancashire men invented the first machines of mass production (the Crompton mule, the spinning jenny), were the first to use steam to drive them. But the price of industrial precocity, in an age that was unprepared for it, was paid by the people of Lancashire. In Lancashire's "dark, satanic mills" children labored twelve hours a day, women grew old at 30. Religion was their chief succor. The Methodist revival burned bright in the Lancashire mill towns, and its influence provided Britain's Labor Party, one of whose strongholds is South Lancashire, with a strain of Biblical humanism that tempers the doctrinaire Socialism of its Marxist intellectuals. South Lancashire today sends more than 50 M.P.s to Parliament, two-thirds of them Labor. Depression in its textile industry could increase the Labor vote in next month's general election. Looms Without Orders. Last week the threat of depression loomed large over Lancashire's valleys. Among the crowds that cheered the Queen were many of the 32,000 millhands laid off for two weeks because the mills are on short time. Last year Lancashire exported 72 million yards of cloth less than it did in 1953--a drop of 10%. "Half our looms have no orders," said 37-year-old Ronnie Carter, manager of a weaving mill in the town of Padiham (pop. 12,000). "But we're lucky. Two of the town's ten mills have shut down com pletely." The immediate causes were obvious. Australia, Lancashire's best customer, last month slashed its imports of cotton cloth by 33%. In addition, uncertainty over whether the U.S. cotton surplus would be sold abroad at less than cost had led importers everywhere to cut back their textile orders in the hope of lower prices.* In the long run, however, Lancashire's textile troubles lay deeper than the futures market. Decline & Response. Fine cloth from towns like Padiham no longer can compete in price with Japanese and Indian cloth, spun by cheaper labor on machines that, more often than not, were built in Lancashire. Cheap Indian cloth is even flooding into Britain itself: 16 million yards in 1953, 130 million in 1954. Lancashire men complain, with some justice, that the countries which put up barriers against its textile industry are allowed to flood the British market. Their critics reply, with justice, that hidebound Lancashire has allowed its methods and machinery to become obsolete. "The solution, if there is one," wrote the London Economist, lies "in vigorous innovation and specialization rather than in trying to cling to the cheaper end of the trade." Another, more lasting solution is being worked out by Lancastrians themselves. Convinced that their textile mills are moribund, many weavers are quitting their looms and looking for other jobs. The transition is apt to be painful, but tens of thousands of ex-cotton workers are now making Canberra bombers, cathode ray tubes, heavy tanks, soap and TV sets in scores of modern new plants mushrooming in South Lancashire. Already, engineering (with 500,000 employed) has overtaken textiles (400,000) as Lancashire's No. 1 industry. "I remember when there was nothing but cotton from one end of town to the other," said Charlie Shackleton, one of Padiham's weavers. "Now look at it." Where it once finished muslins and poplins, Padiham now boasts a fine big washing-machine plant, is building a huge radio factory that will soon employ 3,000 men. "My 15-year-old son," says Charlie, "will be the first Shackleton in four generations who won't be in weaving. He's going into engineering. He'll have a good future too."

* Lancashire's stocks of raw cotton were lower last month than they have been at any time since the U.S. Civil War (when Lancashire cotton workers sent addresses of encouragement to President Lincoln and sometimes starved rather than use the "slave cotton" which British merchants were trying to import from the blockaded Southern states).

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