The Warminster Town Centre Conservation Area Assessment (Informative Document), published in March 2007, noted:
Cloth/wool trade – As well as bringing wealth to the town, the cloth trade has left a number of weavers’ cottages and distinctive buildings. The town later became well known for leather glove manufacturing.
K.H. Rogers, in Wiltshire And Somerset Woollen Mills, published by the Pasold Research Fund Ltd., in 1976, noted:
Horningsham Mills
There were two fulling mills at Horningsham in the eighteenth century. One on the lower side of the road was held with an adjoining grist mill by Bennett Sanger under a lease of 1696. When it expired in 1746 the fulling mill was re-let separately to William Meares, a clothier from Corsley. He already held the other fulling mill on the upper side of the road, and may have been responsible for building it on a new site. The original lease of 1734 refers only to a house, buildings and pools, and the place was perhaps only a dye-house then.
Both mills passed in 1766 to William Everett, son of a Heytesbury clothier, then twenty-four years old. He evidently converted one mill into a gig mill, by which one man and a boy could do as much work in two hours as thirty men could do in a day. This was destroyed by s mob of 500 shearmen of Wiltshire and Somerset on 2 August 1767, a riot so celebrated that it found a place in Marx’s Capital.
A letter from ‘Constant Reader’ to the Salisbury paper gives the background to the episode:
For many years the Gloucestershire clothiers have manufactured a great quantity of naps, shags, and a sort of woollen goods called Bath beavers, for the dressing and preparing of which they have used gig mills, which are allowed to be a more expeditious and much better as well as cheaper method than dressing by hand only. Indeed, they cannot be dressed properly and as they ought by any other means than by the gig mill. Now Mr. Everett and his family have for thirty years and upwards manufactured the above sort of goods, and have been obliged to send them upwards of 30 miles to be dressed at gig mills; consequently he was at a much greater expence than if he had dressed them himself at home, besides that of carriage to and fro, and even then he could not make near the quantity that he would have done, supposing he had a mill of his own. Therefore can Mr. Everett’s design be injurious to the workpeople in his neighbourhood? Was it not on the contrary, procuring them that work to be done here, which otherwise must have been done in Gloucestershire?
He ended by pointing out the increase in the trade in Gloucestershire since the gigs had been used there.
Everett kept on the mills, presumably for fulling only; by 1793, he was using machinery, for he advertised for a man who could take care of three or four engines, and had a perfect knowledge of spinning. He also had a dye-house, the equipment of which was offered for sale after his death in 1806. No machinery was included in the sale. The upper mill was let to John Bleeck, a Warminster clothier, but it had apparently been pulled down before 1820. The lower mill must have been converted for the silk trade by 1812, when it was described as a ‘silk house’, occupied by John Ward. On the upper site the fine clothier’s house still stands, and there is a range of buildings, now converted to houses, which probably formed part of the dye-house, for at one end stands the hexagonal former drying stove.
WRO, 845, lease books, etc.;
SJ, 10.8.1767, 24.8.1767, 21.1.1793, 21.4.1800, 25.5.1807.
K.H. Rogers, in Wiltshire And Somerset Woollen Mills, published by the Pasold Research Fund Ltd., in 1976, noted:
In 1756 Ebenezer Coombs, a clothier, took a copyhold house and garden which was renewed to his son of the same name in 1776. In 1783, he was described as a ‘second and livery clothier’. By 1828, there were extensive buildings and a pond on the site. Ebenezer Coombs died in 1831. It is known that either he or his son, Ebenezer Sperrin Coombs turned for a time to the manufacture of silk, presumably on this site. In 1840 the house occupied by E.S. Coombs and the spacious factory adjoining were offered for sale, held of Lord Bath for two healthy lives, aged 56 and 73. Coombs, the younger of the two lives, died eight days after the auction. The lease could not in fact be sold, either then or when it was again put up in 1845, and fell into hand in 1850. By then the buildings were pulled down.
Ebenezer Coombs (d.1831) also took a lease in 1776 of a cottage and shop at Whitborne Moor. In 1789, a new lease was made to Thomas Down, then described as a shearman but later as a clothier. After his death in 1816, his executors renewed the lease in 1816 and 1834. In a survey of the parish made in 1828, the property was described as a house and silkhouse occupied by Elizabeth Down. In 1836, it was put up for sale as a house and factory, with potential use as a malthouse, occupied by Thomas Down. It was not sold then, but in 1839, the assignment of the lease to a linen-draper from Warminster probably marked the end of trade there. The buildings were still standing in 1876.
These two groups of buildings stood on adjoining sites at Lower Whitborne on the east side of the road leading south from Corsley Heath. The considerable pond on the upstream side of a building probably indicates that water power was used.
WRO, 845, lease books, sale particulars, etc.;
M.F. Davies, Life In An English Village (1909), 45.
K.H. Rogers, in Wiltshire And Somerset Woollen Mills, published by the Pasold Research Fund Ltd., in 1976, noted:
Chapmanslade
In 1814 Thomas Vine, who had been one of a partnership running Corsley Mill, added two lives to a lease of a house in Chapmanslade. He built a factory adjoining it and ran it until 1830, when the machinery of Vine and Son was put up for sale; it included five scribbling and three carding machines, billies, jennies, tucking and willying mills, presses, a patent cutter and brusher and steaming apparatus. By 1836, when a new lease was made, the house was partly used as a beerhouse called the Nag’s Head; and materials of the factory and engine house were sold by 1837. A reservoir has been made on the site, and the machinery had no doubt been driven by steam since 1814.
WRO, 845, lease books;
DG, 18.3.1830, 13.7.1837.
Extract from The Changing Face Of Warminster by Wilfred Middlebrook, published in 1971:
The silk factory came on the heels of another cloth industry, for at one time woollen fabrics, kerseymeres and blankets formed the principal manufacture of Warminster and the neighbouring towns in Wiltshire and Somerset. From the reign of Elizabeth to the end of the eighteenth century the clothiers of Frome, Warminster, Chippenham, Bradford On Avon, Trowbridge, Westbury, Heytesbury and Wilton were men of great wealth and position.
This was all hand-woven material, with the weavers using handlooms in their own homes, getting their yarns from the warehouses and woolstores of the merchants and delivering the woven cloth to their masters; the silk trade of Macclesfield was run on similar lines and for a much longer period. The invention of the power-loom, first driven by water-wheels in cloth factories, followed by the introduction of steam power, helped to kill the local wool trade. Huge factories were set up in Lancashire and Yorkshire, at the source of the steam-producing coal, and there began the steady migration of country folk to the new industrial towns and cities of the north.
Another factor that caused the rapid decline of weaving in Wiltshire was the increasing consumption, throughout England and the Continent, of cotton and linen fabrics.
According to Daniell, there were thirty prosperous cloth factories in Warminster in 1790. They were clothing shops where the cloth was finished after the spinning, carding, warping and weaving had already been carried out in the workers’ cottages. The invention of the “spring loom’ dealt a heavy blow to the trade in 1801, with riots by the workpeople, who threatened to smash the new looms. These riots lasted until 1803. By this time there were twenty-two clothiers in Warminster.
On one occasion, after weavers had paraded the town with bludgeons day after day, the Riot Act was read by the High Constable of Warminster in an open space between the Obelisk and the National School, and the mob finally dispersed after being fired on by the Yeomanry Cavalry. This was early in January 1817, when twelve hundred weavers had assembled at Dilton Marsh and marched to Warminster, wrecking the houses of weavers who were at work on the new looms.
There were more riots in 1830, when men from Hindon, the Deverills and Crockerton, decided to sack the town of Warminster and destroy Longleat House by fire. A troop of Lancers was sent from Trowbridge to Hindon, to deal with the mob before it could join the men of the Deverills, with orders to take no prisoners as the gaols were already full. While the people of Warminster were hiding their valuables and preparing for the worst, the men of the Deverills and Crockerton lined the main road waiting for the mob from Hindon, but they waited in vain. The Lancers had attacked them and some were killed, while many were wounded – some had their hands severed as they tried to grasp the bridles of the soldiers’ horses.
Heytesbury labourers also rioted in 1830, when Colonel A’Court called for help and the Yeomanry, under Captain Long, went to the rescue. The rioters dammed the river at Codford and flooded the water meadows, the swollen river hindering the troops, but finally twenty-five prisoners were taken and sent to Devizes Gaol. The prisoners were being taken via Warminster but the Heytesbury men got there first and blocked the road at the turnpike. Armed only with stones they were soon put to flight but made another stand in Warminster, and were only dispersed the following day when further help came from Devizes.
In 1812 the only clothiers in Warminster were Mr. H. Wansey in Back Street and West Street; Messrs. P. and C. Warren in West Street; Mr. W. Hinton of West Street; Messrs. Bleeck and Strode of Bugley; and Mr. Rossiter at Pound Street. The last two looms ceased to work about 1824, in Church Street and Mifflin’s Yard, off Vicarage Street. The Church Street factory was probably the building known as Byne Cottages, and it still has the attics where the hand-looms were installed. Bleeck’s Buildings was also once a factory and is now a tenement block, while Aldridge’s factory at the Cock Yard was for a long time a ruinous tenement – now demolished to make way for part of the council housing estate of Westleigh.
Writing in 1932, Victor Strode Manley, as part of his Regional Survey Of Warminster And District, wrote the following notes concerning Upton Lovell:
From the high road one sees the gaunt ruins of the cloth mills which remained after the fire of about thirty years ago. Cobbett mentioned them under date 2nd September 1826. He had just interviewed some ragged clothiers at Frome who “had much clearer views of what is likely to happen than the pretty gentlemen of Whitehall seem to have . . . they thought the trade would never come back again to what it was before . . . The first factories that I met with were at a village called Upton Lovell, just before I came to Heytesbury. There they were doing not more than a quarter work. There is one factory, I believe, here at Warminster, and that has been suspended during the harvest, at any rate . . . It is the same at Bradford and Trowbridge . . . The landlord at Heytesbury told me that every one of them had a licence to beg, given them, he said “by the Government.’ I suppose it was some pass from a magistrate.” – Culley’s ed. II. 154.
Warminster & Westbury Journal, Friday 7th June 1929:
DEATH OF MR. WILLIAM WALKER
A well-known Wiltshire resident passed away at Upton Lovel on Sunday in the person of Mr. William Walker, a former cloth magnate, who made West of England cloth famous the world over.
Aged 69 years, Mr. William Walker patiently endured a long illness, and his death was not unexpected.
His passing snaps a link with the past, for he literally grew white in the public service of his native town, Trowbridge, and it was only a few years ago that he passed into the peace of quiet retirement at Upton Lovel, where once were flourishing woollen mills which he owned. He was the son of the late Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Walker, and was born at what is locally known as the Brick Platts, off Union-street. His grandfather was one of the converts John Wesley secured on his memorable visit to Trowbridge. His grandmother was a niece of that great Wesleyan evangelist George Whitfield.
Mr. Walker’s record of public service would fill a volume, so extensive was it in its activities. He had filled the chair of almost every public authority of note, including the old Local Board and the Urban Council, which succeeded it. For over 26 years he was a Guardian, and for 24 years represented the town on the County Council. With others he was responsible for many town improvements, of which present-day residents are enjoying the benefit, notably, the opening up of Court-street, and the commencement of the People’s Park.
He was the doyen of the Trowbridge Magisterial Bench, and continued to take the chair long after his retirement.
In business he succeeded the Gouldsmiths in carrying on the business of Messrs. Samuel Salter and Co., Home Mills, which then, as now, were noted for the production of the world-famed West of England cloth.
THE LATE MR. W. WALKER
FUNERAL AT TROWBRIDGE
In the presence of manyn old associates in public life, the funeral took place at the Trowbridge Cemetery on the 6th inst., of 0Mr. William Walker, who died at Upton Lovel, on the 30th ult.
The family mourners were: Mr. Joseph Walker, Amersham (son), Mr. W. Walker (grandson), Mr. J. Mackie (son-in-law), Mr Lovel Mackie (grandson). Dr. Kenneth Mackie (grandson) was absent owing to his being unable to leave his practice. From deceased’s residence: Mr. W.P. Mines, Mr. J. Petty, Mr. F. Boulter, and Mrs. Wheeler.
The large attendance included representatives of the Trowbridge Bench, of which deceased was Chairman for many years; the Urban District Council, the Trowbridge and Melksham Guardians, the Wilts Constabulary, and many of the organisations with which he had been associated; also a number of his former employees.
The remains were taken by road from Upton Lovel, the cortege being met at the Trowbridge Cemetery entrance by a large assembly. The officiating ministers were the Rev. H. Hall (pastor of the Conigre Unitarian Church), and the Rev. Harry Sanders (an old colleague in public service). The service was of a plain nature, passages of scripture being read and prayers said by the Conigre Pastor. A short address bearing on the useful public life of deceased was delivered by the Rev. Harry Sanders.
The interment was in the family vault, in which lie four predecessors, and was lined with dresses of lilac.
The Warminster And West Wilts Herald, Saturday 18 June 1887, reported:
UPTON LOVELL.
THE WOOLLEN MILLS. – Mr. Walker, the enterprising proprietor of the Woollen Mills here, is just having erected in the mills a huge boiler, weighing thirteen tons, ten cwts. It arrived at Warminster station on Tuesday, and was conveyed to Upton Lovell on Wednesday, taking twelve horses to draw it along on a timber carriage. When the boiler is erected, the factory will be in full working order, and a larger number of hands will be employed.
The Devizes & Wiltshire Gazette, issue dated Thursday 18th November 1886, reported:
“Upton Lovell cloth mills, for many years carried on by Colonel Everett, have lately been purchased by Mr. Walker of Trowbridge, and will shortly be restarted.”
Friday 6th February 1874
From The Western Gazette, issue dated Friday 6th February 1874:
Advance Of Wages At Upton Lovell Cloth Mill
Last week the weavers in the employ of Messrs. J. & H. Hewett, woollen cloth manufacturers, Upton Lovell Mills, applied for an advance of wages, which was acceded to by their employers, to the satisfaction of all.
