A fortune spun from wool
In the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution gathered pace, the population of Bradford grew from 13,000 to over 100,000.There, in 1833, a young man named Titus Salt took over a textile company set up by his father.The company prospered, and Titus proved to be a shrewd and energetic entrepreneur.
One day he noticed 300 bales of wool gathering dust in a Liverpool warehouse.It was alpaca wool from Peru and nobody had any use for it, so Salt took a sample and, in great secrecy, experimented with the fibres, producing a type of worsted cloth.He bought the bales up cheap, and the cloth he manufactured took Victorian high fashion by storm.His fortune was made, and Titus Salt became the biggest employer in Bradford.
The satanic mills
With over 200 factory chimneys belching smoke, Bradford was at this time the most polluted town in England. Sewage was dumped into the river where people obtained their drinking water and there were regular outbreaks of cholera and typhoid.Only 30% of working class children born to textile workers reached the age of fifteen, and average life expectancy was just over eighteen years.
Titus Salt was one of the few employers in the town who showed much concern, and in 1842 he installed in all his factories a new type of smoke burner which dramatically reduced pollution. In 1848 he became mayor of Bradford and tried to persuade the council to pass a bye-law that would force all mills in the town to use the new smoke burners, but he was met with determined opposition: the other mill-owners simply refused to admit any connection between the smoke from their chimneys and the deaths of the children.
In disgust, Salt decided to move out of Bradford.In 1850 he announced plans to build a new industrial community three miles outside Bradford in healthy countryside on the banks of the River Aire. There were good commercial reasons for this: he would have an improved water supply, he would be able to install modern machinery, and would have a healthier and therefore more productive workforce.
Saltaire
Clearly lacking in modesty, Titus Salt named his new village Saltaire, and it took twenty years to build. At the centre of the village was the mill, which contained the largest room in the Western world at the time.(At one point Salt planned to buy part of the Crystal Palace for a weaving shed, but it was not robust enough to withstand the vibrations of the engines.)At the grand opening of the mill in 1853, 3,500 guests ate two tons of meat, half a ton of potatoes, 320 plum puddings and 100 jellies.Salt’s mill was designed in neo-classical style, inspired by the renaissance, and symbolising the triumph of man, a style much favoured by the self-made millionaires of the day (though for those with inherited wealth like John Ruskin this style represented vanity and self-glorification and they preferred designs based on medieval ‘Gothic’ architecture).
Noise in the factory was reduced by placing the shafting which drove the machinery under the floor. Large flues removed dust and dirt, and of course the mill chimney was fitted with the latest smoke burners to reduce pollution.
At first, the 3,500 workers had to travel from their homes in Bradford to work in Saltaire. However, during the next few years, 850 houses were built. There were semi-detached houses for the managers, while ordinary workman had cottages with a living room, scullery and three bedrooms, far superior to those available to working people elsewhere.Fresh water was piped into each home from Saltaire's own reservoir, and gas was laid on to provide lighting and heating. Unlike the people of Bradford, every family in Saltaire had its own outside lavatory.
To encourage people to keep themselves clean, Salt also built public baths and wash-houses. Saltaire had its own church, school, hospital, library and a variety of shops.Forty-five almshouses were provided rent free with a pension of ten shillings a week to retired persons of ‘good moral character’.
Salt decreed that there would be no public house, no pawn shop and no police station.A notice at the entrance of the village said ‘Abandon beer all ye who enter here,’ although in 1867 an off-licence was allowed in the village.The mill’s security officer had a house on a street corner with a glass windowed tower on the roof so that, it was said, he could observe the activities of the villagers.
In 1870 a club and institute were opened, and Salt declared to the villagers:
It is intended to supply the advantages of a public house without its evils; it will be a place to which you can resort for conversation, business, recreation and refreshment, as well as for education – elementary, technical and scientific.In the belief that ‘It is gude to be merrie and wise’ provision is made for innocent and intelligent recreation.
Salt provided a park, and altered the course of the river Aire to improve the view and allow boating, but smoking, gambling and swearing were banned.Numerous societies were established under Salt’s patronage, the most popular being the Horticultural, Pig, Dog, Poultry and Pigeon Society.
Dickens visited in 1857 and reported that ‘all looked prosperous and happy.’In 1874 Practical Magazine described the town as ‘a nation in miniature, a little kingdom within a kingdom’.
Salt was a strong advocate of profit sharing, although unable to carry his partners on this point.But he was certainly no soft touch; he employed child labour, and opposed legislation raising from eight to ten the age at which children could be employed in factories as ‘half-timers’.He was not sympathetic to trade unions and in 1876 unrest in his mill was met with a lock-out of all workers.
Salt boasted that he never read a book.He was a strong willed character, indeed idiosyncratic: ‘His fancy for chequered waistcoats, his fondness for growing pineapples and bananas at home, and his strange partiality for crows, denoted a curious, Alice in Wonderland side to his nature.’[1]
A friend to the Chartists
Salt supported adult suffrage and in 1835 he was a founder of the Bradford Reform Association.He publicly supported the chartists and condemned the 1832 Reform Act with which the government attempted to buy off chartist demands for universal suffrage.But, disturbed by the growth of the ‘physical force’ chartists led by radicals such as Feargus O’Connor , Salt helped establish the United Reform Society, an attempt to unite middle- and working-class reformers.
Although he had been an extremely rich man, when Salt died in 1876 his fortune was gone. His family was horrified to discover that during his life he had given away over £500,000 to good causes.
Sources
Ian Campbell Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs, 1987.
Jim Greenhalf, Salt and Silver: a story of hope, 1998.
[1] Jim Greenhalf, Salt and Silver: a story of hope, 1998, p 18.
