HISTORY 1

Index
before Salt's birth
1803
1813
1823
1833
1843
1853
Appeal
Page Links

Salt as Yorkshire Patriarch

"Bradford......is, proverbally, one of the dirtiest, and worst regulated towns in the West Riding."
A Letter to the Inhabitants of Bradford, on the subject of the Lighting,Watching and Paving Act, written by one of their townsmen. Anonymous (possibly the Rev Nicholas Heineken 1763 - 1840, Minister of the Unitarian Chapel, Bradford) 1825

In 1799 Robert Brown, a farmer from the Lothians, was commissioned by the Board of Agriculture, an important quango concerned with agricultural improvement, to survey the West Riding of Yorkshire. He included in his report the following observations, by another hand on the advantages of those engaged in the wool trade living in the country. There were nine of these:
"1st. They enjoy a more uncontaminated air, which, as the employment of the clothiers is not the most cleanly, will conduce to their health"
Observations 2 to 7 can be summed up as cheaper and easier access to fuel,, the sun (for drying and bleaching cloth) low-rent accomodation and pasturage for a horse as transport for goods.
"8thly" Workers occupying a farm are able to keep a cow or a pig and poultry. They also have an advantage for the political economy of the country in that they have time to reclaim 'waste land' which it would not be to the advantage of regular farmers to do. Finally they learn agricultural skills which may be called upon at the time of harvest when famers in arable areas need more hands.
"Lastly, By living in the country there is less temptation to vice; and by occupying a small parcel of land, a life of labour is diversified, and consequently relieved."
In 1818 William Marshall published this extract in the Review and Abstract of the County Reports to the Board of Agriculture at which point he added this comment:
These sensible remarks, after what has been observed of the manufactures of Lancashire, naturally give rise to a comparison between the cotton and the woolen manufactures; in which the latter appears with many and high advantages...........It is painful to relate however that many of the advantages, above enumerated are now decreasing. Invention has done too much. Machinery is drawing the spinners of wool, as of cotton into the pestilential lazarets of manufacturers."
By the 1850s the market had dealt with this connected set of advantages for ever.

c1750 Beginning of the worsted trade in Bradford
1768 Proposal to build canal linking Leeds with the west coast port of Liverpool. Bradford businesmen John Hustler and Abraham Balme promanent in promoting this scheme.
1771 14th May birth of Robert Owen
1774 Opening of Bradford Canal linking the town with the Leeds- Liverpool canal at Windhill near Shipley. The canal basin below the parish church. became the centre of commercial development in Bradford. (Daniel Salt, Titus Salt's father, was to open his Bradford business at Bermondsey beside the canal. in 1822)
1775 Opening of Bradford Piece Hall - a covered market for the selling of 'pieces' of worsted cloth.
1777Completion of section of Leeds-Liverpool Canal from Gargrave near Skipton to Leeds; its main cargoes were coal and limestone from the reef knoll formations near Skipton. This latter cargo is interesting, used for dressing the acidic soils of the Pennines in order to 'sweeten' them it shows the importance of agriculture, rather than industry.Foundation of first Bradford bank
1780 In connection with a lawsuit concerning the Bradford soke mill a local census is held; this shows the population of Bradford and of the townships of Horton, Bowling and Manningham, which would make up the future town, to be 8,525
Birth of Grace Smithies mother of Sir Titus Salt Bart
1781 Birth of Daniel Salt father of Sir Titus Salt,Bart
1786 Robert Owen arrives in Manchester. Over the next few years he proves himself a succesful businessman
1789 US constitution comes into operation. Taking of the Bastille and beginning of the French Revolution
1793 Great Britain declares war on France.Attempt by John Buckley to set up the first steam-powered mill at the West End of Bradford. This being the fashionable area he was warned off in the following terms:

Take notice that if you or any person in connection with you shall presume to erect or build any steam engine for the manufacture of cotton or wool, in a certain field in Horton, near Bradford...called or known by the name of Brick Kiln Field, we....shall, if the same be found a nuisance,seek such reddress as the law will give.......Thomas Atkinson,Nathaniel Aked, John Smith,Isaac Wilson, Thomas Holdgate, Jonas Bower, John Rand, William Whitaker, John Hardy, Hy. William Oates, Mary Laidman, Betty Swaine, Francis Town,J.Lupton, John Aked.

1794 France abolishes monarchy.First spinning machines installed in Bradford by James Garnett at Paper Hall, Barkerend.First combing machine set up in Kirkgate,Bradford . Powered by a horse-gin it was a failure.
1798First mill built at the Holme next to the Bradford Beck a few hundred yards above the town's cornmill. It has a 15 h.p. steam engine. William Murgatroyd, the son of one of the partners later became Mayor of Bradford and built the pseudo-elizabethan mansion of Bankfield near Cottingley Bar

1801Population of Bradford 13,264
1802 Marriage of Daniel Salt, son of Titus Salt, drysalter, of Hunslet, Leeds and Grace Smithies of the Old Manor House Morley, the parents of Sir Titus Salt, Bart
First mill in Bradford destroyed by fire. The mill at the Holme is rebuilt
1803 Failure of the Peace of Amiens, Great Britain declares war on France
. Thompson's Mill built at Silsbridge La. John Rand builds mill at the bottom of the Horton Rd ;in otherwords near the spot where Buckley had failed to build ten years earlier partly because of Rand's opposition.
Against some opposition a Commission is established to clean, pave and light the town of Bradford; this act of Parliament is the first recognition of the changes which were underway.

Return to index

20th September 1803 Birth of the future Sir Titus Salt at the Old Manor House
During the family's residence at Morley the Manor House is licensed for Congregational worship
1805 The Battles of Trafalgar, Ulm and Austerlitz result in the division of the European world between Britain and France
1806Cotton mill built at Gt Horton
1811population of Bradford 16,012
1812 Luddism in West Riding and Nottinghamshire. Assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Percival. Charles Dickens born.
1813 Family moves to Crofton, near Wakefield where Daniel Salt takes on lease of 100 acre farm. The farm house is also licensed as a place of worship

Return to Index

Titus Salt 10 years old
1814 Abdication of Napoleon
1815 Napoleon escapes from Elba. During the 'One Hundred days' he attempts to rally left-wing support to his regime by means of liberal constitutional measures.
18th June 1815 Battle of Waterloo. In defeat Napoleon surrenders himself to the British and is exiled on the South Atlantic island of St Helena
1814 - 1818 Titus Salt receives "a plain commercial education" at Mr Harrison's school, Wakefield.
1815 Rev Patrick Brontë becomes Curate of Thornton where his most most famous children will be born over the next few years
1816Robert Owen Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark at the opening of the Institution for the Formation of Character
Birth of Charlotte Brontë
1818 Marshall's Mill built at Manchester Rd.,Bradford
Birth of Emily Brontë
1819 Reform meeting suppressed by Manchester magistrates - ("Peterloo"). Earl Fitzwilliam forced to resign as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding for allowing a, perfectly constitutional, meeting of Yorkshire electors to protest against the government support for the magistrates' action
1820 Titus Salt, his ambition to be a doctor foiled by his inability to stand the sight of blood, is placed with Mr Jackson of Wakefield to learn woolstapling. Death of George III. Attempted uprising in London(the Cato St Conspiracy).31st March attempted uprising in Huddersfield area.Cliffe Mill Gt Horton built
Rev Patrick Brontë becomes Perpetual Curate of Haworth
Robert Owen Report to the County of Lanark
1821 Population of Bradford 26,309.Cross Lane Mill Gt Horton built. Return to Gold standard
1822 Daniel Salt moves with his family to Bradford "just then entering upon that wonderful career of commercial prosperity which is almost unparallelled in the history of English towns." It was, in other words, the boomtown of the West Riding, its growth based on the Worsted trade. The family's movements tell us something of the changing economy of the area: farming and the woollen trade in decline but the worsted industry, based on steam power and the factory system expanding rapidly
In this year a power loom was set up at Shipley but was carried off by a crowd who attacked the house
Daniel Salt opened a business as a woolstapler in Bermondsey, near the parish church and Titus entered the firm of Messrs. Rouse and son, only established in 1815, to learn all aspects of the trade.In due course he joined his father in the firm of Daniel Salt and son attending woolsales in London and Liverpool and travelling throughout Lincolnshire and Norfolk to purchase their clip from the farmers.
The family joined the congregation of Horton Lane Chapel .where Titus taught in the sunday school. This chapel was important as the centre of what has been called Bradford's 'alternative elite ' the manufacturers and businessmen who led the movement for reform.
Charles Fourier Traitè de l'association Domestique-Agricole in which he proposes the zoning of cities and in his description of a Phalansterie describes such characteric motifs of the modernist movement as internal streets and enclosed bridges linking the upper floors of buildings.

Return to Index

Titus Salt 20 years old
1824 Combination Laws abolished - Trade Unions legal
1825The price of land has has increased most surprisingly in the immediate vicinity of the town within the last few years. It is now impossible to purchase land adjourning the town by the acre; everything is sold by the yard........Thirty years ago Bradford was a very inconsiderable place. little better than a large village and completely surounded by woods so as to be almost entirely concealed. now you have difficulty finding a good tree& what were then fields are now populous streets. Within the last five or six years building ground might be bought in Darley Street for five shillings[25p] a yard. There is now some to sell but the proprietor will not set a price & has refused one guinea[£1.05] a yard; I could have bought the same three years ago for ten shillings[50p]

The Journal of Dr John Simpson of Bradford 31 January 1825

Four important events in the history of Bradford took place in this year. The first was the Bishop Blaize Festival. This celebration of the wooltrade involving both masters and men looked back to the mediaeval guilds after the second,the twenty-two week woolcombers strike, such an event could never again take place . The third was the case of Rawson v Wright heard at York Assizes in which the Lord of the Manor asserted his market rights against a local clergyman who had built a meat market in the town. The final event was the national commercial crisis which took place in December of that year when, following the collapse of the City of London house of Sir Peter Pole and co., 70 banks throughout the country suspended payment. So great was the restriction of the money supply that, according to Huskisson,"we were within twenty-four hours of barter"
Death of Saint-Simon
May1826 Movement against the use of power looms throughout the North of England. In Bradford on 1st May a crowd gathered at Four Lane Ends and marched down the dale and through the town to Horsfalls Mill at North Wing. Over the next few days the attacks on the mill intensified until the military were called in by the magistrates. Two of the crowd were shot dead.and several wounded. Many years later an eyewitness remembered two future mayors of Bradford, William Rand and the 22 year old Titus Salt remonstrating with the crowd and then enlisting as special constables.Cannan'sMill (later known as Cannon Mill,) Gt Horton built
1828 Buonorotti Conspiration pour l'Egalité which in reviving the the Plebian revolutionary tradition of Gracchus Babeuf is credited with being an important source of the European revolutionary tradition
Late 1820s Titus Salt buys Donskoi wool from Russia. Despairing of selling it because of the difficulty of processing the tangled fibres he takes Thompsons Mill, Silsbridge Lane(now Grattan Rd) and begins to spin it himself.. Prospering he has within a few years four other mills in the town centre
Fourier Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire
1830 In the absence of the French Army, busy conquering Algiers, Revolution breaks out in Paris. Charles X overthrown. The throne offered to the Duke of Orleans who becomes Louis Phillippe, King of the French
21st August 1830 Marriage of Titus Salt and Caroline Whitlam at Grimsby
1831 Population of Bradford 43,327

1831 - 1832 The Whig Government's attempt to reform Parliament blocked by the House of Lords. Political upheaval in country, which may have included quite respectable gentlemen planning an insurrection;. reform bill passed by Lords after William IV agrees to create enough peers to force the bill through the threat of this being enough to induce the Tory leader, the Duke of Wellington to ask Tory peers to absent themselves if they could not vote for the measure. In Bradford Daniel Salt, who has chaired reform meetings and allowed his Piccadilly warehouse to be used as a venue, is hailed as the Father of Reform in the town.

Return to Index

Titus Salt 30 years old
1834 Whig government brings in the New Poor Law. Bradford Non-Comformists support national campaign against payment of Church Rates. Alpaca imports amount to5,700lbs. cotton warps introduced into Bradford.
Enfantin Colonisation de l'Algerie

Titus Salt first notices three hundred bales of Alpaca wool at the warehouse of Messrs. Hegans at Liverpool. he experiments with a small sample and, satisfied as to its quality returns to buy the shipment. This story is supiciously like many others concerning Victorian innovators. But Salt undoubtedly became the leading manufacturer of alpaca since, although other manufacturers were involved in the developing trade, Salt's experience with Donskoi wool made him the leading manufacturer of mixed fabrics (a wool weft on a cotton or silk warp) and thus of the most favoured fashion textile. Alpaca imports equalled 199,00lbs
Over the next decade Salt becomes one of the richest men in the West Riding.In time the family moves to the 18th Century mansion at Crownest,Lightcliffe, near Brighouse. He encourages crows to return to the park and stocks the lawns with alpaca.
1835 Alpaca imports 184,400lbs
Black Dyke Mill built at Queen'sHead later Queensbury
1837 Beginning of Bradford Chartism.January: Feargus O'Connor addresses meeting in Peter Bussey's Roebuck Inn. Some time after this a delegation from the Radical Association asked the predominantly middle class Reform Society for help with a petition in favour of Household Suffrage. The Request was denied. September: Henry Vincent addresses Bradford Meeting
1838 The Anglican Church in Bradford attempts to collect the Church Rate. Henry Heap, the long-serving vicar of Bradford is taken ill at the meeting called to discuss the measure and dies shortly afterwards. He is succeeded, as Vicar, by William Scoresby scientist and former Whitby whaling captain.( his father had invented the crow's nest an aid to spotting whales).Scoresby is determined to press the claims of the established anglican church in this predominantly non-conformist town.
The People's Charter published
1839 1,325,500lbs of alpaca wool imported. June rejection of Chartist petition by House of Commons.Public house owner Peter Bussey, Physical Force Chartist organises uprising in Bradford as a part of national movement (the most famous episode was the Newport uprising led by John Frost former mayor of that town.);. Military drilling is reported around Bradford. Bussey loses his nerve and flees to the United States.
1840 Bradford birthrate 31.2 per thousand; deathrate25.7 per thousand; Infant mortality 170 per thousand under one year.
Etienne Cabet Voyage en Icarie - written whilst the author was an anti-Orleanist exile in England during which time he had met Owen
1841Population of Bradford 66,715. Widespread dissenting opposition to the Church Rate. The minute recording the decision to oppose collection is signed by 200 gentlemen including several future mayors. Bradford United Reform Club is formed; Salt is a member together with Robert Milligan, later the first Mayor of Bradford, Henry Forbes the third Mayor and moderate working class reformers.

J.A.Jowitt describes the origin of dissenting opposition:
To understand why religion was such a potent factor in Bradford politics it is important to remember that the Anglican church was the Established Church of the country and therefore Nonconformists laboured under a series of disabilities because of their religion.......For a man such as the Congregationalist Titus Salt this must have been particularly galling. Almost certainly a millionaire by the early 1840s, he was treated as a second class citizen because of his religious convictions and like a common criminal when he refused to pay his Church Rates.
J.A.Jowitt Introduction to Mechanization and Misery The Bradford Woolcombers Report of 1845.(1991)

Bradford magistrates decide to erect barracks at Bradford Moor overlooking the town on the Leeds side. It houses a troop of cavalry and several companies of infantry.
Foundation of Brook Farm, West Roxbury,Mass
1842 Titus Salt elected High Constable of the Manor of Bradford a sign of the power of the organised opposition, and of his standing in the movement Following wage reductions (25% at Ashton) a General Strike spreads throughout North of England. 18th August Bradford Chartists resolve to support the movement.
Edwin Chadwick's Poor Law Commissioners' report on Sanitary Conditions
1843 Revolutionary German poet Georg Weerth moves to Bradford.. Later he describes his journey through fields from Brighouse in Calderdale. "Suddenly, on a bright day, it became evening". Later Weerth becomes close to John Jackson, Chartist of Horton Township and reproduces his memoirs of the English Radicals and of early Chartism in MSS intended for the German Press but not published until the 1950s.
1st March trial of Feargus O'Connor and 58 others opens at the Shire Hall, Lancaster Castle. The charge states that:

they unlawfully did conspire confederate and agree together, by causing to be brought and gathered together divers unlawful, tumultuous and riotous assemblies of seditious and evil-disposed persons, in various parts of this realm, and by forcing and compelling divers of Her Majesty's peaceable subjects, being then employed in their respective trades, manufactures, and occupations, to desist and depart from their respective employments and work, and by divers seditious and inflamatory speeches, libels, placards and other publications, to create alarm, discontent and confusion, with intent thereby unlawfully to effect and bring about a change in the laws and constitution of this realm, against the peace of our said Lady the Queen, her Crown and Dignity.

One speech for the defence, that of Richard Pilling of Stockport, is eloquent not only in its expostion of the conditions under which people lived and worked but also in showing the political views common in the working class. Whatever it may have been others, it has been a wage question with me and I do say that if Mr O'Connor has made it a Chartist question, he has done wonders to make it extend through England,Ireland and Scotland . But it was always a wage question and a Ten Hours Bill with me.
Saying that he was 43 but had been mistaken for sixty he records that when he started work as a handloom weaver at the age of 10 he had earned 16/-(0.80GBP) per week. After twenty years at the trade he was compelled by necessity to go to the factory where he earned 6/6d(0.32½ GBP).
He explained to the jury the significance of a wage reduction of only one penny per 'cut' (he was working on piece rates).His wage at the time amounted to £1 11s 3d( just over 1.56GBP)per week therefore a reduction of 1d amounted to a cut of 2/6(0.12½ GBP)per week this was one eighth of the food budget for himself, his wife and three children. Some people think a penny is a small reduction, but it amounts to five weeks wages in the course of a year.
Pilling concluded: And now gentlemen of the Jury you have the case before you; The masters conspired to kill me; and I combined to keep myself alive.
Pilling was among those acquitted. (Link to documents on the physical effects of factory work.)
13 April Bradford poet and employee of Salt's John Nicholson falls, drunk, from stepping stones across River Aire beside Dixons Mill on the future site of Saltaire. He reaches the bank but dies before being found.

Return to Index

Titus Salt 40 years old
28th December Death of Daniel Salt aged 62. He is buried in the graveyard at Salem Chapel, Manor Row, Bradford
1844 Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby published. The character of Mr Millbank represents an ideal of service - the manufacturer who takes on the responsibilties formerly excercised by the aristocracy. He builds a village for his workforce with a church, clerical residence schoolhouse and institute.

1845
In the course of last week I have visited some of the most filthy and wretched abodes that the mind of man can conceive, in which misery of the lowest description was personified. In a portion of this town called the Leys,there are scores of wretched hovels, unfurnished and unventilated, damp, filthy in the extreme, and surrounded by stagnant pools, human excrement and every thing offensive and disgusting to 'sight and smell'. No sewers,no drainage, no ventlation. Nothing to be seen but squalid wretchedness on every side, and the features of the inmates show a perfect and unmistakeable index of their condition: all this is to be seen in the centre of this of this wealthy emporium of the worsted trade
Bradford Observer 16th October 1845

Samuel Cunliffe Lister,with help of G.E.Donnisthorpe, produces first mechanical combing machine. .This development means that all processes in the worsted trade are now mechanized
Lister proceeds to buy up all patents involved
Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Labouring Classes founded
Eugene Sue's Le Juif Errant features the character of M.Hardy who builds a communal building with co-operative shops for his workforce
Disraeli's Sybil or the Two Nations - the subtitle is still a potent phrase in British politics.Although not set in Airedale the author's visits to William Busfeild Ferrand at Bingley are somewhere in the background. In the novel Mr Trafford the manufacturer builds a village for his workforce with an emphasis on hygene and moral welfare.
1846 Peel abolishes protectionist Corn Laws. The resulting split in the Tory Party begins the last act of the realignment of British Politics which had begun at the after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Although the Tories form governments over the next thirteen years they do so as a minoroity in the house of Commons.Eventually, in 1859, Peelite Tories, Old Whigs and Radicals join together to bring down Lord Derby's government and doing so they create theLiberal Party.( the Tories are out of office for a generation)

If the lower orders have not places where they can engage in sport and keep their minds engaged in matters of that kind, it is the very thing to drive them to Chartism - Report of the Health of Towns Commission

The Richardsons build a village for their workforce at Bessbrook,near Newry
Phalanstery at Brook Farm destroyed by fire
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë publish their poetry
1847 Incorporation of Bradford. Robert Milligan elected the first Mayor. Titus Salt becomes Alderman and Magistrate; shortly afterwards he is appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of the West Riding.
May Allons en Icarie - the inspiring title of Cabet's manifesto.
December Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.....Constant revolutionising of production, uninterupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
December Cabet announces purchase of a site in Texas for his communal experiment

1848 3rd February advance guard of 69 Icarians leave for Texas
22 February Revolution in Paris Louis Phillipe,King of the French, compelled to abdicate.Revolutions throughout Europe.Cabet decides to remain in France
Following the rejection of the Chartist petition to Parliament armed drilling began in Bradford. Adelaide St, Manchester Rd becomes a 'no go area' for the police; these serious preparations for a rising were eventually suppressed by the military. The uprising itself is aborted in August when trades union leader George White is arrested. Titus Salt becomes the second Mayor of Bradford. he attempts both the elimination of smoke pollution and moral regeneration.
400 Icarians travel to Texas during the year. Cabet joins them in December and finding the Texas land unsuitable purchases land from the Mormons at Nauvoo, Illinois
1849 Titus Salt takes his workforce to Malham: (?the first works outing)
Icarians move to Nauvoo
The Cholera in Bradford; by October 420 deaths had occurred in the borough.

"....that dreadful scourge brought many facts before the Council to demonstrate the insufficiency of its powers in dealing with the sanitary condition of the town. The scourge in question was most destructive of life" in districts which "abounded with places presenting unmistakable evidences of the violation of the laws of health and common decency, and were the certain and prolific sources of pestilence. Notwithstanding this, the Council found their endeavours towards improvement retarded on all sides: on the one hand by the indisposition of private owners to effect any improvement" not forced on them by law;" and again, by the slow and tortuous process of the law"
William Cudworth Historical Notes on theBradford Corporation 1881
Edward Akroyd builds the small industrial village of Copley near Halifax incorporating modern sanitary arrangements, a school, a library and a church.
November Salt succeeded as mayor by Henry Forbes(Milligan's partner)

1850 Salt commissions architectural firm of Lockwood and Mawson to design his works and village at Shipley(the engineering being designed by William Fairburn - later Sir William).
The name Saltaire - a conflation of Salt and the River Aire is adopted.
Around this time Salt begins using an heraldic crest with the modest motto QUID NON DEO JUVANTE - What not with God willing
1851Population of Bradford 103,778At the Great Exhibition in London it is noted that of the worsted department: The most remarkable exhibition....is that referring to alpaca and mohair goods, or mixtures of these with cotton or silk; the trade in which has sprung up within a comparatively short period, and progressed with a rapidity and success unparallelled in the history of manufactures. One town alone, Bradford,has risen from the obscurity of a mere manufacturing village to the position of one of the busiest and wealthiest communities in the country yet its operations in trade are almost entirely confined to(this) class of goods Quoted in Cudworth
Near the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park London a group of model working class dwellings is erected.
Lord Shaftesbury's Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act and Common Lodging Houses Act passed by Parliament
December 1851 Presidential coup d'etat in France. In the following year Louis Napoleon declares himself the Emperor Napoleon III.
1852Titus Salt resigns as alderman. Charles Dickens writimg in his own Household Words satirizes Titus Salt and the discovery of Alpaca - "the Great Yorkshire Llama".
1853 S.C.Lister having achieved a stranglehold on the industry begins to sell combing machines at 600% mark-up.However Titus Salt, in partnership with Edward Akroyd of Halifax, outmanoeuvres him. They approach the very last unbought-up patent-holder and negotiate purchase for a large sum. Without having paid they then approach Lister offering to sell to him in return for a license to make combing machines for their own use. Lister has no choice. He gives them the licence and then has to pay the Patent-holder the large sum which they had agreed..
Return to Index

Titus Salt 50 years old
20th September 1853 Saltaire mill is opened on Titus Salt's fiftieth birthday
The Mill represented the bleeding edge technology of its time integrating all the processes of the trade from woolcombing through spinning to dispatch under one roof. This development had been made possible by the progressive mechanisation of worsted manufacture over the previous fifty years and by the huge accumulation of capital which resulted from them and from Britain's domination of world trade. Around the mill Salt built housing for his workers incorporating utilities and sanitary services. Over the following decades he added a church, a hospital, almshouses, a school, a park and the Saltaire Institute containing a library, meeting rooms and a gymnasium

Return to top

History 2 (1853 - 1876)

This page is incomplete it will improve over the coming period with the addition of references and more hyperlinks.

If the various historians who have contributed to this page feel ill done by there is no need - your work will be acknowledged as the page develops; some of the existing references can be deduced by consulting the Bibliography

Do you have any Saltaire Ephemera?

The Saltaire Village Society is always looking for printed material related to the village. They are particularly interested in photographs and other images of the Washhouse.If you think that you any items of interest then please contact the Society directly via:

Clive Woods at Falcon Books

13/13a Victoria Rd, Saltaire BRADFORD BD18 3LQ
West Yorkshire, UK

Phone: 01274 584275 (international: +44 1274 584275)

Wednesday - Sunday 13.00 - 17.00
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
or by e-mail via the webmaster at this site

dbryant@clara.net

Return to index

Return to Start of Text

Page Links
History 2 (1853 - 1876)

Back to main page

* Getting to Saltaire* Pictures of Saltaire * Books at Saltaire* Tourist information
*Books about Saltaire* The Marble Likeness of their Liberal Master *Links
* a walk along Albert Terrace *
Northern Tourist Links(Bradford)