Robin Longbottom examines how a village played a key role in supporting the textile industry

FOR 150 years, the village of Oakworth was a centre for the manufacture of shuttles for the textile industry.

A shuttle is a 'boat'-shaped piece of wood designed to carry thread through the warp on a loom in the manufacture of cloth.

It held a bobbin of thread, known as a pirn, and originally the weaver threw it from one hand to the other – however, this limited the width of the cloth to the reach of his arms. To make a broader cloth, two weavers were required to stand at either side of the loom and throw the shuttle from one to the other.

In 1733 John Kay, a Lancashire man, invented the flying shuttle which enabled a weaver of broad cloth to sit centrally to the loom and send the shuttle automatically through the warp from a box at each side. The shuttle was propelled by yanking on a length of string, known as a picking band – this was attached to a mechanism at each box that struck the shuttle with sufficient force to fire it from one side to the other and then back. Each time a shuttle passed through the warp was known as a pick; the flying shuttle dramatically increased the number of picks and so sped up the production of cloth.

After the introduction of the power loom there was a great surge in demand for shuttles. Individual shuttle makers are recorded in Keighley as early as 1803 but with full mechanisation a small number of specialist firms began to produce them in large numbers. One such firm was Thomas Burwin & Sons of Lidget in Oakworth. Thomas Burwin had begun his working life as a handloom weaver and in the early 1830s had put his eldest son, Benjamin, into the trade of shuttle making. In the 1840s he went into partnership with his son and by 1851 the company was employing several men and boys, including Thomas' other two sons, Thomas and John. As the business expanded, they also turned to making pickers, also known as picking sticks. Pickers were lengths of turned wood, ash or American hickory, up to three feet long which were part of the mechanism that struck the shuttle to fire it through the warp.

Shuttles were first turned on a lathe, but then required a considerable amount of hand finishing before they were complete. Although made of wood, there were several metal parts including two iron end cones and a hinged spindle to hold the pirn. The cones and spindles were made by specialist smiths, spindle forgers, many of whom worked out of small workshops in Keighley. Each shuttle also had two white glazed china eyelets to protect the yarn as it left the shuttle with each pick. By 1880 Thomas Burwin & Sons was employing 19 men and boys and the factory had been extended to accommodate them. The lathes and other machinery were powered by a small steam engine, but the work was not without its dangers – a 16-year-old apprentice was killed when an emery wheel burst.

After the turn of the century the company was managed by Thomas Burwin's grandsons, Seth and David Burwin. When the business closed at the end of the First World War one of its employees, John Edwin Fearnside, set up a new shuttle-making factory at Park Works in Clough Lane, Oakworth. The business eventually passed to his son, Cecil, who continued the tradition of shuttle making in the village into the early 1980s. Fearnside eventually sold out to the Scandura Group in Cleckheaton and when the Oakworth factory closed, only specialist weavers were still using shuttles – which were being made from polyethylene.

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