Shoddy heap: a material history between waste and manufacture

Abstract

This essay uses a present-day mountain of textile waste known as ‘shoddy’ as an entry point into the history and ramifications of the development of wool recycling technology in West Yorkshire, England. It is argued that this entity, produced since the early nineteenth century by means of the collection, shredding, and re-spinning of old and discarded wool rags, emerged as both technological innovation and raw material. Its history, defined in part by its precarious position at the nexus of waste and manufacture, is that of a reconfiguration of technology with simultaneously ethical, political, and environmental dimensions.

Keywords:

• recycling and reuse
• waste
• textiles
• secondhand clothing
• shoddy
• Heavy Woollen District
• UK

Acknowledgements

I extend my thanks to Malcolm Haigh, John Martin, Alistair Longbottom, Simon Jackson, and Ben Mantyla for their firsthand insights into the history and meaning of shoddy, and to the staff and curators at the American Textile History Museum, the Kirklees Archive, and the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds for their generous assistance. I have also gained much from feedback on this project as presented in 2014 at the Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and NYU, and in 2015 at the University of California at Santa Cruz. With especial thanks to the anonymous reviewers, Carl Zimring, Camilla Schofield, Jason Sanford, and Jennifer Tucker, and the employees of FeltTec, Batley, UK.

Notes

1. Sources, both historical and contemporary (the latter being interview subjects in modern-day West Yorkshire) disagree on the etymology of the word shoddy, along with that of shoddy’s finer ground cousin, known as mungo. Some have said it dervies from an Arabic word meaning to shed, or reuse, whereas others posit origins in the word ‘shod.’ Interview by author with Alistair Longbottom, Greenhill Mills, Batley, November 1, 2012, and Interview by author with Malcolm Haigh, Batley, September 1, 2011; see also Jubb, A History of the Shoddy Trade, 31; Megraw, Textiles and the Origin of Their Names; and “The Woollen and Worsted Trade of Great Britain.”

2. Berg, “Markets, Trade, and European Markets;” also “The Woollen and Worsted Trade of Great Britain.”

3. Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 41–5.

4. Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 102–5. On the woolen and worsted industries modern emergence and dominance in the period, see Jenkins and Pontung, British Wool Textile Industry; see also “The Western Wool Textile Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” in Jenkins ed., The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, 761–79.

5. Woolen and worsted refer to two different types of yarn, and by extension the fabrics woven with them. Woolen yarn (spun from carded wool) is relatively loose and tends to be used for making knits such as sweaters and scarves. Worsted yarn (spun from combed wool) is tighter and stronger; it tends to be used for tailored garments such as coats, suits, skirts and blazers. Shoddy could be used in the production of either kind of yarn.

6. Morrell, “Wissenschaft in Worstedopolis: Public Science in Bradford, 1800–1850.”

7. Before the mind-nineteenth century, cotton and linen rag paper was generally produced sheet by sheet, using rag pulp created in small water-powered mills. This preceded what is generally considered to be the “modern” or “industrial” era of paper manufacture marked by a transformation from rag to pulp-based manufacture for paper, with rags increasingly reserved for banknotes. See Andrews, Rags: Being an Explanation of Why They are used in Making Paper and Reynard, “Unreliable Mills.” On the transition in the context of industrialization, see Magee, Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry and McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 113; in the context of recycling more generally, MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered, 30.

8. Dana, A Muck Manual for Farmers, 142–3.

9. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. These practices predated the Medieval and Renaissance periods, as described by Wild, “The Romans in the West: 600 BC–AD 400,” 93.

10. On making do, Strasser, Waste and Want, 72–3. The concept of “bricolage,” introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss (in his 1962 La Pensée sauvage), is employed in the service of attempts to refocus attention in the history of technology on practices of use, repair and recycling. See for example, Männistö-Funk, “The Crossroads of Technology and Tradition,” 756. On the turn towards use, repair and innovation more generally in the history of technology, see Edgerton, Shock of the Old.

11. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 247–55. Also, Alternative Exchanges.

12. On the idea of waste in nineteenth-century England, see Cooper, “Modernity and the Politics of Waste” and Scanlan, On Garbage.

13. Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital; also Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries. And on the more general economic and political conditions in the period, see Griffin, A Short History of the Industrial, 86–104.

14. McCulloch, A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation, 1437.

15. On the development of shoddy, and for evidence of the mythology surrounding its development, see, for example, “The Woollen and Worsted Trade of Great Britain,” 57; “Yorkshire,” Westminster Review; also Jenkins and Pontung, British Wool Textile Industry, 3.

16. The details of the (shoddy origin) story of Benjamin Law were relayed to me in multiple interviews by residents of West Yorkshire Riding, but with most clarity by local historian Malcolm Haigh. Interview by author with Malcolm Haigh, Batley, on May 31, 2011 and on September 1, 2011. It is also recounted in Haigh’s book, The History of Batley.

17. Old wool had, for centuries, been put onto fields at the year’s end; during the winter the action of wind, rain and snow, would cause nitrogen to leach the wool into the soil. Dana, A Muck Manual, for Farmers; also Winter, Secure from Rash Assault, 40–61.

18. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial Revolution, 201–2.

19. In articulating things in this way, I am both drawing from and contributing to the recent work on issues of repair, retrofitting and recycling. David Edgerton laid out some of the stakes involved in their pursuit in terms of the history of technology more generally in “From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic Theses on the Historiography of Technology.” Recent monographs pointing this focus on specific objects and industries include Jørgensen, Making a Green Machine, and Zimring, “The Complex Environmental Legacy of the Automobile Shredder,” and Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America.

20. Burrows, History of the Rag Trade; also, Interview by author with Alistair Longbottom, Greenhill Mills, Batley, November 1, 2012.

21. In this sense, the shoddy industry was the creator of new kinds of jobs. Here it might be argued that the industry differed from the more established textile industries, those whose transition to the putting out and factory system triggered the widely publicized Luddite machine thrashing protests in the early 1810s. In 1860, of the 600 people in Batley estimated to be employed by the dozens of shoddy firms in the region, 80 worked as rag grinders. But a far greater number – an estimated 500 people – were “pickers” – female rag sorters, overseen by foremen. For the causes of these protests, and an astute analysis of the implication thereof, see Bailey, The Luddite Rebellion; employment numbers from Jubb, A History of the Shoddy Trade. On the larger context of Luddism, including in Batley and Dewsbury, refer to E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 474–5, 546–50.

22. Jubb, A History of the Shoddy Trade, 20.

23. Burrows, A History of the Rag Trade, 1; Radcliffe, Woollen and Worsted Yarn Manufacture, 63–5.

24. The majority of the rags processed in the shoddy towns of West Yorkshire in the first half of the nineteenth century came from Germany and Holland and – closer to home – Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere in England. Specific numbers can be found in Bischoff, A Comprehensive History, 179–80, further fleshed out in “Woollen Rags: An account of the number of bags of woollen rags imported from January 1818 to January 1822” (April 24, 1822) and “An account of the quantity of woollen rags imported yearly since 1828; and, so far as can be stated, its proportional application to manufacture and agriculture” (PP, House of Commons and Command, v. 52). See also Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial Revolution, 195.

25. See Ginsburg, “Rags to Riches: The Second-Hand Clothes Trade, 1700–1978,” Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England” and Lemire, “Shifting Currency;” also Shell, “A Global History of Secondhand Clothing.” On the development of markets for a range of secondhand consumer goods in Western Europe see the excellent collection edited by Stobart and van Damme, Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900. Another valuable collection is Fontaine, ed. Alternative Exchanges: Secondhand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present. For the British context, Lambert, “Cast-off Wearing Apparell.”

26. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 369. See also Scanlan, “In Deadly Time: The Lasting on of Waste in Mayhew’s London.” On the larger context of waste in relation to the emergence of modernity, see Scanlan’s On Garbage, especially the first chapter.

27. Jubb, A History of the Shoddy Trade.

28. “The Batley Rag and Shoddy Sales,” 37.

29. “Yorkshire,” 191.

30. “Devil’s Dust,” Chambers, 103.

31. The focus of such sentiments on rag grinding machinery in particular, is connected to the embodied and deeply personal nature of clothing, over and above any organic connotations of raw wool. (Shell, “Textile Skin.”)

32. For an especially resonant literary manifestation, see Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, esp. Chapter 5 of Book 1 and Chapter 6 of Book 3. Leo Marx productively situates Carlyle’s work more generally in the context of an emerging philosophy of the machine in Machine in the Garden, 161–72, 286.

33. C. Knick Harley, “Trade: Discovery, Mercantilism and Technology,” 176–90.

34. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 24 February 1842. (Alternate form: Parliamentary Debates 60, cc.1018–82. 1065; or Fifth Day/Corn Laws, Mr. Villier’s Motion, Total Repeal, Adjourned Debate.)

35. Transcript continues: “They now put scarcely any wool into their yarn, only just as much as will keep the devil’s dust together. The rags, as you know, are collected from the most filthy holes in London and Dublin, and are brought from the most unhealthy regions, infected by the plague and every epidemic, and of course, they are full of deadly poison.”

36. “Devil’s Dust,” Spectator, 16; and Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances (2nd edition), 26.

37. Parliamentary Debates 60, cc.1018–82. 1066. On Ferrand’s explosive use of rhetoric during his tenure in the House of Commons, see Great Industries of Britain, 275–6.

38. Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was published as a critique of the industrial revolution from the perspective of workers, written by the son of a wealthy textile industrialist between late September 1844 and March 1845. The author’s focus on evaluating the state of society through the clothing worn by the population was surely influenced by his own experience as a textile industrialist and heir himself. First published in German in 1845, and translated into English in 1885 for authorized English-language publication in 1887, The Condition of the Working Class was finally published in London 1891.

39. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class, 66. The passage continues, “… But among very large numbers, especially among the Irish, the prevailing clothing consists of perfect rags often beyond all mending, or so patched that the original color can no longer be detected. Yet the English and Anglo-Irish go on patching, and have carried this art to a remarkable pitch, putting wool or bagging on fustian, or the reverse – it’s all the same to them … Ordinarily the rags of the shirt protrude through the rents in the coat or trousers. They wear, as Thomas Carlyle says, ‘a suit of tatters, the getting on or off which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar.” (Engels, 66.)

40. Engels, 66–7.

41. Jubb, A History of the Shoddy Trade, 22.

42. Jubb, A History of the Shoddy Trade, 23–4.

43. See Cooper, “Peter Lund Simmonds and the Political Ecology of Waste Utilization in Victorian Britain.”

44. Peter Lund Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances: or, Hints for Enterprise in Neglected Fields. The second edition, completely rewritten, appeared eleven years later under the title Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances: A Synopsis of Progress Made in their Economic Utilization During the last Quarter of a Century At Home and Abroad. Simmonds was so inspired by shoddy, among other waste products, that he lobbied for, and successfully helped to establish standalone exhibitions on the subject.

45. Head, A Home Tour, 141–52.

46. Head, A Home Tour, 150.

47. Black and Black, Black’s Picturesque Guide to Yorkshire: with Map of the Country and Numerous Plans and Views, 346.

48. This created a situation, exemplified by the discourse surrounding the shoddy temple, in which the working class brushed elbows with the mercantile elite. Given this new mode of potential interaction, a man that heretofore would have had little hope of advancement might now find himself impressing his employers and other higher ups as worthy of consideration for promotion. Interview by author with Malcolm Haigh, Batley, September 1, 2011.

49. “Devil’s Dust,” Chambers, 104. For the larger literary context in which shoddy became romanticized in this period, see John A. Erskine Stuart, The Literary Shrines of Yorkshire, 30, 74.

50. Jubb, A History of the Shoddy Trade, 24.

51. On the scandal in government contracting during the Civil War, see, for example, archival materials such as “Letter from Isaac Comstack to the Van Wyck Committee Regarding Shoddy Blankets. February 2, 1861” (NA RU 223 Committee Papers of the Select Committee on Government Contracts, 1861–1863). On its simultaneously ethnic and economic dimensions, Bunker and Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism and the Civil War,” and more generally, Wilson, Business of Civil War, 179. Popular expressions of the new awareness of shoddy included popular songs such as “Last days of Shoddy” and “Shoddy on the Brain” and novels such as Henry Morford’s The Days of Shoddy. At the time, Northern textile factories were simultaneously using shoddy for the production of Union uniforms, and clothing for slaves on the southern plantations. (Myron Stachiw, “For the Sake of Art and Commerce.”)

52. For an overview, see John A. E. Stuart, “Rags and their Products in Relation to Health.” On the ambiguity surrounding what was then and is now meant by terms such as “woolsorters’ disease” and “shoddy fever” in the late nineteenth century, see Metcalfe, “The History of Woolsorters’ Disease.”

53. See “The Labeling Bills in Congress,” as well as The Shoddy Industry vs. The Virgin Wool Industry and “Protecting the Wool Standard: Truth in Fabric.” See also Jenkins and Malin, “European Competition in Woollen and Cloth.”

54. West Yorkshire is one of those places where shoddy still carries weight – both nominal and material, others including various cities in India, where (mostly synthetic) shoddy production has recently boomed. On the Indian case, see the excellent monograph by Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing.

55. Interview by author with Alistair Longbottom, Greenhill Mills, Batley, November 1, 2012.