From Rags To Riches, It's A Re-Cycling Tale (11 October 1974)

There is a good deal of talk nowadays about the need for a greater re-cycling of industrial and domestic “waste.”  Quite rightly, it is pointed out that much material is now being dumped which, with a little ingenuity, could be reclaimed for further use.

There is one material, however, which has been intensively re-cycled for 120 years or more, sometimes three or four times over.  That material is wool.

Wool is, of course, the foundation of the wool textile trade.  But just as significantly, it is also the foundation of the less well known “shoddy” or “mungo” trade.

The two trades are so interwoven as to be almost but not quite, indivisible.  You may be startled at the idea of wearing shoddy.  The truth is, however, that unless your suit is made wholly of synthetic fibre or unless you have paid the very earth for a first-class worsted, you are sure to be wearing a certain amount of shoddy all the time and have been doing so all your life.  But you need not worry – it takes an expert to tell the difference in the higher grades.

First-time wool

A textile relative tells me:  “You could say that if the Duke of So-and-so buys three first-class suits in Savile Row he has really bought five.  The three will be of first –time wool.

“But when eventually the cotton warp is carbonised off the woollen weft and the wool pulled down for further use there will be enough of it for two more suits of practically the same quality and possibly of greater strength.”

An enormous amount of expertise goes into the wool textile trade.  Different breeds of sheep and other wool-bearing animals yield very different qualities of raw material.  The wool of a single animal also varies.  An effect of this is that a cloth of high-grade shoddy can be superior to a cloth of low-grade first-time wool.

Birthplace

Originally, the wool textile trade was distributed far and wide over the country in the form of hand-loom weaving.  (Incidentally I myself was born in what had once been a hand-loom chamber.)  The invention of steam power and the further inventions of mechanised spinning and weaving changed all that.

Mass production was now a possibility.  Requirements were good supplies of running water and coal.  These existed side by side among the Pennine foot-hills of the West Riding, together with a considerably supply of raw material grazing all around.  An industry was thus born which for scores of years meant more to the country’s economy and export trade than the car industry does today.

New towns

New towns and boroughs sprung up. Labour was attracted.  Wool had to be sought from as far away as Australia to meet the ever-increasing export demand.

About the middle of the last century a few Yorkshiremen, true to their nature of always hating to see good stuff going to waste, realised that pure wool fibre would still be pure wool fibre after a piece of cloth had been discarded as worn out.  No-one knows who were those men of genius, but by their invention of carbonising and rag-pulling machines they created a second revolution almost rivalling that of the first.

By a careful blending of new and used wool a durable cloth or blanket could be manufactured at nearly half the price.  What was (and still is) produced was a greyish fluff, which could never be dyed really white, but which in all other respects was as spinnable and weavable as a tuft of wool that clings to a hawthorn hedge straight from a sheep’s back.  It just weighed a little more when made up, and on it the boroughs of what is called the Heavy Woollen District were founded.

The rug merchants and shoddy manufacturers were soon doing a roaring trade.  The rag-and-bone man became a familiar figure throughout the land.

Rags of the world

But the shoddy trade could not expand on this country’s rags alone and eventually the rags of the world were coming to the great stone warehouses built to receive and sort them, the sorting being a particularly skilled though flea-ridden job.

Side by side with the warehouses there sprang up large mills on which titles such as “Smith and Co., shoddy manufacturers” were proudly emblazoned.  More coyly, the tilte, “Mungo Manufacturers” might be used.  Chambers Dictionary says of this word, “Origin obscure.”

Actually, it is a bit of Yorkshire dialect.  The story goes that when two of the founding fathers of the shoddy trade had pulled their first bit of reclaimed wool, one asked the other, “Dost think it’ll go, Jim?”  To which Jim, having committed his last farthing to the project, replied, “Ee, but it mun go, or else. . .”

Noble sheep

Today the shoddy trade is nothing like it used to be in extent.  The body blow came after the war with the large-scale introduction of synthetic fibres.  These are not impossible to reclaim, but a small mixture of them with natural fibre is very difficult to detect until woven.  Then they appear in the piece as tiny white specks and ruin it.

Thus, while nothing can take the place of first-time wool, rags are no longer a royal road to riches.  As for myself, I joined another kind of “rag” trade and that hasn’t been one either!