Wool and Flannel

Look up when you are walking through Newtown or Llanidloes. On the top floors of otherwise ordinary buildings there are long ranges of windows, far more glass than a domestic room needs. Those are weaving lofts, and they are what is left of an industry that once dressed miners in Australia and soldiers in the Crimea.

What flannel is

Loosely woven woollen cloth with a slightly raised surface, warm, cheap, and comfortable next to the skin. It made shirts, underclothing, blankets and working clothes, and demand for it in the nineteenth century was effectively unlimited.

Wales made it because Wales had the sheep, the soft water for washing and fulling, and a rural population with time in the winter.

The domestic system

For most of its history this was not factory work. Spinning and weaving happened in farmhouses and cottages across mid Wales, on hand looms, by families who also farmed. The cloth was collected, taken to a fulling mill to be washed and thickened, and then carried to market.

The place name pandy means fulling mill, and there are a dozen of them across Powys, all on fast water.

The market was Welshpool at first, then Newtown, which built a flannel exchange and became the collection and finishing centre for the whole trade. Llanidloes did the same on a smaller scale upstream.

The towns swell

From roughly 1790 the trade concentrated. Weavers moved off the land into the towns, into terraces built specifically for them with the loom shop on the top floor and the family below. Newtown's population multiplied. So did Llanidloes's.

Some proper factories followed, with water and then steam power, along the Severn and its tributaries. But a great deal of the work stayed on hand looms in those upper rooms much longer than it did in England, and that turned out to matter enormously.

Why it failed

Yorkshire. Power looms, steam coal on the doorstep, capital, and rail access to ports. By the 1830s Welsh flannel was being undersold in its own markets.

The response in Newtown and Llanidloes was to cut wages, repeatedly, in a workforce that had already left the land and had nothing to fall back on. That is the immediate context for what happened next.

Chartism

The People's Charter — votes for all men, secret ballot, paid MPs — reached the flannel towns in 1838 and took hold fast. In April 1839 a crowd in Llanidloes freed three arrested Chartists from the Trewythen Arms and the authorities lost control of the town for several days. Thirty-two people were tried at Welshpool; three were transported to Australia.

It is a mistake to read that as a political event that happened to occur in a textile town. It was a textile event. The grievance was wages and the vote was the proposed remedy.

The long tail

The trade did not vanish overnight. It declined through the second half of the century, and one Newtown business found a way round it: in 1861 Pryce Pryce-Jones began selling Welsh flannel by post using the new railway, built the Royal Welsh Warehouse, and made a fortune sending mid-Wales cloth to customers who would never come here.

A handful of Welsh woollen mills survived into the twentieth century by turning to tapestry quilts and blankets for a tourist market, though the survivors are mostly in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire rather than Powys.

What to look for

Weaving loft windows on upper floors in Newtown, Llanidloes and, less obviously, Llanfyllin and Welshpool.

The Newtown Textile Museum, which occupies a genuine six-loom weaving shop with the workers' dwellings underneath.

Mill buildings along the Severn and the Clywedog, mostly converted.

Any pandy on the map, and the weirs and leats that go with it.