I am delighted to be able to give the Museum an almost new computer unit. To be able to return something back into the knitted world is a very pleasant feeling as my family history is connected with textiles from Grandfather's family - Simeon Watson, b. 1855 (a textile dealer in Bradford Census 1861) and Grandmother's family William Roe b. 1860 (manager Nottingham Manufacturing Ltd 1875 (Inscription of presentation clock in my possession).

 

Simeon's son, Charles Watson worked as a manfacturer's agent selling "drapery" until he co-founded Chapman and Watson Ltd, wholesale drapers. They sold gloves, hose, half-hose and knitwear to Nottingham and district retailers. He bought the infamous Moot Hall when the Music Hall there became a bawdy house and unprofitable. With hindsight it is praiseworthy that he made no severe or structural alterations to the building, and the unique glass roof is still there today. It is hard to imagine its use as a warehouse. He retired in his 80s, and the building is now used as a restaurant.

 

William Roe's son, Herbert Roe, founded Cooper & Roe Ltd in the 1890s. He built a state of the art factory on Roden Street, Nottingham. This was for making up garments from the new circular fabrics and the factory operated in a vertical method : fabric was sent to the top floor and then descended from floor to floor by way of chutes, to be cut, sewn, steamed and packaged, eventually arriving at the Packing room on the ground floor.

 

Eagle Works on Carlton Road, existing still despite two bombs next door, is no longer manufacturing knitwear. It was built after Roden Street, but the increased demand from the First World War provoked the building of a new "state of the art" single storey factory, but this time in Ruddington. Greenfield land was available on Pasture Lane next to the Wm Baker Lace Factory.This factory contained a large, fully fashioned department, which in its life contained multi-head 24 and 28 gauge machines from William Cotton, Bentleys and later S A Monk, also some flat bed Dubied ribs in 8 and 14 gauge. There was a large circular fabric manufacturing workroom with Interlock, RTR and Plush machines. These were in different diameters from 16" to 28" to minimise the waste in making up by allowing "solid sides".

 

An overhead conveyer supplied yarn on cone from a distant Yarn Shed, direct to individual knitting machines in the workroom. This yarn store was situated near to the railway boundary, and had no heating in the shed so that the cotton and wool did not dry out. This was a very cold place to work in winter!

 

Layered fabric was removed on the same conveyor for despatch to external dyers and finishers. Names such as Vernon Road Dyers and Springfield Dyeing and Finishing are two that come to mind. Most of the bleachers and dyers were usually situated by the banks of the Leen from Bulwell to Basford. That conveyor made no concessions to employees, having to descend to waist height for loading and unloading. It would have been banned immediately today by Health and Safety.

 

A large contingent of female labour worked in the building, but there were separate Male, Female and Staff canteens. Buses were on contract to collect and return the employees to their villages as Ruddington alone could not supply all the labour needed.

 

My first recollections of C & Rs, as the family called it, were being taken to watch my father play cricket on the company cricket ground - this was further down Pasture Lane, near to the railway. If the cricket wasn't interesting the trains certainly were - I think this was 1946, still in the days of clothing coupons and petrol rationing. My father C W Watson learnt his technical knowledge at the textile department of the Nottingham University College. He spent his working life in the Sales department, both Home and Export, until he retired in 1969. The Company would not sell to "Retail Chain Stores", i.e. Marks & Spencer, as a matter of solidarity with the policy of the Hosiery Manufactures Association. This meant that other than Jaeger, their customers were the steadily decreasing clothing wholesalers. After World War 2, he drove extensively through England in cars such as a 1939 Ford Popular, in winter with a sack of potatoes in the boot to help traction and stability. To aid the post war export drive he travelled, each autumn for 10 weeks, across Canada and the USA selling to stores such as the Hudson Bay Co., Macy's, and Brooks Brothers - all this by boat and train as airliners could not then fly as far as New York.

 

There was no discussion about career choice during my schooling - I was going into the family firm. There was therefore no need for A levels or any time at university. I started in 1955 at Pasture Lane as Howard Marshall's asistant in the cutting room. This meant physical labour, fetching and moving parcels of circular knitted fabric wrapped in stiff brown paper. The pay was £3 10 shillings a week. It also meant that after 5 years of boarding at a boys only school I had to adjust to being the only male in a workroom of 45 females, their ages ranging from 17 to 60. And all, I thought, determined to make me blush! I will always remember my first Christmas Eve at Ruddington. We were all thrown out of the factory early, at 2.30 pm, as "it as getting dangerous!"

 

Circular fabric was laid up in layers, patterns chalked on the top, and then cut either by a band knife or Eastman disc knife. The resulting garment parts were tied in a bundle, the appropriate ribs were added, and they were put into a wheeled truck and pushed into the next door workroom. Also in the adjoining room were the "Linkers". These "girls", mostly in their 40s (any older and eyesight was a problem) spent all day running on ribs to fully fashioned bars. This was a process that had not really changed since the hand frame. The concentration needed to earn a reasonable wage, for it was all piece work, was intense, but they chatted away all the time, yet pressed on the ribs working at a spacing of 28 needles to an inch.

 

Never to be forgotten memories of Coooper & Roe, Ruddington include :  two course "meat and 2 veg" lunches in the canteen; the sound of twenty working fully fashioned machines; being hit by that conveyor! avoiding the exposed, near vertical driving belts that powered the circular knitting machines; the smell of newly steamed wool fabric, together with the sight of the finished product - wool combinations for the desert  Arabs in the middle east; bearded needle circular plush machines hanging from the roof; the sewing room manageress Miss Mabbot shouting at me about some minor misdemeanour; the stampede for the buses when the 5.00 pm bell rang; my first works day outing - 600 employees in 24 buses going to Butlins in Filey for the day. National service in Catterick seemed a very different life.

 

Two years in khaki with the Royal Signals as a radio technician, and then I came back to Ruddington, but not for long. While smarting from a "family hold back" situation, I decided to widen my knowledge and experience of the industry. I found myself a job in Sales starting with Yarn, Silk and Nylon from Macclesfield, selling into the Lace trade, and to circular knitters. This was followed by a job in Fabric sales, warp knitted tricot, and Raschel edgings to Nottingham makers-up. Then back to yarn sales with Nylon throwsters, Qualitex, before moving to Monsanto to sell their Blue C nylon from the new plant in Dundonald near Glasgow to the throwster companies.

 

After 2 years travelling England and South Wales as a specialist sales executive with end users such as Dunlop, the Glove and Rope trade in Devon, South Wales for Nylon throwsters and Warp knitters, Cumbria for Kangol berets, Norfolk for a nylon throwster in Cromer, and a specialist weaver in Colchester, dividing my time between sales visits, politics and internal meetings was not my idea of a long term career.

 

Accordingly I, together with a Monsanto colleague, founded a company producing single jersey and later interlock. This company grew over 8 years to produce 40 tons of circular fabric a week, running, as they now say, 24/7. Eventually the company faced further investment in  higher speed machinery to remain competitive. As the market was very difficult to foretell, and the machinery was becoming more and more expensive, the painful decision was taken to liquidate the company. A few years before, Cooper & Roe had avoided insolvency by a hastily arranged takeover by the Albert Martin Group. As the English knitwear industry became more and more uncompetitive the Albert Martin Group had to move their manufacturing abroad to remain profitable. The Pasture Lane site had also become more valuable as a residential building site, rather than a manufacturing facility providing employment and creating wealth in the local community. The factory was demolished, as had happened to the Wm Baker Lace factory next door.

 

After a number of short term employments I secured the position of chief executive of Hatra with the task of making the organisation commercially viable. If I thought Monsanto was too political, I was unprepared for the scale of politics at Hatra. The Hosiery and Allied Trades Research Association was founded during World War 2 as a vehicle for allocating the imported cotton that arrived in the convoys that survived the journey from the cotton fields of Egypt, India and America. After the war the cotton board became the fledgling research association, achieving a brilliant history of research, standard setting, and receiving world-wide acknowledgement as a centre of excellence. From the position of having a membership comprising all the main knitwear manufacturers, and a £1 for £1 matching finance from the government, together with sponsorship for scientific research projects, the association fell on difficult times. In 1985 I arrived to attempt to remodel the stump of the former organisation to enable it to survive as a commercial company.

 

Jack Smirfitt was the librarian presiding over the most extensive technical textile library in the western world. As a commercial chief executive I needed a technical prop and advisor, and how well Jack filled that need. Our friendly relations even survived my moving the entire library from the front of the old house to the ground floor of the "new" wing. The new wing housed the KIF offices and the old building was home to KLITRA. With an ever declining pool of knitted fabric and knitwear manufacturers the HATRA membership and income fell steadily, in spite of winning some income producing projects, all written, or re-written by our experienced librarian. The HATRA council ended my endeavour when they decided that the new price list for services and products that would enable to organisation to halt the annual losses "was too high a level for members to afford".

 

This decision, together with their earlier view that development or outright sale of the vacated old building was not an acceptable policy for a members association, convinced me that my ideas for a financial revival would never succeed. I will always remember receiving back my draft letters on technical subjects and testing reports with notes in the margin by Jack - "might be better to put it this way"; "not enough evidence for that conclusion, although I think you my well be right"; and always "should be a Z, not an S".