Eileen Short – formerly of Keighley and now living at Muir-of-Ord near Inverness – has sent a cutting from her local paper describing how a demand for hand-made cloth like Harris Tweed has “secured incomes for crofters in the Western Isles”.
There are some “thirty single width weavers using traditional Hattersley looms” made in Keighley.
Carloway crofter, Norman Mackenzie, works on one dating back to the 1920s.
George Hattersley and Sons Ltd, of North Brook Works, established in 1789, had made their first worsted power looms in 1834. Down the decades they had been awarded gold medals at trade exhibitions as far afield as London, Paris, Milan, Moscow and St Louis.
Photographed in September of 1958, this fleet of lorries belonging to Wall’s Shipping Ltd is about to transport 20 Hattersley looms, a warping and beaming machine and four automatic winding machines on the first stage of their journey to China. They had been ordered by China National Transport Machinery Import Corporation, of Tientsin.
Wall’s Shipping only took them as far as the docks. Presumably by way of advertisement en route, two of the lorries carry headboards inscribed ‘Hattersley Looms’.
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