The Nostalgia column with Margaret Watson: Looking at our highly skilled rag sorters

Last week I wrote about women who earned their living as rag sorters, and I continue the theme this week by writing about the rag warehouses in which they worked.
Which mill is this?: This photograph taken in the early 1900s shows a group of rag sorters with their two foremen. It was taken outside a Dewsbury rag warehouse, but unfortunately I do not have the name of the mill. If anyone could identify where it was taken and the names of those pictured, please let me know.Which mill is this?: This photograph taken in the early 1900s shows a group of rag sorters with their two foremen. It was taken outside a Dewsbury rag warehouse, but unfortunately I do not have the name of the mill. If anyone could identify where it was taken and the names of those pictured, please let me know.
Which mill is this?: This photograph taken in the early 1900s shows a group of rag sorters with their two foremen. It was taken outside a Dewsbury rag warehouse, but unfortunately I do not have the name of the mill. If anyone could identify where it was taken and the names of those pictured, please let me know.

Hundreds of local women worked as rag sorters in Dewsbury and Batley during the days when the two towns were the centre of the world’s shoddy trade, but little has been written about their contribution to the textile industry.

Rag sorting might have been a dirty job, but it was also a highly skilled one with rag sorters having to identify a wide variety of materials just by ‘touch’.

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They had to work at great speed sorting a large number of different ‘sorts’ of rags, sometimes as many as 40, skilled work which was generally regarded as women’s work.

Margaret Watson.Margaret Watson.
Margaret Watson.

Many of the early rag sorters were Irish women who came to Dewsbury and Batley during the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to follow their husbands who came here looking for work as labourers and navvies.

Many of the women were followed into the rag trade by their daughters, and it was not unusual for two or three generations from the same family to work in the same rag warehouses.

Like most immigrants in a strange land, the Irish women were prepared to undertake the least pleasant of tasks, and rag sorting was without doubt one of these.

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Conditions and working practices in those early days were harsh. Children as young as nine were often employed to work alongside their mothers ‘picking’ rags.

Records show that the number of Irish women working in this area in 1871, as a percentage of the total, was 65%, a figure which had dropped to 26% by the 1890s.

Rag sorting was regarded as a young woman’s occupation and the majority of rag sorters were in their teens and early twenties.

It was not until much later that older women were also employed in the trade.

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Records provided by Henry Day’s of Savile Town, Dewsbury, reveal that the typical rag sorter was female, aged under 40, and quite possibly Irish.

Many names on their work’s register indicate Irish ancestry, such as Flannagan, Conroy, Dignan, Keegan, Curley and Hooley.

The rags sorted in local warehouses were mainly old clothes collected in the streets by ‘tatters’, but rags were also imported from all over the world, including uniforms of soldiers fighting in the wars.

Until the introduction of ‘shoddy’ in the early 19th century, these materials were regarded as waste and thrown away.

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But a special re-processing method invented by Batley man Benjamin Law, enabled such materials to be recycled and fashioned into new fabrics.

Over the years there were vast improvements in working conditions in local rag warehouses and modern machinery was introduced.

When I was a little girl, my mother worked in a rag warehouse at the bottom of our street, and sometimes in school holidays she took me with her.

I was given the freedom of the whole building and allowed to wander at will, climbing over the bales of rags and swinging from the ropes hanging from the ceiling.

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It didn’t bother me that the place was damp and dirty and the rags smelled musty because, although I didn’t know it, I was receiving fantastic ‘work experience’ long before the two words were coined.

It was expected of me, despite only being eight years old, to do my bit which meant running errands and going to fill the kettle a dozen times a day from the tap in the basement because there was no running water on any of the four floors.

I watched fascinated as the women sorted the rags into various shades and textures, hurling them at great speed into the myriad of baskets before them.

They could tell exactly which rags went into which basket in a fraction of a second and it mystified me how on earth they managed to do it.

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They were exceptionally skilled women who never got the credit they deserved, and were generally looked down on by others in the textile trade who had cleaner and better paid jobs.

Going into a rag warehouse as a young child and watching how the rag sorters worked, taught me a great deal about how important it was to get along with your work colleagues and to give them a helping hand when things got tough.

They sent me out to every lunchtime to get their dinners, usually fish and chips, which meant a lot of queuing because there were dozens of mills on Bradford Road in those days.

Despite the harsh working conditions, most of the women enjoyed their work, and if you talk to retired rag sorters today you will still hear them waxing lyrical about the warm camaraderie which existed in the largely female environment of the rag warehouses in Dewsbury, Batley and Spen Valley.

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Anyone wanting to know more in-depth about the rag trade, please go online to read an excellent document written by Charles Day on the history of the shoddy trade and that of his family firm, Henry Day’s, which was founded in 1844.

Visit www.henryday.co.uk to find out more.

Email [email protected] if you have any more information about rag warehouses and sorters in the Dewsbury area.