The Leeds Library was founded in 1768. Just a year later, Scottish inventor James Watt filed his first British patent for a steam engine. Before long, the Industrial Revolution was in full smoky, smoggy swing - and Yorkshire was stoking its fires. From our position in the heart of Leeds, the Library has seen the city and its neighbours through the early Revolution’s population growth, the Victorian factories, and beyond. Our history collection contains dozens of local stories from across all of these eras of industry. Each one is a reflection of the wider history of England’s changing industries - as you’ll see in the select few we have presented below!

The late 18th and early 19th Centuries were times of great industrial invention in the UK. In Yorkshire, where the textile trade dominated, the impact of these inventions are clearest in the case of mechanical weaving machines (invented in 1785). By the early 19th Century, these machines began to put skilled textile makers on lower wages or out of work. This lead to the rise of the ‘Luddites’ in Yorkshire and Nottingham.

The Luddites have suffered from a post-mortem image problem. Though now synonymous with hating technology and progress, they were actually a workers’ rights movement. Initially, soon-to-be Luddites attempted to renegotiate their contracts - petitioning for a minimum wage, minimum labour standards, and a tax to fund worker pensions. This failed. Luddites had no union, and factory owners were rapidly reducing pay and replacing skilled labourers with underpaid, unskilled hands (often children) to work the machines. The machine breaking was equivalent to a strike: direct action by workers to pressure wealthy employers.

While Yorkshire’s textile industry was in turmoil, though, innovations in steam-powered locomotive technology was strengthening the county’s mining operations.

Much of this was thanks to Matthew Murray (1765-1826). Without him, trains as we know them might not exist. Murray moved to Leeds in 1789, and found work innovating machines to help spin flax at a nearby mill. By 1812, he had invented the first commercially viable steam locomotive. Soon after, his machines were put to use in service of the Middleton colliery in Leeds - on the railway tracks John Blekinsop had recently designed. Combined, the technology allowed a huge increase in the amount of coal the collier could transport.

Locomotives weren’t Murray’s only focus, though. He was a key figure in the development of the hydraulic press, and several of his large steam-powered mill engines operated for eighty years after his death. His machines helped fuel the growing industrial revolution - and there was only more expansion to come.

The Victorian period saw Leeds’s population growth explode. Industrialisation meant more factory jobs centralised in cities , and by 1840 Leeds had a canal, a railway station, and a population of over 150,000. These extra mouths needed extra food - something Leeds-born industrialist John Fowler (1826-1864) was very conscious of. Shocked by the Irish Potato Famine, Fowler set himself the challenge of cheapening food production using steam engines. By his untimely death in a hunting accident in 1864, he had developed four types of steam-powered ploughs. After his death, his brothers took over his company (the Steam Plough Works) and continued development on his machines.

These steam ploughs revolutionised the farming industry, leading to a much-needed boom in food production. But ploughs were not the only machines manufactured by Fowler’s company. They also designed and built road engines, traction engines, rail engines, and were one of the first companies in Britain to invest in producing electric lights and power cables.

Eventually, in 1947, the company was absorbed by a larger conglomerate - but the food production Fowler helped facilitate was vital to his Victorian brethren.

Not all those who profited off of Yorkshire’s industrial boom had Fowler’s humanitarian concerns, however. By the early 20th Century, the county was also home to one of the richest aristocrats in the country - the 6th Earl William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam. During his lifetime, his wealth grew a thousandfold. How? Coal. His home was Wentworth House, a veritable palace in the heart of a busy South Yorkshire coal field. An unintentional metaphor for the state of a nation where 88% of the population owned next to nothing and 1% owned nearly everything, the manor was surrounded by pits, collieries, and tens of thousands of poverty-stricken workers. The photo below shows Wentworth being guarded during coal riots in 1897, and this disquiet did not fade with time. The epitome of the wealth divide came in 1912, when a royal wining and dining visit to Wentworth House coincided with two catastrophic explosions in local mines that killed 131 workers.

But the good fortunes of the Fitzwilliam family were not to last. The mines they owned were all nationalised under Labour’s post-war government in 1947. Soon after, then-Minister of Fuel and Power Manny Shinwell ordered open-cast coal mining to be done directly outside the manor. As a whole, the family’s history is a microcosm of the wider effects of the industrial revolution and Britain’s shifting social situation.

Nothing impacted 20th Century British society and industry like the World Wars. High casualties in the First World War left British towns bereft of young men, and sparked drastic changes in fashion and attitude amongst remaining youth culture. The Second World War was even more impactful on Yorkshire. Factories all over the county turned to making munitions and planes, with majority female workforces.

You can look no further than Leeds-Bradford airport for a local example: AVRO (Yeadon). Founded in 1910, A.V. Roe & Co. (AVRO) was the world’s first registered aircraft manufacturing company. After the outbreak of World War Two, AVRO’s secluded factory in Yeadon (just outside of Leeds) turned to manufacturing thousands of combat aircraft for the war effort. Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancaster Bombers - all came together under the precise hands of AVRO (Yeadon)’s female engineers, who made up 60% of staff. Since Leeds was heavily bombed throughout the war, the factory (pictured left) was camouflaged with grass and even a duck pond. It wasn’t bombed once, and continued manufacturing until just after the war ended in 1946.

In the post-war years, British industry and economy boomed. Evidence of this can be found in the Library’s copies of ‘The Leeds Journals’. Produced monthly throughout the 20th Century by the Leeds Chamber of Commerce, they contain news and (perhaps more interestingly) hundreds of adverts for contemporary services and products.

Particularly interesting are the copies from the 1950s and ‘60s which include a ‘Clean Air’ section. A 1974 report on climate change by the CIA claims that “the climate change began in 1960, but no one, including the climatologists, recognised it”. This advert in the ‘Clean Air’ section of a 1956 Leeds Journal from Esso Fuel Oils, however, shows that Leeds people did feel the environmental effects of local industry. It does boast ‘Fuel Oil’ as the solution to the smog problems, though - so not quite at the level of modern green technology!

The late 20th Century saw the start of the British deindustrialisation trend that created our current economy. The 1980s famously saw massive (and contentious) closures of mining pits nationwide, and manufacturing companies gradually moved out of the country to cheaper pastures. In 1956, the Bank of England reported that manufacturing accounted for 33% of Britain’s GDP. In 2022, this had fallen to just 10%. This had devastating ripple effects for Yorkshire towns that relied on mining and manufacturing for income. Large swathes of local historic industry buildings were abandoned and left to deteriorate - until alternative uses were found for them in the culture and service industries. The Leeds Industrial Museum, for example, has made its home in Armley Mills. A larger-scale example of this changing use is Salt’s Mill in Saltaire, Shipley.

Saltaire was practically built by 19th Century industrialist Sir Titus Salt, who, like many Victorian entrepreneurs, made his fortune in textiles. His mill was the largest in the country, and Saltaire village sprang up around it to house its massive staff. Motivated by Christian duty and economic interest, Salt added multiple public amenities in the village. By the 1980s, however, deindustrialisation had lead to a century of decline. It was reinvigorated by Jonathan Silver, a Bradford magnate, who turned the by-then abandoned mill into the art gallery/retail centre it is today. Now, the mill is home to a David Hockney art gallery, restaurant, and shops; a perfect microcosm for British industry’s shift from manufacturing to service.

With Thanks To:

Exhibition: Finnian Davies, Anna Goodridge, and Niimi Day Gough

Digital: Niimi Day Gough

Bibliography:

Images:

Mary Evans/Rue des Archives, AVRO Heritage Museum, ‘Yeadon’ (Online: 2023), Jack Brayshaw, ‘AVRO 1939 – 1945’ (Online: 2023), Leeds Chamber of Commerce, ‘The Leeds Monthly Journal’ (Vol. 27, 1956),

Information:

Jessica Brain, ‘The Luddites’, Online: Historic UK (2018), Paul M. Thompson, ‘Matthew Murray and the firm of Fenton Murray and Co’ (London: Paul M. Thompson, 2015), Michael R. Lane, ‘The story of the steam plough works’ (London: Northgate, 1980),Catherine Bailey, ‘Black diamonds: The rise and fall of an English dynasty’ (London: Penguin, 2007), Gerald Myers, ‘Mother worked at AVRO: The story of AVRO (Yeadon) and its contribution to Britain’s war effort’ (London: Compaid Graphics, 1995), Alice Bell, ‘Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)’ (Online: The Guardian, 2021), Jim Greenhalf, ‘Salt & Silver: A story of hope’ (Bradford: Bradford Art Museums and Libraries Service, 1998), Tejvan Pettinger, ‘How the UK economy has changed in the past 70 years (1952-2022)’ (Online: Economics Help, 2022).