Titus Salt and Saltaire

Rochdale Antiques Society held its first meeting on Wednesday 10 September.

Felicity Guthrie said: "Our first meeting last night was so fascinating. Our speaker was Maria Glott on the 'Building of Saltaire World Heritage Site'." 

Titus Salt was born in 1803, the first of 9 children. He went to Batley Grammar School but didn’t do well because he didn’t like Greek, Latin and the Classics. His father, Daniel, had repeatedly told him that the only thing in life was to make money.

Titus joined his father in the wool trade and made a tremendous amount of money - £450 million by the time he died – which was divided up between his 11 children. He counted Prince Albert amongst his friends and was a major investor in the Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition.

He was a driven and obsessive man only sleeping for a few hours per night. On a visit to Liverpool Docks he found bales of alpaca which had been left behind by a ship. They were going to be thrown away as useless, but Titus worked day and night to discover a way of making cloth from them. He eventually did so and made a dress out of this very soft wool for Queen Victoria, having taken the precaution of securing a patent for 50 years to spin alpaca wool.

He had mills in Bradford employing thousands of people but the slum conditions caused disease to spread and life expectancy was only about 23. Unions were formed to demand an improvement in conditions and Titus decided to build a huge complex outside Bradford to enable his empire to continue. He moved to “Saltaire” near the River Aire on one side and the canal on the other and train lines were moved to allow easy movement of his goods, both in and out.

The first mill opened in 1853 with a million square feet. Within two and a half years 850 houses with running water, flushing toilets and lighting had been built on a grid pattern, each street named after a person he knew, plus schools, churches, a laundry, shops and a park, but no pubs or pawn shops. He was obsessed with cleanliness and pollution. He refused to let washing be hung outside the houses, if found it was confiscated. He insisted on them washing every day or be fined.

No animals were allowed in the houses, there was to be no loitering in the streets and no more than 8 people were allowed to congregate there. The streets had a hierarchy with good, bad, and in-between workers being allocated to specific ones and then divided again into specific houses which showed the occupiers’ position at the mill by the number of panes of glass in their windows (the smaller the number the better) and the number of panels in the doors (the greater the number the better).

Everything was used to make more money. The mill chimneys had charcoal louvres to prevent smoke belching out of them and the soot was cleaned out by small boys and sent to ink producers; the rainwater from the mill roof was piped to the houses; female urine was piped to the fixing room, male urine was collected in barrels and sent to the tanneries in return for leather driving belts, lanolin was made from filtering the fat from the wool and used to make cosmetics and the waste lanolin was made into briquettes for fuel.

He built a huge dining hall so workers didn’t have to waste time going home, there were three sittings each of 750 people, all of whom paid for their food. The waste from the tables was collected and sold to pig keepers and was sufficient to build two houses per year. In 1850 3500 people clocked on at 6am including 1,000 children aged six to 12. They produced 18 miles of cloth every day.

Titus Salt either owned or had a major interest in many, many industries and companies, he was an MP, magistrate, Lord Lieutenant, Mayor of Bradford.

He died aged 73 in 1876 – truly a driven man.