Like other Lancashire cotton towns, Blackburn traditionally had a mix of spinning and weaving alongside coal mining. This changed with the introduction of the power loom. In his book, A History of Blackburn, Derek Beattie suggests that Cartwright’s first power loom was unreliable and so not taken up to any great extent in Blackburn. This changed first with a better model from Roberts and Sharp in 1822 and then by the locally produced Kenworthy loom. From here production increased massively aimed more and more at export markets.
By 1914 most coal mining had gone and Blackburn was a cotton weaving town. In the aftermath of the Great War, there was a resurgence in cotton manufacture, but it was short lived.
The problem was the disappearance of export markets as former customer nations began or resumed their own production of the cloth from often native grown cotton. Thus India which had been a strong market for ‘grey cotton’, a Blackburn staple, reduced their imports from 3,000 million tons a year to just 500 million in 1936. The imports they continued to make were more and more sourced from Japan with the benefit of new machinery and factories. For Blackburn this meant the closure on most mills and staggering unemployment. The town was first excluded from the Special Areas Act aimed at creating new employment, but this was corrected in 1937.
In the interwar years in spite of a decline in cotton production, the British Northrop Loom Co was set up to exploit an American invention and machines were manufactured and supplied to the South American market adding further to their move to self sufficiency. They featured in the Festival of Britain Design Review. South American textile manufacturers had already sent students to the Blackburn Technical College to learn the necessary skills.
In 1938 Mullard began production of radio valves in a factory on a new industrial estate which supplied valves to most of the UK radio manufacturers. In 1961 Mullard had 17,500 employees here and in Mitchum, Blackpool and Burnley.. The town was then home to a Royal Ordnance engineering factory in the Second World War and a shadow factory in a former cotton mill producing gas masks.
At Salmesbury aerodrome BAE System manufacture parts for the Eurofighter, with testing at nearby Wharton. This manufacturing activity was built on the shoulders of English Electric which built many famous aircraft in WW2 and in the postwar period and became part of BAC. I write more about this in my post on nearby Preston .
Moving into the 21st century, Blackburn’s largest private sector employers include Crown Paints, the John Lewis soft furnishings supplier Herbert Parkinson founded in 1935 and Graham and Brown Wall Coverings founded in the 1940s. Crown Paints can trace its history in Darwen back to the eighteenth century. It is now part of the Danish Hempel Group. ICI Acrylics in Darwen were the largest Perspex manufacturer in the world with many factories overseas. It moved from the northeast to Lancashire during the Second World War to secure vital production of Perspex for windscreens of Spitfires. On the split up of ICI it became part of Ineos rebranded as Lucite International. As Perspex International in the 21st century it became part of Swiss multinational Schweiter Technologies AG.
Further reading:
Derek Beattie, A History of Blackburn (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2007)
British Manufacturing History 