Nearly sixty years ago the last woollen cloth mills in Westbury closed. Angel and Bitham Mills had operated under the Laverton name for over a hundred years after being bought by Abraham Laverton in the 1850s.
Anybody who walked along Church Street will remember the sound of machinery coming from inside the mill. The two mill chimneys dominated the town’s skyline and the hooter indicating the beginning and end of the working day was a familiar sound.
Cloth manufacturing had been important to Westbury for many centuries. In its heyday it was probably true that almost every family in the town was connected to the mills in some way. During the nineteenth century, my own family included weavers and other cloth workers and some of them lived in Prospect Square which Abraham Laverton had provided.
Today, Westbury Museum is looking after artefacts from the mills, including the statuette of Hercules which appeared on The Repair Shop, along with photographs of the machines and some of the people who worked on them.
The museum is also storing a series of three painting showing some of the processes involved in making cloth. Included in the paintings are mill employees, who we believe we can identify and who may have family still living in the town. The artist was Gwynneth Luce, the wife of the mills’ managing director and the pictures probably date from the 1950s or early 1960s.
The first painting of the carding shop shows Arthur Goodenough in the foreground loading wool into a carding machine. In the background, Arthur Bellingham or Pat Tolman is performing the same task.
The second painting has Ernie Adey and Stan Payne in the stock room and the third shows the gig mill where the cloth is nearly ready to be sold. Tom Williams and Frank Smith stand by the teasel machine while Bill Davidson is sitting at the tenter machine. The two women, one identified as Millie Vidler, are cloth menders. Their job was to weave in and tidy up any loose threads left after the cloth had been woven.
Westbury Museum is always interested in hearing about your memories. You can contact us through our website westburyheritagesociety.org.uk or on Facebook. Or come and see us on the first floor of Westbury Library.
