A Unique Legacy of Five Generations

I decided to write down some of our family history below so that it can be passed on to our daughter Pagan. Amos Hargreaves Reed grew up on a farm on the slopes of Pendle Hill in the wet landscape of North East Lancashire. Like his fathers before him, he tended to his flock of sturdy hill sheep and farmed them for wool and mutton. Lambing in Spring was a tough business, but he made ends meet most years. When an offer to home weave cotton fabrics came from a Liverpool agent in nearby Colne, Amos was intrigued and wanted to find out about this new business opportunity. He started with a few handlooms in his cottage for himself, his wife and his children, and soon moved these to the outside cowshed which they renamed the “Weaving Shed”. By 1852 Amos Reed was making more income from commission weaving than sheep farming and he pooled his assets in with fellow farmers to create the Spenbrook Mill Co-Operative Society where they all shared space, water wheel power and several sheds of looms. Without knowing it at the time, “Grandpa Hargreaves” as he is known in the family, had started a family tradition in textiles which would last for over five generations and is still flourishing today.

The new town of Nelson flourished in the early twentieth century and produced a few millionaires. One of these was William Reed who was an exacting and demanding taskmaster. He expected his weavers to take up all broken ends in their warps to ensure best quality cloth and was often seen himself in the weaving shed tending to his looms. He expected the same attention to detail from his bank and following a small accounting error which made him so annoyed, he decided to change bankers in his own eccentric way. William walked into County Bank in the centre of Nelson one morning and asked to see the manager at the counter. In a loud voice he asked “What is the balance of our company account, Mr Earnshaw?” When the manager replied and William Reed was satisfied that several other customers had heard his reply, he said “Good. Please make out a cheque to withdraw the entire balance and credit it to your competitors, District Bank, across the road!” Both District and County Banks were eventually merged into today’s Natwest Bank so William’s day of satisfaction was shorted lived.

Alice Nutter was accused and hanged for witchcraft in 1612. She was the last gentlewoman to be accused of this crime and is often remembered in the area around Halloween. She owned land on the other side of Pendle Hill to Nelson and passed this down to her great grandson James who grew up in the nearby cotton town of Barnoldswick during the mid 1800’s. James Nutter & Sons Limited was another successful Lancashire weaving business which flourished at the turn of the century. James built Bancroft Mill complete with a majestic Roberts steam engine with two horizontal pistons. The engine was christened by his wife Eliza Jane in 1920 and the cylinder drives are named Eliza and Jane in her memory. James built seven identical houses for each of his children along Tubber Hill overlooking the mill so that there would be no jealousy amongst them. Forty years later his youngest grand daughter, Patricia Anne, would marry into the Reed Moorby family in nearby Nelson.

My grandfather Clifford Reed took over the management of William Reed and John Moorby weaving companies after the First World War during a booming business period. His stature as a well respected entrepreneur in the rapidly growing town of Nelson enabled him to become one of the first elected Mayors. He is remembered for bringing electricity to Nelson and for investing in the famous Victory V lozenges factory which later became the Fisherman’s Friend. His handlebar moustache and spats were trademarks of his appearance at town council meetings and at the Royal Cotton Exchange in Manchester.

Both the Reed and Moorby sides of the family were active in designing innovative engineering solutions in their quest to weave and produce the ultimate dress, drapery and sheeting fabrics. Clifford Reed patented the “graduated reed” which enabled looms to weave cloths with a higher thread count in the centre than towards the selvedge and hence help with the post-war demand for affordable bedlinen. He also pioneered the concept of “Beetle Finish” sheetings where cloth from Lancashire was finished in Northern Ireland with a 24 hour beetling run where wooden blocks pummelled the cloth continually with stream water in an effort to create a super soft finish. Both Peter and myself continued this tradition of innovation by re-engineering looms to weave 94″, 112″ and 124″ as mattress sizes have grown ever wider and deeper.

Peter was the youngest of all twelve Reed & Moorby children. After service in the Royal Marines and a delayed university career, his ambition was to teach classics and be a Scoutmaster. But the collapse of the Lancashire textile industry in the mid 1950’s and the loss of his older brother in the war caused the family to draw him into the John Moorby family business which finally closed under the Textile Scheme in 1959. Against the trend Peter rented space in his new father-in-law’s mill and re-invested his share of the government compensation payout into starting a new weaving business which catered for the emerging trade in bedlinen for five foot mattresses – like his grandfather before him, he re-engineered his existing Lancashire looms to weave at 112″ wide and launched the first “KING” size sheets. This innovation was to be the start of a long and successful run for Peter Reed (Textiles) Limited as the company grew into being a leading worldwide brand for quality household linens. Peter followed his father Clifford as a local magistrate and an elected member of his town council.

When the US Embassy in Paris ordered a wedding gift for Princess Grace’s marriage to Prince Rainier in 1957, they turned to our Madeiran embroidery factory for a unique design of tablecloth. The artist Max Romer created an organdy and linen appliqued masterpiece which was loosely based on Grace Kelly’s wedding veil and which we still sell over seventy years later. The same tablecloth was ordered recently by a Saudi Princess in terracotta for 48 place settings; this was shipped to a palace in Riyadh and has never been seen again. Karen Reed took this design from our embroidery archives in Funchal and turned it into a rich jacquard bedlinen which is available in five dyed shades. Recently she has developed this same design into a textured heavyweight towel to match the bed linen.

Before telephones and emails the Lancashire Cotton industry used to trade face-to-face at the Royal Cotton Exchange on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Spinners, weavers and merchants would travel into Manchester by train and stand on the floor in their allocated pillar spot so that their customers and suppliers could meet them. Top Hats were the style until the second world war when Bowlers replaced these. Special train services from the spinning & weaving towns into Piccadilly station were filled with smoke and hats twice a week – ladies travelled on a later train to avoid this inconvenience. Members of the Reed & Moorby companies maintained representation on their pillar space (C14) until the Exchange finally closed in 1968. When I first started working at the mill, spinners would still call on us every Tuesday morning out of habit and respect for the Exchange – and the meetings always started with a shared cigarette before discussing any business.

Many will remember how London boomed in the 1970’s as Arabs and their wealth flooded into Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Five star hotels were booked out during the Middle East summer months and the demand for quality bedlinen sky rocketed. As Arabs bought property in Central London, so the demand for large size beds, mattresses and linens literally exploded – and everyone shopped at Mr Fayed’s store, Harrods. Business out of season and during the legendary Sales periods boomed, especially in household linens. It was a tradition that suppliers always worked in the store on the first and last days of the Sale and I recall duirng the Summer of 1978 when ushers were asking shoppers to exit Harrods as they were concerned about structural safety caused by the weight of people on the floors. During this period Roy Cox (Linen Buyer) demanded “Super King” size bedsheets and we responded by developing a new wide width rapier loom in Belgium which produced the first 120″ (3 metre) wide sheets.

Propelled by the Thatcher economic boom of the early 1980’s, and by her personal use of our sheets, my father decided to build a new weaving shed in Nelson just as his grandfather had done in 1891. Although “Mrs T” was booked to open the mill, due to a late security threat she was replaced by Kenneth Clarke who was Paymaster General at the time. It was the first new weaving mill “Switch On” in Lancashire for over eighty years – and is almost certainly the last weaving mill to be built in the UK. The Switch On of Springfield Mill, Lomeshaye was attended by over a hundred selected guests from the industry and was the culmination of my father’s lifelong involvement in the Lancashire textile industry.

Mark and Karen met through a bedlinen launch in Johannesburg in 1990 and were married two years later. Karen’s international modelling background and innate sense of style and fashion quickly had a strong influence on the direction of our bedlinen designs in the 1990’s. I insisted that Karen “start at the bottom” (as I had done) by cleaning the embroidery department, running machines on nights, and cataloguing the design collection. By 1995 Karen’s horizontal stripes and pleated trim bedlinen designs were the talk of trade shows in Frankfurt and New York – and she worked closely with Conran Shop and Designers Guild to develop their first in-house bed linen ranges by combining our Lancashire weaving skills with our Madeira embroidery. As our Managing Director today, few others have as much experience and knowledge of how fine quality household textiles are spun, woven, finished, stitched, embroidered, packaged and marketed as Karen does with her thirty five years of experience in the business.

Like buses come all at once, our private label bedlinen collaborations mushroomed from 1988 until 1995. Our initial work with Polly Dickens at Liberty and then the newly launched Conran Shop caused labels such as Designers Guild, Margaret Howell, Donghia, Angel Zimmick, Nicole Farhi, Mulberry and Fired Earth to work with us and design bespoke bedlinen collections for their brands. The original colourwoven Designers Guild range of bedlinen was particularly successful and went viral in North America through mail order catalgues like Chambers before the advent of online sales. This was a golden period of sales and created a headache for mill production and stock management as sales until then had been “95% white…”. We still refer to this period as the ‘colourful nineties’!

The tough decisions to downsize our manufacturing in Lancashire and Maderia was a painful period in our company’s history. Karen Reed was adamant that our family’s provenance and heritage in the business was worth saving and she set out to find a new manufacturing base. Twenty years later our company is refinanced, restructured and delivering better quality and more intelligently priced woven constructions than Mr William, Mr Clifford and Mr Peter (the three previous generations) designed all those years ago. Karen’s challenge to other suppliers is to show her how products which are labelled “Made in Italy” or “Made in England” but are grown in China, purported to be woven in Italy, sewn in Portugal and warehoused in England have a low environmental footprint. I am proud not to hide the fact that our Suvin Egyptian staple length cotton is grown in India within 200km of where it is spun, woven and sewn into bedlinen. Just as my father built a new weaving shed when others were closing, and just as we insisted that 400 thread count is the highest plain weave which can be achieved, again we are defying the trends in our quest to supply authentic and sustainable products at an intelligent price.