Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

spreading fast, profitability was not guaranteed. 203
Increasingly workers specialised in
certain processes, the needle industry closely mirroring Adam Smith’s classic division of
labour within the pin-trade. 204
In Alcester the Scrivens scoured the needles, while
George Pardoe was a needle-pointer and ‘hard straightener’. 205
By the 1790s the needle
industry was probably the town’s biggest source of employment.
The town’s involvement in the needle-trade continued to grow in the first half of
the nineteenth century. Surname evidence shows that members of local families involved
in other trades moved into the needle industry. 206
The structure of the industry at this
period was a mixture of large and small production units. 207
Although only a handful of needlemaking businesses advertise in the
directories, 208 one fifth of the fathers in baptisms 1831 to 1840 are in the needle-trade.
By the 1841 census there are 74 male needlemakers over 20 years of age. The enormous
part played by women and children is of course hidden by most sources, but in the 1841
census we find 50 male needlemakers under 20 years, 39 female needlemakers over 20
and 18 female needlemakers under 20. 209
The census is quite likely to have underrecorded
child and women workers especially if they were casual workers in the trade.
Child needlemakers may have been an important contributory factor to Alcester District’s
203 WaRO, DR360/79 shows that in the first decades of the next century several of the parish’s poor
children were apprenticed to the town’s needlemakers. Also see G. E. Saville, ed., ‘Needlemakers and
Needlemaking of the Alcester, Sambourne and Studley Area’, ADLHS, OP24, (1981), pp. xv, xvi.
204 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 109-110.
205 WaRO, DR360/79, Alcester apprenticeship indentures, 1776 and 1780. Division of labour is discussed
further under Zone D, The Needle District.
206 For example, the basketmaking Spooner family. (WoRO, probate of Thomas Spooner, Alcester,
basketmaker, 1831.)
207 For more detail see Zone D Metal section below.
208 Pigot’s Warwickshire Directory 1828-9 lists 5, West’s Warwickshire Directory 1830 lists 9, Pigot’s
Warwickshire Directory 1835 lists 3 (including a father and son concern) and PO Warwickshire Directory
1845 lists 10 (including 2 partnerships).
209 See Table 4.8 above.
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