Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

various uses was on the increase nationally over the study period. The employees went
largely unnoticed in the archives while the masters are more likely to emerge. 125
The
growing demand for paper provided business opportunities for those with capital, such as
the Allen family. Amongst the items listed in Thomas Allen’s inventory in 1720 is
‘brown paper made for sale’, perhaps marketed as wrapping paper for the hardware
products of the west midlands and locally-produced needles. 126
The entrepreneurs at the paper mills were often local, but specialist workers such
as the Webb family were attracted from afar. 127
The paper masters had to diversify in
order to succeed. For example, in 1768 John Holyoake of Hewell Paper Mill advertised
for journeymen papermakers to specialise in ‘writing work’. 128
One Beoley papermaster,
John Oram, was also a fur-dealer and leather-dresser. Mary Oram and Sarah
Mander are examples of widows who continued the papermaking business after their
husbands’ deaths. 129
Towards the end of the eighteenth century John Mills took over the
paper-mill at Beoley; he continued to make paper, but also made needles there. 130
Throughout the study period the paper-mill at Beoley continued production,
providing employment for the odd rag-sorter and several paper-makers (mainly male),
125 For example, WoRO, probate of Thomas Batten, Beoley, paper master, 1749, £522-11-1.
126 WoRO, probate of Thomas Allen, Hewell Paper Mill, (Tardebigge), gentleman, 1720, £98-8-0, and of
John Allen, Hewell Paper Mill, (Tardebigge), yeoman, 1720, £745-13-7. Needle packets and wrappers
became a speciality of the local paper-mills in the nineteenth century.
127 Members of the Webb family of papermakers had connections with Hampshire, Cambridgeshire and
Oxfordshire, as described in http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/webbsredditch Chapter 1 (10.30 a.m. 21 Aug.
2008).
128 Berrow’s Worcester Journal 21 July 1768. Presumably this means workers able to make good quality
writing paper.
129 A. Shorter, Studies on the History of Papermaking in Britain, (Aldershot, Variorum, 1993), p.255.
130 National Needle Museum, Redditch, Day-book of John and Matthew Mills.
276