Mee-mawing

With everyone around you able to read your lips you had to get into a huddle if you wanted to be private. Eavesdroppers saw no good of themselves.

Weavers looked after maybe eight or ten looms each. Their work was to replace the pirns in the shuttles when the weft ran out and take up broken warp ends if a flaw appeared in the cloth.

Yarn didn't break easily in a damp atmosphere so, to keep the humidity high, sheds were frequently built into hillsides. It was in everyone's interest, including the weavers who were paid by the piece, to keeping the looms running. To thread a shuttle, though, they had to put it to their lips and suck. In doing so they'd not only breathe in dust and dirt, but also the germs which thrived in that damp air. Trade unionists argued that the practice of "shuttle kissing" spread disease and, through the middle decades of the twentieth century, they fought a campaign to have it banned.

Bessie Dickinson, a weaver from Barnoldswick (or "Barlick"), was a life-long campaigner. She started working as a weaver in 1916 when she was twelve years old and joined the Communist Party in 1922. Click on the player to hear a recording I made with her in 1976, when she was seventy-two (r/t: 1 min):

Although hand-threaded shuttles were introduced in 1937, pressure to increase and maintain high levels of cloth production during the second world war meant that shuttle kissing wasn't outlawed until 1956.

In this picture the shuttle on the left, the one with the curved slit in its casing, is hand-threaded. The one on the right, with just a little hole in its side for the weft to pass, is a kissing shuttle.