Heathcoat was offered £10,000 compensation to restart his business in the Midlands but instead he moved to Tiverton, Devon, where he started again and set up a massively successful business. The building was destroyed and 200 workers lost their jobs. The threat of execution certainly did not deter the band of Luddites who, on 28th June 1816, broke into John Heathcoat’s factory and smashed 55 frames. Problems remained until the middle of the 19th century, by which time hand production in the woollen industry had virtually ceased. Perhaps because they were protected by local communities. In 1812 the government made ‘machine-breaking’ – the destruction of factory machines – a capital crime, but, though in 1813 seventeen men were executed, overall very few men were caught. On several occasions Luddites fought British soldiers.
The government response was harsh, and British soldiers were sent to trouble spots. Luddites broke into factories and destroyed machines, they also attacked employers and others such as magistrates. The movement began in 1811 in Nottinghamshire and rapidly spread across the country. Luddites saw themselves as robbing wealthy machine owners to give jobs back to poor weavers – like latter-day Robin Hoods (a British mythological figure who robbed the rich to give to the poor, and was also believed to have lived in Sherwood Forest). Ned’s existence has never been confirmed by historians, but he was said to live in Sherwood Forest and to lead the movement. The Luddites took their name from Ned Ludd, often referred to as ‘General Ned Ludd’ or ‘King Ludd’. Hand weavers were finding their prices undercut by the new mass factories and they were becoming unemployed while the new jobs were being created in the massive factories that were springing up across Britain – often referred to at the time as “dark satanic mills”. But what the Luddites were really upset about was that it was changing the nature of work in the industry. The reality was that automated machinery was not reducing the number of jobs in textiles, it was actually radically increasing the size of the overall industry. The Luddites were British 19th century textile workers who wanted to get rid of the new automated machinery which, they believed, was destroying jobs in the textile industry. – Robert Calvert, writer, poet and musician ‘They tread on our future and they stamp on our dreams’ That all he could do was wreck and destroy,Īnd He turned to his workmates and said: ‘Death to Machines’ By 1816 he was a major employer in the Midlands, but he had yet to contend with the Luddites. John set up his own company based on his machine. As a result of the invention of the machine, within 25 years, the price of the lace had collapsed whilst employment in the industry had rocketed. John studied the process of making Buckingham lace by hand and the machine he eventually came up with essentially imitated the motions of a lace-maker’s fingers in tying the meshes of the lace. Others had been working on this problem for many years and none had succeeded.
The biggest problem for John was to learn how to invent a process to automate the twisting of threads around each other to form a net. This machine was designed to make lace similar to Buckingham or French lace which was then all made by hand. He did apprenticeships in the textile industry with the makers of textile-weaving frames and, in 1805, he designed the highly automated bobbin net machine. John Heathcoat was the son of a cattle farmer, and was born near Derby in 1783. What caught my attention about Knightshayes, and will make it of interest to readers of this blog, is how the Heathcoat Amory family made their money. Although now open to the public as an attraction, the 19th century Knightshayes estate was once the home of the powerful Heathcoat Amory family, who were (and still are) influential in British industry and politics. Recently I visited Knightshayes Court, owned by the National Trust, a British conservation charity.