This is the story of a family textile business established in Bradford in 1895.
The Company was founded jointly by three brothers John Davy (1854-1942), Francis Henry Davy (1862-1929) and Stephen Davy (1872-1941).
The brothers had six brothers and sisters and they were the children of William and Mary Ann Davy (nee Barrett). William was born in 1828 and died in 1901. The large family lived in a small cottage near the parish church in Kildwick, a village between Keighley and Skipton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. William Davy was the village clog, boot and shoemaker. All the children left school when they were twelve and like most of the other children went to work in one of the several woollen mills in the area. The girls would learn to work on the spinning machines or the weaving looms and the boys would train on the carding machines or on more manual activities.
By 1895 John, Francis and Stephen had responsible positions as carding, spinning or weaving ‘overlookers’ in T & M Bairstow’s fine-worsted spinning and weaving mill in Sutton-in-Craven, only a few miles from the original family home. The three brothers would have overall responsibility for the quality of work produced in their different departments. John and Francis were married and Francis and his wife Mary Ann (nee Hargreaves) had a one-year-old son, Walter, who was born on the 18th of March 1894. Mary Ann was a farmer’s daughter from Wood Top Farm, high-up on the hillside above Sutton village. From a young age, Mary Ann had been a weaver at Bairstow’s mill.
That year, 1895, the three brothers took what must have been a ‘leap in the dark’ decision to leave their secure positions with Bairstow’s and establish their own company in Bradford, then the world centre of wool merchanting and processing, fifteen miles away down the Aire valley. It is somewhat of a ‘grey area’ as to how they accumulated enough capital to make the change, and it has been suggested that John Davy may have had brief speculation with gold in South Africa, but that year they bought two small warehouses for storage and sorting in Fawcett Court, now long gone, but then near the bottom end of the old Manchester Road in the centre of the city, and another single storey warehouse called Anchor Shed in Prince Street, Dudley Hill, which is about two miles up the steep Wakefield Road away from the city centre, Anchor Shed had previously been used as a Salvation Army Citadel and hostel.
The brothers decided that John and Stephen would become ‘waste merchants’ and visit the many local spinning and weaving mills in the area to buy the ‘waste’ which was accumulated at the end of a ‘run’, often in very large quantities. This material, mostly spun threads, was sorted into different qualities, colours, and types and re-cycled into a worthwhile different raw material which could be sold, to be used on its own, or as a percentage of a new blend.
Steam to heat the water came through a pipe from a boiler, and the belt-driven power to run the machines was also provided by a line shaft through the party wall, both supplied from W & G Chambers Dye Works next door.
For the next thirteen years, the three brothers shared the profits each of them made and then in 1908 they decided to create three independent companies and the Bradford Waste Pulling Company run by Francis Davy was established. The company always traded on a commission basis. It did not buy or sell the material it processed but worked for mills who sent their ‘waste’ to be processed, and for waste merchants who had bought the ‘waste’ and after processing sold it on as specific blends to other mills and manufacturers.
Walter Davy left school when he was fourteen in the summer of 1908 and travelled by train six days a week to Bradford and initially went to work with his Uncle Stephen to learn the rudiments of the ‘Bradford ‘trade’, particularly by being sent out almost every day on his own to visit scores of mills in Bradford and the surrounding West Riding textile towns to buy and also try to sell processed and unprocessed wastes. This was a traumatic time for a barely teenage boy but looking back Walter knew that he had quickly learnt to cope with difficult and sometimes scary mill ‘buyers’ who, sometimes without a word being spoken, threw on the floor and left the Sample Room, all of Walter’s carefully prepared samples which had been tightly and carefully wrapped in their traditional blue sample paper. From being sixteen usually two nights a week after a long day in Bradford, Walter would attend evening classes at Keighley Technical College for maths and English lessons.
Walter stayed with his uncle until he was conscripted into the Royal Navy during the Great War in 1915. He became a radio telegraphist in its somewhat primitive days, serving with a four-ship flotilla of minesweepers converted from fishing trawlers based in Falmouth in Cornwall. Walter’s main duty was to listen through earphones for submerged enemy submarines, through a large amplified rubber tube dangling over the ship’s side!
Early in 1919, he was able to come home and from then on he joined his father at Dudley Hill. Francis Davy died in January 1929 and for nearly the next fifty years Walter diligently expanded the waste processing business and bought new, more efficient machinery when he felt the company could afford the expense. Up to 1968 the company never borrowed any money to purchase machinery.
In spite of serious recessions in the 1920s and 30s, Walter Davy said the mill was never busier than during the two World Wars when it was essential that all bi-products from textile manufacture were re-claimed. During the 1939-1945 war the Company often ran for twenty-four hours six days a week.
The Company can claim to have been one of the first to have begun to recycle nylon fibre waste from the early 1940s, and viscose cellulose fibre was also processed for over twenty years until the mid-1960s. Viscose, a cellulose fibre derived from spruce trees is very inflammable in its raw material state and the insurance costs through the risk of fire eventually made the re-cycling process unviable. Walter Davy often described viscose by its original colloquial name ‘artificial silk’.
Until the late 1980’s the Company processed the full range of fine quality natural fibres, including all wools, mohair, alpaca, camel hair, some cashmere, angora, and even reindeer hair, used as an effect fibre in ladies skirting material, and the mill’s precision cutting department, as an occasional change from cutting thousands of tons of fine botany wool tops on commission, cut pure silk top sliver and occasionally Chinese human hair used for the stiffening of lapels on men’s jackets.
For over eighty years the company prepared, scoured and garnetted vast quantities of fine white botany thread waste which was then delivered weekly to a mill in Wilton near Salisbury in Wiltshire which made high-quality surgical felts but particularly piano hammer felts for Bechstein and Steinway pianos. Also almost weekly the company scoured and garnetted large blends of wool and nylon thread and selvedges for a mill near Stroud in Gloucestershire that wove tennis ball cloth for Wimbledon tennis balls.
During its most active years the company’s customers were spread throughout the United Kingdom from Brora and Elgin in the far north of Scotland, to Kilmarnock near Glasgow, the Border Country textile towns of Galashiels, Selkirk and Hawick, most of the traditional West Riding textile towns particularly Elland, Bury in Lancashire, Trefriw in North Wales, the Cotswold towns of Chipping Norton and Witney, Minchinhampton and Nailsworth in Gloucestershire, Wellington in Somerset, Wilton in Wiltshire, and Buckfastleigh and Dartington in Devon.
By the late 1940’s Walter Davy’s eldest son Keith had joined the business and ten years later in 1957 the youngest son Roger became a full-time employee. Walter Davy died in April 1979.
In the mid-1960s Keith established his own textile merchanting company which ran parallel with the original family business and Roger became MD of the fibre processing company. Keith’s eldest son Andrew later very ably expanded his father’s merchanting business but that company has now been sold to an overseas concern. There is still though close family continuity through another of Keith’s sons Mark, and two of his sons, Charles and Robert, who with their father are an integral part of the original and successful ongoing business. Now 128 years later from its initial founding in 1895, the Davy name happily and successfully remains, and continues, as one of the few surviving companies of the Bradford textile trade.
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