Shuttles are elegantly formed wooden tools used for weaving textiles, like cotton, on looms, they are usually manufactured from Dogwood, Cornel or Persimmon, all hardwoods which rarely splinter.
Within a shuttle is a hollow which contains a hinged ‘shuttle peg’, upon this is mounted a ‘pirn’, basically a long thin reel or bobbin, around which yarn is wound, it works by passing the lateral horizontal yarn of the ‘weft’ at right angles through the longitudinal yarn of the ‘warp’, so weaving together the two and creating cloth.
Kissing the shuttle
As a device for speeding up the whole weaving process shuttles are very efficient and have been in use for hundreds of years, however for a long period of their history there was one problem, this being that the yarn on the pirn would quickly run out and need replacing by hand.
Weavers were paid ‘piece-rate’, meaning that they got paid by the quantity of cloth produced rather then by the hour, so any time lost not weaving equated to money lost, so the necessary task of threading a new pirn of weft yarn onto a shuttle peg had to be done as quickly as possible.
The eye on a shuttle is small and difficult to thread yarn through by hand, so a weaver would accomplish this by sucking the end of the thread through the eye with their mouth instead, shuttles which required this became known as ‘sucking’, or suction shuttles and the practice itself was called ‘kissing’.
Consumption
At the height of the Cotton boom it became clear that weavers were dying at a much higher rate then in any other profession and that the main disease responsible was ‘consumption’.
The causes of consumption were unknown for a long while and many suppositions were put forward, one was that sputum on dust particles was to blame, which it turned out later wasn’t too far off the mark.
As a disease consumption had been known of for centuries, biologists have recently theorised that the organism which causes it evolved in tandem with humans over tens of thousands of years, but as it was predominantly a disease of the working classes it was only really looked into with any degree of seriousness in the mid 1700’s, around the time of the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial revolution
The Industrial revolution led to many thousands of workers moving from the countryside to towns and cities to seek employment in the new cotton mills. As housing and amenities for these thousands of workers was undeveloped and highly sought-after living conditions were initially of very low standards, in fact they were downright horrible! Overcrowding, lack of sanitation, and malnutrition became huge issues which only got worse the more people arrived.
This led to such a steep increase in cases of consumption that it began to effect industrial output, this was the first time the disease and its possible causes were looked into.
The Great White Plague
It took until 1882 for a German bacteriologist, Robert Koch, to isolate the tubercle bacillus from the sputum of consumptive patients and figure out that Tuberculosis, “the Great White Plague”, was responsible for these countless deaths.
Previously weavers had suspected that the reason for their profession’s sickness was solely a lung disease called ‘byssinosis’, named after the ancient greek words for flax or linen býssin and for disease nosos, (the root for ‘noxious’ and ‘nauseus’) also known as ‘mill fever’, ‘cotton worker’s disease’ or ‘brown lung’.
This was caused by cotton fibres lodging in the air passages and still occurs with workers in developing countries now, the practice of sucking the yarn exacerbated things as weavers were actively inhaling the fibres.
Characteristic Cough
At the time a worker could be identified as a weaver because of the characteristic hacking cough they developed, but there were some other tell-tales signs of their profession, which were also derived from the unhealthy habit of kissing the shuttles.
One surefire sign was missing, chipped and oddly-coloured front teeth. The broken teeth can be explained by the physical action of sucking the thread through the wooden shuttle and very often yarn would be dyed in all sorts of colours and hues, of course this was long before the invention of health and safety regulations, so dye could be made from any colourful, toxic concoction of chemicals.
Not only were these chemicals inhaled along with the cotton fluff but taken into the blood in other ways, through chapped lips, chipped teeth or swollen gums (remember malnutrition was rife) so some weavers were being poisoned in all sorts of exotic ways.
The shuttles weren’t just used by the one weaver either, but by the whole factory floor, so if one worker had ‘the lurgy’ it quickly spread to everyone else. There was also the outside influence of ‘trampers’, who were itinerant weavers who roved about mills waiting for a days work, which they might be given by the management if someone else didn’t turn up for reasons of illness, childbirth etc, they often introduced new diseases to a mill.
Safety and self-threading shuttles
Once these dangers were recognised and widely acknowledged by the industry some practical measures were put into place to prevent the practice of shuttle kissing, first was the introduction of ‘safety shuttles’ which were constructed so the yarn would pass by a small ball of cotton before leaving the shuttle, so it couldn’t be sucked through the eye, only threaded by hand.
In many mills weavers were provided with a metal hook with which to thread the yarn but this took longer then the old practice of kissing so many weavers just ignored these.
Eventually the self-threading shuttle was invented which removed the need to hand-thread yarn entirely, these were widely in use by the early 1900s and many mills had banned the use of sucking shuttles by then, although it didn’t become law until later in the century.
The Prohibition of Kissing
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the USA was the first place in the world to prohibit the kissing of shuttles, the state built its fortune on cotton and their milltowns went through a very similar boom-and-bust cycle to those in northern England.
After a prolonged outbreak of TB the state realised the central role sucking shuttles played in its spread and legislated to ban their use;
Acts of 1911, Chapter 281: “An Act to Prohibit the Use of Suction Shuttles in Factories”
Section 1. It shall be unlawful for any proprietor of a factory or any officer or agent or other person to require or permit the use of suction shuttles, or any form of shuttle in the use of which any part of the shuttle or any thread is put in the mouth or touched by the lips of the operator. It shall be the duty of the state board of labor and industries to enforce the provisions of this act.
New types of self-threading shuttles were developed at this time, but shuttle kissing was not banned in England until 1952, and in some mills sucking shuttles remained in use up until the 70’s.
Shuttle Kissin’, an old Lancashire Dialect Weaving Rhyme by Sam Fitton (1868-1923)
Matilda Carly Toppin’ wer’ a weighver, an’ a lass
Who did her share o’ laughin’, an’ earned her share o’ brass:
Hon kissed her share o’ shuttles, too, but if they’d nobbut let her,
Hoo’d rayther pass her time away i’ kissin’ summat better.
Matilda had a tackler who’d getten very free
Wi’ bonny Curly Toppin’, for he kept her in his e’e;
But th’ way this felly pestered her amounted to a craze,
An’ hoo wer’ gettin’ wary of his spooney little ways.
Hoo couldna stir a peg but he wer’ awlus at her heels, he followed her i’th factory, or gooin’ to her meals;
So once as hoo wer’ comin’ wi’ a shuttle fro’ his bench, he blarted eawt, “Matilda, tha’rt a gradely pratty wench:
I dunno want to see thi kissin shuttles o’ this life, so if I were to ax thi, wouldtha come an’ be mi wife?
If tha’ll gi’ me thi kisses, for I think tha’s mony left,
I’lI mak’ a patent thingammy for suckin’ up thi weft.”
At that Matilda cocked her e’e, an’ shook her curly yed,
‘Then givin’ him a little smile hoo wagged her yed an’ said:
“I’m very much obliged for o’ thi promises, shuzheaw,
An’ yet I conno’ marry thi, for tha’rt so very feaw
I’m sick o’ bein’ single, an’ I’m sick o’ suckin’ weft,
Mi teeth are gettin’ rotten, an’ I haven’t mony left,
I thank thi for thi offer, which I very much decline,
For I’d rayther kiss a shuttle than a face like thine!”
First published in The Cotton Factory Times, Jan 6th, 1911
Sam Fitton
Sam Fitton was born in Cheshire in 1868 and first worked in the local cotton mills, he became well-known for his acutely observed caricatures, poetry and illustrations and ended up making this his career, contributing to publications such as the Cotton Factory Times, he was also somewhat of an expert in Lancashire dialect. I’ll publish some more of his poems in the future.
A B-H
Northwest Nature and History 
One thought on “Cotton Chronicles, Kissing Shuttles”