Background
Author: Nev. Ramsden
The Bell Family of Whitehaven
Whitehaven had grown fast in the eighteenth century, sustained by a solid export trade of coal to Ireland. Ship-building had gone on there since the seventeenth century, to provide and maintain the collier fleet, and had expanded until Whitehaven ships were bought by ship-owners all over the North-West. Ships’ carpenters, ropers, block-makers and anchor-founders crop up regularly in the Parish Registers, but no one was making sail canvas, a gap in the market if ever there was one; all the sail canvas was made in Lancashire, in Lancaster, Warrington and Kirkham.
The Whitehaven story starts when Daniel Bell, a native of Hawkshead and a Quaker, was apprentice in Lancaster in 1745 to a flax-dresser. In 1753 he married Rebecca Frodsham of Pouton, having set upon business as a flaxman, buying raw flax, preparing it in his own workshop, then putting it out to be hand-spun by local women. Joseph, their third child, was born in 1759. Unfortunately, Daniel died the next year, leaving Rebecca to raise their children and run the business, which she managed alone until 1769, when she married David Cragg. Nothing definite is known about Joseph until 1781, when he appears as a fully-fledged owner of a flourishing business, still a Quaker and then aged twenty-two.
Then, at some point between 1781 and 1784, Joseph made a big career move and came to Whitehaven where Joseph Bell in partnership with The Hornby brothers of Kirkham in Lancs. opened a Sail Cloth Manufactory in Scotch Street in 1784, trading as Hornby and Bell until joined by Henry Birley, nephew of the Kirkham factory owners, at some time by 1793. The partners opened Low Mill, on the River Ehen, and enlarged the product range to include huckaback (familiar today as roller towelling) and haberdashery.
All these new flax-spinning factories, producing canvas yarn, were part of the national war effort, equipping the Navy and the merchant marine. After 1815, the bottom fell out of the market and most of the smaller establishments closed down. The Hornbys, the Birleys, and Bell & Bragg were big enough to weather the storm and survived, though Bragg left at some point before 1823. Joseph Bell’s factory continued until he died in 1832, leaving ‘all that my Linen or Flax Manufactory … situate in or near Castle Meadows, and all that my newly erected Warehouse in Irish Street’ to his three sons, Joseph, John and Daniel. The Catherine Street mill lasted as a flax mill until 1853, a monument to Joseph Bell, who started small as a Lancashire handicraftsman, and finished by leaving Whitehaven one of its major landmarks.
…… taken from an article by Margaret Robinson in The Cumbria Industrial History Society - Newsletter, April 2002