Others
tried their hand at new skills, many took
up framework knitting, they would hire a
knitting frame from a frame smith, working
long hours to pay for the rent of the frame
and to eke out a living.
Some
who were better off bought their own frame,
and built a top story on their house with
a lot of windows to provide as much light
as possible, for the work was a strain on
the eye-sight, With this advent of the home
knitting industry, some of the better off
set up as "Bag Rosters" he would
be a
middleman who negotiated an order for hosiery,
supplied the yarn for the knitter, then
collected the work from the knitter in one
of the local pubs of which he was often
the publican, so that there was always the
temptation for the knitter with cash in
his hand to drink his wages away over the
next day or two.
Re
would then work day, and night by candlelight
when he had sobered up. Times were very
hard for them, but much harder for their
wives and families. Other men took up other
occupations, or a combination of occupations,
so we see in the records, brick and tile
makers from the clay in their back
gardens, with beer house keeping, boot &
shoe making in a garden workshop, these
workshops surviving to the present day.
In 1851 in High cross St Leicester, Thomas
Crick was employing 22 men & 12 women
at his shoe making factory, two years later
he took out a patent for an improved method
of fixing the uppers to the soles by using,
tacks sprigs or rivets, instead of stitching,
for this he invented an iron covered last
to hold the work, this turned over the points
of the tacks when they were hammered forming
a riveted fastening.
This
invention expanded Crick's business so rapidly,
that he employed the bag hosiers methods,
sending the cut leather pieces out to Sileby
and other villages, where there was plenty
of willing labour to make up the shoes.
The leather was sent out on Mondays in baskets,
and collected on Saturdays, this was known
as basket-work.
By the 1890's Crick had introduced gas or
steam driven machinery, and he saw the advantage
in setting up factories in the villages
rather than leaving it as a cottage industry,
his first such factories were at Sileby,
Barwell and Earl Shilton.
Later
some of his employees at Sileby left and
set up a co-operative society for shoe-making
calling it Excelsior Shoes, selling their
products through the Co-operative Society
shops. Again some of their employees decided
to set up on their own, and thus were born
such firms as; Walker Kempson & Stevens,
Newbold & Burtons, Moirs, Swan &
Preston, Lawson Wards,
Brays, and Willetts, which all thrived until
foreign competition with cheap labour gradually
saw their demise.
Where
as many small clay pits had been worked
by individuals, Mr William
Tucker Wright saw the advantage of employing
men to dig the clay from one
or two large pits for the production on
a large scale of facing and common bricks
& roof tiles.
The
bricks from this source were used in the
construction of St Pancreas railway station
in London.
These three principal industries were the
mainstay of the economy of Sileby for many
years, employing a large part of its population.
When
they declined, a wall-covering manufacturer
and several small elite engineering firms
took up the slack, but a large number of
the working population of Sileby have been
obliged to seek work further a field. This
then is a pen portrait skimming the history
of Sileby; it is good to see the independent
spirit of its Danish founders, still prevalent
in its inhabitants in the present day.
