THE ADAMS BUILDING
Details inspired by lace design at The Adams building
Thomas Adams was a the Lace manufacturer and banker from Worksop in Nottinghamshire. The Adam's building was purpose built as a lace showroom. it was built to impress and has intricate decorations of lace designs on the inner doors and on the stone work outside it also had a plaque in reference to Britannica and overseas trade.
The upstairs lace loft, where our studio is now based has very good light this was innovative design so workers could work long hours in natural light without the use of candles, the delicate and intricate finishing work of lace designs was often performed by women and children.
Exploitative as this trade was at the time Thomas Adams was considered a philanthropist.
He provided lots of extra services for his workers such as a school for their children and a chapel on site. Thomas Adams is buried nearby in st. Mary's in the Lace Market
Most places in Europe in England had a handmade lace industry however Nottingham was the first place to have lace machines. Adapted from stocking making machines by John Heathcote and John levers the Leavers lace machine changed the way lace was manufactured. This single industry was responsible for the growth and wealth of Nottingham.
Lace became more affordable due to machine manufacture and supply and demand. Nottingham had dominance of the industry until the late 19th century when. many countries had industry of their own due to the smuggling and export of lace machines across Europe and India and worldwide.
Industrialisation
People came from nearby villages and rural areas to work in the Lace industry in Nottingham. This caused the growth in the population of the city. living conditions for the workers were overcrowded and poor there was no fresh food and living conditions were un sanitary. The life expectancy for most people of this time was just 28 years old there was high child mortality due to general exploitation of workers doing long hours for, poor pay child labour danger of death and injuries from the machinery.
LACE AT NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
Nottingham Castle
On a trip to Nottingham Castle last year I visited the latest exhibition that they were holding their from the archives, much of this exhibition has been moved to Newstead Abbey for their lace places exhibition alongside the work that we're doing. It seems a shame that there's no dedicated Lace museum in Nottingham to preserve the history of the industry that built the whole city.
There is an Industrial Museum at Wollaton Hall that has some of the Lace machines alongside other machinery from the Industrial Revolution and there's also a framework framework knitting Museum nearby which Focuses more on knitting and not lace making.
The DH Lawrence museum in Ilkeston, though dedicated to the local writer it's notable that his parents were also also lacemakers and again I mentioned, Cluny lace also based in Ilkeston, which is the only working lace factory that continues to make heritage Lace on the levers lace machines, passed down through nine generations of family.
Some of Nottingham lace collection is also housed in the NTU lace archive which can be viewed by appointment only.
The lace on display here at Nottingham Castle, before it was moved, shows the many different uses of lace both of female decorative clothing to stockings to storytelling in the Lace panels it also shows the smaller samples of machine lace
And has a lot of examples of local work and descriptive text about this industry.
LEAVERS LACE
I have a particular interest in John Leavers as his name is so similar to mine (Leivers, though spelt differently) and he was born in Sutton In Ashfield where my own family comes from, so i did a little research into him about the origins and spelling of the name. Judith Edgar from Newstead was very helpful with my enquiry and sent me some information as well as the research ( below) that I found on line.
Below is some information about John Leavers that Newstead Curator Judith Edgar kindly sent to me after a conversation we had when I enquired as to the origins of his name and if it may be connected with my own.
"John Leavers Biography by Fabrice Bensimon (NB translated from French via Google translate!)
John Leavers was born "John Levers" around 1784/6 in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, son of
John Leavers and Ann Leavers, née Walker. He has two brothers and a sister: Joseph Leavers (born
around 1796, who married Anne Mila in 1815), lace worker and mechanic for the tulle trades; Mary
Leavers (born in 1797, embroiderer); Thomas Leavers (born December 5, 1800 in Nottingham),
mechanical builder.
John Leavers' fate is strange. On the one hand, its name is known all over the world:
Leavers lace machines were sold there until the 1960s. Leavers lace was awarded at
the Brussels International Exhibition in 1910. In 1947, for example , there were 730
Leavers machines in 54 factories employing 5,000 workers in the United States. And
if this technology is now out of date, even today, the Cluny Lace factory in Ilkeston,
Great Britain, produces Leavers lace, a luxury product. And at the same time, John
Leavers is an unknown.
We know very little about the first part of the life of John Leavers, in
Nottinghamshire, capital of English hosiery and where mechanical lace is born. In
particular, the social background and education from which Leavers benefited is
unknown; historiography has insisted on the social mobility allowed by British
society, where many inventors with modest origins then made a fortune; however,
the majority of inventors actually come from families of skilled craftspeople,
manufacturers, the liberal professions and wealthy families. In 1809, John Heathcoat
patented a machine, the "Old Loughborough", which very well imitates handmade
lace; he patented his machine and made a fortune. Industry historian William Felkin
points out that Levers, a frame smith and setter up, improved Heathcoat's machine
skills with his "very great" mechanical talent and engineering "(" mechanical genius
and skill ”). He would then have worked in secret, in an attic north of Derby Road, in
Nottingham. For reasons that remain unclear, neither he nor his client, John
Stevenson and Skipwith, of Nottingham, have patented the improvements he has
made, in particular the fact that the coils (less than one millimeter in diameter)
'thickness) are in a single row. This improvement in Heathcoat's craft, made around
1813-1814, nevertheless made it possible to produce good quality mechanical lace
in large quantities. Leavers works in another workshop where he further modifies his
machine and builds several each year. Felkin, who did not know Leavers personally,
but draws on several accounts, describes him as:
« a friendly, kind-hearted man, and a great politician; fond of company and song, being
himself band-master of the local militia, in which also one of his brothers was a member….
A free-liver and irregular in his application to his business. He sometimes worked day and
night if a mechanical idea or contrivance struck him, and would then quit all labour for days
of enjoyment with chosen boon companions.” 1
Half a century away, Felkin insists on this discrepancy between Leavers'
inventiveness, his machine being "by far the most delicate", and his financial
misfortune:
« By his invention, he was in reality greatly assisting to lay the foundation of the
machine lace trade, the annual English transactions have at times amounted to £5,000,000,"
In regards to the project I followed this line of enquiry out of personal curiosity, I don't want to trace my ancestry and turn this into a history project, however I feel so many personal connections with this project, from the maker of the lace machine, to my own history with Newstead and our studio space in the Adams building.
lace is weaved into our history and its this aspect of the research that I'd like to carry forward.
LACE IN LITURATURE
Below is a poem that Judith read to us during our first visit, she emailed me this on request.
It describes the contrast between the the upper and working class women lives through the voice of a lace maker.
Mary Bailey, poet and lace runner
‘You ladies of Britain, we most
humbly address,
And hope you will take it in hand,
And at once condescend on poor
RUNNERS to think,
When dress’d at your glasses you stand.
How little you think of that lily
white veil
That shields you from gazers
and sun:
How hard we have worked, and
our eyes how we’ve strain’d,
When those beautiful flowers we run.
View the ballroom, where beauty
beams round,
And shines with such
elegant grace,
And think you in no ways
indebted to us,
THE RUNNERS OF NOTTINGHAM LACE’.
From Petition to the British Fair by Mary Bailey (?-1828)
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