THE BRITISH TEXTILE INDUSTRY- CRABTREE

As some of you may know I upload my vintage fabric finds to Flickr every week. Sometimes I’ll write a little something about the textile if it has the manufacturer or designer printed on the selvedge, but in general most of the fabrics have been cut and are unidentifiable. What I LOVE about Flickr is that every now and again someone like Bob Pedley comes along and comments on one of my pictures. Bob identified the fabric below as a Crabtree Fabrics Ltd print

Flower 1950's Fabric

He was able to tell me what the fabric was made of (cotton bark-weave) and even what machine it was printed on (Aljaba Duplex)! Apparently there was so much ink on the early prints that the fabrics could be stood up on their end. The coarseness of this design was considered quite crude – perhaps representing the operators getting used to the changes in printing. Later designs were much more precise.

Bob worked as a Textile Designer from 1952 when Ben Crabtree started up Crabtree Fabrics Ltd. Crabtree were the main contractor using Heaton Mills near Manchester, England. Along with printing, fabrics were prepared for printing and other processes with bleaching and dyeing of cottons, and later man-made fibres, polyester, nylon.

Crabtree Fabrics were produced for furnishings, principally curtains. I asked if Crabtree collaborated with any art designers like it’s counterparts such as David Whitehead in the 1960’s. Bob said that most the designs were bought from freelance designers or design studios around Manchester or ideas were given to a studio who produced sketches. So no particular designer was collaborated with, although it was mentioned that Ben Crabtree bought from Conrad in the early days. I suspect the reason for this was that the fabrics produced at Crabtree were mass market and cheaper.

Here is another example of the sort of fabrics Crabtree produced. Thunderbirds were produced under licence in the mid 60's. The irony is that these are worth a fortune now, so they may have well been produced using a famous designer!

Thunderbirds Vintage Fabric

Bob continued to work for Crabtree Fabrics as Export Manager and travelled widely in Europe & Scandinavia in the late 50's and 60's. When the Transfer Paper side of the Group was introduced he moved to Heaton Mills and ran Transfer Paper Printers Ltd., from 1972 until Heaton Mills closed in 1984.

When the mill closed Bob set up his own printing company acquiring the machines used and in recent years has scrapped perfectly good machinery and about 2000 rollers of the over 3000 they had.

Thanks Bob for an interesting discussion.

As some of you may know I upload my vintage fabric finds to Flickr every week. Sometimes I’ll write a little something about the textile if it has the manufacturer or designer printed on the selvedge, but in general most of the fabrics have been cut and are unidentifiable. What I LOVE about Flickr is that every now and again someone like Bob Pedley comes along and comments on one of my pictures. Bob identified the fabric below as a Crabtree Fabrics Ltd print

Flower 1950's Fabric

He was able to tell me what fabric was made of (cotton bark-weave) and even what machine it was printed on (Aljaba Duplex)! Apparently there was so much ink on the early prints that the fabrics could be stood up on their end. The coarseness of this design was considered quite crude – perhaps representing the operators getting used to the changes in printing. Later designs were much more precise.

Bob worked as a Textile Designer from 1952 when Ben Crabtree started up Crabtree Fabrics Ltd. Crabtree were the main contractor using Heaton Mills near Manchester, England. Along with printing, fabrics were prepared for printing and other processes with bleaching and dyeing of cottons, and later man-made fibres, polyester, nylon.

Crabtree Fabrics were produced for furnishings, principally curtains. I asked if Crabtree collaborated with any art designers like it’s counterparts such as David Whitehead in the 1960’s. Bob said that most the designs were bought from freelance designers or design studios around Manchester or ideas were given to a studio who produced sketches. So no particular designer was collaborated with, although it was mentioned that Ben Crabtree bought from Conrad in the early days. I suspect the reason for this was that the fabrics produced at Crabtree were mass market and cheaper.

Here is another example of the sort of fabrics Crabtree produced. Thunderbirds were produced under licence in the mid 60's. The irony is that these are worth a fortune now, so they could have been produced using a famous designer!

Thunderbirds Vintage Fabric

Bob continued to work for Crabtree Fabrics as Export Manager and travelled widely in Europe & Scandinavia in the late 50's and 60's. When the Transfer Paper side of the Group was introduced he moved to Heaton Mills and ran Transfer Paper Printers Ltd., from 1972 until Heaton Mills closed in 1984.

When the mill closed Bob set up his own printing company acquiring the machines used and in recent years has scrapped perfectly good machinery and about 2000 rollers of the over 3000 they had.

Thanks Bob for an interesting discussion.

Comments

There have been no comments made on this article. Why not be the first and add your own comment using the form below.

Leave a comment

Please complete the form below to submit a comment on this article. A valid email address is required to submit a comment though it will not be displayed on the site.

HTML has been disabled but if you wish to add any hyperlinks or text formatting you can use any of the following codes: [B]bold text[/B], [I]italic text[/I], [U]underlined text[/U], [S]strike through text[/S], [URL]http://www.yourlink.com[/URL], [URL=http//www.yourlink.com]your text[/URL]