MINING, railways, shipbuilding, steelmaking – proper industries with which the North-East is always associated. But people often forget how big the textile industry was until only a couple of decades ago.
Memories 298 featured Ramar, the garment manufacturer which was founded in Crook in 1945 and employed more than 450 people, mainly women, until it closed in 1991.
Daniel Simpson, of Crook, draws our attention to the factory next door to it on the Government-owned “advance industrial estate”: the Advance Throwing Mills (ATM). It opened in 1964 to specifically employ pitmen, like Daniel, who had been made redundant as the Durham coalfield contracted.
ATM spun nylon in to different types of yarn. For example, in 1966, it won a contract to supply £250,000 worth of “crimp yarn” to the Netherlands. Crimp yarn was an ATM speciality, said the Echo.
“The yarn is knitted and then deknitted and the crimp is then steamed into permanence,” said the report. “Crimp yarn is used in many modern stretch garments.”
By 1968, when the President of the Board of Trade, Anthony Crosland, opened ATM’s extension, it employed 425 people, 200 of whom were ex-miners.
In 1974, when ATM was taken over by the American chemical giant Monsanto, Crook and a satellite factory in St Helens Auckland, employed 650.
It was, therefore, a giant blow to the Crook economy when in 1979, to much surprise, Monsanto announced that both factories were to close – pushing the Wear Valley’s unemployment rate up to 17 per cent, making it one of the country’s blackest jobs spots.
This, though, was just the start of a couple of decades of decline in the textile and garment industry – for instance, Darlington’s Paton and Baldwins, which had employed 3,500 women in the early 1960s, stopped all production of yarn in 1984.
The decline ended in industrial death in a grim 18 months at the start of the 21st Century when 4,000 textile jobs were lost – Courtaulds, Barbour, Coats, Dewhirst and Varahwear all went.
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