Scouring

Unpacking wool at a Witney mill, early 20th century.

This is the cleaning of the raw wool fibre which takes place after the wool has been sorted into different qualities. Although sheep were washed or dipped before they were sheared, between 30% and 70% of the weight of the raw fleece wool could still be made up of particles of grease (lanolin), dirt and other impurities such as grass, thorns and dead hair - even after it had been sorted. One of the main skills wool buyers needed was an ability to judge the proportions of wool to dirt in the different wools on offer. A lot of the impurities were removed by the scouring process, the aim being to leave behind a soft, fine-textured, pure fibre that would spin up into in an even thread. Before industrialisation, scouring generally took place in fulling mills where wool was soaked in stale urine (known as 'lant') or fullers' earth to clean it. If wool was not properly scoured then it could cause problems later when it came to carding, dyeing and spinning.

Scouring machines were used in some mills in Britain, which bathed the wool in successive warm detergent rinses and carried away all the dirt without matting the fibres together. Until the middle years of the 20th century it appears that Early's did very little scouring on their premises and treated the wool 'in the grease' and this seems to have been true of the other Witney blanket makers. A small proportion of wools were scoured, though: Merino wool (used for the finest quality blankets) as this had a very high percentage of grease in it, and also wool which was going to be dyed a colour in order to form the 'laces' or stripes in a blanket. Processing wool this way meant that a lot of machine cleaning had to take place, especially if wool bought from fellmongers had a high proportion of lime in it as this produced a putty-like substance. If cleaner wool was required this was usually ordered from, and carried out by, the wool supplier or fellmonger although Early's also had a small scouring machine. An acid carbonising treatment would be used to remove any vegetable matter that still remained in the wool after it had been cleaned.

Clare Sumner