Pattern in Cotton

At Littleboro, Lancashire, the countryside tells a century of cotton history. There are the old cottages, where women used to hand out woven cloth to merchants on horseback in return for more yarn to weave into more cloth. There is the 100-year-old red brick mill, which Cuthbert Barwick Clegg's grandfather built to replace cottage industry, and where he prospered. (Now a third of its 1,500 prewar workers rattle around in the big weaving rooms among many idle looms.) There is the big grey stone house, built by Grandfather Clegg, now too big for Cuthbert to staff with servants. There are the bright new cottages (Cuthbert now lives in one) built for textile workers who, before the war, were among the poorest paid of England's workers. And there are new, low, grey stone weaving sheds, built in the last decade, where Clegg hopes to install new highspeed weaving looms before year's end.

Cuthbert Clegg, who strives to keep his cotton mill modern, is a rarity among millowners in the "Black Country." Many a third-or fourth-generation industrial family is as encrusted with habit and stifling tradition as their mill towns, nestling like ugly blackheads on the face of one of England's greenest regions, are encrusted with soot and smoke.

To shake the British cotton industry, which has declined 45% in 20 years, out of its lethargy has become a principal preoccupation of the Labor Government. The way Britons are going about modernization in cotton and 14 other industries* is startling to American businessmen, used to thinking that their own initiative is the surest spur to technological progress.

When the Laborite president of the Board of Trade, Sir Stafford Cripps, outlined the new Government's program for industry last fall, he promised not only Government ownership of the key industries but "a system of planned and controlled private enterprise for the rest." To deal with "the rest" he set up three-sided "working parties"--representing labor, management, and the public interest.

Fussy Fetters. The working party for cotton (one chairman, four trade unionists, four employers, three independent members representing the general public interest) reported that Britain's manpower shortage is the biggest obstacle to full development of the cotton industry. This is a stock answer when any country finds its standard of living unsatisfactory because its productivity per man has decreased. Then the committee tackled the real problem: how can prewar mills, with obsolescent spindles, be converted into modern plants needing fewer but higher paid workers?

The whole working party could agree that the industry needed better marketing methods, central planning, full surveys of textile equipment and capacity for making new machines.

But half of the working party (including Cuthbert Clegg, two other owners' representatives, the three public representatives) opposed the key recommendations of the report: 1) a three-year levy on each spindle for a fund which the Government would use to help equip plants with new machines; 2) grouping of small mills into larger, more economical units; 3) shutdown of plants now having idle machines (because of labor shortage), to permit more intensive use of their labor force in modern plants.

Cuthbert Clegg and his fellow dissenters vainly insisted that the profit motive would be incentive enough for millowners to switch to modern methods. "There is little incentive," they said, "to be found either in monopolistic capitalism or in free enterprise fussily fettered by the state."

Public Experts. The reliance of industry on Government guidance, growing even under Tory Governments, is stronger than ever at a time when every aspect of the national effort has to be directed into the most economical channels. The Government's new role in industry constitutes an economic revolution against self-directing free enterprise. The Cleggs of the cotton industry and vigorous leaders in young industries like aircraft, plastics, and rayon textiles, might salvage a sizable chunk of the industrial process for free enterprise as it is known in the U.S. But in the planning for cotton, Britons could see the pattern for the British version of "free" enterprise, with the state as efficiency expert as well as overall planner.

* Pottery, china clay, hosiery, furniture, boots & shoes, carpets, domestic glassware, jute, linoleum, wool, jewelry & silverware, cutlery, heavy clothing, lace.

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