With foundations firmly rooted in Bradford since 1890 Stanley Mills was the original home of William Halstead, a powerhouse of Victorian Bradford’s textile industry. The company has now been amalgamated with other well known brands, and continue to make natural fibre woven cloths at the same location in Tong. On average they dispatch 10,000 metres of finished cloth per week to customers all over the world.

Whilst we’re very proud of our heritage and it’s great to see all the old machines clacking away, we’re also guardians of the future of the West Yorkshire textile industry. We have to bring new, young people into the business, which means that we have to look at new machines and investment. Whilst it’s not quite as exciting to look at from an aesthetical and a history point of view, we have to invest in new technology, to be able to bring new people in and get them interested. So heritage is important, but we have to look to the future.

The public perception of textiles is still dark satanic mills. It’s William Halstead’s 150th anniversary this year, so for 150 years we’ve been housed in this four story mill building. We’ve got the heritage here, but we have to keep it modern and bright and appealing for people to want to come and work here.

Customers, they love the history, they love the archive room, they love all that, but we’ve got to keep going and we don’t keep going on rackety old machines. We make fabrics for apparel, for menswear predominantly, but some ladies wear. We make fine woollen suitings, coatings and jacketings.

Most of our business is export, we have three main markets. A strong Far East business, selling to Japan and Korea. We also sell fabric to the Middle east for travel suits and the dishdasha robes. When the temperatures in the winter go down they start to feel cold and want to wear something warm, so they buy lightweight woollen fabrics. Then the other part of our business is the luxury brands throughout the world. So Prada, Gucci, Burberry, Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, you name it, we make fabric for those top brands.

We’re at the top end of the market in terms of price compared to something someone like Marks and Spencer or Next, for example. But don’t be deceived, the prices of the garments don’t reflect the price of the fabric. A garment like a jacket only takes one, one and a half, or two meters tops of fabric. It’s all the other paraphernalia that goes with it: the linings, the buttons, the trims, running the stores, the marketing that bumps up the prices of the final garments.

But equally, it’s not just a premium product. We have to offer a premium service as well. There’s no point having good quality and then delivering late. So we offer the full package of quality of service and quality of product. You know, the quality standards are really exacting.

When I originally started here the majority of cloth was mohair suiting, but we do a lot more finer stuff now, like cashmere. We’re also weaving quite a bit of woollens as well, which we didn’t do so much of before, but we are branching out into the heavier woollen cloths, probably more for overcoats and things like that.

An overlooker will come and start the job up. He’ll apply the correct wefts, the correct settings to the machine, and he’ll start it up. And then somebody will come and inspect it, end by end (thread by thread) before it goes into production. Then I go around and find out if there’s any issues. I work on efficiencies, breakdowns, I order all the parts, and train people as well, so it’s quite a busy day.

The satisfaction in the job, I’d say, is coming to a problem and when you can stand back and go, it’s sorted. There’s so many settings and tiny little adjustments that will cause problems, and different yarns can cause different issues. It can be quite tiresome, but I enjoy it. When you do solve the problem, that’s the goal.

I’m a warping supervisor. We do warping in this department, for quality cloth for all over the world. We do all sorts from thick yarns and very thin yarn, to Cashemeres and Mohairs. Some of them are more of a problem than the others. Some will run really nice, some won’t. It just depends on the yarn itself and how it’s been treated. Loads of things happen to the yarn before we get it. Sometimes it might not have been steamed properly. So it has to be sorted.

When I first started here, in 2002, it was just William Halsteads and it was just more or less mohair. But since Stanley Mills took over, we supply more worldwide now. I mean, making these high quality products, it’s a real craft, a skilled job.

We get loads of visitors coming round. They come from all over the place, Japan, China. They all come and take photos and watch what we’re doing. They’re interested to see if we’ve got good facilities here, good health and safety. That we are not like a workhouse, that we have breaks and to make sure that the workforce is treated well.

I work in the Quality Control department. We have the final inspection and we have the mending room which I overlook. My role here as QC manager is to check all the quality, design and shade is as it should be. We have customer specifications, their details and a little sample cutting. I get a copy, the customer gets a copy, and so then we’re working from the same sheet.

I joined John Foster’s Black Dyke Mills, the big mill in Queensbury, when I was 17. That was in 1987. I was trained in house at John Foster’s to do burling (removing imperfections) and mending, and that’s where it all started from. So I started here in the mending department and then went to mending supervisor and then onto QC manager. You’re kinda the big troubleshooter.

We really struggle to get qualified menders so we decided to do our own training and it’s been really successful. We’ve done really well. I mean the youngest one we’ve got down there, she came to us when she was 17, and I think she’s 20 this year. So we’ve gone from like the older end to now catering more for the younger ones, which is what we want. We want the young blood to come through because I’m not going to be here forever. So we need people to take our places to keep the textiles going strong.