Titus Salt

Titus Salt was born in 1803 to Daniel Salt, a drysalter, and Grace Smithies, daughter of Isaac Smithies, of Old Manor House, Morley where the Salt family were to live. Titus attended a local dame school and then Batley Grammar School. In 1813, the Salt family moved to a farm at Crofton near Wakefield and Daniel became a sheep farmer. Titus attended “the day school connected with Salem Chapel” in Wakefield and later, the grammar school.

Titus made a long-standing friend at the day school - his teacher, Enoch Harrison. In 1853, Harrison was a guest at Salt's Mill's opening banquet on Salt's 50th birthday.

Salt's first job was as a wool-stapler in Wakefield but the family moved to Bradford in 1820, bringing that post to a close. Whilst father Daniel set up as a dealer in wool, Titus spent two years learning about textile manufacture at William Rouse and Sons before joining his father's company which traded in Russian Donskoi wool amongst others. Donskoi was widely used in the woollens trade but not in the manufacture of worsted cloth. Titus encouraged the Bradford spinners to use Donskoi in worsted manufacture, with no success. So father and son decided to utilise it themselves and set up as spinner and manufacturer. The experiment was a success.

Between 1833 and 1835, the Salt business changed significantly. Daniel retired; Titus's brother Edward joined; Titus struck out on his own; and the family partnership was dissolved.

During this same period, Titus embarked on experiments with alpaca wool from Peru. The first documentary record of Salt encountering the wool is in his Day Book. On 27 June 1835, Salt recorded one bag of “Peruvian wool”.

The story of Salt's discovery of the fibre is well known, not least because it was published by Charles Dickens in a slightly fictionalised form in the magazine Household Words. Salt came upon bales of alpaca wool in a warehouse in Liverpool and, after taking some samples away to experiment, came back and bought the consignment. According to Balgarnie, his friend and biographer, the tale is substantially true.

Though he was not the first in England to work with the fibre, he was the creator of the lustrous and subsequently fashionable cloth called 'alpaca'. It was this that transformed Salt from successful young businessman to the largest employer in Bradford.

Around 1850, he decided to build a mill large enough to consolidate his textile manufacture in one place. However, he "did not like to be a party to increasing that already over-crowded borough [Bradford]" and bought land three miles from Bradford, in Shipley, next to the River Aire, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Midland Railway. In 1851, the construction of the factory began. Saltaire Mills, now known as Salt's Mill, opened with that grand banquet, on his 50th birthday, 20 September 1853. The construction of the village of Saltaire, with its houses, almshouses, shops, schools, an infirmary, a club and institute, baths and washhouses, started in the following year. In 1858–59, he built the congregational church, now Saltaire United Reformed Church, later donating land on which the Wesleyan chapel was built by public subscription in 1866–68.

Famously, he forbade 'beershops' in Saltaire, but the common supposition that he was teetotal himself is untrue.

Salt was a private man and left no written statement of his purposes in creating Saltaire, but he told Lord Harewood at the opening of Salt's Mill that he had built the place "to do good and to give his sons employment".

In David James's assessment:

"Salt's motives in building Saltaire remain obscure. They seem to have been a mixture of sound economics, Christian duty, and a desire to have effective control over his workforce. There were economic reasons for moving out of Bradford, and the village did provide him with an amenable, handpicked workforce. Yet Salt was deeply religious and sincerely believed that, by creating an environment where people could lead healthy, virtuous, godly lives, he was doing God's work. Perhaps, also, diffident and inarticulate as he was, the village may have been a way of demonstrating the extent of his wealth and power. Lastly, he may also have seen it as a means of establishing an industrial dynasty to match the landed estates of his Bradford contemporaries. However, Saltaire provided no real solution to the relationship between employer and worker. Its small size, healthy site, and comparative isolation provided an escape rather than an answer to the problems of urban industrial society".

Saltaire was named alongside Hyde, Egerton (then Turton), Tottington (Bury), Bollington, Holbeck (Leeds), Belper and Copley as an example of workers' colonies built by British rural factory owners in the Austrian economist Emil Sax's 1869 book Die Wohnungszustände der arbeitenden Classen und ihre Reform. Sax reported that "the employers' main motive for building dwellings for their workers" was to increase their productivity by shortening their walking commute, and construed the projects as "housing reform". In The Housing Question, Friedrich Engels objected to this view and explained that the colonies constituted a "cottage system" in which the employers doubled as landlords, and could thereby impose monopoly prices and prevent strikes with the threat of eviction. On these grounds, he commented, "for factory production in the rural districts expenditure on workers' dwellings was a necessary part of the total investment of capital, and a very profitable one, both directly and indirectly".

On 21 August 1830, Salt married Caroline, daughter of George Whitlam, of Great Grimsby. They had eleven children, six sons and five daughters. The children each have a street named after them in Saltaire.

William Henry Salt born 5 December 1831

George Salt born 22 April 1833

Amelia Salt born 29 November 1835

Edward Salt born 3 April 1837

Herbert Salt born 17 April 1840

Fanny Caroline Salt born 7 August 1841 died aged 19 on 4 August 1861

Titus Salt, commonly known as Titus Salt Jr, born 28 August 1843

Whitlam Salt born 20 October 1846 died 5 April 1851 aged 4

Mary Salt born 30 April 1849 died 14 May 1851 aged 2

Helen Salt born 19 June 1852

Ada Salt born 18 November 1853

In 1876 Salt died at his home, Crow Nest, Lightcliffe, near Halifax. "Estimates vary, but the number of people lining the route [of the funeral cortege, from Lightcliffe to Bradford to Saltaire] probably exceeded 100,000."

Salt was buried at Saltaire Congregational Church as were his wife and many of his children.

"One of the most celebrated traits of Sir Titus Salt was his philanthropy", say Barlo and Shaw. They list many of his gifts and estimate that the total value was "approx.£139,000". However, they warn that their list "should not be regarded as complete," and a new study has confirmed this caution. It identifies a total of 269 gifts with an original value of nearly £170,000 and says that “At today's prices, this represents more than £16,000,000”.

Most of Salts' gifts benefitted the Bradford area but Hull, Scarborough and Grimsby feature along with places many hundred miles from northern England. In 1867, Salt provided the funds to pay for the first Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) lifeboat to be stationed at Stromness, Orkney. The boat was duly named Saltaire.

Several gifts benefitted people from outside Britain. For example “sufferers of a fire in Hamburg” in 1842; “Hungarian refugees” in 1850; and the “sick and wounded of the armies of the two Nations engaged in war on the Continent” in 1870.