Between the two World Wars, Britain experienced the Great Depression. According to one economic historian, ‘At all times between 1921 and 1938 at least one out of every ten citizens of working age was out of a job’. The cotton industry, which relied heavily on exports, particularly to the British Empire, was very hard hit. Its foreign markets, also suffering from the world-wide recession, could not afford to buy British goods. Britain’s exports of cotton to India fell to a tenth of their previous level. There was also increasing competition from the domestic industries of India and Japan.
In the northern textile towns, falling production meant falling wages and massive unemployment. The workers suffered great hardship and there was industrial unrest. The industry had been slow to modernise before 1914, and had continued to specialise rather than integrate spinning, weaving and finishing. It was only state intervention in the shape of the Spindles Board (1936), and the Cotton Industry (Reorganisation) Act (1939), that forced the industry to modernise on the eve of World War II.
Cotton manufacturers continued to search for new markets throughout the period, and many made imaginative uses of modern advertising techniques to introduce their products to countries as far afield as South America and Russia.
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