Titus Salt

Sir Titus Salt Bt
Illustration of Salt, 1872
Member of Parliament for Bradford
In office 19 May 1859 – 1 February 1861 Serving with Henry Wickham Wickham
Preceded by	Thomas Perronet Thompson
Succeeded by	William Edward Forster
Personal details
Born	(1803-09-20)20 September 1803 Morley, Yorkshire, England
Died	29 December 1876(1876-12-29) (aged 73) Lightcliffe, Yorkshire, England
Resting place	Saltaire Congregational Church
Political party	Liberal
Spouse	Caroline Whitlam ​ (m. 1830)​
Children	11
Education	Batley Grammar School
Occupation	Manufacturer, politician
Known for	Founding of Saltaire

Sir Titus Salt, 1st Baronet (20 September 1803 – 29 December 1876) was an English manufacturer, politician and philanthropist in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, who is best known for having built Salt's Mill, a large textile mill, together with the attached village of Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

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.^[1] Titus attended a local dame school ^[2] and then Batley Grammar School.^[3] 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.^[2]

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. ^[2]

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. ^[4] He then spent 2 years learning about textile manufacture at William Rouse and Sons ^[5] under the instruction of John Hammond ^[2] before joining his father’s company, dealing in wool. The company traded in Russian Donskoi wool. This 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.^[2]

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.^[6][2]

During this same period, Titus embarked on experiments with alpaca wool. It was the wool of the alpaca that transformed Salt from successful young businessman to the largest employer in Bradford.^[7] 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”.^[8]

The story is that 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. 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'.^[9] The discovery was described by Charles Dickens in a slightly fictionalised form in the magazine Household Words.^[10]

Salt was Chief Constable of Bradford before its incorporation as a borough in 1847 and afterwards a senior alderman. He was the second mayor in office from 1848 to 1849 and was later Deputy Lieutenant for the West Riding of Yorkshire. Smoke and pollution emanated from mills and factory chimneys, and Salt tried in 1842 unsuccessfully to clean up the pollution using a device called the Rodda Smoke Burner.^[11][12]

Around 1850, he decided to build a mill large enough to consolidate his textile manufacture in one place, but he "did not like to be a party to increasing that already over-crowded borough"^[13] and bought land three miles from the town in Shipley next to the River Aire, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Midland Railway. In 1851, he began building the model village of Saltaire. He opened Saltaire Mills, now known as Salt's Mill with a grand banquet on his 50th birthday, 20 September 1853 and set about building houses, bathhouses, an institute, hospital, almshouses and churches. In 1857, Salt was President of the Bradford Chamber of Commerce. In 1858–59, he built the congregational church, which is now Saltaire United Reformed Church, at his own expense and donated the land on which the Wesleyan chapel was built by public subscription in 1866–68. He forbade 'beershops' in Saltaire,^[9] but the common supposition that he was teetotal himself is untrue.^[14] He was a county Justice of the peace and also a Deputy Lord Lieutenant.^[15]

Salt was a private man and left no written statement of his purposes in creating Saltaire, but he told Lord Harewood at the opening that he had built the place "to do good and to give his sons employment".^[16]

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".^[17]

From 1859 until he retired through ill health on 1 February 1861 Salt served as Liberal Member of Parliament for Bradford.^[9] On 30 October 1869, he was created a Baronet, of Saltaire and Crow Nest in the County of York.^[18]

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, and served from 1867 to 1891.^[19] A second lifeboat was funded by Salt, and was the first boat to be placed at Angle, in Pembrokeshire. At a ceremony on 28 November 1868, the boat was named Katherine. The boat served at Angle until 1888.^[20]

On 21 August 1830, Salt married Caroline, daughter of George Whitlam, of Great Grimsby.^[2] They had eleven children, six sons and five daughters.^[21] The children all have a street named after them in Saltaire.^[22]

• 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 Aug 1843
• Whitlam Salt born 20 October 1846 died 5 April 1851 aged 4
• Mary Salt born 1849 died 14 May 1851 aged 2
• Helen Salt born 19 June 1852
• Ada Salt born 18 November 1853 ^[2]

In 1876 Salt died at Crow Nest,^[23] Lightcliffe, near Halifax and was buried at Saltaire Congregational Church. "Estimates vary, but the number of people lining the route [of the funeral cortege, from Lightcliffe to Bradford to Saltaire ^[6]] probably exceeded 100,000."^[24]

• Joseph Rowntree (philanthropist)
• George Cadbury
• Lever Brothers

Bibliography

• Balgarnie, Robert (1970) [1877]. Sir Titus Salt, baronet. Settle: Brenton Publishing. ISBN 0902847007.

Wikisource has the text of the 1885–1900 Dictionary of National Biography's article about Titus Salt.

• Burnley, James (1885). Sir Titus Salt and George Moore. London: Cassell & Co. ("The World's Workers" series).
• Kidd, Charles; Williamson, David (1990). Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage. London and New York: St Martin's Press.
• James, David (2004). "Salt, Sir Titus, first baronet (1803–1876)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/24565. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• "Titus Salt". Archived from the original on 24 June 2007. Retrieved 20 June 2007.
• Valentine, S. R, Sir Titus Salt: The Founder of Saltaire and its Mill, Themelios Publishing, London, 2021.
• "The vision of Titus Salt 1853" (video in 5 sections). A history of Britain: Changing lives. Timelines.tv. Retrieved 26 March 2008.
• Kidd, Charles (2003). Burke's Peerage and Baronetage (106th ed.). London.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• "Salt, Titus" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Titus Salt.