Shurat cotton wasn't rubbish- it was used by the fine Indian textile industry, which the East India Company had deliberately set out to destroy, so that they could profitably import Lancashire cotton goods. Being machine- made, these were usually far inferior to the hand- woven native product. But the mill machinery was set up for American cotton, which could stand the less gentle handling given by the mechanised spinning machines and looms.

It was only a generation or so earlier that the last of the Lancashire handloom weavers had been driven to the workhouse, and to me one sad feature of the affair is the silence of Sam Bamford. He had been a radical forty-odd years before, leading one of the contingents to St.Peter's Fields in Manchester in 1819, to the meeting that ended in the Peterloo Massacre.