The Great Western Cotton Factory

The Great Western Cotton Factory was opened on a site in Barton Hill, Bristol in April 1838 to spin and weave cotton into cloth. The cotton processed at the factory was brought from America to the port of Liverpool and carried by water to Bristol. It was the only example of a cotton mill in the south west of England, most other factories being in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire.

The Barton Hill district of Bristol was a rural retreat from the busy city centre up until the early nineteenth century when the digging of the Bristol Feeder Canal brought industries including the Great Western Cotton Company, keen to use the water as transport.

Strong links with the cotton mills of Manchester and Liverpool were forged through a partnership between northern businessmen and sixteen other shareholders from prosperous mercantile Bristol. By 1864 when the business became a limited company, two directors were Bristolian, three were from Manchester, one from Liverpool and one from Eccleshall. Expert workers, many of them women, were employed directly from northern England to get production started and work the specialist machinery:

A lot of the finance for new investment in Bristol in the nineteenth century was derived from profits from the Atlantic slave trade, as well as compensation paid to owners of slaves following the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Robert Bright and George Gibbs, West India merchants, Gibbs Bright & Co. were active in the slave trade and both were original shareholders in the Great Western Cotton Company alongside the Manchester cotton manufacturer, Joseph Bell Clarke. Other Bristol merchants, bankers and businessmen who were shareholders of the Great Western Cotton Factory included William Edward Acraman, Alfred John Acraman, Peter Maze, Richard Ricketts, Frederick Ricketts, Henry Bush Thomas Kington the younger, Charles Pinney, Robert Edward Case, Henry Bush, Philip William Skynner Miles, George Henry Ames, Peter Freeland Aiken, James George, Daniel Cave and Joseph Cookson.

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