Ann Christie

Dissertation: The Thread of Silk: a Norwich Textiles Company 1900-1950

The Norwich silk-weaving company Hinde, founded in 1810, continued production until the 1980s. Norfolk Museums hold an extensive archive of Hinde’s production notebooks, samples and photographs. This archive, together with oral history accounts from retired factory workers and newspaper reports of the financial circumstances of the company, are the sources for my investigation of the company’s production in the first half of the twentieth century.

The three chapters move outwards, from a close focus on the production notebooks and the complex networks of communication they reveal, to working life at the factory as it is represented in company photographs and oral history, and finally to the economic and historical context of the company, with particular reference to the production of artificial silk fabrics in the interwar period.

The main themes that emerge throughout are firstly the central importance of process, which drives the design of woven fabrics as well as strategic choices of investment. Secondly, drawing on Rita Felski’s work on time, I investigate layers of temporality – the fragmented temporality of the archive as well as linear and cyclical time – underlying the different source materials. Thirdly, I consider how historical narratives can be constructed from them.

Close attention to one company reveals its geographical specificity and its historical context within a specialised industry. The Hinde company exemplifies a lost industrial past that can only be recovered through objects, memories and texts.