Simmondley Mill
For every Edmund Potter, there were a dozen Joseph Lynes. Lyne lived at Simmondley Hall, owned a farm and seven cottages, and had probably been active in the domestic textile industry, and in 1800 he built a mill for “carding and spinning” on Green Lane, where it met the stream which flows down through Horse Clough from Whiteley Nab (Simmondley Lane had yet to be built).
The stream was just about big enough to drive a small mill, but it drained Simmondley Pit, Glossop’s main source of coal at that time, so was probably polluted, and problems with water quality caused the business to fail by 1822, and to be put up for sale. In the meantime, in 1817 he had built a very much larger mill in Dinting Vale, with two buildings each five storeys high, as big as any locally.
He never finished it. He ran out of cash and, according to Robert Hamnett, had to borrow from his neighbour at the Hall, Moses Hadfield, who may well have taken the unfinished mill as security. In the meantime it loomed empty and windowless over the turnpike road, occupied by owls the ghostly hooting of which led to stories of its being haunted and to its being given the nickname of “Boggart’s Mill.”
Eventually, in 1825 it was taken by Edmund Potter and his partners, including Moses Hadfield, for use as a printworks. Potter also struggled at first, but eventually expanded his business along the valley into the biggest printworks in the world. He also acquired the Simmondley mill, farm and cottages, but doesn’t appear to have kept them for long. At some point part of the mill was apparently converted into a private house.
Lyne’s business appears to have been revived, however, for in 1842 William Lyne, “picker maker, Simmondley” appears in a trade directory. Pickers are the leather straps on a loom which whack the shuttle back and forth. By 1846 he was a “cotton band manufacturer.” The 1857 map, though, shows the millpond as having been drained, suggesting that whatever was being done there required little or no power.
By 1876, it was “William Lyne and Sons, band makers and farmers”, the sons being George and Thomas, and by 1879 (see map above), at least one of the two buildings was again up and running as a “cotton mill” with the millpond full, and possibly some steam power. The map also shows a rope walk, indicating that it was making cotton rope, and a directory of that year describes the firm as “picker and rope manufacturers”. Band and rope making appears to have been a local speciality, and was a better option for small mills than trying to compete directly with the big firms making yarn and cloth.
By 1895 George alone was listed as “picker and cotton band manufacturer” with Thomas as “farmer”. On the 1897 map the mill was no longer labelled as such, suggesting that the size of the business was very much reduced, and the last reference to George as a cotton band maker was in 1899. Hamnett, writing not long after, said that part of the mill was in ruins and part was being used for bottling mineral water.
Whilst, over the course of the 19th century, a few other textile families had acquired huge empires and fortunes, the Lynes appear to have ended it pretty much as they began it, as farmers and minor players in the textile industry, and in that respect they were more typical than the Woods, the Sidebottoms and the Potters.
By 1921 the main mill building had been demolished, by 1954 it was (almost) all gone, and by the 1960s there was a greenhouse there. The last surviving part of Boggart’s Mill was cleared away in the early 1970s, and most of Simmondley Mill now lies under the houses and gardens between Spring Rise, The Green and Simmondley Lane. However, the developers formed a ruined fragment of the northernmost part into their sales office, now a small private dwelling – all that remains of a cotton empire that might have been.
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