Longdendale – Vale House
Vale House Mill is lost in the sense that the site is now under the reservoir of the same name. The story, though, of how in 1795 Robert and John Thornley went there from Hadfield and created a new industrial community is well-known, and we have an 1860 photo, one of the earliest of any mill in the area, which shows the two big spinning blocks, powered from the Etherow by a single large wheel, which the brothers built before they went bankrupt in the mid 1820s.
We also have a succession of plans of the site drawn for Manchester Corporation between 1847 and 1861. Something on those plans has, however, been overlooked. At the very top of the site they show a separate group of buildings, which look very like a smaller mill with cottages attached (see pic – red arrow). The main building would measure about 86 by 20 feet, typical dimensions for an early mill using Arkwright’s water frames (with or without Arkwright’s permission.)
It would have drawn its power not from the river but from Ashfield Gutter. Although the foundations of the lower buildings have all disappeared, either washed away or buried under silt, those of this group of buildings reappear whenever the water is low, and they include an arch in the main building (see pic, from the dry summer of 2018) which could have been the entry of the headrace.
So did the Thornleys first build this mill, before moving on to much bigger things (and going bust)? It seems unlikely. They had recently spent a lot of money bringing more water, via the Torside Goit, to their mill, or mills, in Hadfield, and the only logical reason to go up the valley would be to build something much larger using the much greater power available from the Etherow. More likely, therefore, that they took over an existing mill site, and the access it provided to the river, then expanded.
There may be other evidence for that. In “The Cotton Industry in Longdendale and Glossopdale” Tom Quayle said that Vale House was built in 1775 by Samuel Oldknow, who sold it to the Thornleys 20 years later. His source, though, was “a thesis by an unknown writer” and Oldknow’s involvement must be extremely doubtful as he would have been only 19. He is also, as the builder in 1790 of the enormous Mellor Mill, one of the best-known figures in the early cotton industry, but no-one else seems to be aware of any connection between him and this area.
1775 is also a very early date – only four years after Arkwright’s first mill at Cromford. However, the story may nevertheless contain a kernel of truth. This mill, on a small tributary stream down a farm track, well hidden, if that were necessary, from Arkwright’s lawyers, is much more typical of one from the late 1770s or the 1780s than anything that the ambitious, and experienced, Thornleys would have wanted to build in 1795. Their yardstick would have been their late father’s partner John Turner, who in the same year added Bottoms, powered from the Etherow, to his three existing mills at Waterside.
In the end, whilst it never rivalled Waterside, Vale House did become one of the larger mills in the area, employing up to 600 people after later owners added weaving and steam power. It might have become even larger, but by the early 1850s it was obviously doomed, and new investment would have ceased. When Manchester Corporation, having bought it in 1864, thought of restarting it for a while, their engineer Frederick Bateman advised that the machinery was fit only for scrap.
NEXT – Part 6: Cowbrook Mill
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