Foreign News: Slump & Boom in Lancashire

"She's a bonny woman," said a mill girl as the red and black Rolls-Royce with the royal standard fluttering above its radiator crept through a Lancashire cotton town one sunny day last week. From the car window Queen Elizabeth II smiled at her loyal Lancastrians and waved a gloved hand. It was the Queen's first state visit to the grimy industrial county where 5,000,000 sturdy English folk spin the bulk of Britain's cotton textiles, mine a goodly share of its coal. She had come with her husband Philip to shed a ray of royal hope in the one region of prosperous Britain that is visibly and chronically depressed. "Dark, Satanic Mills." Lancashire is not the tourists' England. Forty miles wide by 60 miles long, it is bisected by the river Ribble into a northern rural section that merges into Wordsworth's Lake District, and a southern industrial coalfield choked with so many cities, slums, mining villages and cotton mills, greyhound stadia, slagheaps, canals and railroad sidings that it forms a single complex, something like the Ruhr. South Lanes, as Britons call it, is the most populous region of Britain outside London. Its people are a nubbly mixture of English yeomen, Welsh shepherds and Irish peasants, congealed into Lancastrians by the Industrial Revolution. With its deepwater port of Liverpool (pop. 790,000), its damp climate and plentiful coal, Lancashire was for a century the cotton clothier of half the world. Lancashire men invented the first machines of mass production (the Crompton mule, the spinning jenny), were the first to use steam to drive them. But the price of industrial precocity, in an age that was unprepared for it, was paid by the people of Lancashire. In Lancashire's "dark, satanic mills" children labored twelve hours a day, women grew old at 30. Religion was their chief succor. The Methodist revival burned bright in the Lancashire mill towns, and its influence provided Britain's Labor Party, one of whose strongholds is South Lancashire, with a strain of Biblical humanism that tempers the doctrinaire Socialism of its Marxist intellectuals. South Lancashire today sends more than 50 M.P.s to Parliament, two-thirds of them Labor. Depression in its textile industry could increase the Labor vote in next month's general election. Looms Without Orders. Last week the threat of depression loomed large over Lancashire's valleys. Among the crowds that cheered the Queen were many of the 32,000 millhands laid off for two weeks because the mills are on short time. Last year Lancashire exported 72 million yards of cloth less than it did in 1953—a drop of 10%. "Half our looms have no orders," said 37-year-old Ronnie Carter, manager of a weaving mill in the town of Padiham (pop. 12,000). "But we're lucky. Two of the town's ten mills have shut down com pletely." The immediate causes were obvious. Australia, Lancashire's best customer, last month slashed its imports of cotton cloth by 33%. In addition, uncertainty over whether the U.S. cotton surplus would be sold abroad at less than cost had led importers everywhere to cut back their textile orders in the hope of lower prices.* In the long run, however, Lancashire's textile troubles lay deeper than the futures market. Decline & Response. Fine cloth from towns like Padiham no longer can compete in