Papers of Tony Pitman, chemist and textiles technician for various Nottingham textile businesses

The collection comprises of physical and digital files of information created by Tony Pitman during his working life or subsequently due to his ongoing interest in the industry, a large album containing machine and hand made lace samples, a piece of lace depicting the Trent Building of the University of Nottingham (along with other smaller samples of lace including some produced by Cluny Lace Company of Ilkeston), an album of photographs of Wrights & Dobson dyers, printers and finishers of Carlton Road, Nottingham, various publications consulted by Mr Pitman during his career or collected for interest, and a couple of small technical instruments used for measurement.

Tony Pitman came to Nottingham to read chemistry and was a graduate recruit with a large chemical company who paid for him to take various associate examinations at a number of institutions (traditional universities were only offering inorganic chemistry). For example in 1954 he undertook an examination for the Associateship of the Society of Dyers and Colourists at Nottingham and District Technical College Department of Textiles. After a period of national service he began working for the large conglomerate investment company Thomas Tillings, which bought up a number of companies in Nottingham and it was these companies that he was sent to work with. One was Spray and Burgess, a textiles company specialising in the dyeing of lace for the Nottingham lace trade. He helped them to set up technical services and quality control and laboratories (one was in Colwick in Nottingham). Spray and Burgess started looking at processing fabrics for dressed goods and printing lace dress fabrics. They set up a printworks in Basford at an old lace processing factory. When Courtaulds bought out the company Tony Pitman was made redundant and began working for Wrights & Dobson Ltd., dyers and printers of Albany Works, Carlton Road, Nottingham.

He undertook a great deal of work with the curtain section of the Nottingham and Scottish lace industries up until about 1980, and was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Operative Lace Makers and Auxiliary Workers (whose archive is also held by Manuscripts and Special Collections). Curtain machines were quite different from the Levers machines which Nottingham also specialised in. They were much larger, producing 4-500 inch wide fabric. The higher the point or gauge of the net, the better the quality (cheaper net curtains would be only 6 or 8 point). He helped a lace dying company based in Calais, France, to set up a plant to deal with the processing and dyeing of lace. The machines producing lace were lubricated with graphite (known as black lead) which would be put in a bag and spinkled over the machine). The workers operating the machines would often wipe their hands and faces on the fabric. The lace produced by the machine would be sent to a separate company to be cleaned, bleached and dyed, so the dyers would need to deal with the problem of removing the graphite which was ingrained in the tightly woven fabric. Lace cleaning originally would have been done with a mangle and a dolly. Specialist companies in France used a clearning process based on cassein which would cling to the graphite.

As the worldwide demand for lace began to diminish many companies looked to find ways to become more profitable by taking on more of the production processes themselves. Mr Pitman would work with companies to help them set up factories or plants to deal with the various finishing processes. Many lace-making firms were known as grey makers because they would sell the untreated lace to the lace manufacturers who would then transform the fabric into a saleable commodity (by bleaching, and dying it). They would often also manage the shipping and warehousing. Female outworkers would check and mend the fabric at their homes. JB Walkers (whose papers are held by Manuscripts and Special Collections), would have their lace held by the dyers as finished stock, but they later set up their own warehouse, and eventually became even more vertically integrated by taking on the dyeing (Scottish firms were the first to do this). Wrights and Dobson set up a factory near Carlisle. Tony Pitman also worked with companies in Spain and Catalonia to start producing lace. In the 1960s there was some concern in the UK about the amount of water companies were using to attempts were made to develop pressure dyeing which would use less water.

Tony Pitman would often attend the international industrial textile exhibitions at which the machinery would be exhibited, to research the latest techniques. He picked up the 1897 lace sample book (MS 1019/3/1) at a Paris exhibition which he attended with the Design Director of Wrights and Dobson. Books of old lace designs would often be sold for inspiration or designers would sell individual designs. The larger lace firms would have their own lace design department. Wrights and Dobson were interested in the lace sample book because they were looking to develop flock printed lace. This involved producing a cheap and simple net fabric which would be printed with the design in glue to which would be adhered (using an electric charge) viscose fibres about half a milimetre thick, producing a velvet/suede pattern on the background net. Although early attempts by low quality producers might not survive the first wash, better made versions of the fabric later became quite succesful in dress making.

Towards the end of his career, Tony Pitman became a consultant and helped to develop the first high tech warp knit fabrics using high visibility colours. He also was involved with the introduction of heat transfer printing which was the basis of most digital fabric printing today and had a design company specialising in flock printing designs. He had a design company called Text Trend which he later sold which was involved in flock printing.

Wrights & Dobsons Brothers owned seven factories (two dyers and finishers, two small printers of flock, a weft knit and a warp knit. The collection includes an album of photographs of their dyeing and finishing plant on Carlton Road (MS 1019/5).

The material has been arranged by type.

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Identification of copyright holders of unpublished material is often difficult.

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Reprographic copies can be supplied for educational and private study purposes only, depending on access status and the condition of the documents.

Mr Pitman approached Manuscripts and Special Collections with the bulk of the material in 2015. The photograph album and information about Mr Pitman's career and about the volume of lace samples was added in 2019 during research for the Weston Gallery exhibition 'Fully Fashioned: archival remnants of the textile trade'.

Records of the Amalgamated Society of Operative Lace Makers and Auxiliary Workers, 1851-1973 (Lm)