BACK 200 YEARS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 160, 8 July 1937, Page 20

BACK 200 YEARS.

HOME-MADE LOOM. ROMANCE OF CRAFTSMANSHIP. (Special.—By Air Mall.) LONDON, June 19. Henry and Alfred Oldroyd, of Hudderefield, Yorkshire, weave their own clothes and those of their family on a home-made loom built from old bedsteads, odd bite of wood, a brewing sieve and a chaff cutter. Granddaughter Edith Finel wears* a tailored costume which challenges the finest products of famous local looms. It k a emart brown and white herringbone tweed.

The etory of Mies Finel's costume and of the clothes woven by Henry Oldroyd is a romance of craftsmanship in an age of mechanised industry. Some years ago the brothers Henry and Alfred Oldroyd owned a prosperous oldfashioned oatcake baking business in Hudderefield. 111-health forced them to close down. It was then that 72-year-old Alfred and younger Henry decided to stay at home and make their own cloth. They looked round the house, assembled pieces of old iron and timber, and built their own loom. Alfred had had 40 years' experience in a woollen mill before he took up baking. To enter the little outbuilding that contains the loom is to step back into the eighteenth century.

In the middle of the low-raftered room Henry eits working the beam with treadles, moving the ehuttlee with a "picking rod." "Knowing folks eaid Ahd never be able to do herringbonee on this loom," Alfred said with a chuckle. "But Ah told 'em Ah would and Ah have!" They can even make hearth rug* on it. Henry and Alfred weave only for themselves and their family, rhey refuse to sell their cloth