NWSA Sounds of the Lancashire Textile Industry: Shuttle-kissing

This is a recording taken from the North West Sound Archive's theme packs, one of several produced to give an insight into the region's history by use of short extracts of speech and sound taken from the Archive's large collections.

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... when we went to what's called the Lancashire looms.

And how would they do that? How would they work with the kissing shuttles?

Well it's a bit difficult to explain in speech but they just put the ... they had a skewer kind of thing inside a wooden shuttle, and they skewer the cop onto it and then push it down, it would clip down, and then the end of the cotton you had to put your mouth to a hole in the shuttle and make a sucking noise, you see, and it would draw the cotton through. If your were unlucky the cotton went down your throat and choked you. It wasn't very nice. So that why a lot of weavers had bad chests.

Did they damage their teeth at all?

Yes, they said they did...