Sir Titus Salt
Sir Titus Salt (20 September 1803 29 December 1876) was a successful businessman who helped improve conditions for his workers, building a model factory and village. Influenced by his Methodist faith he brought a social conscience to capitalism at a time when many industrial workers lived in abject poverty.
Titus Salt was educated at Morley, Batley and Wakefield before learning the wool trade at the age of 17. He was a spirited and determined worker. He soon became a driving force behind the family’s wool business and also an important member of the Horton Lane Congregational chapel.
He married aged 27 and then took a business gamble by investing in a new type of wool Donskoi wool grown by sheep on the banks of the Russian river Don. He also experimented with a new Alpaca wool from Peru. It was this new wool fibre which helped the Salt business takes off helping Titus Salt becoming one of Bradford’s most successful businessmen.
He also became the second mayor of Bradford in 1848. It was a turbulent time, with poor standards of living for most of the Yorkshire working class.
In 1853 he opened a new super large mill in Saltaire, near Shipley. It was about 3 miles from Bradford and Titus Salt hoped that the cleaner Aire Valley would help insulate his workers from the Cholera epidemics which were common around the centre of Bradford. In addition to the huge mill in Saltaire, he built 823 houses, shops, school, chapels, recreation facilities and churches for his workers. His impressive buildings and parks can still be seen in Saltaire. He was a great philanthropist of the age, helping his workers have unprecedented living standards for the time. He was also a strict Methodist and required his workers to attend chapel on Sundays, gambling and drinking was frowned upon.
His family business disappeared 16 years after his death, but, the mills were used well into the twentieth century when they fell into disuse from the decline in British manufacturing.
The Salt Mills have since been renovated and turned into offices and small shops.
