FACTUAL
A Shoddy Business
Saturday 27 May 2006 20:00-21:00 (Radio 4 FM)
Rony Robinson travels to Batley in West Yorkshire, to unweave the story of Shoddy - the process of ripping apart old clothes and re-spinning the fibres to create new cloth.
This revolutionary idea was devised in the town by local man Benjamin Law, but now almost all the mills have closed and Shoddy is no longer produced, as we've learnt to recycle in other ways.
Rony delves into a local oral history archive, and walks around the town with local historian Malcolm Haigh, recalling when Shoddy played a major part in the industrial and social revolutions. It produced affordable new suits for the working man, it clothed the armies of the world and it even introduced a new word to the English language.
