St. Johns Church Farnworth

A happy Sunday morning to you all. Above is a picture of the outside of my local Church, The Church of St. John the Evangelist., in Farnworth. My thanks to Peter for both of these pictures.

"What has this to do with Papermaking?", I hear you thinking. Well quite a lot. Buried here is the body of Thomas Bonsar Crompton.

As you may remember from my earlier Blog, the Fourdrinier brothers financed the development of the worlds first successful paper machine, (before they went bankrupt), in the early 1800's.

The problem with this machine was that it only MADE the paper continuously, as the sheet came off the wire, it had to be cut by hand and still dried piece by piece.

Crompton, who was already heavily involved in the cotton industry,  realised that papermaking would go nowhere unless the paper could also be continuously dried, and so he set about inventing a system, the felted drying cylinder.

The town of Farnworth would not have flourished and grown were it not for the paper industry that thrived under his guidance, and the village of Prestolee would never have existed.

The picture above, is the Coat of Arms of Farnworth. The two blue cotton shuttles between the wasps, and the cotton plants above, are in recognition of the part the cotton industry played in the establishment and growth of Farnworth. The three wasps, who are Papermakers themselves, represent the paper industry's contribution.

Crompton was also the first person to use cotton in papermaking, and now cotton is the only fibre used for certain security papers like currency paper.