Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/346

ÆT. 42] dyeings were all done with his own hands, with no help beyond that of a boy who had till then been employed as errand-boy to the glass-painters' workshop. "So well had he prepared himself," Mr. George Wardle says, "that I do not think a single dyeing went wrong, nor was any appreciable quantity of yarn wasted." But in the little dye-house at Queen Square nothing could be done beyond what might be called laboratory experiments: to dye on the scale required for the firm's wants meant falling back on regular dyeworks. For these he went to Mr. Thomas Wardle at Leek. He was the brother-in law of Morris's own manager at Queen Square, and was then already becoming known as one of the first practical authorities on dye-stuffs and the art of dyeing, chiefly as applied to silk and cotton. Morris found him full of interest in the revived methods which had long gone out of use, but which Mr. Wardle remembered as going on in his own boyhood, and which some of his older workmen had themselves practised. For about two years from the summer of 1875 Morris paid numerous and often protracted visits to Leek, where he and Wardle actually restored vegetable dyeing to the position of an important industry.

His first visit to Leek was made in July of this year. "I can't get back till this day week," he writes home when he had been there a few days. "I really can't come away without having come here for nothing; not that I haven't got on fairly well, but that I must see something more of results. The copper pots in the dye-houses, full of bright colours where they are dyeing silks, look rather exciting, but, alas! they are mostly aniline: our own establishment is very small, but I daresay will for some time to come turn out more goods by a great deal than we shall sell."