Titus Salt

Sir Titus Salt

Sir Titus Salt, 1st Baronet (20 September 1803 – 29 December 1876), born in Morley, near Leeds, was a manufacturer, politician and philanthropist in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. His father Daniel Salt was a businessman and was sent Titus to Batley Grammar School. The Salt family lived at Manor Farm (now The Manor, a pub) in Crofton, near Wakefield between 1813 and 1819.

After working for two years as a wool-stapler in Wakefield he became his father's partner in the business of Daniel Salt and Son. The company used Russian Donskoi wool, which was widely used in the woollens trade, but not in worsted cloth. Titus visited the spinners in Bradford trying to interest them in using the wool for worsted manufacture, with no success, so he set up as a spinner and manufacturer.

In 1836, Titus came upon some bales of Alpaca wool in a warehouse in Liverpool and, after taking some samples away to experiment, came back and bought the consignment. Though he was not the first in England to work with the fibre, he was the creator of the lustrous and subsequently fashionable cloth called 'alpaca'. (The discovery was described by Charles Dickens in slightly fictionalised form in Household Words).

Titus Salt's statue in Roberts Park

In 1833 he took over his father's business and within twenty years had expanded it to be the largest employer in Bradford. In 1848 Titus Salt became mayor of Bradford. Smoke and pollution emanated from mills and factory chimneys and Salt tried unsuccessfully to clean up the pollution using a device called the Rodda Smoke Burner. Around 1850, he decided to build a mill large enough to consolidate his textile manufacture in one place, but he "did not like to be a party to increasing that already over-crowded borough", and bought land three miles from the town in Shipley next to the River Aire, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Midland Railway and began building in 1851. He opened it with a grand banquet on his 50th birthday, 20 September 1853, and set about building houses, bathhouses, an institute, hospital, almshouses and churches, that make up the model village of Saltaire. He built the Congregational church which is now Saltaire United Reformed Church, at his own expense in 1858–59, and donated the land on which the Wesleyan Chapel was built by public subscription in 1866–68.

Salt was a private man, and left no written statement of his purposes in creating Saltaire; but he told Lord Harewood at the opening that he had built the place "to do good and to give his sons employment". It is sometimes believed that he was tee-total but this is untrue. He did, however forbid 'beershops' in Saltaire.

Salt was Chief Constable of Bradford before its incorporation as a borough in 1837, and afterwards a senior alderman. He sat as mayor from 1848–49, and was later Deputy Lieutenant for the West Riding of Yorkshire. In 1857 he was President of the Bradford Chamber of Commerce, and served as Liberal Member of Parliament for Bradford from 1859 until he retired through ill health on 1 February 1861. In 1869 he was created a Baronet, of Saltaire in the County of York.

He died at Crow Nest, Lightcliffe, near Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1876 and was buried at Saltaire Congregational Church. "Estimates vary, but the number of people lining the route [of the funeral] probably exceeded 100,000".

Further reading

• Kidd, Charles, Williamson, David (editors). Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage (1990 edition). New York: St Martin's Press, 1990.
• James, David (2004). "Salt, Sir Titus, first baronet (1803-1876)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24565 
• "Titus Salt". http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRsalt.htm. Retrieved 2007-06-20. 
• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page
• "The vision of Titus Salt 1853" (video in 5 sections). A history of Britain: Changing lives. Timelines.tv. http://www.timelines.tv/ipA14.html. Retrieved 2008-03-26. 

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Thomas Perronet Thompson and Henry Wickham Wickham	Member of Parliament for Bradford 1859 – 1861 With: Henry Wickham Wickham	Succeeded by William Edward Forster and Henry Wickham Wickham
Baronetage of the United Kingdom
New creation	Baronet (of Saltaire) 1869 – 1876	Succeeded by William Henry Salt