Verviers: Rise and Fall of an industrial Empire

Shot during winter time. In search for visual evidence of the Industrial empire Verviers once was.

The town of Verviers in Belgium is in the flat basin formed by the valley of the Vesdre River. The water there was of such high quality, thanks to its low lime content, that it was particularly suitable for washing wool. It was in this valley that the Simonis factory was set up in 1680 by Guillaume Henri Simon Simonis, a middle-class Verviers merchant born in the town in 1640 and known as “le Mercier” (“the haberdasher”). At the end of the eighteenth century, a spinner in Verviers would work with a single spindle, whereas in England, the Industrial Revolution had already resulted in machines being used for spinning wool. The British government threatened anyone who exported this technique with permanent exile, in order to protect the country’s monopoly. Nevertheless, William Cockerill, a young British engineer, departed for Sweden in 1797 with the blueprints for his famous wool-spinning mill. However, no one seemed to be interested in his ideas, and he eventually ended up in Hamburg. There, he met a wool buyer from Simonis who realized the value of this technique, which had until then been unknown in continental Europe. This pioneer in the field then came to Verviers with his family and signed a contract in which he agreed to produce spinning machines exclusively for his new employer. The first machine was constructed in 1797 in the building known as “Au Chat”. Success was not long in coming to Simonis, which, in addition to being able to compete with the English on level terms, had gained a major technological advantage over its continental competitors.

This spinning machine was only the first of many technological innovations that were to see the light of day in Verviers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These inventions included machines for carding and spinning wool, longitudinal shearing machines and the Leviathan, which was used to clean the wool. More generally, electricity, the steam engine and the coming of the railways increased capacity in terms of both production and transport to levels never seen before. In this same period, the bill of exchange became widespread in commercial exchanges, seeing as it had the advantage of eliminating the risks associated with transporting and using cash, in the form of gold or silver coins, for business transactions.

In 1857, demand from the wool industry in Verviers led to a plan to build a dam in the area, in order to supply all the local textile companies with pure water of equal quality. This dam, at La Gileppe, with a capacity of 12 million cubic metres, was inaugurated in 1878. All these innovations, plus an abundant supply of skilled labour, made Verviers a prosperous town and a center of the wool industry, like its competitors Bradford (England), Mönchengladbach (Germany), and Roubaix (France).

During the First World War, there was a sharp reduction in the trade in woolen cloth because of the shortage of raw materials. Then came the economic crisis between 1929 and 1935, which caused a further decline in industrial activity, especially in the Verviers area. Production was cut and workers were laid off. The Second World War followed and, like the first, led to a shortage of wool. However, there was worse to come. At the end of the War, the Allies mistakenly bombed Simonis’s spinning mill, and this prevented the company from playing a full part in the recovery in business life that followed.