WHEN looking back at Worcester’s manufacturing past three products immediately leap to mind – stylish gloves, fine porcelain and piquant sauce.

But carpets? Surely not. That’s Kidderminster isn’t it?

Not necessarily so, because at one time carpet making was being touted as the future for Worcester too.

Back in George III’s day, from 1760 until 1820, the city had a growing number of carpet factories, which were blessed with Royal patronage amid a general feeling that something big was happening here.

Unfortunately the trade failed to last, but it did bring to prominence a man who was to play an important part in the city’s affairs.

For Edward Webb not only ran a carpet factory that pretty much carpeted the nation’s railways, but he also provided Worcester’s first and only factory school for child workers, was mayor of the city in 1847-8 and became a strong supporter of Dr Charles Hastings, the local physician who founded the British Medical Association, when not everyone was so enthusiastic.

Webb, who was then only 27, bought a horsehair weaving factory in Copenhagen Street in 1835.

It then had 14 seating looms and two looms for cider cloth.

By 1843 he had expanded the machinery to include 29 Jacquard looms to weave figured hair seatings, fancy crinolines and carpets.

By 1846 there were 70 weavers employed and a further weaving shed had to be built.

A specialist line was horsehair-carpet foot rugs for railway carriages.

First made for the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway Company, they were later sold to almost every railway company in the country.

Webb introduced steam power into his mill in 1854 and after an initial setback production increased and the labour force rose to more than 100, including a large number of children, whose job was mainly to pass horsehair to the weavers’ hands.

Like young mill workers everywhere they worked long hours with little reward, but Edward Webb and Sons, unlike many employers, felt concern for them and provided an evening school and library for 40 poor female workers in Bull Entry on the edge of its extensive site.

Although lessons must have been hard going for the youngsters after a day in the factory.

The working hours were long, starting at 6am with a break for breakfast at 8am, when women would come trooping out dressed in their clogs and shawls, just like they did in Lancashire.

Webbs had a distinguished client list. It made carpets for William Gladstone when he moved into 10 Downing Street for the fourth time in 1892 and provided 600 yards of “grey Worcester” for a processional way at the wedding of the Duke of York in 1893.

Meanwhile Edward Webb became an important figure in Worcester’s civic life, supporting medical, art and archaeological causes.

He even backed a series of lectures in the Shire Hall that involved the unrolling of a mummy.

And no, this wasn’t when Amanda Barrie’s Cleopatra emerged from an unrolled carpet in Carry On Cleo.