Titus Salt

Who was Titus Salt?

Sir Titus Salt, 1st Baronet, born in Morley, near Leeds, was a manufacturer, politician and philanthropist in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. His father Daniel Salt was a drysalter, and then a farmer, and sent Titus to a school in Batley, identified in some sources as Batley Grammar School, and then to another near Wakefield, named in some sources as Heath School. The Salt family lived at Manor Farm 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, Salt 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'.