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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 6. 1966.

[introduction]

Wool Forms part of a very old Industry rich in tradition and which, in its thousands of years of history, has slowly evolved arts and techniques which have resulted in products which command the admiration and respect of all nations. This holds good for both sheep farm and woollen mill.

It was wool that established the power and prosperity of Britain in Plantagenet and Tudor times and filled the Woolsack on which the Lord Chancellor sat. In the Industrial Revolution which started in the 1700's the inventive mechanical genius of such men as Kay. Arkwrlght. Hargreaves and Crompton set afoot a new wave of development in wool manufacture, which has enabled England to retain a pre-eminent leadership in wool. Contemporaneously the work of such men as Coke gave English sheep-breeding a new impetus and leadership in the field of wool production.

The pioneers who came to New Zealand in the decades following 1850 included those who knew something of the latest British developments in sheep breeding and wool manufacture. They looked eagerly back over their shoulders for any signs of new innovations which they could use in the land of their adoption, where the handicap of distance from world markets was felt continuously.

By 1900 the wool industry stood pre-eminent among British industries as having attained a remarkable peak of achievement solely due to technical efficiency, to the art and experience of the sheep breeder, to the enterprise and skill of the designers of mill machinery, and to the operators of this mill equipment, whose development continued to show rapid progress.