Museum Pays Homage to the Humble Needle

Search the world like a giant haystack and you’ll find only one needle museum. Naturally it’s in Redditch, the needle capital of the universe.

“About 70% of all the world’s needles come from here,” said the curator of the National Needle Museum, an unexpectedly fascinating survivor of the area’s ancient needle mills.

The needle is such an everyday, humble object that it’s surprising a whole museum could be devoted to it. But visiting these aged red-brick buildings by a millpond induces a new respect for “one of the earliest implements used by man.”

For centuries needles have been king in and around Redditch, 128 miles north of London. Some 60 factories once enslaved a quarter of the area’s adults in the back-breaking, filthy, eye-straining labor which the simple needle demanded.

Claims ‘Unique’ Status

One of these factories was Forge Mill, which Queen Elizabeth II opened as the National Needle Museum in 1983. An amazing place, it unashamedly boasts it is “unique.”

“Forge Mill is the only remaining water-driven needle mill in the world,” says a museum pamphlet. But that conveys nothing of the color, the life and vibrancy of the mill today.

Parts of it date from the 1700s. The mill and its work carried on unchanged for 228 years, until 1958. Much of it looks unchanged even now.

For the volunteers who saved and preserved Forge Mill have made it seem as if its needle makers had just stepped out for lunch.

Everywhere in the “scouring” mill is the clutter and purposeful disorder of a genuine working factory. A tea kettle sits on a coal stove. Tools are scattered where they might have been left. Dirty rags hang about.

Only Noise Is Missing

There are no boring museum labels. Instead, placards explain what went on in each musty, crowded room, packed with ancient machines which seem just to have stopped. Only the noise, heat and smells are missing.

There would have been lots of those and unimaginable amounts of sweat. For the needle museum’s main lesson is that making needles was not only unpleasant but surprisingly complicated.

One writer in 1898 listed 22 operations in manufacturing a needle. The museum mentions 30, but concentrates on eight.

It brings these to life with dirty, realistic mannequins “operating” actual needle-making machines. Just looking at them is enough to make you groan.

One dummy is frozen in the act of pumping his foot endlessly up and down stamping eyes half-way through needle blanks. Another mannequin strains her eyes to perforate the needle completely. An unkempt woman and her urchin child, working in a dingy home, thread needles onto metal strips so the eye end can be polished.

Processes Demonstrated

One after another, the laborious processes--straightening the wire, grinding the points, hardening needles by fire--are vividly demonstrated by the models and the recorded voice of a man who spent his working life in Forge Mill itself.

Upstairs in the mill’s old factory, colorful museum displays tell you almost more than you ever wanted to know about needles.

For example, people in the developed world use an average of two needles per person per year. In undeveloped nations, one.

Amazing collections of needle packages are arrayed like trophies of swords or pistols. Fish hooks and phonograph needles, knitting needles and crochet hooks vie with a vast range of curved surgical needles, whose wire is not round but triangular.

Embedded in a plastic block is a tiny “space needle,” used by NASA to sew thermal barriers and fillers onto space shuttles. This, of course, was made in Redditch.

Thinner Than Human Hair

Nearby is “the world’s smallest needle,” a third as thick as a human hair, used to suture the cornea of the eye. They’re still made by hand.

On the other side of a huge water wheel is the “scouring” mill, its 200-year-old, water-powered machines still in grubby working order.