Story and image by Mark Hayes

A Spinning Jenny is an advanced multi bobbin spinning wheel that first revolutionised the manufacture of cotton in the 1700s and set up the cotton trade in Lancashire and Yorkshire, kickstarting the industrial revolution , destroying the rural economy and making the farmer workers into city peasantry.

A Spinning Jenny is also what my mum would call a daddly-long-legs, or cellar spider , the type that’s all legs and tiny body. I think it was a popular name for them as Leeds was big in the cotton trade and spiders get everywhere , and those long legged ones tend to hand form a single thread a lot.

Anyway so a Spinning Jenny is to me not an early piece of mill equipment but a tiny spider with very long legs. 

(all the above is entirely true) 

A walloping jenny is a very large ‘tiny’ spider with very ever long legs , but as Hopeless is not the safest of environments, the front two legs have grown even longer and developed nub like clubs at the end of them with which the ‘wallop’ things. Sometimes , on those brief hot hours you might call summer elsewhere , the population booms and walloping jennies go one the rampage like a million tiny drummers…   and not one of the buggers can keep time.

This can be loud but not a problem.

Urban legend says that once in a while you get a really really big walloping Jenny , then you have a problem.   

(For more of the things Mark Hayes gets up to, do visit his blog https://markhayesblog.com/ )