A Strut(t) Around Belper II

The Gangway.

After you have explored the Strutts' North Mill at Belper, you can walk under the Gangway, a stone arch which once connected the North Mill and West Mill (no longer extant). The Regency era was noted for industrial unrest during times of hardship (most famously the Luddite attacks of 1812).  If you look at the arch (built 1795) you will notice some musket holes placed there in 1810 so that the millowner and his men could fire at anyone who attacked the mill.

Crown Terrace, Belper.

When the Strutts built their mills in Derbyshire, they chose sites with fast-flowing rivers to power the machinery. However, often these rural sites did not have enough local people who could work in the mills. So millowners like the Strutts and Richard Arkwright built new houses with gardens to attract people to come and work for them, and you can see millworkers' housing on Green Lane, The Clusters, Joseph Street etc. Many of the houses have their own pigsty and privy - a vast improvement on the town housing in places like Angel Meadow in Manchester.

Belper boy Samuel Slater was one of the child workers whose stories I told in The Children History Forgot. Samuel began his career as an apprentice to Jedidiah Strutt; Slater became one of the founding fathers of the American cotton industry. 

More millworkers' housing, Belper.

The mill workers in Belper were mostly women and children (their menfolk found employment in local workshops). In 1816 the Strutts employed nearly 1500 people, including over 700 children (just 100 were younger than ten). On average the children earned 2s 6d per week.None of the children who worked at the Strutt mills were parish apprentices like those at Quarry Bank Mill; they were 'free labour' and lived with their parents.

The factory hours were from 6am until 6pm, including dinner and tea-times. Most of the children could read; the Strutts funded a Sunday school and day schools in the town, and built a Unitarian chapel (1788). 

Nail Shop, Joseph St.

The Strutts told a parliamentary select committee (1816) that their mills had benefits for local families as well as providing them with work: ‘before the establishment of these works, the inhabitants were notorious for vice and immorality, and many of the children were maintained by begging; now their industry, decorous behaviour, attendance on public worship, and general good conduct, compared with the neighbouring villages, where no manufactures are established, is very conspicuous.’ 

East Mill, Belper.

Unitarian Chapel, Belper.

Belper was a working textile town from the late 18th century until the 1980s. The town is still dominated by the huge East Mill (1912), built for the English Sewing Cotton Co., which took over the Strutts' mills fifteen years earlier. But the East Mill now stands empty and silent.
However, if you visit the Memories of the Mills website you'll discover millworkers' memories and oral histories of life in the Derwent Valley factories during the twentieth century.

Scotland's Industrial Past and Present

Map of Scotland, 1845.

Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys is back with a new series. This week on the programme he visited some industrial sites and we've been treated to some fascinating archive footage of workers. During the second episode he had a ride on the Waverley paddle steamer, and visited the David Livingstone Centre at Blantyre - I was especially interested as I did not realize that the famous missionary was a child worker in a cotton factory. Episode 3 was another treat as Mr Portillo visited a modern steel rolling mill, the Clyde Falls at New Lanark, and explored the Union Canal and the Falkirk Wheel, which I would love to visit one day. Over the next few weeks, I'll be taking a look at some of the fabulous heritage sites I visited last year, but haven't had time to blog about yet, as I'm busy writing Regency Spies.

Growing Up at Work

If you search through the censuses for your ancestors , you may be surprised at how early youngsters were expected to work, compared with the present day. When my great-grandfather, William Kirkwood Dickman, was fourteen years old, he was a coach-painter’s apprentice in Gorton (1871 census). According to later censuses, when he grew up he continued working as a railway coach painter, and his death certificate in 1931 gives his occupation as railway coach painter.

Another ancestor, my great-great-grandfather Arthur Lomas, born in Alstonefield, Staffordshire, was a child silk worker – a ‘silk picker’ - he cleaned loose fibres from the warp threads for the weaver. Arthur, aged 12 at the time of the 1881 census, lived in Leek with his parents. He was a ‘half-timer’, i.e. he went to school for half a day, and worked the rest of the day.

Some of my other Lancashire ancestors worked in the county's famous industries, cotton and coal mining. My great-grandmother, Sarah Jane Pickvance, was a ‘sheet weaver’ at Farnworth when she was fifteen years old in 1881. In the same year, my great-grandfather John Richard Tudge (who later married Sarah) was a coal miner in Little Hulton; he was fifteen years old, too.

John was lucky to be born later in the century; the the 1842 Children's Employment Commissioners found children as young as five working in Lancashire pits. The 1842 Mines Act banned boys under ten, and all females, from mine work.

Images from the author’s collection:

A Spitalfields weaver weaving silk by hand in the 1880s. Engraving, unknown artist, Cassell’s Family Magazine, 1883.

A disused miners’ cage (lift) at Astley Green Colliery Museum.

This early twentieth century postcard shows a cotton weaving shed and a Lancashire lass in her holiday finery.

Children of the Potteries

The pottery industry was heavily reliant on child labour. In 1816 in Staffordshire, Wedgwood’s Etruria works employed over 100 children aged ten to eighteen (a few children under ten also worked there).

In the 1840s, a children’s employment commission discovered that over 1500 children under thirteen worked in the Staffordshire potteries, plus over 3,700 aged thirteen to twenty-one. They usually started work when they were seven or eight years old.

Children did many different jobs in the Potteries. They worked as ‘jiggers’, ‘mould runners’, ‘oven boys’, ‘dipper’s boys’, apprentice painters and figure makers. The jiggers and mould runners helped the dish, plate and saucer makers, and they worked extremely hard. The jigger turned the potter’s wheel. The mould runners carried pots to and from the stoves. They were on their feet all day. Sometimes boys did both jobs. They walked over several miles in a day.
The children, who were directly employed by the potters, typically worked for up to thirteen or even fifteen hours daily. Plate makers’ boys worked in temperatures of up to 120ºF (48 Celsius).

Some of the pottery processes were very unhealthy because white lead, and sometimes arsenic, was used in the glazing agent. The glaze made the pots look beautiful after they had been fired in the kiln, but was highly poisonous. You can find out more about the pottery children of Staffordshire and other counties in The Children History Forgot.

Images: Pottery manufacture: Placing earthenware in the biscuit kiln, putting pots into saggars, ‘turning’ the pots on a lathe to create rims and other decoration, and transferring prints onto pots. Charles Knight’s Pictorial Gallery of Arts Vol. I, (c.1862).
The Wedgwood works at Etruria. Engraving from Staffordshire and Warwickshire Past and Present, Vol. II, (William Mackenzie, London, no date.)

Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. © Sue and Nigel Wilkes.

Not long now!

It's less than a month to publication day for The Children History Forgot! Over the next few weeks I'll be discussing the many different jobs done by children in Georgian and Victorian times. Children worked in a huge variety of industries, not just in cotton factories or down coal mines.

Images: Lancashire child miners - 1842 Report on Mines.

A little girl working in a cotton factory. Engraving by G.P. Jacomb Hood. (1857-1929.) Grindon’s Lancashire.

Do-Gooders

I was very interested to see Ian Hislop's new TV series The Age of the Do-Gooders on BBC2 last night, especially as he covered Robert Owen and his mills at New Lanark which I will be discussing in my forthcoming book on child workers, 'The Children History Forgot' for Robert Hale. Next week's episode is on child labour, so I will be fascinated to see which aspects of the story of the fight to get Britain's working class children into school Hislop covers. Lord Shaftesbury will no doubt loom large, but will Hislop mention the factory inspectors such as Leonard Horner who fought so hard to encourage better education for factory and workshop children?  

The Story of England

I have been greatly frustrated with my TV viewing recently as I kept missing Michael Wood's Story of England, but I caught up with episode 5 last night, which dealt with the industrial revolution. There was some very nice footage of Foxton Locks for canal fans.
I was fascinated by the item on hosiery trade in Leicester and the visit to the Framework Knitting museum, as this was the first time I have seen one of these machines in action. Wood used witness statements from the Framework Knitters Select Committee of 1844, when the trade was in an acute state of depression, to bring the workers' story to life. The select committee discovered children learned the trade from an early age; five and six year olds worked at stitching gloves or chevening (embroidering) stockings. They began learning how to use the stocking-frame when they were about nine or a little older. The story of Britain's child workers is the subject of my forthcoming book, and I hope to have some news for you soon.

Children of the Furnace

Furnace work in Victorian glass 'houses', where glass was manufactured, was the province of men and strong boys. Apart from ‘intemperate habits,’ no ill effects were found from working in the furnaces. However, some of the lads were treated quite roughly. The young apprentices began work before the men. Gaskell, a twelve year old apprentice, told the 1865 Children’s Employment Commission that the boys at Pilkingtons’ crown and sheet glass works: ‘always get called about three hours before we start with the men, for we have to sweep up and get ready for them before they come. We could do it all in an hour if we liked but we like to play in that time. We are called at all times night and day. The “teazer” or furnace man goes round the town and calls every boy in the house (glass house) when the furnace in that house has heated the metal in the pots enough to start working in about three hours. He comes to the door and knocks and calls “Gaskell,” and then, if it’s night, my father looks out of the house and says “Number – called,” that is the number of the house. So I get out of bed and go off.’

Like iron foundry workers, their lives revolved around the needs of the ever-hungry furnaces. Shift times depended on the type of glass being manufactured and the size of the crucibles used to melt the glass. Boys worked in the cutting and polishing departments, too, along with young girls and teenagers.

You can find out more in my feature on Victorian child glass workers in this month's issue of children's magazine Aquila and in my book Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives.

Image:
Glassblowing, engraving by G. P. Jacomb Hood, Grindon’s Lancashire.