than 100 were fully employed. Numbers kept themselves alive by
collecting nettles and boiling them. Some were entirely without food
every alternate day, and many had but one meal in the day and that a
poor one.[39]
Our last stage is Burnley, where the weavers--to quote again from Dr.
Cook Taylor--'were haggard with famine, their eyes rolling with that
fierce and uneasy expression common to maniacs. "We do not want
charity," they said, "but employment." I found them all Chartists, but
with this difference, that the block-printers and hand-loom weavers
united to their Chartism a hatred of machinery which was far from being
shared by the factory operatives.'
What a comment on England's industrial supremacy--England with her
virtual monopoly of large-scale manufacture in Europe! It must have been
a puzzle, too, for the Poor Law Commissioners, who were then building
workhouses in these parts for the purpose of depauperizing hand-loom
weavers on the less eligibility principle.
But how was it, with such a Poor Law, that the hand-loom weavers did not
die of starvation by the thousand? If we enter a cotton mill we shall
see why. Within these gaunt walls, which are illumined at night by
sputtering gas-light, the factory children work, earning twice as much
as their parents, who were too old and too respectable to become factory
hands.
By this time, perhaps, it is evening, but this matters nothing to the
'melancholy mad engines', which feed on water or burning coals. The
young people will still be there, with eight hours work to their credit
and more to do--'kept to work by being spoken to or by a little
chastisement'.[40]
'I have seen them fall asleep,' said an over-looker in 1833, 'and they
have been performing their work with their hands while they were asleep,
after the Billy had stopped. Put to bed with supper in their hands, they
were clasping it next morning, when their parents dragged them out of
bed. Half asleep they stumbled or were carried to the mill, to begin
again the ceaseless round.'
'It keeps them out of mischief', said the opponents of shorter hours.
Besides, the conditions were no worse than any other industries! Factory
work, however, as the doctors show, was different from work in the
mines. The heat and confinement of the mill caused precocious sexual
development, whilst in the mines the result of exaggerated muscular
development was to delay maturity.
In 1842 conditions are better than they were in 1833--thanks to the
factory inspectors. There is little positive cruelty, and the sight of
deformity--enlarged ankle bones, bow legs, and knock knees, caused by
excessive standing as a child--is rare. The problem now is one of
industrial fatigue. The children are 'sick-tired'.
5. The Midlands of Leicestershire, Notts, and Derbyshire are a region of
red bricks and pantiles, dotted over valleys of exquisite green. So let
us leave the smoke of Lancashire and hover here for a while. Here dwell
the stocking workers or frame-work knitters--the people who knit on
frames stockings, gloves, and other articles of hosiery. It does not
look like a region of industry. There are only a few towns, such as
Nottingham, Leicester, and Loughborough; and except for a few lace
factories in Nottingham, large buildings are rare. The town knitters
either work in their own homes or in shops with standings for perhaps as
many as fifty frames. In the villages the knitting is nearly all done in
the cottages, opposite long low windows, or in a small out-house which
might well be a fowl-house.
But in the streets of Leicester we can see 'life' of a sort. We can
watch the procession to the pawnbrokers. Some of the knitters pawn their
blankets for the day, and most lodge their Sunday clothing during the
week. Says a Leicester pawnbroker:
'We regularly pay away from £40 to £50 (to some 300 persons)
every Monday morning or on the Tuesday. They will, perhaps, wash
on the Monday and get their linen clean preparatory to the next
Sunday, and in the course of the week they bring all the linen
things they can spare. Friday is the worst; they will then bring
their small trifling articles, such as are scarcely worth a
penny, and we lend on them, to enable them to buy a bit of meat
or a few trifles for dinner.'[41]
They are too poor to indulge in church-going or alcohol. They have no
clothes to go to church in. Their publican is the druggist, where they
buy opium for themselves and Godfrey's cordial, a preparation from
laudanum, for their children. In the whole of Leicester, with its
population of 50,000, there are but nine gin-houses. And only on Sundays
do they get a bit of schooling. 'We have only one bit of a cover lid to
cover the five of us in winter ... we are all obliged to sleep in one
bed.'[42]
A frame smith, making his usual inspection of hosiers' frames at
workmen's dwellings in Nottingham, after thus spending a fortnight,
found his health had begun to suffer from the squalid wretchedness of
their abodes. Thinking to improve it, he went on the same errand into
the country, but found the frame-work knitters there in a still more
deplorable state. From the bad air and other distressing influences in
their condition and that of their dwellings, in another fortnight he
returned, too ill to attend to his business for some weeks afterwards.
This occurred in 1843.[43]
Nottingham, however, with its up-to-date lace trade was usually better
off than this. The lace factories, like the cotton mills in Lancashire,
eased the position of the hand-workers. In Leicestershire the knitters
had no such alternative. The more their earnings were reduced, the more
helplessly they were bound to their only trade.
6. 1842 is a long while ago! Let us go to sleep for thirty years and
wake up in 1871, when the Truck Commissioners are publishing their
report.
West of Birmingham lies the black country, an area of some twenty square
miles. Here, if we have read the evidence of the Truck Commissioners, we
can interpret a dumb-show in Dudley, where the nail-makers dwell.
On Monday mornings the nail-maker emerges from a small hovel containing
a smithy and walks into Dudley to call on a gentleman known as a fogger,
a petty-fogger if he is a middleman, a market-fogger if he is a master.
The nailer comes out with a bundle of metal which he takes to a second
house and changes for a second bundle of metal, and with this he walks
away. (The next nailer, not so lucky, hangs about till Wednesday
morning, waiting for his metal.) On Saturday the nailer comes back with
his nails, enters the fogger's shop, and emerges with 12_s._ in his
hand. But he does not go home. He slips into a shop close by and parts
company with the shillings. In return he gets a parcel, the contents of
which are obviously displeasing to him. What has happened?
The nailer is a Government servant. But the Government only employs him
indirectly. It puts out contracts for rivets and nails to contractors
who sublet their contract, so that the work reaches the nailer at third
or fourth hand. The Government, in the interest of public economy
(Victorian England is famous for retrenchment), gives its contract to
the lowest tenderer; and the policy of the lowest tender is responsible
for the dumb-show we have watched.
To begin with, the nailer gets metal which does not suit him, so he has
to change it, and this he does at the price of 2_d._ per 10_d._ bundle,
at a metal changers, a relative of the fogger. (His friend who has to
wait till Wednesday for his bundle is kept idling about in order that
he may drink what is left of last week's earnings at a 'wobble shop'
which is owned by yet another branch of the family of fogger.)
When the nailer and his family have worked fourteen hours a day
throughout the week, the nailer returns on Saturday with the nails, and
receives 12_s._ for them. These shillings he takes to the fogger's store
and exchanges for tea and other articles. The shillings are 'nimble'; we
commend the rapidity of their circulation to Mr. Irving Fisher. A fogger
who pays out the shillings from his warehouse receives them back again
in a few minutes over the counter of his store. 'He will perhaps reckon
with seven or eight at one time, and when he has reckoned with them, and
perhaps paid them six, seven, or eight pounds, he will wait until they
have gone to the shop and taken the money there as they leave the
warehouse. Then he goes into the shop himself for it, as he cannot go on
paying without it.'[44]
But surely this is truck! Certainly not. There may be 'fearful cheating'
with tea, but the nailer is not bound to go there. He is perfectly free.
The only trouble is this: it is a case of tea or no work the week
following. This is why, despite the Truck Act of 1831 and despite the
known existence of the abuse, these practices are rife among the nailers
as late as 1871, the year in which the Truck Commissioners issued the
Report from which this scene is compiled. The plight of the nailers is
not the plight of factory operatives or miners; it is the plight of the
frame-work knitters, of men who are bound by the intangible fetters of
economic need to the uncontrollable devil of 'semi-capitalism'.
2. MINING OPERATIONS
1. Coal was king of the nineteenth century. The first steam-engine was
built to pump water out of coal mines, the first canal was cut to carry
the Duke of Bridgwater's coal from Worsley to Manchester. The first
railroads were laid around Newcastle to convey the coals from the pit
mouth to the river. George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive,
began life as a trapper on a Tyneside colliery.
Where would English industry have been without its king? In 1780 (in
round figures) 5,000,000 tons of coal were raised in the United Kingdom:
in 1800, 10,000,000; in 1865, 100,000,000; and in 1897, 200,000,000.
Coal enticed the cotton factories from the dales of the Pennines to the
moist lowlands of West Lancashire. At every stage of their work the
iron-makers depended on coal; and the great inventions in the iron and
steel industry are land-marks in the expansion of the demand for
coal--Cort's puddling process 1783, Watt's steam-engine 1785, Neilson's
hot blast 1824, Naysmith's steam-hammer 1835, Bessemer's steel-converter
1855, Siemen's open hearth 1870, Thomas' basic process for the treatment
of highly phosphoric ores 1878. The steamship, a novelty in 1820, ruled
the seas in 1870; and ironclads followed steamships. The smokeless
steam-coal of South Wales guarded the heritage of Trafalgar. By the end
of the nineteenth century, coaling stations were an important item in
international politics.
Meanwhile, the people of England, heedless of Malthusian forebodings,
multiplied exceedingly. They lighted their streets and buildings with
coal-gas, and burnt coal in their grates. With coal they paid for the
food and raw materials from other lands. Imports of food and raw
materials were offset by exports of coal and of textiles and hardware
produced by coal. The spirit of invention has pushed on to electricity
and oil, but coal is still the pivot of English industry and commerce.
And therefore, seeing that coal has meant all this to England, let us
look at the men who raised the coal. How did they live, what did they
think about, what did they count for then, what do they count for now?
2. In 1800 the miners stood for nothing in the nation's life. In
Scotland they had just been emancipated from the status of villeinage.
In Northumberland and Durham they were tied by yearly bonds. Elsewhere
they were weak and isolated. In 1825 a 'Voice from the coal mines of the
Tyne and Wear' cried: 'While working men in general are making 20_s._ to
30_s._ per week (_sic_) the pitmen here are only making 13_s._ 6_d._ and
from this miserable pittance deductions are made.'[45]
In 1839, during the Chartist disturbances, a Welsh M.P. wrote to the
Home Secretary begging for barracks and troops: 'A more lawless set of
men than the colliers and miners do not exist ... it requires some
courage to live among such a set of savages.'[46] When the miners came
out in 1844, there were thousands of cottages tenantless in
Northumberland and Durham. For the colliery proprietors owned the
cottages, and when the miners struck evicted them. So the miners set up
house in the streets. 'In one lane ... a complete new village was built,
chests-of-drawers, deck beds, etc., formed the walls of the new dwelling;
and the top covered with canvas or bedclothes as the case might be.'[47]
Yet, for all their griminess, they had human hearts and voices. During
the strike they obtained permission to hold a meeting at Newcastle; and
the wealthy citizens who made their fortunes out of the coal trade
trembled before the invasion of black barbarians. But the meeting passed
off in rain and peace. Thirty thousand miners marched in procession,
'for near a mile flags in breeze, men walking in perfect order'; and as
they marched, they sang, as only miners sing, songs and hymns and
topical ditties:
'Stand fast to your Union
Brave sons of the mine,
And we'll conquer the tyrants
Of Tees, Wear, and Tyne!'
Up and down the Durham coalfields tramped a misguided agitator (in after
life the veteran servant of the Durham Miners' Association), by name
Tommy Ramsey. With bills under his arm and crake in hand, he went from
house-row to house-row calling the miners out. He had only one message:
'Lads, unite and better your condition.
When eggs are scarce, eggs are dear;
When men are scarce, men are dear.'[48]
Such blasphemy appalled the Government's Commissioners. But the miners
had a zest for religion as well as for strikes. During the strike of
1844, 'frequent meetings were held in their chapels (in general those of
the Primitive Methodists or Ranters as they are commonly called in that
part of the country), where prayers were publicly offered up for the
successful result of the strike.' They attended their prayer meeting 'to
get their faith strengthened'.[49]
Such ignorance could only be cured by education. Some worthy members of
society had already recognized the fact. In 1830 a Cardiff 'Society for
the improvement of the working population in the county of Glamorgan'
issued improving pamphlets:
No. 9. Population, or Patty's Marriage.
No. 10. The Poor's Rate, or the Treacherous Friend.
No. 11. Foreign Trade, or the Wedding Gown.[50]
But the northern miners were perverse people. In Scotland, according to
one Wesleyan minister,[51] the miners read Adam Smith. In
Northumberland, with still greater perversity, they preferred Plato. 'A
translation of Plato's _Ideal Republic_ is much read among those
classes, principally for the socialism and unionism it contains; in pure
ignorance, of course, that Plato himself subsequently modified his
principles and that Aristotle showed their fallacy.'[52]
3. The Royal Commission of 1842 on the Employment and Condition of
Children and Young Persons in Mines disclosed facts which made Cobdenite
England gasp. The worst evidence came from Lancashire, Cheshire, the
West Riding of Yorkshire, East Scotland, and South Wales. In these
districts juvenile labour was cheap and plentiful; and this was an
irresistible argument for its employment, though the miners themselves
disliked it. The meddlesome restrictions on the factories were a
contributory cause. Parents, it was said in Lancashire, were pushing
their children into colliery employment at an earlier age because of the
legal restrictions upon sending them to the neighbouring factories.
A Lancashire woman said in evidence:
'I have a belt round my waist and a chain passing between my
legs, and I go on my hands and feet.... The pit is very wet where
I work and the water comes over our clog tops always, and I have
seen it up to my thighs.... I have drawn till I have had the skin
off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family
way.'[53]
The children's office was a lonesome one. Children hate the dark, but
being little they fitted into a niche, and so they were used to open and
close the trap-doors. A trapper lad from the county of Monmouth, William
Richards, aged seven-and-a-half, said in evidence:
'I been down about three years. When I first went down, I could
not keep my eyes open; I don't fall asleep now; I smokes my pipe,
smokes half a quartern a week.'[54]
Except in the northern mining districts, where there were good day and
Sunday schools and Methodism was powerful, a pagan darkness prevailed.
As a Derbyshire witness put it:
'When the boys have been beaten, knocked about, and covered with
sludge all the week, they want to be in bed all day to rest on
Sunday.'[55]
In the hope of startling a religiously-minded England, the Commissioners
reproduced examples of working-class ignorance. James Taylor, aged
eleven,
'Has heard of hell in the pit, when the men swore; has never
heard of Jesus Christ; has never heard of God; he has heard the
men in the pit say, "God damn thee ".'
A Yorkshire girl, aged eighteen, said:
'I do not know who Jesus Christ was; I never saw him, but I have
seen Foster, who prays about him.'[56]
4. Just as in the East Midlands the frame-work knitters worked for
middlemen or master middlemen, and just as the Dudley nailers worked for
petty-foggers and market-foggers, so too the Staffordshire miners worked
for 'butties'. Here again the workers were exposed to the petty
tyrannies of semi-capitalism; and here again the middlemen, in this case
the butties, incurred the odium of a system for which their superiors,
the coal-owners and coal-masters, were responsible.
Why the butty system prevailed in the Midlands--and in a modified form
it prevails to-day--is not clear. In some places it seems to be
connected with the smallness of the mining concerns or of the metal
trades which they supplied. In South Staffordshire a contributing factor
was the ancient and allied industry of nail-making.
The conditions in South Staffordshire in 1843 are fully described in the
Midland Mining Commission of that year.
The butty was a contractor who engaged with the proprietor or lessee of
the mine to deliver the coal or iron-stone at so much per ton, himself
hiring the labourers, using his own horses, and supplying the tools
requisite for the working of the mine. The contract price was known as
the 'charter price' or 'charter'. Thus by a freak of language the
Staffordshire miner knew by the same word the 'butty's charter' which
was the symbol of his oppression, and the 'people's charter' which was
the goal of his desire.
'The butties', said the miners and their wives, 'are the devil: they are
negro drivers: they play the vengeance With the men.'[57] The men
kicked when, after working a couple of hours, they were fetched up,
without pay, on the excuse that there were no waggons to take away the
coal. But the butty comforted them with a bottle of pit drink, and all
was smooth again.
A collier related a case where 'a pike man had worked only one half-day
in the week and got 2_s._ for it, and because he did not spend 6_d._ of
this at the butty's shop, the latter told the doggy (the under man) to
let the man play for it.'[58]
The miners recognized that often the butty was not to blame. In the
district north and east of Dudley, the butties got their 'charter price'
from the coal-owners in the form of tickets on the coal-owners'
truck-shop. What else could they do but hand them on to the men? 'He
used to be a very good butty,' said one miner's wife, 'till they haggled
him and dropped his "charter", so that he cannot pay his men.'[59]
West and south of Dudley the butties, though they did not truck their
men, kept public-houses; and being employer and publican in one, they
had a tight hold on the men.
Was the compulsion to drink an oppression? To our minds, yes; as also to
the minds of the teetotal Chartists whom the Government imprisoned, and
of the strike leaders whom the Government's Commissioners denounced. But
to the majority of the miners the abundance of beer was a delight. They
objected to the butty's bullying, but they loved his beer, especially
the feckless ones, for when wives were importunate the drunkards pleaded
necessity.
However, all the beer-drinking could not be charged to the butties. The
miners themselves, in their own fellowships, were devoted to it; and
the compulsion of friends was as severe as the compulsion of butties.
Every approach to recreation, every act of mutual providence against
accident or disease, began and ended in beer. The day a man entered the
pit's company, he paid 1_s._ for footing-ale, and the doggy saw that no
churl escaped. When a lad was old enough to have a sweetheart he was
toasted with the 'nasty' shilling. The sins of the married men were
washed away in half-a-crown's worth of ale. The beer-shop was the
head-quarters of the Burial and Savings Clubs. The first charge on a
Burial Club was a good oak coffin, the second charge drinks for the
pall-bearers, and then a glass or two for the rest of the company.
They had lotteries to which each man contributed 20 fortnightly
shillings. Each week a name was drawn, and the lucky man stood a feast;
while every member, in addition to a shilling for the box, produced
6_d._ for drinks.
In all these festivities the butty was in the offing. When they would
have him he presided; and so at his worst an obnoxious bully, at his
best he was an accommodating landlord.
Direct employment, such as prevailed in the north of England, would have
averted much of this evil. There were no structural difficulties in the
way of change. Direct employment would not have meant a change to
another class of work (this is what direct employment meant for knitters
and hand-loom weavers). The butty system existed and persisted through
slackness and irresponsibility. The owners paid compensation for
accidents, when they might have diminished the number of accidents. They
paid commissions to middlemen with whom they might have dispensed. The
system made temperance impossible for the individual; and the masters,
with the full approval of the Government, did their best to destroy the
'pernicious combinations' by which alone a standard of sober decency
could be promoted.
5. The Report of the Truck Commissioners (1871-2) enables us to complete
the picture. It also enables us to understand why, at this late day,
truck was still rife in certain districts.
Truck and Tommy, truck-shop and Tommy-shop, are convertible terms. Truck
is from the French 'troc' = barter. Cobbett tells us how the word
'Tommy' was used. In his soldiering days the rations of brown bread,
'for what reason God knows', went by the name of Tommy. 'When the
soldiers came to have bread served out to them in the several towns in
England, the name of Tommy went down by tradition, and, doubtless, it
was taken up and adapted to the truck-system in Staffordshire and
elsewhere.'[60] From the textile districts it had all but disappeared in
1871. When the cotton manufactures went to outlying dales for water
power, they were almost compelled to open stores for their workpeople.
Owen's store at New Lanark was, in effect, a well-managed truck-shop;
and the Truck Commissioners of 1871 reported that the New Lanark Company
of that day was breaking the law. But when the cotton industry was
gathered in the towns, the need for company stores ceased. Consequently,
after the passing of the Act of 1831, which prohibited truck altogether,
the masters very generally abolished the stores of their own accord; and
survivals were jealously watched.
A collection of Factory Scraps, preserved at the Goldsmiths' Library in
London, contains a copy of the Factory Bill of 1833, with some pencil
notes in Ostler's handwriting which run:
_Cragg Dale Facts_
_Truck System_: Little altered: men knew they were imposed. They
pay in money now--but compel them to buy at their own shops....
Wholesale warehouses at Rochdale say, 'Oh! put it sideways: it
will do for Cragg Dale masters to sell among their people.'
_Song_: 'Lousy butter and burnt bread.'