Life in a Georgian Cotton Mill – Oliver Twist style – At Quarry Bank Mill

Again I’m slipping a post in between the progression of Harriette’s story and taking you back to the middle of last week, when I spoke about Quarry Bank Georgian Mill and the history of spinning and weaving cotton. Today I am going to tell a bit about life at the mill in the 18th Century.

There’s an amazing Apprentice House just up the road from the mill, sadly I couldn’t take any pictures inside, so you are going to have rely on me verbally painting the scene for you.

In this period of the 18th Century industrialisation had put many people out of work and the poor houses were overflowing with men, women and children in need of food and shelter. So men like Samuel Greg, who built Quarry Bank Mill, saw an opportunity for cheap labour, they went to the poor houses to obtain children who would work for food and board under the definition of being apprenticed to learn a trade (exactly Oliver Twist style).

They were taken away from their parents at seven or eight and brought to the Apprentice House miles away from home, and they would then be asked to sign away their lives until they were sixteen, when they would be employed or leave. They were literally asked to sign a contract which said they agreed to be Samuel Greg’s possession for that period of their lives, it gave them no rights and no wages for their labour, beyond a bed, a roof, and food; they became slaves basically.

The boys and girls were kept in separate rooms in the house. The girls all slept in one large whitewashed dormitory with a hatch to let them in and out, which was locked when they went in at night and opened again at five in the morning when they had to get up to go to work. The girls were crammed into rows of beds, with straw pallets and a single blanket, wide enough to top and tail three, and you can imagine when the locks were secure, the bitter arguments and bullying the younger ones perhaps endured. As far as possessions, they had a single peg for spare clothes and nothing more.

The boys were split across three rooms, because they’d fight, but again were locked away at night, like animals.

They worked, then breakfast was taken down to the mill, and again just like Oliver Twist, they ate gruel, a dollop of porridge, not from a bowl, but placed into their hand. They had the same for lunch, another dollop, but this time seeds or vegetables had been mixed into it as the Gregs were emancipists and believed in keeping their apprentices healthy (we were told most apprentices would only be fed once a day). Their evening meal was more substantial and two or three times a week they had meat. The real difference from Oliver Twist though was that they were allowed more. The Gregs believed the children could do more work if they weren’t hungry.

But the negative aspect of the Gregs emancipation, was that Samuel Greg’s wife Hannah believed the children should be educated. So after a gruelling ten-hour day at the mill, the children came back to the Apprentice House and had to do their chores, planting and tending the vegetables, feeding animals, cleaning rooms, emptying out the toilet pits… And then after all this Hannah Greg insisted they had lessons to teach them how to read and write. They must have been too exhausted to learn a thing.

You might think Sunday, a day when the mill stopped running, would be a day they could recoup but no, on a Sunday, they had to wash and put on a clean outer layer of clothes and then walk six miles to church. Then for the only time in their week they had a few hours to play or do as they wished after a meat dinner, before they had to walk another six miles back to church for the evening service.

Were the children happy? Certainly some of them weren’t as they ran away, but in comparison to other mills, or the poor house, or having nowhere to live… Their lot was better than most.

While the children were working Hannah Greg enjoyed a social life which was equivalent to any ton society madam in London, she gathered together the bright and artistic of Manchester, and invited them to her home to debate and discuss common interests. She was highly respected in the area, but the fabulous thing was she wrote lots of letters and journals recording all she did and what she thought. One of those characters from history that I love, as I find these the best way to really discover how people lived and what they were like, by reading their thoughts. So of course, I bought the book, maybe more on Quarry Bank Mill, and Hannah Greg, at a later date then…

Come back on Sunday for Harriette’s story.

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional love stories.

See the side bar for details of Jane’s books, and Jane’s website www.janelark.co.uk to learn more about Jane. Or click ‘like’ on Jane’s Facebook page to see photo’s and learn historical facts from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras, which Jane publishes there. You can also follow Jane on twitter at @janelark

Spinning and weaving in the early 1700s – At Quarry Bank Mill (the setting for the Channel 4 drama, The Mill)

Having been away on holiday last week I have some aside posts I am going to intersperse between Harriette’s continuing story. I can’t wait any longer to share these facts I’ve discovered with you. So look out for more of Harriette’s story on Sunday, but today I am going to talk to you about spinning and weaving cotton…

We went to an amazing Georgian mill on holiday, Quarry Bank Mill. It was built in the late 1700s. I don’t know why, but I was really surprised to discover that the site was the family home, as well as the mill. Foolish really, of course they didn’t have cars to drive into work.

When we walked up the hill beyond the mill we walked into what was obviously a historically planted and sculpted garden, I said to my husband, this is really weird it’s like a proper garden, someone must have turned the mill into a home. But then we started seeing signs talking about what the garden had been like in the 1700’s and there was a large Georgian house to the side, which was I guess a couple of hundred yards up the hill from the mill. This was the family home.

We walked around the mill, and were shown how carding, spinning and weaving worked. Here’s a board showing the process.

But with my author’s brain, not that I’d necessarily include it in a story as I write about the upper class, but it was fascinating to be talked through family life in the early 1700s and before that, when many homes were part of the cloth making industry.

Before the days of factories weavers worked alone at home, and weavers were always men. Women did the carding and the spinning, and it took eight hours to spin what it took one hour to weave, so families wanted to keep their spinning wheel going constantly so it wasn’t just a mother’s task, but the from the age of 4-5 children, including young boys would be taught to card, separating the fibres of wool or cotton, ready for spinning, and then girls would be taught to spin from 7-8 and work on the spinning wheel in shifts to keep their fathers provided with thread for weaving – hence why women who did not marry became known as ‘Spinsters’ because they would then be left at home to keep spinning.

Looms in the home were wide enough for one person sitting at it to throw a shuttle through and be able to catch it the other end (so a stretched out arms width), and generally men would work alone at the loom, and their loom would be passed from father to son, and yes this is another historical origin of a word ‘heirloom’. I know – I love learning all these delicious little facts. It was a fab place. But I’m not done yet…

Did you know why broad cloth is called broad cloth? Well if you don’t you’ll know now. Broad cloth was more valuable because it was wider, which gave it more versatility for use, and it was wider because it was made on a two-man loom, so one person sat one side and threw the shuttle, the other caught it.

But then came the invention of the water powered looms. Which could produce far more cloth at a much greater speed, and this is what was built at Quarry Bank, a huge water powered mill to receive the cotton. I hate talking about the slave trade, it was a vile practice which creeps me out… but it was a fact, it happened, and at the time the mill was built, merchants would sail to Africa to capture slaves, take the slaves to America to farm the cotton, and then bring the cotton back to the Britain to stock the mills, and it was cotton Quarry Bank was built to process.

Of course then mills were in the situation that women could not spin the cotton fast enough to stock the looms, and calls were put out urging someone to invent a spinning machine. The spinning-jenny came into life. Initially it was a small number of spindle’s and some families bought one and still worked at home.

But then giant machines were developed ones that cottage industries couldn’t keep up with and this was the point when poverty began hitting the majority of the working class in the late 1700s.