How Britain Worked Read online

  I PLOUGH THE FIELDS (AND THEY SCATTER...)

  By the 1860s, fields that had previously been ploughed using a team of horses to pull a single blade through the soil were being turned over using steam power and a whole new set of skills were being introduced to agriculture. It was a man called John Fowler who developed the idea of using steam engines for ploughing, winning a £500 prize in 1858 for the system that he came up with. Fowler’s idea used a steam engine parked at one end of the field and a pulley system anchored at the other end, with a cable running between the two. The cable was wound by the steam engine and attached to the cable was the plough, which was dragged through the soil.

  I had a go on a similar set-up with a great big steam traction engine at either end of a field. As the ploughman, I had to sit on the plough and guide it along, steering it with a wheel that was almost comically huge. Because there’s no power steering or suchlike that you might find on a modern vehicle, you need a steering wheel that big to keep the plough on course. You can’t do it just by twiddling a little knob. I doubt that steering wheel would even fit inside my Astra van. I might have struggled to keep my furrows straight, but for a Victorian ploughman used to walking behind a plough pulled by heavy horses, fighting to guide the blade as it bucked and baulked through every heavy patch of soil, steering a steam-drawn plough must have seemed like luxury.

  Turning the plough around at the edge of the field was proper hard work. It’s a heavy old piece of kit with blades and steering gear at either end, carefully balanced so that only the rear end where the driver and his mate sit is in contact with the soil. Lifting the blades out of the ground to line the plough up for the next run needed two of us hanging from the ‘front’ set to tip the balance, lift the rear blades out of the ground and turn what had been the front into the back. It took a lot of effort, but once the plough was hooked up to the drag lines again, it was soon trundling along at a cracking pace.

  Steam-powered ploughing in this way could turn over a field twenty times faster than a man walking behind a Shire horse and did it with four blades cutting the soil instead of just one. That, of course, was the sort of mechanisation that put a lot of people out of work. But mechanisation was creating work, too, and of a more regular variety. Machines like the steam engines and the plough were built in factories, and these factories offered a steady wage with year-round work: agricultural work, by contrast, was often seasonal.

  MILLS AND BOOM

  Not all factories were crammed into the hearts of the burgeoning new cities. Some were in far more remote locations, such as Gayle Mill in North Yorkshire, which we visited a couple of times while filming the TV series. Gayle Mill was built in 1784 by entrepreneurs Oswald and Thomas Routh, who saw the expanding cotton industry as a sound investment. The end of the war in America, which had won its independence from Britain, meant that the transatlantic ‘triangular trade’ route was flourishing once more. Triangular trade involved manufactured goods such as cloth, guns, tools

  and other metal goods being exported from British ports to the west coast of Africa. Slaves were then carried as cargo from Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and America; finally, cotton and tobacco were shipped back across the Atlantic to Britain. The three legs of the trade route formed the Atlantic triangle, the most controversial part of the system being the slaves kidnapped in Africa to be sold in America. It seems almost unbelievable to us now, doesn’t it? But for many years the slave trade made a lot of people in Britain a lot of money.

  The cotton arrived at Liverpool docks, which had grown since the first part of the commercial docks was established in 1715 to become Britain’s second busiest port, after London. The importance of Liverpool, and later Manchester after the opening of the ship canal in 1894, to the cotton business was that they were in the north of the country, which was the best place for weaving. Down south, the air was too dry and cotton yarn was liable to dry out and snap, which caused delays in production while the problem was sorted. In the north, the damp atmosphere meant that breaking yarns was less of a problem. Raw cotton, however, is a bulky commodity, difficult and expensive to transport, so shipping it direct to the north west was the obvious thing to do.

  Plenty of moisture and rain meant that there were also plenty of streams to turn the water wheels that powered most of the cotton mills, at least

  before steam engines came along. So, even though it isn’t in the middle of an industrial town, Gayle Mill wasn’t too badly situated. It had a ready supply of water from Gayle Beck to turn its mill wheel and the locals had long been involved in knitting as a cottage industry. They worked on the land, but also hand-knitted garments using locally produced wool: some of them would even knit as they walked to work in the fields! The Rouths knew that they had a local workforce that was familiar with textiles and they reckoned that a new road that had been built from the west was the answer to any potential transport problems.

  They were right, for a time. When the mill first opened there were only twenty like it in the whole country. Seventy years later there were nearly

  2,000 and Manchester was where it was all happening – the people called the city ‘Cottonopolis’. In 1789, an advertisement was placed in the Manchester Mercury offering Gayle Mill for sale. Bringing cotton in and shipping finished yarn out was clearly proving to be a more expensive transport problem than the Rouths had anticipated. They failed to find a buyer for their business, and the mill soldiered on.

  Gayle Mill was a very practical design for the time; a thoroughly modern factory in a rural setting. It was arranged over three floors, with internal hoists to lift loads through trapdoors between floors. The raw cotton bales were delivered to the top floor where the cotton was beaten or ‘scratched’, to clean out all the dust and seeds. All done by hand, this was dirty, exhausting work, yet was work deemed suitable for women and children.

  The cleaned cotton was dropped through a trapdoor to the middle floor where the cotton fibres, already separated a bit by the scrutching, were straightened and untangled by carding. Initially, this would also have been done by hand, using carding combs, but there were eventually carding and roving machines that stretched the cotton into a kind of yarn. The yarn, which had no real strength as the fibres were still quite loose, was then passed to the lower floor where the spinning machines turned it into thread. This was wound onto bobbins and despatched in consignments to the weaving works in Lancashire.

  It wasn’t a production line in the way that Henry Ford would have it when he began building cars in Detroit, but for the time, this was pretty much state of the art. The system at Gayle Mill had been pioneered by a businessman called Richard Arkwright, who set up a water-powered mill at Cromford in Derbyshire in 1771. Arkwright subsequently established other mills out in the countryside where he had a good water supply for power. He overcame the problem of not having enough local workers in rural areas by bringing them in from elsewhere, building homes for them and creating what became known as ‘factory villages’.

  But the country mills found it difficult to compete with city factories, where steam power was proving to be far more reliable and transport was not a problem. Gayle Mill was a good example of an enterprise where the supply and transport problems made it difficult to compete. When the mill was squeezed out of the cotton business, it went over to spinning first locally produced flax – flax being the plant that is used to produce linen – and then wool for the local knitting cottage industry (specifically to be used in making socks). The woollen mill prospered for a while but when it fell on hard times again it was partially decommissioned: the building was turned into residential accommodation for a few years during the nineteenth century.

  Then, in 1879, Gayle Mill went back to work as a factory. The latest industrial woodworking lathes, saws, drills and planes were installed and it became a sawmill. When the railway had come to nearby Hawes a few years earlier in 1876, it had revitalised the whole area: there was now plenty of work manufacturing parts for carts
, fence posts, roof beams and all manner of wooden produce. The factory tended to run on a seasonal basis: the winter months were spent acquiring and stockpiling raw materials, with trees felled locally and stored as timber to dry or ‘season’ in preparation for use in the mill; spring and summer were the manufacturing months before the process returned to tree felling in the autumn.

  DARK SATANIC MILLS

  When the factory was operating, whether as a cotton mill or a sawmill, it worked just like a factory in a big town or city. A bell was rung to call the workers into the mill first thing in the morning, there was another bell for dinner (lunch is dinner up north, remember) and a final bell at home time. Village and family life revolved around the bell: sounds like being back at school, doesn’t it? For those working in factories in the cities, however, factory life was far stricter than in any school.

  Like the rural factory owners, industrialists in the cities realised that they needed their workforce close at hand. They built streets of terraced houses, typically with two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs. In the early days, these houses had no running water, with a whole street having to share an outdoor pump. Outside toilets were also shared by a number of houses and rubbish was dumped in a sewer running down the middle of the street. Factory workers packed themselves into these houses, with several families sharing the four rooms and splitting the rent owed to the mill owners. Slum conditions like these are, of course, a perfect breeding ground for disease and there were regular outbreaks of cholera and typhus. It didn’t take long for the bosses to realise that a workforce that was dying off from preventable diseases was not good for business. Consequently, the workers’ housing was slowly improved.

  While living conditions for factory workers did get better, the environments in which they lived and worked were still far from ideal. Entire families worked in the mills and a twelve-hour factory shift from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. was regarded as a normal day. Sixteen-hour stints were not uncommon: that wasn’t overtime, either, but a standard shift. The factory bell or hooter might sound as early as 5.00 a.m. and if you weren’t inside the factory doors ready to start work an hour later, you were locked out. There were no excuses for arriving late when the gaffer knew that you only lived ten minutes’ walk away. You lost a day’s wages and, more than likely, the next day’s wages as well, as a fine for not showing up.

  The long hours meant that, for much of the year, workers were going to work before dawn and coming back after sunset. Even when they did see daylight, the smoke from the factories’ steam engines (by 1850, 86 per cent of all factories relied on steam power) and the furnaces of the engineering works, combined with smoke from the coal fires or stoves that were the only source of heat in every home, created an almost permanent dark cloud over the area. Dark satanic mills? When William Blake coined the phrase in the poem that we know as ‘Jerusalem’, he didn’t know the half of it. The quality of the air that people were breathing on the way to work was very poor, but when they got into the factory, it was even worse. In the engineering works, there would be all sorts of smoke and dust drifting in the atmosphere; in the mills it was cotton fibres and dust that people had to contend with. It didn’t help that water was often sprayed on the floor to keep the dust down, or that steam pipes were set up to spray steam into the air high above the heads of the workers to keep the atmosphere damp. This meant that workers were breathing in moist air and their clothes were never really dry.

  Lung disease and stomach disorders became an occupational hazard for factory workers. Seldom seeing sunshine led to a lack of vitamin D and this, along with a poor diet, meant that children’s bones didn’t grow properly. Kids from the factory communities were less likely to grow tall and strong, and far more likely to have the bowed or ‘bandy’ legs associated with rickets.

  It was to protect these children in particular that the government introduced legislation in the form of the Factory Acts. In 1833, a third of the workers in textile factories were children or boys between the ages of eight and seventeen. The factory owners liked employing children because they could pay them less than adults. The bosses had no problem with childish bad behaviour: the child’s parents (unless the kid had been hired from an orphanage or workhouse) were most likely also working in the factory and would be disciplined if their son or daughter misbehaved. Not only were they cheap labour, but children were also small enough to squeeze underneath machinery to tie up loose threads, or to clean out muck and waste that was threatening to clog up the works. Because they could crawl in to do this, there was no need to switch off the machines to carry out these tasks, and hence there was no loss in production. This was often dangerous work but, as one manager told a factory inspector in 1864, ‘They seldom lose a hand... it only takes off a finger.’

  The Factory Act of 1802 forced factory owners to provide proper ventilation and to supply children working for them with two complete outfits of clothing. Children between the ages of nine and thirteen could work only eight hours a day and those between fourteen and eighteen a maximum of twelve hours. Children under nine were officially banned from working and had to go to school instead. Not only that, but the factory owners were made responsible for building the new schools for their workers’ children.

  By 1819, children under sixteen years were limited by law to a seventy-two-hour working week and a further Factory Act in 1833 decreed that children up to thirteen years old could not work more than eight hours a day without a lunch break. The children were also required to have a minimum of two hours of formal education each day. In 1848, the ‘Ten Hours Act’ limited all workers to a ten-hour day. Industry responded by making nighttime working commonplace and keeping the factories running constantly with ten-hour shifts day and night.

  In the mid-1880s, a chap called Tom Mann started to make a bit of a name for himself as a champion of workers’ rights. He published a pamphlet calling for a standard eight-hour working day, became involved in a number of different strikes and encouraged the trades unions to adopt the eight-hour day as one of their main goals. His demands would be a long time coming: most workers didn’t enjoy a standard eight-hour working day until well into the next century.

  While at Gayle Mill, we watched some film from the early 1900s that showed weavers working in a factory. It really helped to make sense of everything that we had been learning about factory life. The machines were packed in pretty tight and there were no real safety guards to protect the people working on them. It was clear that the factory wasn’t there for the workers, but was all about the mill owners and making money. One kid in the film looked as if he wasn’t more than twelve years old.

  Watching the women on the film leaving the factory, it struck me that they all looked happy and were smiling. That may have been because there were some strange men there filming them – not something that would have happened every day – but they certainly seemed to have a spring in their step. These women really were ‘happy campers’ and, for people who were worked hard for long hours and paid a pittance, none of them looked like skinny slaves being worked to death, and I certainly didn’t spot anyone suffering from the ‘obesity epidemic’ that plagues Britain in the twenty-first century. They all looked reasonably fit.

  For those who had jobs, money to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table, maybe these glory days of British industrial might weren’t always as bad for the poor downtrodden workers as we are often led to believe, although no one could deny that vast improvements to working conditions for those who laboured in Britain’s factories were sorely needed. Yet Britain was known then as ‘the workshop of the world’. Can we still say that now? I don’t think we can.

  WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE

  We weren’t at Gayle Mill just to watch old documentaries. There is, you see, a unique feature about the place. Far from those dark satanic mills in the cities, out in the beautiful Wensleydale countryside, Gayle let the steam age pass right on by and stuck with water power. The big water wheel, however,
was done away with, and a special kind of turbine was installed instead. The idea of using water turbines was not exactly new – the Romans were using them as long ago as the fourth century – but the great advances in metallurgy and engineering in the nineteenth century meant that turbines were now far more efficient and boasted impressive power output.

  Designed by Professor James Thomson of Queen’s College, Belfast, Gayle’s innovative double vortex turbine was installed in 1879. The turbine was built by an engineering firm in Kendal called Williamson Brothers and was a very clever piece of machinery. It was a sealed unit, with the two parts of the casing, like two five-foot-high dustbin lids, bolted together all around the outside. Water was fed into the casing from a supply pipe, and it rushed around the outside of the turbine before it was fed through specially positioned vanes that directed it in a spiral towards the centre where the water vortex – like a whirlpool – turned a shaft. The same thing was happening inside both halves of the casing, which is why the turbine was known as a ‘double vortex’.

  Although it was using the same water supply as the original huge water wheel, the turbine produced twice the power despite being a fraction of its size. The shaft supplied the equivalent of eleven horsepower: belts transferred this power from the spinning shaft up into the factory, where another shaft ran the length of the building. From that shaft, a series of belts and pulleys powered the woodworking lathes, the planing bench and the saw. There was enough power to run all of the factory machines at once.

  Unfortunately, the turbine was out of action when we went to see it because it had sprung a leak and had to be shut down. This wasn’t just a few drips, mind you, it was losing forty-three litres of water a second – that’s a fair old amount of water. For those of you concerned about the environment, don’t worry. The water was all leaking back into Gayle Beck and flowing on down the valley.