Shining Threads Read Online Free PDF Page B

the exact age of each of her offspring, having neither the strength nor inclination to be concerned. The employers had one yardstick: if the children were the right size they were
considered fit to be employed in the mill, and one did not ask for sight of a birth certificate.
    The Act also declared that regular meal-times were required for the children who worked at their mules and looms and provision must be made for two hours’ schooling each day but when a
‘hand’, which is all they were to unscrupulous millowners, was at its desk and not ‘minding’ its machine, little profit is made, and besides, what does a man who is to spin
or weave for the rest of his days want with reading and writing?
    Of course, Charlie Greenwood’s sister-in-law had attended to all these matters twenty years ago at the Chapman Spinning and Weaving Concerns, her new mill at Chapmanstown, and, as far as
possible, at her four older mills which her grandfather had built in Crossfold. She had begun her enlightened, some said lunatic improvements in the conditions of her operatives’ lives with
the renovation of her factories and the building of new houses on the land she purchased on the outskirts of the town. They were sturdy little dwellings with a parlour and a scullery, two or three
bedrooms, a bit of yard at the back and a privy for each family. There was piped water from the clean, fast-flowing river and allotments, one to each man, so that he might grow his own vegetables.
A church, an ale house, a school, a library were also built and a Mechanics Institute where sturdy young lads, eager to ‘get on’, were learning things which would surely lead to
revolution among the lower orders. What would it be next, the stunned inhabitants of Crossfold and Edgeclough, and indeed the whole of the Penfold Valley had asked, and more to the point, where was
the profit in it? But twenty years after the Act in many of the mills it was still the practice to employ children under the legal age, many of whom were worked until they fell asleep at
their machines. Only last week, Charlie had heard, a little lass who swore she was nine years old but who could have been no more than six or seven was half-scalped at Jonathan Abbott’s mill
when her long hair – which should have been tied up in any case – became entangled in the machine, still moving, which she was cleaning. She had been dragged clear by her demented
mother for whom she was ‘piecing’ and taken to the infirmary in Edgeclough to be stitched up. It seemed it was of no concern to her employer when she had turned up for work the next day
at the customary time of five thirty for her twelve-hour shift – in need of her wage one presumed – the bandage on her head already grey and stained with the filth with which she and
her family were in daily contact.
    Despite the open windows, the long room with its rows of clattering machinery was fearfully hot. Scores of women and older children attended me mules whilst others ran from machine to machine
piecing the broken yarns, sweeping up the cotton waste, the smallest clambering beneath dangerously moving straps and pulleys, chains and wheels, all fenced off, to get at the oil-coated waste
which collected there. Some carried empty roving bobbins, taking them to the machines and bringing away the full bobbins of spun yarn which were placed in a huge basket and dragged away by a sturdy
and cheerfully whistling lad. The air was thick with ‘fly’, specks of cotton fibre and dust which, despite all efforts to dispel it, still hung in a mist about the workers’
heads.
    Charlie did not expect to find anything amiss in his spinning room. Nevertheless, it did no harm to let the overlooker see that he was on the alert for any infringement of those rules made to
protect, not exploit the operatives. This was part of his daily round and though today’s took place as usual it was at a quicker pace than he would normally proceed. As soon