They proceeded at a steady pace along the pleasant thoroughfare until the carriage turned a corner and there, in the centre of a vast square, stood the imposing building of the Royal Exchange, the very heart of the cotton industry and without which, it was said, the sprawling body of its trade which spread over most of Lancashire, would cease to function. Radiating out from the Exchange like the spokes of a wheel were dozens of streets in which lay the thousands of warehouses, factories and sweat-shops connected with the cotton industry, and all within five minutes’ walk of its hub. The Royal Exchange was the focus of buying and selling cotton and on market days, Tessa had heard, its huge halls were crowded from one end to the other with buyers and sellers, not even the least self-respecting of them without his tall silk hat for this was the most important cotton market in the world. She would come here one day, Will had told her, for she must learn everything there was to know about cotton if she was to become the manufacturer her mother and her Aunt Kit had been. All around it, enormous warehouses were crammed with cloth, some of it her own, brought from surrounding towns: Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Stockport, and Crossfold! The excitement began to grow in her at that moment.
The streets became increasingly narrow and twisting the further they went and the buildings were so tall it was almost impossible to see the sky. There were waggons heavily laden with cotton cloth, with piece goods and dress goods, with huge bales of raw cotton and all the commodities on which Manchester had built its reputation as the centre of the cotton industry. Waggons lumbered in and out of wide gateways, the patient, plodding dray horses which pulled them bending their heads with the weight of their huge loads.
‘Oh, Lord,’ Emma gasped as their own carriage swayed quite dangerously in the frantic rush which seemed to pervade the area. A hurrying multitude crowded about the conveyance and the impassive animal which pulled it, and surely the massed sea of people were in danger of being run down by the dozens of vehicles which crammed the streets, all of which were involved in the many and complex layers of employment the industry produced. Brokers, yarn merchants, dyers, waste dealers, merchants, manufacturers, buyers and sellers, all were hurrying in the direction of the particular street or region which dealt with their own section of the trade. Stockport and Salford were ‘making up’; Piccadilly and Portland Street where the great warehouses were situated; Brown Street was ‘shirts’ and Stride Hill ‘underwear’. It looked just as though some careless foot had kicked over an ant-hill, scattering the human ants in every direction, but there was a strange kind of order about it for each ant knew exactly its own destination and business.
‘Oh, Lord,’ Emma said again, inclined to be even more tearful as rude, inquisitive faces peered in at them, some leering at the sight of two pretty women in a place where the only females were those drabs who worked in one of the hundreds of small factories, sweat-shops most of them, which crowded the cellars of every street, and were allied to the cotton trade.
The bustle of the town centre began to die away as they crossed the river Irwell, turning left to follow what was really no more than a cobbled track running beside the river. It was here that the stench invaded the carriage, faint at first and causing no more than a tendency to sniff and turn one’s head in an effort to identify it and its source.
‘What is it, Miss Tessa?’ Emma whispered.
‘God knows, Emma, but whatever it is it seems to be getting worse by the minute.’
They each held a dainty scrap of perfumed lace to their nostrils and Tessa felt her stomach begin to move distastefully as the stink became so strong she could not only smell it, but taste it.
On one side of them ran the river, slow moving, evil looking, with unidentifiable objects floating sluggishly just below its surface. Along its banks great piles of rotting garbage swung in the gentle eddies of river water which had carried it there. The smell was appalling and Tessa had the strongest desire to scratch at herself just as though the deeper they penetrated into the squalid district the more loathsome the miasma of filth grew on her skin.
‘’Ere we are,’ the driver of the carriage told them. He had a look about him which said he would be glad to get away from this place himself. Already attracted by the sight of the carriage, the area was beginning to swarm with what must have been inquisitive children but which looked for all the world like small, scurrying monkeys, grey-coloured, pallid, furtive. He could not imagine what two such elegant ladies wanted here, but a fare was a fare though if they asked him to wait he’d have to refuse. These urchins would pick his cab clean, wheels an’ all, if he stood still for more than two minutes.
They were in a courtyard, large and square with immensely tall houses on three sides of it, each floor-level of the buildings contained by an iron-railinged balcony and each connected by narrow stairs up to the sixth and top floor. The courtyard was unpaved and in its centre a huge pool of water had collected in a hollow, unable to run away to the river in which sewage was dumped. Directly in the middle of the water was a broken building with an opening, evidently once a doorway from which not only the door but the frame was missing as well. It was from here that the stench came, an invisible eruption to which those who inhabited the court seemed impervious but which brought stinging tears to Tessa’s eyes. Everywhere was filth, mud, rotting carcasses of what must once have been a living cat or dog, and in it the children played, barefoot, almost naked, and men and women lolled, the smoky sunshine and warmth lulling them into a somnolence which gave them the appearance of living corpses.
Emma began to choke and gasp as the foetid air entered her lungs. ‘Merciful heaven! Miss Tessa, please . . . we can’t stay here . . . call the carriage . . . don’t let him go, Miss Tessa. . . . We’ll be murdered where we stand . . . or worse. Please, oh, please, Miss Tessa . . .’
Tessa felt the smarting tears clog her eyes but she clung to Emma’s arm, convinced that if she did not keep a hold on her the maid might make a run for it. They moved jerkily towards the left-hand side of the courtyard. Her pretty, pale grey gown now had six inches of brown filth about its hem and the ooze of something quite dreadful seeped into her boots. Emma continued to weep loudly.
‘Be quiet, Emma,’ Tessa said through gritted teeth, ‘or I swear I shall strike you. We shall just enquire here for Annie.’ She indicated a doorway above which was a sign stating that ‘Good Beds’ were available, but Emma was beyond caring and continued to cry loudly. The children screamed in play and Tessa wondered how such undernourished bodies could make such a noise as they threw whatever came to hand at one another. Slime ran down every wall, seeping into the unpaved ground, but a woman leaned casually by the doorway, inured, one supposed; to the horror by its familarity.
‘I’m looking for Annie Beale,’ Tessa said firmly, her manner letting the woman know that she would tolerate no impertinence.
‘Who?’ The woman smiled pleasantly, or so she thought, but the sight of the blackened stumps in her mouth made Emma recoil against her mistress’s shoulder and reminded Tessa of that day on the moor, long ago now, when the tinkers had chased her.
‘Annie Beale. This is Pike Street, isn’t it?’
‘Aye, it is.’
‘Well, then, do you know her? She’s about twenty-four and has three sisters and a brother. She came here six months ago . . .’
‘Oh, that one.’
‘You know her then?’
‘’Oo doesn’t, stuck-up cow.’
‘Where is she then? Where does she live?’
The woman indicated with her head towards a doorway which stood below ground in the third house along the road. Down the flight of area steps which led to it trickled some thick brown liquid, gathering at the bottom and leaking under the fragile door and, Tessa assumed, into the cellar beyond.
She had turned away, her manner brisk and undaunted, wanting somehow to show this woman who eyed her with such amusement that despite her own upbringing she was quite able to cope with the difficulties the woman lived amongst every day.
‘She’ll not be in,’ the woman said.
‘Oh . . . ?’
‘Well, she’ll be at work, won’t she, now she’s better.’
‘Better?’
‘Aye, from’t fever.’
‘Fever?’ Emma moaned and Tessa felt the dread move in her.
‘What . . . fever?’ There were so many. Cholera, dysentery, and dozens with no name but all rife in places such as this and carried indiscriminately to strike down where they were least expected, for they were no respecter of class or privilege.
‘We gerrit regular round ’ere.’ She smiled more broadly, revealing most of the obscene interior of her mouth. ‘Sorts out weak ’uns, they say. Mind you, I’ve seen a strong, well-set up lad go whistlin’ off to’t mill in’t morning’ an’ be lyin’ wi’ ’is toes turned up by nightfall.’
‘Who . . . did Annie . . . her family . . . ?’ Her mouth was so dry she could barely speak but the woman continued to grin slyly.
‘She’ll be at Spicers in Earnshaw Street.’
‘And . . . the rest . . . ?’
‘Nay, they’ve gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘All on ’em in one day. Seen it ’appen a lot. ’Ole families kick t’bucket an’ one left ter tell t’tale.’
Oh, dear God, sweet merciful God . . . She felt the ground tilt and for one dreadful moment thought she was about to go down into that foul, slime-coated horror which lay about her, but somehow balancing against the half-fainting Emma she kept herself upright.
‘Where . . . where is . . . Earnshaw Street, if you please?’
‘Just up yonder.’ The woman turned away, her interest in the visitors at an end.
They walked to Earnshaw Street for there were no cabs to be found in this pestilential jumble of rat-ridden cottages in which ten, fourteen, sixteen persons slept habitually in one room, this area of tottering tenements where the residents lived in rows side by side and on top of one another, where a hundred rooms housed more than a thousand destitute outcasts.
‘Just up yonder’ proved to be back over the bridge which spanned the Irwell, another rickety building with the name SPICERS PINS over the door, and needing no more than a stiff breeze to have it down, Tessa was convinced. The large room which led directly off the street was filled with small tables at each of which sat four children. None of them appeared to be more than six or seven years old, small, pallid, their eyes quite blank and incurious, and the sound of their wheezy breathing in the foetid air reminded Tessa of the sound of the engines at Victoria station, but that had been cheerful and energetic and this was not. There was a kind of frame fixed before each child on which was suspended what appeared to be a heavy weight. Under each table was a treadle and as the child pressed it with a bare and bony foot, the weight came thumping down with a deafening clatter. They were ‘pin-heading’, applying heads to the shanks of pins, the heads tightened by a blow from the weight hanging before them.
Annie was not among them.
Emma clung like a child herself to Tessa’s hand. She had been brought up in the vicinity of mills and the men and women who worked in them. She was from such a family herself but what she had seen today had sent her senses reeling and she could do no more than follow where Miss Tessa led, praying to her Methodist God to deliver her soon from the horrors she was witnessing today. She winced, sidling even closer to her mistress as a man appeared from behind a machine.
‘’Ere, what d’yer think you’re up to?’ he demanded to know, not recognising in that first moment and the dim haze of the work room that Tessa and her maid were ‘quality’. ‘You’ve no right in ’ere an’ I’ll thank yer to be off,’ he added roughly, his manner marking him as the owner of the factory and the children who worked there.
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine.’ Tessa’s tone was peremptory. Her eyes were riveted to the sight of one small child, her back bowed in the form of a letter ‘C’, her head no more than six inches from the table, falling into what appeared to be a deep and comatose sleep. The man gave the child a casual but stinging blow about the ear and her head hit the table top but in an instant her tiny hands were reaching automatically for the pin shanks and her filthy feet for the treadle.
The man scratched his head and Tessa watched Emma do the same. She herself had never felt quite so filthy in all her life. Her skin itched and prickled and she longed to be at home in front of her own bedroom fire, a bath of hot water standing ready to receive her, to soak for an hour in its perfume, but would she feel clean even then?
‘Surely there is no need to strike the child like that?’ She spoke coldly, using the telling weapon of her class, the only one she had.
‘There is if I’m ter keep ’em awake, lady. They’re no use ter me asleep. Anyroad, what’s it ter do wi’ you?’
She sighed for there was nothing she could do, not for this child, but she could help Annie, if no one else in this sweat-shop.
‘I believe you have a friend of mine working here,’ she said haughtily.
‘A friend of yours madam?’ the man said incredulously. ‘What, in ’ere?’ He eyed her expensive gown and boots, her imperious bearing and the expression on her face which told him she would find her friend or know the reason why.
‘Annie Beale. Is she here or not?’
‘Annie Beale? A friend of yours?’
‘Do you employ her or not?’
‘Aye, she’s in pin-sheetin’ room.’
‘Lead me to her.’
‘Nay, missus, she’s busy an’ so am I.’
‘Emma.’ Emma cowered against her mistress, too appalled and terrified to do more than keep herself upright, just. ‘Emma, go and fetch a Peace Officer. I’m perfectly sure these children are all under age, certainly underpaid and definitely undernourished. You will have heard of the Factory Act of 1833, I presume?’ The man stood open-mouthed but managed to nod and indicate that he had. ‘Then if I am not led to my friend at once I shall report you to the Factory Inspectorate. In fact, I shall probably do so anyway.’
She could hear her mother’s voice in her head, saying the words she herself had just spoken about the Factory Act and the Inspectorate, and she marvelled that though her ears had not heard them years ago when they had been discussed, her brain had both noted and retained them.
Annie was the last in a row of girls and young women, all sitting at a long bench with their faces to a grimy, soot-stained window. There was a vice before each one and in the vice was a paper folded previously by the overlooker. The pins made in the outer room were placed carefully, a dozen at a time, in the holes which had been especially punched in the paper, and when the paper was full it was removed and the procedure repeated. The room was damp and packed from wall to wall with similar benches and females, and something else was there too which, though she had never been in such a place before, Tessa recognised as despair.
Annie seemed unable to grasp who Tessa was. When the man tapped her on the shoulder, his truculent face indicating that she was to stand up and shift herself, she did so slowly, her reflexes slack and unco-ordinated. The face she turned to Tessa was grey and narrow, her eyes deep in bony sockets above her cheekbones. Her threadbare skirt and bodice was sweat-stained and sour and her dirty feet were bare.
‘Hello, Annie,’ Tessa said softly and before the amazed stare of the factory owner and the dozens of women who were his slaves, she drew the drab and unknowing figure of Annie Beale into her own elegant and compassionate arms. She held her for a moment then began to guide her between the benches but strangely, it seemed, Annie did not want to go.
‘We’re going home, Annie. Home to your cottage in Edgeclough,’ Tessa murmured, taking Annie’s hand.
‘What about them?’ Annie’s voice was harsh and filled with something Tessa could not identify.
‘Who, Annie?’
‘Them.’ Annie’s hand lifted, swinging in a tired arc to indicate all the hopeless faces who were staring dazedly at her and the fine lady who had
come so incredibly amongst them.
‘What . . . ? I don’t understand.’
‘Yer never did, lass.’ Annie sat down again and drew a sheet of pins towards her.
‘You mean you want to take . . . to take them as well?’
The man at her back began to laugh. He had never enjoyed anything so much for years. The idea of this fine madam trailing up Earnshaw Street with this bloody lot at her heels was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Just wait until he told his missus in that fine villa in Cheetham Hill which ‘this lot’ had earned for him and his family.
‘They’re in as bad a state as me, Tessa Harrison.’
‘Dear God, Annie, I might have known you’d be just the same. Even with all that’s happened to . . .’
‘I’ll not come wi’out ’em.’
‘Very well.’ The factory owner smirked for he’d have summat to say to Annie Beale when her ‘friend’ had gone, but his smirk changed to amazement when Tessa turned to the young women at her back and addressed them just as though they were human beings and not the dregs of the streets which he knew them to be.
‘I am Mrs Tessa Greenwood,’ she said vigorously, ‘the owner of the Chapman Manufacturing Company Ltd in Crossfold. Have any of you heard of Crossfold? It is near Oldham.’ One or two nodded their heads hesitantly. ‘I will give work, decent work, to any of you who can make your way there. Do you understand? Again a couple nodded their heads and it was to these that she addressed herself. ‘I have several mills, spinning mills and weaving and the work is easily learned. Annie here will help you . . .’ It was then that Annie’s new position in life became clear to her and she reached out and clasped her friend’s hand.
Really, Mr Briggs remarked fretfully that evening to Mrs Shepherd in the privacy of the housekeeper’s small but cosy sitting-room, one wondered what the world was coming to when the gentry – if you could call them that, which he doubted sometimes – brought what one could only term a ‘common’ person into the house and the mistress of it treated her as though she was her dearest friend: ordering the bath to be placed in front of her own bedroom fire, totally ignoring Miss Laurel’s cries of alarm, and the maids running up and down the stairs with jugs of hot water and warm towels, with milk and eggs and soup. And to cap it all sending off a carriage-load of servants, who were, after all, in his charge, to some dreadful little cottage in Edgeclough to prepare it for her friend’s immediate return, she said. Light the fire, she told them, Mrs Shepherd, and scrub the place from top to bottom. There’s some unused furniture up in the attic, Briggs, she said, beds and chairs and things. You will know what is needed, just as though I had the arranging of such like. I want the place to be warm and as clean as a new pin. Mind, when she said ‘new pin’, Mrs Shepherd, she shuddered quite visibly, though I can’t think why. And then off they go, the pair of them, three hours later, in madam’s carriage and the whole house in an uproar, and the stables with horses got out, and carriages in and out of the stable yard, and on top of it all Emma having a fit of hysteria, screaming about lice, if you please, tearing at her hair as though she was demented. And as for Miss Laurel, she was in a faint after shrieking for the whole valley to hear that if any disease had been brought into the house to harm her children she would never speak to Miss Tessa again. And he agreed with her, the master, I mean, though knowing the kind of acquaintance he favours in those low gin shops I hear tell he frequents, I can’t imagine why.
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