Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  And were there not, some people argued, enough and more than enough slaves at home?

  25

  The steam machines

  In the spring and summer of 1788 George III visited a pin manufactory in Gloucestershire as well as a carpet works and china factory in Worcestershire; he also took in the new Thames–Severn canal south-east of Stroud. In the following year he visited the carpet manufactory at Axminster and, according to its owner, ‘attended to the workers and asked many questions concerning the principles and processes of the manufacture’. It was the first time, perhaps, that the king had given his consideration to the industry and manufactures of the country which in his reign were growing at an accelerated rate. By this date the steam engine and the power loom were in full operation, with the astonishing revelation that a mechanical hammer could strike 150 blows per minute. It seemed to summarize or represent the remarkable change.

  Everyone dreamed and spoke of steam. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, eulogized it in his long poem, The Economy of Vegetation (1791):

  Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER’D STEAM! Afar

  Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;

  Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear

  The flying chariot through the fields of air.

  Matthew Boulton had written in 1781 to his partner, James Watt, the great pioneer of the steam engine, that ‘the people in London, Manchester and Birmingham are steam mill mad’. Charles Babbage, one of the first proponents of the computer, declared at a later date that ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam’. Its uses seemed to be infinite. It blew the furnaces and punched the metal; it drove the lathe and rolled the iron; it raised the water and drained the mines. It lent the power for spinning and weaving. It was used in flour mills, in malt mills and in flint mills. It was of course also used to make more steam engines. The first steam engine for a textile mill was installed in 1792; eight years later, eighty engines were being employed for the same purpose.

  In 1803 a steam carriage made its way through the streets of London. A year later the first railway locomotive in history made its maiden journey of 10 miles from the Penydarren Ironworks by Merthyr Tydfil to the Glamorgan Canal. Lord Jeffrey wrote of the steam engine that ‘it can engrave a seal, and crush obdurate masses of metal before it; draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble into the air’. What was once done by wind and water, by human effort and animal strength, could now be accomplished by heat alone.

  The Albion Mill had been constructed in 1786, on the south side of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge, with the intention of expediting the manufacture of flour by means of steam; it was the great mechanical spectacle of the age, a wonder of modern life, sporting the most powerful machines in the world, and was described by Erasmus Darwin as ‘a grand and successful effort of human life’. It led directly, however, to William Blake’s condemnation of ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ in ‘Jerusalem’ (1804–10). It burned down three years later in what may have been suspicious circumstances. The millers danced and sang on Blackfriars Bridge. Not everyone was enamoured of the age’s mechanical marvels.

  All this activity was propagated by a delicate and melancholy mechanic, James Watt, who was described by the historian, William Lecky, as ‘a slow, shy, plodding, self-concentrated boy, with weak health and low spirits, entirely without brilliancy and fire but with an evident natural turn for mechanics’. Watt once said that ‘of all things in life there is nothing more foolish than inventing’. He added, on another occasion, that ‘I find myself out of my sphere when I have anything to do with mankind’. It was this somewhat lugubrious individual who changed the shape of the age, since his sudden intuition that the two stages of the engine’s life, the heating and the cooling, could be disconnected provided the breakthrough. With a separate condenser, the engine was more efficient and more stable. The idea came to him in a flash while walking on College Green in Glasgow, but it is doubtful whether the fully conceived scheme would have come to fruition without the active and energetic assistance of Matthew Boulton; Watt himself extolled the ‘active and sanguine disposition’ of the manufacturer and industrialist who drove him forward.

  It was Boulton who had told James Boswell, on a tour of his manufactory, ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – Power.’ Power was the source and origin of what would soon become the full-blown factory system that spread across the midland and northern counties so that the whole aggregation was considered to be one vast factory. Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Denbighshire and Cheshire became the home of the machine. At a later date Andrew Ure, author of The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), compared the factories to ‘the boasted monuments of Asiatic, Egyptian and Roman despotism’. There was therefore a hint of the sublime about their construction, with suggestions of darkness, terror and despair.

  They were constructed from solid brick or stone while some of them contained an iron frame; the same care and ingenuity went into their making as that of the great cathedrals, with which they were sometimes compared. Previous industrial buildings had been almost always domestic in scale which lent them a human dimension; the factories with their several storeys, their iron pillars, their windows grouped vertically rather than horizontally, were a new presence in the landscape. They looked as if they were trying to free themselves from the shackles of the land, like the great single-span iron bridges. Early in the new century the factories were some of the first public buildings to be illuminated by gaslight, so that the brilliancy of their achievement could be seen from far off. An historian of Stockport, Henry Heginbotham, wrote that ‘the drivers of London coaches when passing the mill slackened their speed in order to tell of the miraculous operations performed therein’. Others were not impressed. A contemporary diarist, John Byng, after visiting the silk mills in Derby wrote that the mills ‘quite bewildered me; such rattlings and twistings. Such heat, and stinks!’

  The change was slow, and not fully completed until the middle of the next century, but gradually in the last decades of the eighteenth century great spreads of industry and manufacture were established that had their centre in the mills and in the factories. Many of them were constructed at a distance from the old cities and guilds, so the industrialist was able to create new communities that could service his creations; rows of cottages, chapels, churches, schools, kitchen gardens and even public houses were built on-site. Benefit schemes and rudimentary health insurance were also established; organized sports were encouraged as well as annual outings to some local beauty spot or another. When some industrial rioters threatened Arkwright’s factory at Cromford, he armed his employees with guns and spears.

  The purpose of the new factories was of course readily apparent. By congregating all the workers under one roof it was easier to control and to supervise them; it also led to more efficiency so that a series of ‘shops’ or work-rooms could concentrate on one part of the industrial process. Only the factories could house and maintain the great engines that were now being introduced. One external source of power, such as a river, could create the energy for a thousand machines. The forbidding walls could also protect the industrialist from the theft of his trade secrets. But the large number of workers – men, women and children – meant that there was room for experimentation with time and divisions of labour; it was possible now for the working life of factories to be maintained throughout the night as well as the day.

  The great advantage was that of speed. Everything was running faster. The workers were obliged to quicken their pace in order to keep up with one another, while the wheels and belts ran faster. The old guild legislation and medieval ordinances disappeared under the onslaught of this new form of production; the relationships between workers and employers, together with the customary rhythms of life, were changed for ever. It is not surprising, therefore, that this revolution provoked enormous hostility among those whose lives
and livelihoods were threatened by it. The building of the first steam mill in Bradford, Holme Mill, was plagued by protests and riots. Staverton Mill, near Totnes in Devon, was sabotaged by its own operatives.

  The machines were meant to save labour, but the flood of cheaper goods meant that the market grew faster than the available labour force. In turn the relative shortage of labour led to more and more persistent attempts at efficiency and innovation. Robert Owen, the great mill-owner and philanthropist, declared in 1816 that ‘in my establishment at New Lanark . . . mechanical powers and operations superintended by about two thousand young persons and adults . . . now completed as much work as sixty years ago would have required the entire working population of Scotland’.

  The key lay in the successful division of labour, a concept that Adam Smith had extolled in the first chapter of his Wealth of Nations (1776). He contemplates the nature of pin-making under the industrial system.

  One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations . . .

  Eighteen men could perform in a few seconds a task that would absorb the energy of one man for a whole day. This in turn required the presence of specialized workmen who were all the time seeking more and more technical efficiency; their goal was greater accuracy and precision. But this division of labour also needed the efforts of many hundreds of women and children who were put to the most routine and repetitive tasks. So the changes in national industry created new divisions among the working population.

  The other great shibboleth of industrial change was the need for standardization. This was the context for mass production, and was part of the drive for accuracy, regularity, efficiency and speed. The elimination of variability was indispensable for the creation of a national market. And for this, of course, mechanization was essential. As the Scottish engineer and inventor James Nasmyth put it:

  the irregularity and carelessness of the workmen . . . gave an increased stimulus to the demand for self-acting machine tools . . . The machines never got drunk; their hands never shook from excess; they were never absent from work; they did not strike for wages; they were unfailing in their accuracy and regularity, while producing the most delicate or ponderous portions of mechanical structures.

  So by default the men and women themselves had to be trained to behave and work in the same way as machines. The Edinburgh Review noted that ‘the human operative, in imitation and by the aid of the machine, acquires a perfection little less than marvellous’. But what of these men and women and even children? The last word had been said more than 2,000 years before by Xenophon, the Greek historian, who in Oeconomicus condemned the arts of manufacture that ‘utterly ruin the bodies of workers and managers alike, compelling men as they do to lead sedentary lives and huddle indoors, or in some cases to spend the day before a fire. Then as men’s bodies become enervated, so their souls grow sicklier.’

  It is clear enough that many of those who entered the doors of the factory were being introduced to a more intense or at least more visible form of servitude. Social historians have argued for many years over the relative privation involved in agricultural labour or domestic service, but the factory represented coercion and discipline on a much larger and more organized scale. The personal tie had been broken, and the illusion of independence had disappeared. To enter the new sphere of unfreedom, to be introduced to a world of strict routine and discipline, to work for set hours in a set pattern, marked a profound change in status. The wage labourers were believed by many to have lost their rights as free-born Englishmen. In 1765 Adam Ferguson wrote that ‘we make a nation of helots, and have no free citizens’. The men and women had become ‘hands’ or instruments totally at the disposal of the master industrialist who considered them to be part of his great machine. Once such workers had been known as ‘souls’, and the change in discourse is notable. It was reported to parliament that the operatives expressed ‘the utmost distaste’ for regular hours and regular habits. It was against nature.

  William Hutton was placed in the Derby silk mill at the age of seven where, as he reported, ‘I had now to rise at five every morning during seven years, submit to the cane whenever convenient to the master . . .’ The factory system was known on the continent as the ‘English system’, and a contemporary commented that ‘while the engine runs, the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained fast to the iron machine which knows no suffering and no weariness.’

  Their work was continually supervised by overseers, and a strict code of discipline was generally introduced. Anyone found straying from his or her own ‘alley’, or talking to another employee, was fined. Any worker who struck or abused an overseer immediately lost his job. Anyone found smuggling liquor into the factory was fined 2 shillings. A list of misdemeanours, from the mills owned by Jedediah Strutt at Belper in Derbyshire, included ‘Idleness and looking thro’ window . . . calling thro’ window to some soldiers . . . riotous behaviour in room . . . riding on each other’s back . . . telling lies . . . throwing bobbins at people . . . using ill language . . . quarrelling . . . rubbing their faces with blood and going about the town to frighten people’. The ebullition of high spirits was not permitted. Other crimes were ‘running away . . . being off drinking . . . going to Derby fair . . . sending word she was ill when in fact she was not’.

  It was not difficult to understand the motives of those who ran away. The factories were generally stinking and filthy, filled with the constant clamour of harsh machinery; the workshops on the premises were often dark and narrow, suffocating in summer and too frosty in winter. One report, of a later date, stated that ‘altogether I never saw a [work]shop in more filthy or wretched condition . . . Mr Wallis objected to my examining the children in his counting house because he stated “it would make the place stink so, that his customers could not stay in it”’.

  The precision and regularity of their working hours had all the characteristics of a military drill. At Tyldesley Mill, not far from Wigan and Manchester, the operatives worked fourteen hours a day, including a nominal hour for ‘dinner’; the doors were locked in working hours, except for half an hour at teatime, and the workers were not allowed to ask for water despite the heat of the factory. It was reported that in some instances the managers cheated, and stretched the hours as far as they could go; as a consequence, no workman was allowed to wear a watch on the premises. Working hours gradually improved from thirteen and a half to twelve hours in the course of the century based on a six-day working week. There was no more talk of ‘St Monday’, the day when in an earlier period the operatives were allowed the leisure of the tavern or the green. When at the end of the century coal gas became a source of light, many workers were obliged to work through the night hours. This had become a world of bells, clappers, hooters, horns and clocks.

  It seems that a relative rise in wages differentiated this work from the labour of the farmers or the casual slavery of the domestic system, but this was not appreciated by some observers. In 1771 Arthur Young, a writer and traveller, remarked that ‘every body but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious’. Surplus cash encouraged only idleness and drunkenness. Sir William Temple made a similar point fifteen years later when he observed that the only way to make labourers sober and industrious ‘is to lay them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from meals and sleep, in order to procure the necessities of life’. The usefulness of poverty was widely accepted; since wealth and power depended upon the combined labour of the vast mass of t
he population, then those masses must be set to work at the lowest possible cost. It was, as some thought, the law of God as much as the law of man.

  For some observers the condition of the mills and factories became a metaphor for society itself, where social relations were bound by laws of obedience and discipline. Was this the way the world was about to go? In many respects it was. It has been observed that in the eighteenth century there emerged a greater interest in punctuality and the constant demand for more rapid and expeditious methods. The wheels of machines and carriages revolved faster. Sir John Barnard, successful London merchant and lord mayor, advised in A Present for an Apprentice in 1740 that ‘above all things learn to put a due value on Time, and husband every moment as if it were to be your last; in Time is comprehended all we possess, enjoy, or wish for; and in losing that we lose them all’.

  It was observed that in London and in the larger industrial cities greater hurry was noticeable in the crowds, and Londoners became well known for their punctuality. By the 1730s one third of the inhabitants of Bristol owned a watch, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to state that every respectable citizen of London had a timepiece in his waistcoat pocket. The public buildings of the cities more often than not supported a large clock which broadcast the hours to the teeming thousands who passed beneath them. Benjamin Franklin once more caught the spirit of the age when in 1748 he coined the phrase ‘time is money’.

  Of course it must also be true that some of the woes and hardships were exaggerated by those who were opposed to the industrial system, but the direct testimony of the workers themselves suggests that there was more than a modicum of truth to even the harshest allegations. The workers did not rise up, however, because they were being paid more, fed better and clothed better. The theorists invoked the laws of God and man, but the laws of the market were in the end more powerful.