Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  While these changes were made visible by industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution was itself part of a bigger process which catapulted humanity into the modern age. We have already seen how Britain became a dynamic commercial, trading and manufacturing society before the great watershed of the 1770s; this brought profound changes in the nature of work which were cemented as industrialisation became embedded in society and workers had to organise their lives around the requirements of machinery.1

  The major changes to work patterns which took place from roughly 1650 are best viewed through the prism of the household. Before then the vast majority of households lived in a state of ‘subsistence plus’ – they had enough for their basic needs with a little left over for extras. In the typical rural family with a small amount of land the man did the ploughing, made implements and fixed buildings; the woman harvested, ran the dairy, and prepared the food, while the children gathered produce and looked after animals. The woman might also do some spinning and the man some weaving or nail-making. Any surplus they made could be traded for goods that could not be made at home. Not every household had enough land to support itself, but every working man and woman was capable of a range of tasks that made the household as self-sufficient as possible. This situation was not confined to Britain in the late Middle Ages; it was the dominant state of being for most of human history.2 Every member worked for the good of the household, which was the essential economic unit, so that changes to the household economy had profound effects.

  Over the two centuries from 1650 English households began to earn more than they needed for basic living, which allowed some members of households to focus on a single activity. The wide distribution of relative prosperity among the population was crucial since no one could give up self-sufficiency unless they could buy in goods and services from elsewhere. A woman could not stop making bread to focus on millinery unless someone nearby was prepared to sell bread to her. A farmer could not stop making lime to concentrate on forging knife blades unless he was sure he could buy in lime from elsewhere. So, while it was easy for one person to set up as a specialist milliner, her survival depended on others specialising in all the trades that she needed to satisfy her wants. Everyone had to move together to make the system work, in a process we might call ‘mutual specialisation’ – and this, for the first time in human history, is exactly what happened.

  We have seen how Britain moved from an economy dominated by the English wool trade to a widely based craft-industrial economy in which goods were produced in small workshops, homes, forges and occasional mills. The historic importance of these craft industries was that they allowed the process of mutual specialisation to emerge gradually – though in terms of human history it was a remarkably rapid process – as households could shift the emphasis of their work without becoming instantly dependent on others. Farmers in Staffordshire could do more nail-making as demand increased, perhaps saving time on gathering wood for fuel by buying in coal; a woman could develop her skill in making clothes, and buy in bread or ready-butchered meat from a village shop. The eventual result was a society of workers with specific occupations, rather than a nation of households with simple basic needs to fill.

  Though these changes took two centuries to work through, the process reached the critical point of self-sustainability in the first half of the eighteenth century. Over just a few decades people changed from organising their work on the basis of their household’s needs, to orienting themselves to the demands of the market. To Adam Smith, writing in 1776, this seemed logical, even inevitable: ‘It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. The tailor does not attempt to make his own shoes but buys them from the shoemaker. The shoemaker does not attempt to make his own clothes but employs a tailor.’3

  Rational it may have been, but it was nevertheless utterly revolutionary. The effect of specialisation was to make each household as well as the economy as a whole more productive. One reason was simple logistics; a person working continuously at one task – weaving, for example – will produce more than five people only giving weaving one-fifth of their time and breaking off to perform other tasks. But the time spent at work increased by around 25 per cent from 1760 to 1830, and there was also an intensification of work. It seems that people began to work longer and harder because they knew that they would be able to use their surplus income to buy in goods. Workers also had the newly available possibility of advancement, which drove the desire to acquire skills. Some historians see the change in work habits as being forced on the labouring classes, with the previous custom of working at your own time and pace replaced by the needs of the capitalist owner.4 There is no question that working people traded control over their work for the greater financial rewards of the factory; their motivation for doing so will always be open to question – some workers were coerced, but in many cases households made conscious choices to change their work patterns.

  Industrialisation also brought about a new mobility of labour. People moved from country districts to towns and cities in search of work, while others travelled great distances to exploit their skills, or to find employment. Ironworks were among the earliest to attract workers from far afield. In the early eighteenth century the Backbarrow Iron Company in south Cumbria drew labour from South Wales, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire; ironworks established at Invergarry in the Highlands imported workers from Barnsley and South Wales and charcoal burners from Ireland. At about the same time Abraham Darby took workers from Bristol to Coalbrookdale having previously brought Dutch workers to Bristol. The Coalbrookdale Company built houses for their workers and kept expanding through the century: in 1782 the parish of Madeley, which contained the works and housing, was home to 2,690 people in 440 houses; by 1793 the figures were 3,677 people in 754 houses. John Wilkinson’s works at Bradley, Staffordshire brought in workers from South Wales and Shropshire, swelling the population from 3,000 in 1780 to 12,000 in 1821. In the mid-eighteenth century workers moved from these early ironworks in the Midlands to the Carron Ironworks at Falkirk, which became the largest smelting plant in Europe, and in 1784 Richard Arkwright invited workers from Perth to join him in Derbyshire the following year. The Derby Mercury recorded the result:

  A few Days since, between 40 and 50 North Britons, with Bagpipes and other music playing, arrived at Cromford, near Matlock-Bath, from Perth, in Scotland. These industrious Fellows left that place on account of the Scarcity of Work, were taken into the Service of Richard Arkwright, Esq. in his Cotton Mills and other extensive works, entered into Present pay, and provided with good Quarters. They appeared highly pleased with the Reception they met with, and had a Dance in the Evening to congratulate each other on the Performance of so long a Journey.’5

  The specialisation of work also laid the ground for the factory system as it enabled at least one household member to devote all their waking hours to paid employment – in fact the early factories were unattractive to many workers precisely because they were so demanding. Nevertheless, there were enough families who had either already become specialist wage earners, or who were willing to give it a try, or who needed the money, to make the system work.

  Specialisation utterly changed the nature but also the meaning of work; people in certain crafts had previously identified themselves through their work, but now virtually everyone did that. The new mechanised economy exploited this change and built a society that catered for the needs of workers who would be enclosed in mills and factories for twelve hours a day. Towns were remodelled with factories and housing placed cheek by jowl; transport systems were reconfigured; shops, amusements, parks, holiday resorts were all brought into being to fit around the new ways of working. And, eventually, the bringing together of workers would lead to an alteration in the political, as well as the urban, landscape of Britain.

  New attitudes to work provoked a less tolerant view of others and their place in society. While the
pre-industrial world had seen the state as an organic whole in which each should be valued and cared for, this turned into a belief that each should make their contribution. Individual dynamism was the key to success in life and for the whole economy; each should look to himself and the nation should not be supporting those who could not help themselves. The notion that the poor were not simply people who had fallen on hard times but were different from others was spelled out by the economist and writer Joseph Townsend in his 1786 Dissertation on the Poor Laws: ‘The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action – pride, honour and ambition. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour.’6

  The changing attitudes could only come about once it was possible to separate out the working and non-working; while households had worked together this distinction did not exist, but once paid employment dominated, then non-working people were seen as a burden rather than a potential source of wealth production.

  Factories provide the abiding image of the Industrial Revolution, and while they remained a small part of British production until the middle of the nineteenth century, their influence was profound and long-lasting.7 Textile mills in particular provided a new model of how productive work could be organised. Mechanised machinery within a large factory gave astonishing gains in productivity over hand-operated devices in small workshops: one large spinning mule, powered by steam and staffed by half a dozen overseers, could produce as much thread as several thousand hand-spinners, and of better quality, while a single steam engine could power a dozen mules or several hundred looms. The economic case for more factories grew so persuasive that factories became the central element in a new kind of society in which work, communities, towns, roads, railways and the entire geography of Britain and the lives of its citizens began to be organised to answer their demands.

  While the word factory had been used for centuries to mean a collective place of productive work, the modern sense developed as a manufactory comprising a variety of devices all powered by a single source. The first purpose-built large-scale factory was a silk-spinning mill founded by Thomas Cotchet in Derby in 1704, swiftly followed by another built by the Lombe brothers in 1721. The latter was five storeys and seventeen metres high, thirty-three metres long and twelve metres wide.8 Lewis Paul and John Wyatt built spinning factories powered by waterwheels in Birmingham in 1741 and Northampton a year later, though we know little about their construction. Though a few silk mills followed the Lombes’ example, the great age of factories came with the mechanisation of cotton spinning in the 1770s and 1780s.

  The textile factory came about in two ways: first the gradual combining of individual workers in shared spaces; and secondly through the giant step made by Richard Arkwright. Around Manchester in particular, carders, spinners and weavers began to join forces with their colleagues, or even hire other workers, and move their work from their homes into converted barns, mills and workshops. These small workshop-cum-factories were private concerns and left few records of their existence except when they came up for sale: a building sold in Heaton Norris in Lancashire in 1780 housed thirteen spinning jennies of up to 120 spindles each, seven looms, three carding machines, twenty slubbers’ wheels (for making the rovings used to spin from) and various other items; a building in Altrincham, Cheshire was advertised for sale in the Manchester Mercury in 1782 as being ‘four Stories high, with a Cellar under, and containing on the Inside, 46 feet in length, and 25 feet in breadth, laid out in proper Rooms and Apartments, for the Spinning, Carding and manufacturing Cotton’. The building came with a warehouse, a waterwheel and an acre of land.9 From roughly 1780 to 1810 so-called jenny shops and small mills proliferated. But people with access to capital soon began to see how putting spinning machines and looms into large powered sites and hiring labour to run them, could bring decent profits. In economic terms the textile factories were a development of the putting-out system – instead of clothiers taking raw materials to the workers, they brought the spinners and weavers to the machines. The advantages were clear, since in a factory the machinery could be kept safe and the workers could be regulated and supervised.

  While these developments were under way in and around Manchester, in the early 1770s Richard Arkwright showed that it was possible to construct a purpose-built factory, install a single power source, equip it with cotton-spinning machinery, hire, train and in some cases house and feed a workforce, and still make a handsome profit. The coordination of separate tasks and processes is perhaps the area of the factory which is easiest ignored, and yet most crucial. Arkwright and his successors had to ensure that each stage was completed effectively without causing either a pile-up of materials through going too quickly, or a bottleneck through working too slowly. He also needed his workers to be flexible and to understand the need for an effective throughput, while keeping them focussed on single tasks when necessary. In all of this the workers themselves played a key role. The system did place them in dangerous situations, but it also revealed their adaptability to changes in conditions and technical innovations.10 A lot of factory work was monotonous and some was dangerous, but mechanisation also led to the emergence of the technically ingenious industrial working class, many of whom took enormous pride in their ability to master the needs of increasingly complex machinery.

  Powered machinery: Mechanisation spread through craft industries as devices, like this wheel-cutting machine, were converted from manual to steam power.

  Other factory owners not only modelled their textile mills on Arkwright’s Cromford system, they also used his machinery under licence. The converted workshop soon gave way to the purpose-built factory. However, by the late 1780s textile factory owners began to free themselves from the Arkwright system in two ways. First they successfully challenged his patents, and second they began to install steam engines rather than waterwheels as their central power source. Factories could now be built near to transport to take finished goods out, and, crucially, near to centres of population. Factory owners had no need to follow Arkwright, Strutt and David Dale in building settlements for workers, they simply built their factories in existing towns, which duly expanded to house the workers. Britain’s geography began to be remodelled around the needs of these new producers of wealth.

  The momentum of factories was remorseless as inventors devised and adapted machinery to fit within the factory system. The powered loom is a stark example: in 1806 the cotton industry employed 90,000 factory workers and 184,000 hand-loom weavers; by 1820 there were 126,000 factory workers and the number of hand-loom weavers had grown to 240,000; but by 1850 as mechanised looms spread there were 331,000 factory workers and 43,000 hand-loom weavers; and by 1862 there were 452,000 factory workers and just 3,000 hand-loom weavers – hand-weaving had virtually disappeared. The overall growth of cotton mills followed a similar path; in 1782 there were two cotton mills in the Manchester area; by 1830 there were ninety-nine, and by 1835 there were 1,262 cotton mills in the UK, 683 of them in Lancashire. By 1837 the Factory Inspector had registered a total of 4,283 mills under the 1833 Factory Act.11

  A reference-book entry for 1812 shows that the template for the cotton-spinning factory was by then well established:

  A large cotton mill is generally a building of five or six stories high: the two lowest are usually for the spinning frames, if they are for water twist, because of the great weight and vibration caused by these machines. The third and fourth floors contain the carding, drawing and roving machines. The fifth storey is appropriated to the reeling, doubling, twisting, and other operations performed on the finished thread. The sixth, which is usually the roof, is for the batting machine, or opening machine, and for the cotton pickers, who for a large mill are very numerous.12

  Arkwright’s Cromford mills, which are still standing, were dwarfed by their later imitators. In 1823 Richard Guest wrote of ‘Those vast brick edifices in the vicinity of all the great manufacturing towns of south Lancashire, towering to the heigh
t of 70 or 80 feet, which strike the attention and excite the curiosity of the traveller, now performs labours which formerly employed whole villages.’13 The Orrell mill in Stockport, built in 1834, was seven storeys high, and contained more than 150,000 spindles driven by two 80 h.p. engines and complete with a lift or hoist system to move goods and people between floors.

  The wool trade eventually followed cotton and the towns of Yorkshire’s West Riding began to sprout the same great mills and expanding towns as Lancashire. The population district of Huddersfield, for example, had grown to 108,000 when the journalist and author Angus Reach reported in 1850: ‘The population of Huddersfield and the surrounding districts are almost entirely engaged in the manufacture of wool . . . The town has sprung up almost entirely within the last sixty years. Previous to that time it was but an insignificant cluster of irregularly built lanes.’ Bradford had also grown from ‘a mere cluster of huts: now the district of which it is the heart contains upwards of 132,000 inhabitants’.14

  The change in work patterns and in attitudes to work also had profound effects on the British family and society. While specialisation had begun the process of change, the factory system and the mechanisation of productive work led to a complete recasting of people’s roles. Factories began by employing large numbers of women and children. Factory owners preferred women to men; they could pay them less, they were less likely to be rebellious and they were nimble-fingered in dealing with fine cotton thread. But during the early nineteenth century it became less acceptable for mature, married women to work in factories. The Victorian ideal of the domestic family saw work for women as a pre-marriage phase, and older working women became objects of scorn or pity.15 The increasing survival of children beyond infancy meant that women were needed at home and the respectable middle-class home-keeper was then contrasted with the unrespectable ‘factory girl’. These were a new social phenomenon – financially independent and out to enjoy urban life, they were frowned on by Victorian society and considered unsuitable as potential brides. Mary Merryweather, a Quaker philanthropist and nurse, was hired in the early nineteenth century to help the girls in the Courtauld factories. She found them too eager to marry, unsteady and idle, and lacking in sanitation. Though championing women’s rights in general, she described them as ‘coarse, noisy girls, with no womanly reserve or modesty’. Nevertheless the textile industry relied on young women to make up the major part of its workforce – in 1850 Angus Reach recorded woollen mills in Halifax employing ten women for every man.16