The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) (14 page)

Chapter Six

It took Joseph a month to realise that the
putting-out system was no longer sensible or necessary for spinning but was an
unavoidable evil of weaving.

The demand for cotton had outgrown the old methods
of supply, the market was unbalanced, out of kilter, had no stability, needed
to be modernised. Weaving was insoluble, for the while, in the absence of
workable powered looms that could be operated by semi-skilled hands in a
factory, but the major problems of spinning had been solved – the manufacturer
had a choice of the older water-frames that could be run by unskilled women or
the new mules that produced a finer thread but demanded the strength of men.

At the moment raw cotton was taken out to the
cottages and came back, eventually, as thread or yarns, no two cottagers
producing at exactly the same thickness and strength or in the same time-span.
‘The cotton was of poor quality or too dirty or adulterated or was still on the
wheel’ – the excuses came every Saturday, the finished goods came back less
frequently. Joseph suspected that some of his yarns went out the back door,
sold against cash to other factors, but he could not prove it. The weavers were
worse, being mostly men – cloths that came back were often too loosely woven or
stretched beyond belief in an attempt to get something for nothing, quality was
take it or leave it. Where the weavers were good in quality they were too often
wholly irresponsible, working just enough to live and pay the week’s bills;
Saturday morning was pay-day; Saturday afternoon and evening and the whole of
Sunday was drunk; Saint Monday was for recovery, too often hair of the dog,
meaning that Tuesday went to recuperate from the excesses of Monday. Work for
many started for the week on Wednesday and then the men pushed sixty hours
production out of the three days, quality disappearing from sheer fatigue.

Quality, quantity, reliability, all demanded the new
manufactury, yet the great mass of the men hated the very idea of giving up
their freedom, of surrendering to the discipline of the knocker-up rattling his
pole on their windows before five to get them to the mill-gate to sign in for
six o’clock. The few weavers who were prepared to work in a mill were almost
invariably feckless drunks or ham-fisted bodgers, unable to make their own way
and sacked within a very few days.

The only answer was to get the spinners under
control and then slowly pressure the weavers into responsibility and pray for
the power loom to be perfected so that unskilled labourers could take their
place and consign the feckless drunks to the gutter and then, as they died, to
the history books.

Joseph paid a visit to one of the few spinning
mills, sat up bold on its hillside, a pair of waterwheels powering at least a
hundred of frames, clattering and clacking deafeningly. The owner was proud of
his enterprise, was only too pleased to boast of it, unworried by competition
because he could sell at least twice his output without any effort – but he was
rich already, was not concerned to expand his own premises. Joseph nodded and
smiled and looked intently – the organisation was obvious enough, the machines
known to him and, as he had heard, the workforce was almost entirely women and
children.

“They queue up to work here, Mr Star! A housemaid in
service gets her keep, and half a crown a week, paid quarterly; a chambermaid
in a hotel or an inn gets a few pennies more, and the chance to earn extras if
she’s pretty and willing; both will work twelve hours a day, at least, six days
a week with a half-day on Sunday, if they have a good employer. My girls get
eight bob a week, cash in hand on Saturday morning when they go home at midday,
and they get all of Sunday off, and I give them half an hour for dinner, free
and gratis! The children are off the Poor Law and from the Foundlings Hospital,
and they work no more than eight hours a day and they get a breakfast and
dinner, and a good meal, mutton and spuds each time – no bread and scrape here,
sir; they don’t get any money, of course, that goes to the Vestry, but the
girls can come back to work here when they are twelve and we put the word out
for the boys if they have shown willing, can normally find them a place.”

Slaves were treated worse, Joseph knew, but mostly
they did not have to smile and say thank you to their masters; this country was
not
the heaven on earth he had imagined when he was a little boy wanting
only to get out of Antigua. However, it would do…

“Land, Mr Clapperley, on a good, year-round stream
that will take a header-pond. Twenty acres, at least, more if you can get it at
a sensible price, waste ground or moor, for the best. Where can I find an
engineer? Can you put me in touch with reliable builders who can throw up a
good, solid mill?”

For his fee Clapperley could provide any and all of
Joseph’s needs, and in quick time. A fortnight and he was inspecting two
hundred acres of poor land backing onto the Manchester road, within a couple of
furlongs of the canal and not three miles from Lodge Cottage. The soil on the
hillside was acid and grew little and the bottom was boggy. Enquiry disclosed
that the area belonged to no parish and so paid no Poor Law rate.

Four hundred pounds bought the land from the farmer
whose family had held the acres for years and had never been able to make
sensible use of them other than to run goats whose milk was unpopular and meat
was spurned. Three thousands would build the mill and the waterwheels and put
fifty frames inside for the carding and spinning. That left nearly two thousands
for his working capital, enough to buy a part-load at auction and pay wages for
six months. He expected to be selling thread within three months, splitting his
output, some to go to his own weavers, more to go onto the market – there was a
demand for good yarns from the hosiers and the glovers, both wanting strong,
coarse threads for their knitters.

Two successful years and he would be looking to
expand – the profits were there because cash-money was not. The banks would not
lend to new firms, and preferred to put their money out to old-established
merchants rather than manufacturers, not understanding the new industry;
private investors were few and far between, most wanting security, unprepared
to take any risk at all with the inherited wealth that was their status and
their power in the land. For those who would take a risk, the rewards were high
and taxation was non-existent; a fortune could be made
very
rapidly,
provided there was a lesser fortune to invest in the first instance.

John McKay, a young Scottish engineer – English
schools produced none - appeared, introduced by Clapperley as an expert in his
field and drawing a very pretty plan of his proposed mill; hired on for three
hundred a year he stood over the builders as they brought bricks to the site
and burned their clay and lime to make mortar, and then watched them cut
footings down to the sandstone, finding it to be solid and unfaulted. The
design was quickly amended and the natural stone formed the floor to the mill,
saving money and adding strength; the spoil they cut out was carted straight
downhill and tipped into the edge of the bog, helping it to firm up more
quickly. As an experiment, McKay built large windows into the roof and upper
walls of the big brick box that was the mill, hoping to save on lamp-oil and
make it easier to watch over the machines; there would be no openings in the
lower ten feet, of course, the operatives not to be encouraged to waste time
looking at the scenery.

It was a busy few months for Joseph, teaching himself
the cotton trade whilst setting up house and learning how to make a life with a
young wife of a very different social order. Fortunately for both, Bennet – and
where she had gained her knowledge they did not enquire, though Joseph had some
suspicions of the major – had very carefully explained a wife’s marital duties
to Amelia and had led her to expect to thoroughly enjoy her husband, thus
bringing a very smug expression to the faces of both newly-weds; it made the
give-and-take of marriage much easier for both.

They concentrated on the coarsest yarns at first, it
being much simpler to spin them and achieve a high standard in their output,
and meet all of their orders on time. In a year or two, when they had the
expertise, they would go for the higher prices of the finer threads but they
preferred to walk first, run later, a sentiment Clapperley applauded as
well-expressed, mindful of his commission.

Marks acted as buyer at the auctions and continued
to work with his weavers, men who had known him for some years and had a
tenuously friendly relationship with him, when they were sober. The dyers were
all larger firms, fairly long established and reliable enough and, again, knew
Marks and found it easy to deal with him. Joseph worried about Marks – he had shown
himself to be a good worker, a reliable employee who gave of his best, and that
was not a natural state of affairs for a man who had been treated as he had
been – he should have been harbouring a grudge, surely could not be so docilely
obedient as he showed. Joseph had no knowledge of ‘respectability’, the new god
of the middle order of people, and of the horror of debt and stigma of
imprisonment that had broken Marks’ spirit and left him terrified and cringing.

The girls who worked in the mill were all that had
been forecast – obedient beyond belief, they walked their two or three or four
miles from their parents’ cottages or terraces in town, almost none coming from
the villages, and queued up to be ticked off on the paymaster’s register and be
at their places ready for the six o’clock start, and then they worked, silent,
heads down, hands busy until the belts stopped for their dinner when they filed
out into the fresh air, and very often the rain, and unwrapped the piece of
cloth from their bread and cheese, or dry bread alone at the end of the week,
and ate it quickly and neatly and queued up at the necessaries and then trotted
back to be ready for the wheels to start turning again; in the afternoons they
worked up to the second of six o’clock and then quickly swept up round their
machine before making their number on the roll again and setting off home in
twos and threes in the cold and darkness of winter or the long evenings of
summer. And they competed for the privilege! They would beg to write their
sisters’ names into the books for any vacancy that might arise and chance that
could occur.

It was years before Joseph fully understood the
girls’ desperation to get into the mills, realised just how slight were the
opportunities open to them. They could go into service, rise perhaps to cook in
a middle-class house, unwed and always fearful of losing their place and having
nothing and nowhere to go; a few could take employment as counter-jumpers in
the big new shops just starting to open, eighteen hours a day, six days a week,
living-in under discipline, badly paid and worse fed; more could go to the
mills. The rest must either stay at home, unpaid drudges contributing nothing
to the family budget, or, as perhaps a quarter of them did, they could go on the
game, making a precarious living walking the streets in regular or occasional
prostitution until age, disease, desperation and the gin bottle brought them to
the river. A mill girl numbered herself amongst the aristocracy of the unwed
working class, earning enough to save six pence a week, every week, so as to
bring a very respectable sum with her on marriage in her mid-twenties to a
husband with a trade of his own, an end which many actually achieved. As a
result the workforce in the mills was both grateful and obedient, and highly
profitable, bringing the mill well into the black inside six months.

Roberts Iron Founders returned a profit from the
very first, but it was a tiny, miserable, inadequate trickle of cash; even
allowing for the low price Tom had paid, it was a poor return, less than he was
earning from the funds remaining in Martin’s bank.

Within three months Tom had called George Mason into
conference, asking the single question.

“Why, George?”

“Like I said when first I met thee, sir, we still ain’t
got enough contracts – we work flat out for three days of the six, potter for
the other three, and I’d like to go to seven day working, never let the
furnaces get cool, except when it’s time to change the linings, save a load of
coke that way. Second thing, most of our cast goes to low price jobs, we don’t
do sufficient of the big, expensive stuff, the trusses and pillars for mills
and bridges in particular. Third problem is the wrought iron – we just didn’t
ought to be doing it, Mr Andrews, not using coke. If I had my way, sir, we’d
shut down on wrought and turn to crucible steel, making parts for steam engines
and factory machines and forging hammers and presses – skilled, top of the line
stuff, where the money is.”

“Can you do it?”

“I know how, and I knows where to lay my hands on
four good blokes what have worked at Huntsmans before moving on to another
master who tried to cut their wages when times got a bit hard last year. They
told ‘im where to stick ‘is wage cuts, and came on down here when they found
every door in Sheffield was closed to ‘em, they being marked men, you might
say. Two pound ten a week, they’d cost, and worth twice as much in profit to
us.”

“But, George, they’re stroppy buggers, be forming a
combination and calling strike at the drop of a hat.”

“Best we don’t drop our hats then, master. Besides,
they’ll be taking home twice as much as any other man in the works, there won’t
be any wanting to listen to them if they calls for a strike, and they’ll ‘ave
too much money to lose by going out. As well, if we builds on four more
cottages up the lane we can give them to ‘em while they works for us, like a
farmer’s tied places, only decent; all four are married with wives and little
‘uns back in Sheffield living with their mums for the while. On the one hand,
we keeps them grateful, on the other they’re out in the road if they shouts
their mouths off, and they’ll know it.”