The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (5 page)

The sheriff had warned Agnes and Janet not to be late for their labor assignments. Oversleeping and tardiness were severely punished. Some latecomers were hung by the wrists and flogged. Others were plunged half-naked into a well.

Clang, clang, clang: The wake-up sounded at four thirty A.M. sharp. The bell went on and on until each child climbed out of bed into the sleepy darkness. It was a requirement to be alert and on the floor for the five A.M. whistle call. The half-hour spent from dreaming to drudgery was barely enough time for the girls to throw on their uniforms and gulp down a scoop of gruel. Their next meal was in eight hours.

As they entered the millworks the first time, Agnes and Janet were directed toward the overseer, also called an “overlooker.” Standing above the fray on a small platform, he ordered each girl to tie her hair in a bun and pull her sleeves above her elbows. Anything not tethered tightly was an accident waiting to happen. A strand of hair caught in machines scalped some girls on the job. There were no shutoff valves for a sleeve or a finger that caught in the looms. Each child was responsible for her own safety. If she hurt herself, the overseer blamed her stupidity.

The mill was a notorious breeding ground for abuse and perversion. If a child fell asleep on her feet, the overseer dipped her head into an iron vat filled with water. “Some adult operatives and overlookers did not look beyond themselves for tools of abuse. They kicked children, struck them with clenched fist, and yanked children’s hair and ears.”
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Disaster loomed ominously over the wide-eyed apprentices, imprisoned in a maze of spindles, tangled threads, swaying metal bars, and exposed wire teeth. Agnes, Janet, and the other young thieves stood before the spinning machines like flies examining a spider’s web. From every corner, gas lamps sputtered and hissed. The swinging rods crisscrossing the sunless tomb clanked noisy warnings. Strange sounds bombarded the new arrivals from every direction as they strained to hear the overseer. Stone walls reverberated and amplified the auditory assault: the whir of spinning bobbins, the slapping of the looms’ reeds, the hypnotic drone of leather belts and pulleys, the spastic flapping of the newly woven wool.

By the time Agnes and Janet were sent to Mr. Green’s, conditions of child labor had become so appalling that several government investigations were taking place. Evidence for an 1832 House of Commons Committee on the Factories Labour Regulation Bill described “one girl so bow-legg’d that you could put a chair between her legs.”
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Page after page of testimony described the fate for those conscripted as weans. A man about thirty years old “does not stand, with his deformity, above 4 feet 6 inches high, and had he grown to his proper height I think he would have been about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches. He has been in the mills since he was 5 years old, and he is reduced to that state that he slides along on a stool to do his work.”
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Another investigation, by a committee on the Employment of Children in Manufactories, interviewed adults about their experience as child workers. Robert Blincoe offered testimony that could not be challenged. He hobbled forward on his crooked legs, the deformity most common from youthful years spent in a mill. The committee asked Blincoe, now a father of three, if he would send his children to work in a factory. Without hesitation, he responded: “No; I would rather have them transported to Australia.”
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Robert had watched ten-year-old Mary Richards being torn to pieces when her apron caught on a shaft that turned a drawing frame, the device used to straighten fibers. “In an instant the poor girl was drawn by an irresistible force and dashed on the floor . . . the bones of her arms, legs, thighs . . . crushed, seemingly, to atoms, as the machinery whirled her round, and drew tighter and tighter her body within the works.”
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At the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the same risks stalked Agnes. Seasoned mill laborers soon figured out that keeping pace with the frames and spindles meant staying alive. They developed rhythmic movements that mimicked the millworks; their motions turned mechanical, their gait robotic. Speech, too, took on a short staccato cadence to compete with the mill’s deafening cacophony.

Wool production was a labor-intensive business. It took ten girls to prepare the yarn for one weaver. Older lasses like thirteen-year-old Janet were assigned sorting, according to the wool’s texture. “Picking” the wool, the mill’s most unpleasant task, was primarily assigned to younger workers with smaller hands. Agnes was led past the looms and spinners and brought to the picking bin, where she would stand for the next eighteen months, fifteen hours at a time. Grabbing one piece of wool from the monumental stack before her, strand by strand, she pulled out fatty wool grease infused with dirt, animal skin, sweat, and sheep dung. Tearing the grime out of the bristly fibers, Agnes picked the matted wool clean with her fingers and a large needle. Her lack of experience punctured her skin as she clumsily pulled out thistles, thorns, and burs. Within the first hour, her hands began to cramp and to coil like talons around prey.

The factory was without ventilation. As the shift dragged on, the air grew heavier and thicker. Endless grey filth, never fully cleaned from the sheep’s wool, joined flying fibers, creating hazy smog that covered workers and gears in a grainy veneer. Agnes and Janet were quickly layered in sweat and dust from head to toe. With no place to wash, the children were coated with sticky particles that lodged in their eyelids and their hair for months at a time.

Amid the whir and clang of the machines, Agnes heard the distinctive sound of the overlooker tapping a wooden rod against his palm. The iron tip on the rod’s end threatened a rap on the head for those with rebellious dispositions. Rule breakers were flogged with the same straps that drove the pulleys. Failure to obey the overseer could bring a trip to the “throttle room,” where a girl was tied to a harness and forced to walk back and forth with weights on her back. The most severe punishment of all was reserved for lasses who spoke to the lads on the factory floor. The smallest flirtation took away what was considered a woman’s most prized possession: Her head was shaved bald. The rest of the girls would soon wear the crown of thieves with telltale short haircuts.

After eight hours on the floor, the new recruits felt their stomachs shrink and growl. The piercing sound of the supper bell arrived not a moment too soon. Agnes had only a half hour to shove hot boiled potatoes into her mouth and stand in line at the outhouse. Plunking down on the straw with Janet, this was her one chance to stretch her arms and set aside the stress of trying to keep up the pace. The workers “held up their . . . aprons that were saturated with grease and dirt, and having received their allowance, scampered off as hard as they could to their respective places, where, with a keen appetite, each apprentice devoured her allowance, and seemed anxiously to look about for more.”
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By twelve hours into the shift, Agnes and her co-workers were reduced to a zombie-like state. Speechless, detached, and numb, they prayed for the peal of the nine o’clock release bell. When it finally rang, sighs of relief followed the scuffling sound of several hundred bare feet. The exhausted twelve-year-old dragged her leaden legs down the mill’s path back to the sleep room, ears ringing, thankful for Janet at her side. Half deaf from the din of the mill, the girls soon became immune to the commotion caused by street brawls and hooligans just outside the bothy. Nightfall brought a fitful peace, silence being an experience foreign to a child of the factories and the streets. So, too, was clean air. With no ventilation in the room, Agnes and Janet breathed blackened air even during the five hours they slept.

This was day one of Agnes’s 548-day sentence of wool picking. Her hands would never be the same.

While Agnes and Janet toiled in Mr. Green’s factory, young Princess Victoria was touring cotton mills throughout England in an effort to introduce the future monarch to her subjects and improve the Crown’s image. Like that of most Glasgow girls, Agnes’s coming of age reflected none of the leisure or revelry savored by the empire’s future queen. On September 11, 1833, Agnes turned thirteen. There would be no party. Birthdays were celebrated only among the upper crust.

There was little dignity in becoming a woman on the factory floor. The lower classes could barely afford a single layer of clothing and had no undergarments of any sort. Agnes’s entire wardrobe consisted of one coarse shift. When a lass became an adult with the onset of menstruation, everyone in the mill knew. A trail of public blood marked this rite of passage. Straw spread on the floor absorbed the fluids. Mercifully, one effect of malnutrition was that a girl’s cycle was lighter and shorter than those of the well fed, thus sparing her greater embarrassment.

As she crossed into adolescence, the grey-eyed girl met few adults who were able to rise above the despair and drudgery that overran the slums. On the days she sang on the streets, Agnes had been propositioned by smelly sailors, cursed by pawnbrokers who bristled at her bargaining, and scammed by the bitter crone who owned the boardinghouse. A few of the older women in the mill offered the new apprentices snippets of motherly advice, though they had walked no easy path themselves.

A factory owner held full rein over the daily life of his indentured “street vermin.” Under his authority, sexual abuse was tolerated and even encouraged. After all, he owned these young women for eighteen months or longer. It was not uncommon for owners to offer sons and friends their choice among the mill girls.

Nineteenth-century law provided protections for industry, while labor had none. Parliamentary legislation lavished loving care on its principal source of wealth in the hundreds of laws covering the wool trade, ranging from the correct clipping of sheep to the length and weight of the wool. As for child protection, there wasn’t any. Humanitarianism was in the thoughts of very few. In 1816, utopian socialist Robert Owen first proposed day care for working mothers, free medical care, and comprehensive education. In his mind, a humane government was necessary to temper technology’s rising cruelty, spawned by the Industrial Revolution. A mill owner himself, Owen tried to set an example by providing schools for his workers and allowing children to work no more than ten hours a day. He was considered idealistic for his time, and his forward thinking was widely ignored in an era when greed was the order of the day.

Owen prompted Sir Robert Peel, home secretary and later Britain’s prime minister, to form a Committee of Investigation into the textile factories. Heavily lobbied by the wool industry over fine wine and lavish dinners, the committee examined whether fifteen-hour days were harmful to girls like Agnes and Janet. When mill owners produced long lists of witnesses to testify on their behalf, Owens’s efforts produced exactly the opposite of his intentions. He wanted to expose the abuse of children and ignite social reform. Instead, expert witnesses like Dr. Holmes and Dr. Wilson used medical evidence, provided by the factory owners, to conclude that industrial exploitation brought children no harm.

The committee posed the following question to the physicians it had chosen as experts: “Suppose I were to ask you whether you thought it injurious to a child to be kept standing three and twenty hours out of the four and twenty, should you not think it must be necessarily injurious to the health?” Dr. Holmes replied: “If there were such an extravagant thing to take place and it should appear that the person was not injured by having stood three and twenty hours, I should then say it was not inconsistent with the health of the person so employed.” Dr. Wilson agreed with his colleague, adding that it is “not necessary for young children to have recreation.”
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One way or another, most people born poor ended up in a mill or a coal mine before age ten. Factory owners could buy a child for about five pounds from a workhouse or orphanage. Children signed with an X contracts that bound them to the factory owner until age twenty-one. A lad about the same age as Agnes described his feelings about working in a mill: “I think that if the devil had a particular enemy whom he wished to unmercifully torture the best thing for him to do would be . . . keep him as a child in a factory for the rest of his days.”
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Sir Robert Peel’s committee never heard the testimony that mattered most. Joseph Rayner Stephens, owner of the
Ashton Chronicle
, wrote it years later. He documented firsthand accounts of factory children who had labored during the same years as Agnes. Sarah Carpenter, a young adult in 1849, described to Stephens her experiences as a mill girl, including an account of a supervisor known to the children as Tom the Devil: “I have often seen him pull up the clothes of big girls, seventeen or eighteen years of age, and throw them across his knee, and then flog them with his hand in the sight of both men and boys. Everybody was frightened of him.”
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“Tom the Devil” had pummeled one girl into insanity and beaten two others to death. Another young mill slave by the name of Samuel Davy described the suffering he had witnessed: “Irons were used as with felons in gaols, and these were often fastened on young women, in the most indecent manner, by keeping them nearly in a state of nudity, in the depth of winter, for several days together.”
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The powerful in Parliament turned a blind eye toward these abuses because the textile trade helped feed their fortunes as it spurred the empire’s economy. Forced apprenticeship was ideal for the factory owner because the purchased children were paid substantially less than adults. Men earned about seven shillings a week, boys and girls just one or two. Juvenile thieves like Agnes and Janet were a bargain. They weren’t paid at all except for a small contribution to the local “parish,” the county government under the sheriff ’s jurisdiction.