[Music] imagine it's the early 19th century and you're about to start work in one of Northern England's cutting-edge cotton Mills you turn up here six days a week for a grueling 12 hour shift possibly more depending on your boss it's not great pay it's dangerous and worst of all you can't even complain about it come on you're late [Music] time is money for Britain's burgeoning cotton business and if you're lucky enough to own a meal like this well you stood to make a fortune as for how you treated your working population well you could keep them well housed and well fed or you could work them till they drop it was really up to you in this episode we'll explore what life was really like inside an industrial cotton mill stepping into the shoes of the men women and children who worked here people who worked in these cotton Mills would at times have an average life expectancy in there so mid-30s is it true and using contemporary accounts and testimony we'll discover that your experience of the Industrial Revolution could be very different depending on what you did for a living there you go and your place in society from the Greg's perspective this here represents a really good deal so the question is could you survive working in a place like this all right [Music] this is Quarry Bank in Cheshire built in 1784 by the renowned entrepreneur Samuel Greg it remains one of the best surviving bastions of the Industrial Revolution within 15 years of its construction there were 900 mills like it built across Britain producing immeasurable quantities of textiles such as cotton wool silken linen and enormous profits for a new class of industrialists in the late 18th century raw cotton was shipped to Britain from its Imperial territories and the newly independent United States new inventions such as the flying shuttle and spinning jenny combined with massive investment led to the development of new machines which turbocharged the scale of production soon processed cotton made up an incredible 50 of Britain's exports and the majority of it was produced here in the northwest of England densely populated cities like Manchester Leeds and Sheffield provided a Ready Labor Force the region had an abundance of fast-flowing rivers to generate power and the rapidly expanding Port of Liverpool allowed products to reach a global market [Music] when investing in the construction of a large industrial complex you had to choose your site carefully now you may have noticed we're not exactly in the heart of Manchester here at quarry Bank but we are right next to the source upon which all of our machinery would depend for power [Music] the river bollin provided the water power required to operate the machines inside the cotton mill all that was needed was a giant water wheel to harness this energy once you have that piece of crucial infrastructure in place you just need to bring in a Workforce now a mill like this in the middle of the countryside required a lot of Labor start work at six in the morning some Mills you'd have to walk several miles to get here in all weather it's probably even worse than today and that might mean getting up in the middle of the night but there was no excuse for lateness once the machines were running there was no time to lose the work in a place like this and the ear splitting noise with the least of your worries if you were a mill worker but many poor people didn't have a choice they've moved from the countryside to the cities in their throes looking for a better life and at least here your whole family could be earning a wage in fact you are more likely to be signed up if you brought your children with you why do you allow your children to work at those places where they are ill-treated or overworked necessity compels a man that has children to let them work then you would not allow your children to go to those factories under the present system if it was not from necessity no there were many jobs in a mill like this one some with quite strange names there were Packers pieces overlookers and underlockers reaches in doffers and Drapers theoretically your Asian experience would determine what role you'd get at least if you were a man attitudes at the time meant that women were barred from most highly skilled jobs career progression in the Mills did exist too you could rise through the ranks arriving as a child apprentice and going on to become a foreman or engineer there are a few examples of that happening at quarry Bank Engineers were highly prized and well paid because keeping these machines running smoothly was so important everything depended on them Mill owners needed to find a way to run as many machines as possible Corey Bank was powered by an enormous water wheel like this one known as the Great Wheel it's one of the most impressive in Britain weighing in at 44 tons it provided the factory with 100 horsepower it would change the way we worked forever you see for centuries the British working population had been scattered laboring in their own homes or in the fields now they came from the countryside to the cities in search of a better life for the first time in history hundreds of people came to these factories to toil on these machines under one single roof the spinning Mills are now working until 8 PM by Gaslight unless van has seen it for oneself it is impossible to imagine how glorious is the site of a big cotton mill than a facade of 256 Windows is lit as if the brightest Sunshine was streaming Through the Windows the first Mill here was designed as a long low block with these huge Windows which would theoretically flood the space with light but at quarry Bank the lower panes were actually covered to stop the workers getting too distracted in fact in many mills laborers barely got to any sunlight at all they had to stay focused on their jobs in the decades since its foundation Corey Bank kept on growing and growing a second water wheel had been added a new Mill block and these new weaving sheds had all been added to Samuel Greg's original building it had become one of the biggest cotton manufacturing hubs in Britain and it become a family business passed on from one generation to the next it was a combination of initiative and useful family contacts that allowed Samuel Greg to expand his business establishing new Mills in places like Lancaster Berry and Bollington employing more than 2 000 people even the Napoleonic Wars didn't halt Greg's progress their overall returns between 1819 and 1831 averaged 13.2 percent far higher than any other factories in the area by today's standards work in the Mills seems harsh particularly as regulations barely existed but from the perspective of ordinary people at the time there were some benefits work in a factory was considered more secure than elsewhere and there were real incentives to produce as much as possible Rex I've turned up for my first day of work at quarry bank and we're standing in front of This Magnificent machine here can you tell me what was the development that meant that cotton spinning moved from people's homes into a factory like this one there were some early developments but the the key machine if you will is this one the spinning mule mainly because it allowed the mass production of cotton yarn that was suitable for both elements in the fabric both the warp and the weft before that you would have to use either wall or linen for the warp and it's more inexpensive in layman's terms as I said I've just turned up for my first day how does the spinning mule actually work the spinning meal works by this this part The Carriage would normally be right at the back there and when you set the machine going it would begin to move forwards relatively slowly and it's feeding the prepared cotton off the back and drawing it out to thickness once it gets out here the cotton is down to the thickness that we require but then it needs to put the strength into that by twisting the fibers that's done out on the head here once it's spun that this particular machine will change over automatically as he goes back in it's winding what has now become spun thread down onto these bobbins on the front Okay so so these bobbins they're spinning around so they'll they'll essentially fill up with with cotton and then these will be removed yes absolutely and that's Doffing the mule can you tell me a little bit about this I think we hear quite a lot about it yeah once once the bobbins are full right to the top you've only got to stop it to change it over obviously you can only put so much on there so you would set the machine up so that it thought that it had empty ones on and what that would do is wind the thread around the bottom down there that allows you then to take these off and just snap the yarn but leave it attached to the spindles okay you take the whole lot off you're replacing with a set of new ones and it's more or less ready to go again right okay and removing all of the bobbins all along this line presumably that's quite a long job do they get quite efficient at doing they get things yeah they get very efficient at it because the payment on any of these machines is on results on this machine it's the number of Cycles it completes and that means that every time it stops it's costing you money and let's talk about pay so if I'm in a completely inexperienced worker and I've been told to to come and report to the spinning mule what am I likely to to get as a basic wage when I arrive at quarry Bank it varies it through time obviously but the mule spinner is one of the highest paid people in the industry but for somebody coming in right at the beginning as an adult learning to become a pizza which is mending the threads when they break you could be getting somewhere between well five and ten shillings a week at that time so and presumably that is a little bit more than you'd get working in agriculture I I guess that's why people are coming to work here yeah absolutely the the thing about coming working in the mill it gives you a security that the agricultural economy can't give you you come to Quarry Bank Mill or any of the Mills at that time you'll work for the prescribed length of time and you will get paid what you earn on a weekly basis so you know what's coming if you're in the agricultural economy a bad summer means your style of this winter anyway no matter how hard you work so there are no guarantees with the agricultural economy it was hard work there was insecurity as far as we're concerned nowadays but for those people back then I could imagine this being seen as a very good opportunity while we work you have is our the money we earn comes promptly more so than in any other situation and our work though laborious is the same from day to day with the conditions in the room just right we can now see the spinning mule in action [Music] you can tell it's quite warm in here now he's been waiting for it to get quite warm so that this thing works and at the time that these were in operation the humidity in here would have been quite high and that was crucial for the cotton right it is without without that humidity the cotton fibers don't they don't move smoothly so you're getting consistent yeah and you get a lot more breakages below certain temperature the fibers themselves will become brittle and break anyway but once you're above that that's the humidity you need are you happy that we've reached the right time we're okay now let's give it a go we can run it thank you the kids will be working under here while it was running so this Carriage they had to get out the way as it moved back sometimes they said they had to lie flat on the floor to avoid being crushed we can see there's a gap underneath where they could just about avoid it you might think using children to work the machines was particularly cruel but as far as owners were concerned it was a perfectly normal business practice backed up by legal contracts I'm sat inside the mill manager's private office here at quarry bank and in front of me I have an extraordinary document this here is the earliest surviving original child indenture contract signed in 1785. this document concerns a young boy his name was Thomas royley and he was only 11 years old and although he leaves his Mark right here you can see it's actually signed on his behalf by the overseer of the poor and the mill manager William Faulkner and what really strikes me with this document is the length of time and which he's contractually obliged to work for Samuel Greg says here that he'll be working until he's 21 years old that's 10 years of his life you'd have children who were as young as five or six years old working on those extremely dangerous machines in those really awful conditions but for many of them it was the best deal they were going to get it was either that or they were starve or be abandoned in the workhouse this here represents a very very good deal for The Greggs they're essentially getting cheap labor I mean some of these children may have been paid one or two pence per week if they were handed over by their parents but if they came from the workhouse they wouldn't even be offered at any salary at all and it's interesting that this is in 1785 the original building was only constructed in 1784 and it just shows you how acceptable the idea of using children and exploiting children for their labor was in the late 18th century and how crucial it was for this whole operation foreign bank first started manufacturing cotton around half of its Workforce was made up of kids and it stayed that way until the 1840s children as young as five or six were given some of the most menial jobs in the mill and that particularly meant crawling into tight spaces in and around the machinery now mule scavengers were required to crawl under the working machinery they'd sweep up all of this loose cotton it was a fire risk to leave it as it was and this stuff was just too valuable to go to waste I frequently had to be under the wheels and in the consequence of a perpetual motion of the Machinery I was liable to accidents constantly I was very frequently obliged to lie flat to avoid being run over or caught serious and occasionally fatal injuries did occur down here but there were longer term health risks too you'd be breathing in excessive amounts of cotton dust and that could cause a lung disease called bisanosis No PPE remember inflammation of the eyes cancer of the mouth and hearing loss with the machines running was all common too he also disliked the dust and the flu with which he was half suffocated he soon felt sick by constantly stooping his back ached blinko therefore took the liberty to sit down but this he soon found was strictly forbidden in Cotton Mills his Overlook of Mr Smith told him he must keep on his legs in 1819 The Cotton Factory Act was passed ruling that Mills could only employ children over the age of nine and restricting the Working Day to 12 hours but it wasn't particularly well enforced and exploitation continued plus a 72-hour week for a nine-year-old is still quite a lot as the proprietor of a mill little else mattered to me other than the quantity of product and level of profit to hit production Target my labor force would have to work hard any idleness would not go unpunished children who worked long hours in textile meals were often exhausted and found it difficult to keep their eyes open let alone maintain the speed of Labor acquired by the overlookers [Music] unfortunately for them strict levels of discipline were enforced by the ownership and vulnerable youngsters had little protection from abuse in the mail we were not only chastised but beaten very badly our overseer was a man of very immoral character a very bad man he chastised us with any weapon that came to hand the overlookers are also often in the habit of availing themselves of their control over the female children for very improper purposes whether they were dozing off whistling speaking to a fellow colleague momentarily peering out the window it was all considered idleness a couple of hits with the strap would usually do the trick there's even a story of a boy having his ear nailed to a table sometimes Mill bosses would get a little more creative to keep their workers in line when I was seven years old I went to work at Mr Marshall's Factory at Shrewsbury if a child was drowsy the overlooker touches the child on the shoulder and says come here in a corner of the room there is an iron system filled with water he takes the boy by the legs and dips him in the system and sends him back to work at quarry Banks specifically discipline was enforced in a slightly less brutal manner workers could find themselves owing their employers if they were fine for being a few minutes late for work now if you were a child who wasn't paid a salary that would mean working overtime for sometimes up to 14 hours a day [Music] now with punishments like those hanging over you socialize it with your colleagues while you're at your station wasn't highly recommended there'd be no gossiping over a cup of tea here in fact to communicate at all with the loud machinery some workers would have had to use sign language or become expert what come again boy workers were generally allowed a break at lunch time but sometimes even that had to be eaten on the factory floor some people complain that their food was so covered in dust that they couldn't eat it or the heat and exhaustion have caused them to lose their appetites what time was allowed for your meals 40 minutes at noon and when your work was bad you had hardly any time to eat it at all no we're obliged to leave it or take it home and when we did not take it the overlooker took it and gave it to his pigs and one of the only other places you'd get a few moments yourself was in here and if you come in you'll see doesn't exactly look like much it's it's really just a a wooden seat over a bucket but at the time that this Mill was built this would have been a state of the art privy almost no one that worked here would have seen an indoor toilet before the owners weren't exactly doing it out of kindness they just wanted people to get back to the machines out there as soon as possible there you go [Music] mechanization and the drive to increase productivity meant that people now worked to the pace of a new master Factory time every morning at 6am the workers were summoned by a steam whistle and once inside the mill would work in tandem with the tick of the clock this was a revolutionary change for ordinary working people no longer were their lives dictated by daylight or Seasons they now religiously followed that machine up there [Music] the clock outside on the tower is operated with this piece of Machinery here it would have been looked after and wound constantly in later years at quarry Bank the Greg's introduced what were known as slave clocks synchronized to show the exact same time across the property all throughout the day [Music] now with this technology the Gregs could control their Workforce now there is at the very least a suggestion that some of the more unscrupulous Mill owners would actually tamper with this Machinery here they would slow it down during the day and then speed it up during the night to get even more out of their already exhausted Workforce they could even then find them for turning up late foreign excuse me where do you think you're going you're late for work just finished my shift I think you'll find that the clock never lies get back in there now [Music] [Music] Factory workers had no choice but to push through their exhaust gym up to 40 percent of accidents dealt with at the Manchester infirmary in 1833 were Factory and Mill related most of them occurring in the last few hours of a shift lost fingers and broken bones were among the most common complaints who are so Rex we've got towards the end of a grueling 12-14 hour shift now presumably not only are people completely exhausted they're falling half asleep that there's got to be a lot more risks in in a room like this towards the end of the day yeah there has to be we haven't got statistics exactly of what happened and when and what time but logically then as you get more tired when you think that you're working against the speed of the machine and it doesn't change then that's likely to be when accidents are more likely to happen certainly and what kind of accidents are we talking about mainly what a good show a lot of it will be slips trips and falls as it as it often is but we do have examples of people having some pretty serious accidents as a result of simple mistakes working on the Machinery do we know of any fatalities here at quarry Bank we do in the records there are four recorded fatalities uh three adults and one child uh the child fatality uh happened in 1865 uh the young boy called John Fulton was 11 years old he was employed by the Melissa scavenger so he's cleaning the floor cleaning the back of the machine and for whatever reason and it isn't recorded the exact detail of what happened he was caught up underneath the mule as it went back in and killed instantly uh we also have serious accidents recorded we have um gentleman Carl William Bower back in the 19th century operating carding machines and there was a safe process for putting a new supply of cotton on the back of a carding engine which kept you safe but on this occasion again for whatever reason we don't know he choose to put the new one and push it in with his fingers and it cost him the bottom half of his left arm right okay just a simple mistake so yeah some serious serious injuries and serious risks one description of Mill workers filing out of a factory leaves us in no doubt of the hardships they faced the complexion is sallow and pallid with the peculiar flatness of feature [Music] they're a stature law the average height of 400 men being five feet six inches their limb slender and playing badly and ungracefully a very general bowing of the legs a spiritless and dejected air a sprawling and wide action of the legs and in appearance taken as a whole giving the world but little Assurance of a man or if so most sadly cheated of his fair proportions [Music] I've read a statistic that people who worked in these cotton Mills in the 19th century would at times have an average life expectancy in their sort of mid-30s which which sounds crazy is is it true it is true um it's an average statistic as you pointed out it would seem to be effective more by the conditions that you lived under rather than the conditions you worked under of course the overcrowded conditions in the towns and cities is a direct result of the coming of the cotton industry but we know statistically in the 19th century tuberculosis for example accounts for more than half of the working-class deaths in this country okay so so it's not necessarily always connected to their their work here at the Mill presumably working in a in an environment like this can't have helped though no it can't have helped we will look at our records here and we would see that in the 1840s average life expectancy would be around 42 years there were parts of the Orwell down in Manchester where it was 19 years but that's mainly down to tuberculosis cholera hepatitis typhoid that is that sort of thing it's overcrowded and poor infrastructure but presumably there are also examples on the other side of people who work here their entire lives and remained healthy into retirement oh yeah absolutely um in the in the pay box and the rent box and that we find people certainly living into the late 60s early 70s and right what were the changes what were the changes in the law over the 19th century that that improved things for workers in a place like this they were many and varied uh domain um Improvement for people although they wouldn't see it at the time was reducing the working hours for everybody and increasing the minimum age for children and in introducing the requirement for education for children but it happens sort of piecemeal throughout the 19th century that do we know whether they were enforced particularly well the workers have very few rights if you don't like the rules in your Mill go find another job is the usual thing a lot of the change is coming from the actions of campaigners for change at the time people like Wilberforce and shaftesbury and that who are lobbying Parliament to look at the situation in the Mills and it's not just cotton Mills but in the mills in general and to look at improvements where they can be made they're not always beneficial to the people concerned one of the introductions was the 10-hour bill of 1847 and it's known that Robert High Greg here campaigned against its introduction but the argument he used was that his workers would suffer hardship and famine because they weren't working for as long they weren't going to earn as much so workers might not always have wanted these regulations I guess I guess just from our 21st century perspective we we might see it differently we might see them as a as a great thing yeah of course you've got to remember there's no benefit system there if you don't earn it you haven't got it so if you've got to earn everything you've got and uh parity is introduced later in the 19th century but initially it wasn't if you worked six hours you've got six hours paying if you worked 12 hours you doubled it [Music] by 1830 the Greg's cotton business was booming a year later Samuel Greg and company in which the engineer Peter oet and Greg's four Sons were Partners owned five factories over 400 power looms employed over 2 000 people and turned four million pounds of cotton into cloth foreign Britain was quickly becoming one of the richest nations in the world but many were starting to question the moral cost of the whole operation it was no secret that the prophets enjoyed by the Gregs was built not only on the exploitation of workers in Britain but on the back of an abhorrent institution across the Atlantic just as port cities such as Bristol Glasgow and Liverpool owed their rapid growth to the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade the Greg's family Enterprise relied on the same Commerce to maintain its profits whilst their supplies of cotton came from slave plantations in the Americas the textile products created at Mills like Corey bank would then be sold by Traders in Africa in return for captured slaves who could then be transported across the Atlantic Samuel Gregg himself inherited a sugar Plantation on the island of Dominica which used enslaved African laborers and the cotton garments produced here at quarry Bank were used to clothe those same enslaved workers but times were changing and the oppression of people over in the Americas and in the factories here in Britain could not go on indefinitely in fact no matter how favorable the grace considered the working and living conditions to be here at quarry Bank more and more of his labor force were no longer willing to tolerate being denied human rights and representation in the next episode we'll discover what life was like during the Industrial Revolution outside of the factories both for the rich wow look at this very Grand isn't it and the poor it's work bit of lessons straight to bed up to do the same thing the next day we'll go behind closed doors to see where people ate slept and learned and look at how a wave of social change eventually brought improvements for ordinary workers [Music] foreign to the history Hit YouTube channel hope you enjoyed that video and if you'd like to see more videos where we attempt to try and bring history to life please don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification Bell cheers guys see you soon [Music]