by Clare Hunter
15
Work
In my late teens, I went out to work for the first time and found a part-time summer job at my local dry cleaners. It offered a variety of tariffs, from ‘same day’ to ‘super valet service’. The latter involved not just the laundering and pressing of clothes but the meticulous overhaul of garments. A dress shirt would have all its buttons removed and reattached by hand; an unravelling hem would be resewn; missing hooks or eyes would be replaced and stains removed by a cocktail of chemicals; seams would be tested and over-sewn for strength.
This tending of clothes was done in the very last hour of the day. We would leave the steaming, ironing and big dry-cleaning machines and gather at the back of the shop, where an assortment of needles, threads, pins, buttons and stain removers awaited us. Duties were apportioned according to skill. As the student, I was designated the task of sewing on buttons. Once everyone was settled, the talking began.
I had fallen into the best of company: the world of hard-working women who told it like it was with humour and wisdom. Conscious that I was only seventeen, the women were keen to induct me in what lay ahead: a world of predatory men, disappointing sex, painful childbirth, harried motherhood and constant care. I have never laughed so much in my life. I loved those hours we spent together sewing. I loved these strong women who gathered me into their world and helped prepare me for mine. Even today, the sudden waft of dry-cleaning vapour brings a momentary thrill, evoking memories of being clustered around that large table with the marooned boxes of threads and buttons, our laps piled high with fabric as our hands darted to and fro in a deftness of sewing.
Just before I left the job, the women told me to bring in the clothes I was taking with me on a holiday break before I went to university. When I came in for my last shift, they presented me with them not just laundered, but folded round cardboard, wrapped in tissue, their loose buttons reattached, dipping hems realigned, each and every piece protected in cellophane. It was their gift to mark my departure to another world, divorced from theirs, a world of university and opportunity. But the greater gift had been their companionship and ribald welcome to their world.
The industrialisation of Britain brought with it a major shift in the working lives of people who sewed on buttons and hand-stitched the other laborious processes involved in garment-making. Since the first steam-driven piston engine had been invented in 1712, the acceleration of mechanised production transformed the location and nature of work. There was a major expansion of roads and canals to link the emerging centres of industry where populations were growing exponentially to service industrial progress. By the mid-eighteenth century, textile production was the dominant industry of Britain, resourced by the energy provided by its plentiful rivers and mines of coal. Cottage industries declined as vast numbers of the rural poor moved to newly forged industrial cities, lured by the promise of more stable work. The population grew as families discovered that their pooled income could be increased by having more children, deemed fit to work by the age of seven or even younger. But ‘the sweated industries’ didn’t bring a hoped-for prosperity to the poor. Instead they found themselves exploited with low pay, long hours and unsafe working conditions. Many became pieceworkers, operating from home, paid for the number of items sewn. They were dependent on contractors who could set whatever terms of employment they chose and change them whenever they pleased. In the textile industries, women predominated as the labour required little physical strength. Women were also cheaper and largely un-unionised. Textile pieceworkers often had to pay a deposit for the fabric their contractor provided and cover the cost of needles and thread from their own pockets. In inadequate housing, over-crowded and insanitary conditions (in 1840s Manchester, nearly 15,000 people lived in cellars), workers lived in constant dread of their work being spoiled, since any damage was deducted from their pay. But there was no redress to exploitation and, for women, little alternative employment, bar prostitution. When a widowed seamstress, Mrs Biddell, was charged with theft and sent to the workhouse after she had pawned the cloth supplied by her employer to buy food for her starving children, the poet and author Thomas Hood was so moved by her situation that he wrote eleven verses describing her toil and poverty. The Song of the Shirt was published in the 1843 Christmas edition of Punch, the British weekly satirical magazine:
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Paying her needle and thread –
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang The Song of the Shirt!
The poem fanned the flames of an already increasing public concern about the inhumane conditions suffered by the working poor. But Mrs Biddell was only one of the thousands of textile workers, many of them children, who, despite having employment, lived in poverty. In parts of England, but predominantly in Ireland and Scotland, a new, insidious kind of piecework was introduced. White-work embroidery, or ‘flowering’ as it became known, involved embroidering floral and other patterns on white muslin in white thread. It looked like lace, but its open areas were created through stitching. White-work could be produced and bought far more cheaply than lace itself but it offered the same delicacy. Its desirability and marketability increased when Queen Victoria commissioned it for christening gowns for the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales. Business boomed. At the height of its popularity over 80,000 women and chidren were employed as ‘flowerers’ in Scotland, and an estimated 400,000 more in Ireland. But the stitching of white on white is one of the most taxing kinds of embroidery. For the flowerers its incessant sewing, invariably in poor light, risked injury to their eyesight. A girl could go blind by the time she turned twenty. A supposed remedy was whisky poured directly into the eyes to alleviate tiredness. A Nottinghamshire doctor noted in his submission to the Children’s Employment Commission of 1843 than in ten years of practice he had treated over 10,000 women and girls for eye damage.
By 1906, conditions for pieceworkers had scarcely changed. The Daily News, a radical and reformist daily newspaper founded in 1846, decided to champion piecework reform. It mounted an exhibition in London called The Daily News Sweated Industries’ Exhibition with the aim of ‘acquainting the public with the evils of Sweating in Home Industries.’ There were stalls displaying products that pieceworkers had made and photographs of their working conditions. Many focused on the textile trades: dressmaking, shirt making, umbrella covering, coffin tassel making, tennis ball covering, sack sewing, glove stitching and military embroidery. There was an accompanying handbook which quoted from government and independent reports. These exposed the paucity of workers’ lives and how widespread their exploitation had become. Margaret H. Irwin is cited from her The Problem of Home Workers report published in the Westminster Review in 1897. She describes the conditions endured by shirt hand-finishers and the financial and time pressure they were under:
For shirt finishing at 9d a dozen, one woman had to put on each shirt 2 rows of feather stitching down the breast, sew on 8 buttons, make 6 button-holes, ‘bridge’ the seams, and stitch any part the machine had missed. In order to complete her dozen of shirts she was obliged to sit at the work from 8 a.m. until 1 the next morning. ‘She was not greedy’, she said, and would have been content if she could only have made her full shilling a day. Owing to the irregularity of her work her earnings varied from 2s 6d to 4s a week.
The sewing machine was meant to be these women’s saviour. Different versions of a mechanical aid to sewing had begun to appear from the 1840s onwards. The Americans Walter Hunt and Elias Howe led the way, coming closest to creating a workable sewing machine, but although their inventions, and those of their competitors, did reach the factory floor and tailors’ workshops, these early machines were notoriously unreliable. It was a fellow American, Isaac Merritt Singer, who was to devise dependability: a sewing mach
ine that lived up to its promise of continually sewing pieces of fabric together. His rags-to-riches story epitomised the American dream.
Born in 1811 to poor German immigrant parents, it is thought in the small town of Schaghticoke, NY, Singer was abandoned by his mother at the age of ten and left home at the age of twelve. His two main attributes were his dual love of engineering and showmanship. In moral terms, his commercial rise was inglorious. Singer’s story is one of ruthless betrayals – of women, friends, business partners and family – of predatory sexual liaisons with many – usually young – women, and an immoral, at times illegal, contempt of patent law. But he steered the sewing machine not only into the newly forged garment-making factories of 1850s America and elsewhere in the world but into the homes of thousands. For all his personal and commercial faults, he was driven by an engineer’s curiosity as well as financial gain. He was determined to design a sewing machine that was efficient, durable and affordable.
Singer lived by his wits. Badly schooled, barely able to write or spell, he spent his early years on the road, finding work where he could, as a joiner, a lathe operator, a pitchman in a funfair. The latter gave him a taste for theatrics and he joined the Rochester Players. At nineteen he married the fifteen-year-old Catharine Maria Haley. They had two children before Singer took to the road again, signing up with the Baltimore Strolling Players. When he espied the attractive Mary Ann Sponsler in the audience, he made her his mistress and she was soon pregnant, During their twenty-five-year liaison they were to produce ten children together. He and Mary Ann established their own company, The Merritt Players, but its financial precariousness led Singer to disband the company in the early 1840s and concentrate on the more lucrative potential of inventions. His prototype for a machine to carve printers’ letter blocks caught the interest of the publisher George Zieber who thought that it had enough potential to warrant the investment of his money, time and a workshop space for Singer to hone the prototype into a marketable product. When catastrophe struck in 1850 and a boiler exploded in the building where Singer was working destroying his work-in-progress, he relocated to another workshop in Boston. It was already inhabited by Orson Phelps, a scientific instrument maker to trade, who had once advised Elias Howe on the mechanism for his sewing machine invention, patented in 1845. Phelps had a contract with the sewing machine manufacturer, Blodgett and Lerow. But both Elias Howe’s and Blodgett and Lerow’s machines were temperamental. The company of tailors who rented the workshop at the top of the Boston building were constantly in need of Phelps’ expertise to repair their machines. They broke down with such regularity that Singer, appalled at their inefficiency, declared he could create a much more dependable alternative. Zieber bet him $40 to do just that, adding that if he did succeed then he, Singer and Phelps would form a tripartite company to market his improved model. Singer set to work and, so the myth goes, in just eleven days had cannibalised the disparate machine parts Phelps put at his disposal and assembled a machine that performed continuous and reliable stitching and surpassed its predecessors. His breakthrough had been achieved by lateral thinking. Instead of attempting to devise a machine that emulated the movement of hand-stitchers in a mechanical way, as other designs had done, Singer concentrated on the machine’s purpose: the joining of two pieces of fabric. Through small adjustments, such as using a straight rather than curved needle and making its movement linear rather than circular, he achieved an exactitude and continuity of stitching that hitherto had been elusive.
The three men agreed on a partnership. At first it worked well. Zieber provided the investment in materials and patent costs, Phelps supplied the skilled team of mechanics and Singer the attention to engineering detail. But Singer wanted more than his fair share. He saw off Zieber first, convincing him that he was terminally ill and could better provide for his family after his death by relinquishing his partnership in the company for a lump sum. He bullied Phelps into giving up his shares but retained his services as a salesman on the Singer team. He enlisted as a more useful partner a hot-shot lawyer, Edward Clark, to fight off the plethora of lawsuits from competitors for infringement of their patent rights. His Singer No.1, an industrial model, was finally patented in 1851, and in 1856 Edward Clark finally managed to broker a deal to bring several competitors together to form a patent pool. The cartel, called the Sewing Machine Combination, was the first multinational conglomerate. Walter Hunt, who had invented but not patented a locksmith sewing machine in 1833, was bought off by being enticed onto Singer’s payroll and even Elias Howe came on board, comforted by a royalty on every Singer machine sold. Singer and Clark were ready to conquer the world.
In the Clydebank Museum in Scotland, the site of Singer’s first overseas factory in 1885 – which was to become the largest sewing machine factory in the world – there is a gleam of Singer sewing machines, a display of different models through the ages. Singer’s first model, the Singer No.1, takes pride of place. It is a surprisingly rough-hewn affair, its base a simple wooden box encasing a functionally designed foot pedal (later be re-fashioned as an elegant, intricately interlaced wrought-iron affair). On top is a sturdy sewing machine, its shape not dissimilar to contemporary machines, with a familiar arching sewing arm, top bobbin and side wheel. But its various pulleys and tension wheels, which draw the thread through, lack the finesse of subsequent models. Beside it is displayed the Turtleneck, which Singer designed in 1856 as his first domestic sewing machine. It sits in striking contrast to his Singer No.1, with a compact, box-like structure and small flourishes of gold patterning on its wheel, its body inlaid with a tidy mother-of-pearl posy of flowers. Originally priced at $100, the Turtleneck had to be reduced to $50 because of poor sales, and even then it wasn’t popular. It was only when Singer brought out his Letter A family model in 1858 that sales took off. Larger and more robust, the Letter A, even at a price of $75, became a best seller. Singer had found his niche in the market.
The Letter A was targeted at the middle and upper classes. Singer was determined to persuade them to install sewing machines in pride of place above stairs. His improved family machine was a much grander version than the Turtleneck. This was a machine designed to exude domestic desirability as ‘a beautiful ornament in the parlour or boudoir’ Its body was finished in a gleam of black ‘Japan’ lacquer liberally ornamented with intricate gold scrolling; its metal plates were engraved and its base hewn from highly polished wood. Here was a machine of elegance, a piece of fine furniture with the added appeal of functionality. Its marketing was deliberately gendered to reinforce the stereotype of sewing as an exclusively female occupation. This is borne out by some early examples of the company’s advertisements in Clydebank Museum. They depict a beautifully dressed woman, sometimes with a daughter by her side, sitting serenely stitching on her Singer sewing machine: the light is soft, the scene refined and the mood peaceful. Such marketing was effective. Mechanised sewing relocated the chore of sewing: it moved it from the servant’s quarters and brought it into the drawing room.
Singer and Clark’s legal and financial acumen was accompanied by marketing genius. With the price of a sewing machine beyond the reach of many, Edward Clark persuaded Singer to introduce the first ever hire-purchase scheme. For a mere three dollars a month, people could take home a brand new machine, guaranteed for a year, and pay it up over subsequent years. Purchasers made their payments locally at a Singer store, and received an official payment book that was stamped each month. Other innovative purchasing schemes were introduced. Schools, neighbours, families could group together to buy a shared machine; people could trade in their inferior models, invariably made by Singer’s competitors, and become owners of his latest model.
Always the showman, Singer sent his salesmen on the road to promote his invention in factories, theatres and at church gatherings. He installed attractive young women in the shop windows of department stores to demonstrate his machines where they drew so much attention that the pavements became blocked by rivete
d bystanders. He set up human-against-machine sewing competitions. One, in New York’s largest garment-making factory, had an official-time keeper operating a stopwatch as three of the factory’s fastest hand stitchers were pitted against a solitary sewer on a Singer machine. The latter won hands-down and, the media having been invited out in force to witness the battle, reported that the factory had ordered, there and then, several of Singer’s machines. Some cynics said it had already been a done deal.
By 1885, Singer was selling 900 sewing machines, by 1859 the Scientific American, a popular science magazine, was declaring that it was: ‘astonishing how, in a few years the sewing machine has made such strides in popular favour, going from a mechanical worker to a domestic necessity’, by 1886, sales had reached over 250,000. They continued to escalate and Singer continued to improve his models, adding other customised products to his profits: needles, threads, attachments and polished cabinets. He marketed his sewing machine as ‘the most potent factor in promoting the happiness of mankind all over the world’. By 1906, annual sales of Singer’s sewing machines reached one million units and Singer’s company had secured 80 percent of the world market.
