Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  It is a nice question, however, to determine the actual religion of the industrialists or even of those touched by industry. They were in large part dissenters; very few Anglicans, except for some of the nobles and the great landowners, participated in business. It needed the industry, the self-reliance and the determination of the large body of dissenters to promote industrial change. Since they were forbidden to hold civil or military posts, and were excluded from the English universities, their ambitions were concentrated in other areas. The dissenting academies were in any case fertile ground for young inventors and engineers.

  Many of the great iron-masters were Quakers, sturdy, self-reliant and highly conscious of kith and kin; they did not care to marry ‘out of the Society’ and as a result Quaker dynasties like that of the Darbys were established; the first Abraham Darby came from a family of Quaker locksmiths near Dudley in the west midlands. Thrift and austerity encouraged the accumulation of capital, while prudence and industry directed that capital back into the business. The Quaker network no doubt also led to price-fixing or what might more respectably be called trading agreements.

  Methodism was perhaps a more significant force. In all its forms that faith was an intrinsic aspect of industrial change through its missionary activities among the northern working class; they sought through their hymns and sermons to encourage aspiration rather than despair among those who laboured in factories; the pursuit of success was seen as a Christian obligation, while the quest for innovation and self-improvement was the most honest of causes.

  Drunkenness, time-wasting, laziness and all the other pre-industrial vices were to be exorcized; as alternatives to misery and its various opiates, the Methodists set up their own communal activities, which afforded a sense of belonging, and of participation, in an industrial world that still seemed alien to most of its workers. That is why hand-loom weavers, in particular, became indoctrinated with Methodism as a way of life rather than of devotion. In the summer of 1784 John Wesley ‘found a lovely congregation at Stockport much alive to God’. It was stated as a general rule that ‘where there is little trade, there is seldom much increase in religion’. It has been said, therefore, that Methodism was the religious arm of the Industrial Revolution. In the words of one of Charles Wesley’s hymns:

  Help us to help each other, Lord,

  Each other’s cross to bear,

  Let each his friendly aid afford

  And feel his brother’s care.

  As a caveat it might be added that a significant number of weary workers, of both sexes, might profess no religion at all. God could not have made the mills.

  The iron-masters tended to be assertive and aggressive. They were the first identifiable group of industrialists, some of them coming from agriculture and some from the metal trades. Many of them had names taken from the Old Testament – Shadrach Fox, Nehemiah Lloyd, Job Rawlinson, Joab Parsons, Zephaniah Parker – and they seemed to possess the same primal force. ‘The orders I have made’, Ambrose Crowley told his managers, ‘are built upon such a rock that while I have my understanding it shall be out of the power of Satan and all his disciples to destroy them.’ Iron was in their blood. They could be callous and even ruthless but they seemed to take a proprietary interest in what they called ‘our men’.

  Their employees were obliged to work in conditions that were compared to those of Hades. The furnace, the flames, the smoke, the heat, the white-hot ingots, the whole intricate network of chains and pulleys, are worthy of the graver of Piranesi or Gustave Doré. The glare of the furnaces and the lights of the hearths lit up the nights of the Black Country just as surely as if they had been raked by searchlights. It is perhaps no wonder that Ambrose Crowley invoked the name of Satan.

  The case of iron is instructive in another sense. One great innovation changed the nature of the product. By means of ‘puddling’, a process of melting and stirring invented by Henry Cort in 1783, coke was used to refine pig iron into wrought iron or bar iron. The furnaces became ever larger and the uses of the iron multiplied; it was mined, smelted, refined, rolled into plates and rods. The demand grew for iron chains, iron pipes, iron wheels, iron stoves, iron grates, iron rails, iron mortars, iron nails, iron pots, iron fences, iron pillars, iron buildings, iron ships and iron paving. It was the age of iron. It could be manufactured in apparently unlimited quantities and before long England became the largest iron producer in Europe, providing half of that continent’s supply. The iron bridge that spans the Severn in Shropshire was considered to be one of the wonders of the world and the dramatist Charles Dibdin predicted that ‘it will apparently be uninjured for ages’. Indeed it still stands.

  From the development of the steel industry emerges a similar story of innovation and growth. A clock-maker from Doncaster, Benjamin Huntsman, was the pioneer; in testing the methods for producing finer clock-springs he hit upon a method by which he could maintain the steel at an intense heat in a crucible of clay while its impurities were burned away. It became known as ‘Huntsman’s crucible’ by means of which cast steel was produced in greater and greater quantities. He took out no patent but was determined to keep his secret until he was foiled by a rival manufacturer, Samuel Walker, who on a wintry night disguised himself as a homeless beggar and pleaded to be close to the warmth of the furnace where he could spy with more ease.

  In textiles, the glory of England, growth was apparent on all fronts, from silk to wool, from cotton to linen. The clue to improvement was of course the plethora of machines for carding, for combing, for winding, for warping, for weaving, for lapping, for slubbing, and a score of other operations. One improvement led to another, one technical idea promoted another idea. The new inventions were at first only readily applicable to cotton but they soon spread to wool and to linen.

  It was a process of what might be called incremental change which was not necessarily written down but worked out in practice by the operatives who passed on their skills by demonstration and word of mouth. Men and women, and even children, learned by doing. This is one of the great engines of the industrial change of the late eighteenth century. The knowledge of skilled workers was of indispensable benefit in the spread of inventiveness, with a pool of young mechanics and apprentices who were eager to learn. It was the practical side of the Industrial Revolution which was perhaps most important. Goethe observed that ‘we [Germans] regard discovery and invention as a splendid personally gained possession . . . but the clever Englishman transforms it by patent into real possession’. This may be less than fair on men such as Arkwright and Darby, but it does contain an important truth. The English artisan was well known for his discipline, concentration and urge for practical perfection.

  Thus in the manufacture of cotton there were innumerable minor adjustments, and a stream of suggestions, for the better employment of the operatives. At the accession of George III in 1760 3 million pounds of raw cotton were imported; twenty-nine years later the figure had risen to 32.5 million. Cotton goods became cheaper and much more plentiful; as a result some of the problems of human well-being were reduced. Francis Place, the social reformer, noted that the new cottons worked ‘all but wonders in the health and cleanliness of women’. It took an Indian hand-spinner approximately 50,000 hours to prepare 100 pounds of cotton, whereas the process on Arkwright’s rollers and ‘the mule’ took 300 hours. The production of cotton moved from the East to the West. The plight of the hand-spinners in India and the hand-loom weavers in England was left out of account, leading ineluctably to their suffering in the nineteenth century.

  Two other elements of manufacturing, at this time of change and innovation, deserve notice. A manager at Whitbread’s brewery wrote in the spring of 1786 that ‘last summer we set up a steam engine for the purposes of grinding our malt and we also raise our liquor [water] with it’; the improvements ‘are very great indeed’. The London breweries were soon wholly mechanized, among them the Black Eagle Brewery in Brick Lane, Courage’s Brewery by Butler’s Wharf, the Anchor B
rewery at Southwark and Whitbread’s Brewery in Finsbury. The brewers themselves became rich and influential citizens. Some became members of parliament, while others became mayors, justices of the peace and aldermen. They were the aristocrats among London businessmen.

  The brewers also invented a new refreshment that helped the wheels of industrial change turn with better grace. In 1722 a brewery in Shoreditch prepared the first mug of ‘porter’, a black and bitter beer, with more hops than malt, that pleased the palate of Londoners accustomed to strong and sharp flavours. It was cheaper than pale ale, and was the first beer to be suitable for mass production; by the 1760s, the sale of porter accounted for almost a half of the market in beer. London tastes were also gratified by another marvel of mechanics. Canned soup and canned meat were on sale by 1814.

  Yet the textile industry was central. The mechanization of wool processing lagged behind that of cotton, but eventually it displaced the conditions of work at home where women and children managed the sorting, cleaning and spinning while the men concentrated upon the combing and weaving. The flying shuttle and, eventually, the spinning jenny and the combing machine took their place. New urban districts devoted to wool clustered around Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford and Halifax while the old wool towns of the south-west dwindled away. These changes were not of course without consequences of their own, among them the series of events that became known as the ‘Wiltshire Outrages’. Was it just or proper that a whole way of work, or way of life, should be eliminated? The new wool factories were seen as themselves great machines bent upon destroying custom and ancient practice, employing men and women who did not possess any of the traditional skills or, more importantly, traditional values. One Norwich wool-comber told his employers, in the middle of a working dispute: ‘We are social creatures and cannot live without each other; and why should you destroy community?’ There was no satisfactory answer.

  It was therefore inevitable that ‘combinations’ of workers should be established to agitate for better terms and conditions in their respective trades. The destruction of custom, and the attempt to repeal apprenticeship, added to the general unrest. The Leicester Sisterhood of Female Handspinners was established by 18,500 women in 1788, but most of the workers who joined in the first ‘trade unions’ were skilled male workers in the metal trades anxious to fight employers who wished to cut their wages or change their working hours. They were also intent upon forming a ‘closed shop’ against the incursion of women, children and other forms of cheap labour. When the makers of muslin in Glasgow tried to cut down piece-rates, they were confronted by boycotts and organized resistance. As early as 1726 a parliamentary committee was informed that the serge weavers had their own club houses ‘where none but weavers are admitted, and that they have their ensigns and flags hung out at the door of their meetings’.

  In 1758 a warrant was issued at the Lancaster Assizes for the arrest of nineteen senior weavers who were believed to act as stewards for a combination of several thousand weavers. They had agreed to collect money ‘for supporting such weavers as should by their committee be ordered to leave their masters and made other dangerous and illegal regulations: that they had insulted and abused several weavers who had refused to join in their schemes and continued to work, and had dropped an incendiary letter with threats to masters that had opposed their design’. This activity did not only anticipate the machine-breaking of 1802 and the Luddite riots of 1811, but it also can be seen as a harbinger of the professional and organized trade unionism of the nineteenth century. Even in the last decades of the eighteenth century there were attempts at discipline, organization and cohesion among the ranks of the workers.

  Their example prevailed in other trades. The journeyman hatters formed what Francis Place called a ‘perpetual combination’. Weavers combined in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, while wool-combers were organized in Leicestershire and Yorkshire. Plumbers, carpenters, shoemakers and house-painters had joined them by the end of the century. The factory system was no doubt the true parent of protest and unrest; it seemed to be large and growing ever larger, creating a new world of penury and exploitation.

  The workers were perhaps following the example of their employers since, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the steel manufacturers of Birmingham, the nail-smiths of Gloucester and pin-makers of Nottingham were among the many manufacturers who formed what might be called self-help organizations or, less kindly, price- and wage-fixing rings.

  Outbreaks of riot and machine-breaking were common in the eighteenth century. As early as 1719 the striking keelmen of Newcastle upon Tyne were met by a regiment of soldiers and a man-of-war. In 1726 riots and loom-breaking broke out in the West Country, and in 1749 the silk, cotton and iron trades were disrupted by demonstrators. In 1768 Hargreaves’s spinning jennies were destroyed by irate workers and, a decade later, Arkwright’s machines met a similar fate. The first law to prevent the growth of trade unions, the Combination Act of 1721, banned journeymen tailors from entering into ‘combinations to advance their wages to unreasonable prices and lessen their usual hours of work’. The law and the employers got their way, and created the context for more severe Combination Acts at the end of the century. In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels made the observation that ‘the history of the proletariat in England begins with the invention of the steam engine and of machinery for working cotton’.

  Engels may have misinterpreted the signs of social change in England, and was clearly mistaken in basing them upon continental models; the British form of industrial protest had none of the proto-socialist shrillness of the agitators in France and Germany. It was more formal, more measured and more pragmatic; it relied to a certain extent upon humour and sarcasm, and was maintained by a deep deference for national institutions.

  Yet no doubt something was happening. There was something in the air of the industrial towns and villages that had not been sensed before. An observer, Richard Ayton, going among ‘the people of the lower orders in Lancashire’, noted in Voyage round Great Britain (1813) that they are ‘fully aware of the importance of their labour’. He noted also that they were ‘rude, coarse and insolent . . . Much vice and profligacy necessarily prevail among them; but while their morals are corrupted the powers of their minds are called forth; they become lawless and unprincipled, but quick, cunning and intelligent.’ Was this the new kind of labour that the factory system, and industrial change itself, had elicited?

  26

  On a darkling plain

  The industrial geography of the later eighteenth century was dominated by ‘the drift’. It was in large part fuelled by the movement from the rural hinterlands to the industrial areas of the north and the midlands where the demand for labour was most intense. Who would work in the fields for a pittance when they could work in the factories for a living wage? The looms called them. There was no sudden or general migration, from the south-west and the southeast to the north; it was a process that was gradual and incremental. It is true, however, that the readily available labour drifted from neighbouring rural areas to the nearest industrial centre. It was essentially an aggregate of small movements over a restricted area. That is why, over the eighteenth century, furnaces and forges quickly came to a halt when the harvest had to be brought in.

  Yet there was slow but significant change. Charles Dibdin in his Musical Tour of 1788, noted that ‘manufactories that begin about the centre of the kingdom push on to the north – having taken up their residence in Yorkshire – they expand to the east and west; but particularly the west, in a most astonishing way. Thus, from Leeds to Liverpool – through Bradford, Halifax, Rochdale, Manchester, Warrington and Preston – the population is wonderful’.

  The metal industries had found their home in the midlands, rivalled by the growing cotton manufactures of Lancashire or Cheshire and the woollen manufacture in the West Riding of Yorkshire. That was the geography of trade in the broadest possible terms. Lancashire, the West R
iding, Staffordshire and Warwickshire (together with Middlesex) were by 1800 the most populous counties in England. The consequence was that the rural areas of Essex, Suffolk, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire became ever more agricultural as all traces of industry vanished.

  Special trades flourished in separate small areas. Prescot specialized in watch-parts, Chowbent and Leigh made nails, while Ashton-in-Makerfield manufactured locks and hinges. Staple materials could be found in different regions. Tin and copper were mined in Cornwall; lead was everywhere in the Mendips, but there were large supplies of the same metal in Cumberland and Derbyshire. Salt was the preserve of Cheshire, while slate found its natural home in Cumberland and North Wales. Portland was of course famous for its stone. In the eighteenth century England was a capacious storehouse of natural resources that could be easily exploited, and this in turn promoted industrial progress.

  The result was that each region and each town was fundamentally different from its neighbours; some employed more female than male labour, while others were more dependent upon the ‘boom or bust’ cycle of certain industries. Prices rose and fell according to different variables. Craft industries were shaped by artisan production in manufactories or by the ‘putting out’ system of domestic labour. When a banker, Mr Oakes of Bury St Edmunds, made a journey to Lancashire on business in 1803, he believed that the county was ‘like a different country’. Nothing was familiar or recognizable; even the people seemed different. The simple peasant of Cromford, according to a diarist and traveller, John Byng, had turned into ‘an impudent mechanic’. Joseph Healy, a poet who later celebrated the resistance at Peterloo, observed the ‘half-burnt cadaverous looking animals’ to be found at the Stourbridge glass-works in 1777. This was a new nation.