Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  Not so the miners and ironworkers in the back-to-back terraces of Hanger Lane and Darley Bank. As the slump which followed the Peace of Paris had first shown, their livelihood was little more secure than that of their fellows whereas the claim of the Darley Bank Company over their lives had become absolute. So far from lightening their labours or shortening their hours of work each new machine, each technical innovation meant a more fiercely competitive and therefore more unstable economy, a more relentless pace, a more exacting and rigid discipline. Working hours grew longer and wages lower. The old ‘butty’ system, as it was sometimes called, whereby a foreman or ‘overhand’ contracted with the Company and employed his own labour still survived. But as the scope of the Company’s activities widened so it became the more impersonal and the old paternal relationship which had once existed between the Leeds family and their skilled workmen became less intimate. A system which had originally preserved the virtues of independence and individual responsibility was now sadly abused. The bargains struck between Daniel and Jonathan Leeds and their ‘overhands’ were generally hard; those made between the overhands and their employees were even harder, but their terms were not the concern of the ironmasters. Most of the overhands ran ‘tommy shops’ and paid their men, not in money but in goods of inferior quality at prices which were often far above those prevailing in the open market. In spite of prohibitory Acts of Parliament, this truck system of payment continued to flourish and employers refused to interfere with the ‘overhands’ freedom of contract. Wages, which were already little above starvation level, could never under this system command their true purchasing power. In the attempt to make ends meet under these dire circumstances, the children of the new Winterstoke were put to work almost as soon as they could walk. For centuries children had been accustomed to labour with their parents in the fields, but the work demanded by this industrial age was of a very different order. For twelve and fourteen hours a day boys toiled as stockers in the stifling heat and fumes of the furnace bridges at Darley Bank, or loaded and dragged the corves of coal through the dark galleries of the High Hanger Pits. Through equally interminable hours children only five or six years old acted as trappers in the pits, crouching alone and in total darkness in some inaccessible corner of the mine where they controlled the ‘traps’ or air-lock doors which governed the ventilation system. A boy of fourteen was judged sufficiently responsible to control a Heslop winding engine when it lowered a human freight down the mine’s dark shaft.

  Where labour was so cheap and so plentiful, human life was of little account, especially in the underground world beneath High Hanger. Here the safety lamp, one of the very few humanitarian inventions of the day, brought no safety. Any virtue it possessed was offset by the working of deeper levels where inadequate ventilation increased the threat of spontaneous explosion in the stagnant, stifling air and where the peril of roof falls became much graver. Accidents in the pits were seldom or never the subject of inquest or inquiry so that their toll of human life cannot be assessed. We do not know how many crushed or blasted victims were hauled to the surface; nor how many forgotten dead may still lie entombed in old, abandoned workings. But if we add to the toll of these unrecorded tragedies the men blinded by nystagmus or riddled with consumption and the victims of the recurrent epidemics of cholera, typhus and smallpox which swept through the overcrowded back-to-backs like forest fires, then we can begin to form some idea of the weight of human misery which hung over Winterstoke as heavily as the smoke tainted fogs that rose from the polluted river.

  When we remember that the majority of those whom the new philosophy had condemned to a life sentence under conditions so degrading and brutalizing were countrymen bred in a long tradition of sturdy independence it may seem surprising that they acted with such moderation and that the population of Winterstoke did not rise in organized revolt. There were two reasons why they did not do so, the strength of a bygone conservative tradition and the savage repression of authority.

  Nowadays every demagogue who claims that he fights on behalf of the working man likes to call himself a ‘progressive’, but at this time the roles were reversed. It was the working men who remembered lost lands, lost rights and lost liberties who were the conservatives. The ‘progressives’ were the new class of industrialists who, intoxicated by the power of their machines, prophesied that, provided they were allowed complete freedom to pursue their great undertakings, progress towards a better and more prosperous world would follow automatically. Great landowners, such as the Earls of Winterstoke, who were the rulers of England, stood apart from these contending forces. They understood neither and did nothing to mitigate the clash between them. The new industry had brought them immense wealth in rents and mineral royalties and, as the enclosure movement showed, they also exemplified the philosophy of self-interest. But they did not recognize the fact that their enclosures, combined with the new industrial power and the new transport had created a unique and revolutionary social situation calling for drastic treatment and reform. When their attention was inevitably drawn to the new black areas on the map of England it was not attracted by a desire for reform or because they shared the industrialists’ messianic faith in his machines but because they saw in these areas, rife with misery and discontent, a menace to their security and power. For the bloody and terrible lesson of the French Revolution was fresh in their minds, while the threat of Napoleonic invasion now hung over England. In that event, could the Crown depend upon the loyalty of the teeming population of the new towns? No emotion can more readily unleash the evils of tyranny, injustice, violence and false witness than fear, and the rulers of England became mortally afraid of the new black Winterstoke which sprawled and fumed and flamed in the valley of the Wendle. Any expression of discontent on the part of miners or ironworkers was looked upon as seditious, as an incipient revolution which threatened to overthrow the Constitution. Protests against the price of bread or the abuses of the ‘tommy shops’, concerted efforts to obtain a better wage or more humane hours of work were met, not by any promise of reform but by more rigorous repression and punishment. So that they should not outbid each other for labour, manufacturers could, in defiance of the Combination Laws, associate freely for the purpose of regulating wages, whereas the ringleaders of any attempt among the workmen to combine were prosecuted, indicted by the perjured evidence of spies, and sentenced to imprisonment, to transportation or even to death.

  The old traditional machinery of local government in Winterstoke was unfitted to deal with the problems of the new town for it had become quite unrepresentative. Yet it was the very fact that it had ceased to represent the corporate will of the governed which now made a time-honoured system so corrupt and so effective an instrument of tyranny. Until 1832 the town was still governed, as in medieval times, by the jury of the Court Leet of the Manor of Winterstoke which met at Easter and Michaelmas and which was nominated by Lord Winterstoke’s steward. His steward also empanelled the jury which elected annually the three chief officers of Government, the Reeve and two Constables. These holders of ancient feudal office wielded power and authority such as their humble rural predecessors never dreamed of, reigning as petty dictators over the new town and, like every dictator in history, using spies and informers to make every man suspicious of his neighbour and so strengthen the rule of fear and force. Any miner or ironworker who roused the suspicions of the constables could be prosecuted on a variety of trumped-up charges, for sedition, for conspiracy, for a breach of the Combination Laws or even under the Vagrancy Acts. And once he had fallen into their clutches he knew there was no hope of impartial justice and that a committal to Assizes was almost certain to follow. For the local magistrates consisted of two members of the Leeds family and a Deepforest mine owner.

  Under such a system of government the great landowner and the industrialist, as represented by the two families of Hanmer and Leeds, held absolute power in Winterstoke and that power was backed by all the forces of the Crown. In 181
2 a new barracks was built at Church Ambling where four regiments of foot soldiers and two cavalry regiments were quartered in case of need. It was Government policy to dispose their forces in this way within striking distance of an industrial town but not in the town itself. For it was argued that if, for example, troops were quartered in Winterstoke they might themselves become disaffected and either refuse to act in the event of revolt or even take the part of the insurgents. Although on one occasion there was a quite needless display of military force when a peaceable and orderly meeting of miners took place on High Hanger Down, Winterstoke was never the scene of a Peterloo tragedy. The reason for this was probably the domestic organization of the manufacturing section of the iron trade which survived until the period of reform and thus spared Winterstoke the worst rigours of a factory system which drove the cotton workers of Lancashire to so desperate a pitch of misery and resentment.

  Besides Church Ambling Barracks, two other forbidding buildings, one at Church Ambling and one in Winterstoke itself, remain to this day as grim reminders of this chapter in our social history. The first of these was the new county gaol which was built in 1812, equipped with a treadmill ten years later and enlarged by the addition of a further sixty cells. The second was the Poor House, or ‘House of Industry’ as it was called, which was built at Winterstoke by the Board of Guardians appointed by the local magistrates under the powers of Gilbert’s Act of 1782. Hitherto, vicar and churchwardens had been responsible for the poor of the parish. When we survey these buildings to-day it is impossible to deny that the architects of this period of artistic decadence, whatever Gothic follies they might perpetrate for private clients, served very well the ends of the Crown. Nothing could be better calculated to strike terror and despair to the hearts of its hapless guests than the cold, massive, meticulously proportioned façade of Church Ambling Gaol. ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ is the clear statement, not only of the threatening prison gate but of each great block of rusticated stone. The effect is reminiscent of George Dance’s Old Newgate prison and we feel that its unknown architect must either have been inspired, like Dance, by the Carceri of Piranesi, or haunted, like Vanbrugh, by a claustrophobic terror of confinement. Certainly, like other prison buildings of this period, it is a masterpiece of the sadistic and the macabre. That the building fulfilled an urgent need is revealed by the criminal statistics of committals and sentences to Assizes and Courts of Quarter Session in Midshire. Before 1821 no figures are available, but during the thirty years immediately following no less than 376 persons, including many women and young children, were sentenced to death at Church Ambling, many for offences as trivial as the theft of a loaf of bread, 1,333 were sentenced to transportation, a fate from which few ever returned, and 5,813 received terms of imprisonment, so that the new treadmill was put to good use. Comment upon these terrible figures is at once impossible and needless. They reveal more eloquently than any pages of impassioned prose by what means the spirit of the erstwhile commoners of Winterstoke was broken by their new masters and harnessed to the discipline of new machines and new economics.

  The ‘Union’, as it is now called, in Winterstoke has not the same architectural pretensions as Church Ambling Gaol, but its long frontage of soot-blackened brick and narrow barred windows looks as cold and as pitiless as the prison. We cannot believe that its builders were moved by any spark of charity or compassion; or that they regarded it as anything other than a place of shame and degradation. This building fulfilled an urgent need also, for by the first decade of the nineteenth century one out of every seven inhabitants of Winterstoke was a pauper. Looking at this building, we can understand why, quite apart from any feeling of pride and self-respect, a man would work himself to death rather than go ‘on the Parish’. Here the overseer, like a slave master, organized the paupers in labour gangs to earn their keep. Here the parish children were loaded and despatched like livestock in packed wagons to provide cheap labour for the Lancashire cotton mills where the demand for children was much greater than in the iron trade.

  The reeking, overcrowded courts of industrial Winterstoke, the new barracks, gaols and poorhouses, may appear to us to constitute an indictment of the new order too monstrous to be ignored by any contemporary. Surely those who built these new buildings must have realized that there was something terribly wrong with their society of poverty and punishment. Surely, too, the families of Hanmer and Leeds who ruled Winterstoke must have been monsters of wickedness, rapacity and inhumanity. Yet in fact contemporaries, with a very few exceptions, did not see these evils as we do, nor were William Hanmer, the seventh Earl, and Jonathan Leeds or his brother Peter arch-villains. Indeed, if both these old-established Winterstoke families had suddenly and simultaneously produced unscrupulous and heartless rogues it would have been a very remarkable coincidence. William Hanmer and the Leeds brothers were neither better nor worse than their predecessors. The Earl supported the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade in the Lords and was regarded by his associates as a man of remarkable intelligence, sincerity and humanity. Like his forebears, Jonathan Leeds was a deeply religious man who lived simply and without ostentation and devoted his life to the affairs of the Darley Bank Company. But they were typical men of their age in their different spheres, and in order to appreciate why they did not realize the evil that they did nor see in the new Winterstoke a catastrophe of civilization, it is necessary to understand the prevailing mentality of the age. It is customary to say of men that they are known and judged by their works. So, when we come to assess the corporate achievement of a civilization we pass judgment upon its animating faith and philosophy. The horrors of Winterstoke do not indict any individual man or any particular class of men; they condemn as inadequate and false, as an affront to God, to nature and to man, the philosophy of industrial revolution.

  There is no neat contemporary exposition of this philosophy. We do not find it in the economic or social theories of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Bentham, James Mill or Joseph Hume; nor do we find it if we travel back to the writings of Hobbes or Descartes for, although all these writers influenced it, the faith and philosophy of a civilized society at any given period in its history consists of certain implicit assumptions. They are of immense importance as the starting-point of thought and action, but for this reason they are extremely difficult to analyse. They may change unpredictably, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. Social and economic circumstances and the interpretations of theologians, mystics, philosophers and artists are the perpetual ferment of such changes, being influenced by the assumptions of the day but at the same time modifying them in ways which are often very different from the intention of the philosopher concerned. When we look back to pass judgment upon the men of the first industrial age, the fact that we do so with a reasoning biased by the assumptions of our own age makes it the more difficult for us truly to read their minds. But seeing the misery, the havoc and the lasting harm which they wrought we can at least say with certainty that they were woefully misguided and wrong, and in that certainty, attempt to discover where their error lay.

  By contrasting the minds of the Norman Hugh Fitzwinter and Josiah Leeds I, we have already seen how the medieval conception of the natural world as revealing a divine order and law whose sanctions should govern human society was rejected. So far as human consciousness was concerned, this rejection consisted of the withdrawal of God from the world. For Josiah Leeds God was transcendent but no longer immanent. Josiah Leeds sincerely believed that by worship he could submit his soul to the guidance of the divine will on its troubled journey through the world and that in accordance with his conduct on that journey, divine justice would mete out reward or punishment hereafter. But that the world itself was a revelation of divine order and therefore itself one aspect of Godhead was a conception that never entered his head. Hence it became perfectly possible to reconcile such a profession of religious belief with the materialistic Cartesian view of the world as the product of mindless, mechanica
l forces where the only order is that imposed by the light of human reason. In this way, without any awareness of impiety, man usurped the office of God in the conduct of human society and an Age of Faith was succeeded by an Age of Reason. With human reason thus securely enthroned, its free exercise became the only natural law and the old medieval checks and restraints which had sought to control human appetite, pride and frailty were gradually swept away as infringing upon the sacred rights of individual freedom and self-interest. It was the enthronement of human reason and the policy of laissez-faire in commercial affairs that inspired the great era of technical invention which man in his arrogance chose to call the ‘conquest of nature’.

  By the time the era of steam power and canal transport had been reached, these fundamental assumptions upon which the revolution was based had become much too firmly entrenched in men’s minds to be disturbed by any catastrophic social consequences. The suffering and degradation to which they condemned humanity in their new town of Winterstoke in no way troubled the consciences of William Hanmer, Jonathan Leeds or their contemporaries. By piecing together convenient extracts from the work of contemporary philosophers and economists they were able to evolve theories which squared with their assumptions and which proved to their own satisfaction that such social conditions were not the result of any flaws in the social order, nor of any inhumanity or injustice on their part but were simply due to the operation of immutable economic laws. From Adam Smith they took the theory that for government to intervene in matters of trade could do nothing but harm because it interfered with ‘the obvious and simple system of natural liberty’ whereby unfettered individual enterprise could not fail to enrich society. From Burke they took the view that employer and employed were so dependent on each other that no free contract between them could fail to be other than just to both parties any more than the employer’s profit could fail to benefit his workmen. Conditions in Winterstoke and its overcrowded Poor House scarcely bore out this theory, but here the doctrines of Malthus came to the rescue. The reward of labour was fixed by unalterable law and any coercive attempt to interfere with that law would injure employer and workman alike. Moreover, since population inevitably tended to exceed the means of subsistence the reward of labour must necessarily always remain below the level of subsistence. Hence the consoling conclusion that poverty is an inescapable condition of man. Finally, they accepted from Ricardo the idea that profits and wages were determined inexorably, like commodity prices, by the laws of supply and demand.