Shining Threads (65 page)

January 1862 came in on a wild gale of snow and wind which scarcely abated for three days leaving snow drifts of six feet and more through towns and villages and turning the Pennine moorland
into an incredibly hostile stretch of unmarred beauty.

Starvation began to stare into the faces of those who had, over the last few years, come to believe that they were at least adequately provided for. Out of work and having spent what savings
they had, those operatives who had been employed as spinners and weavers and in trades allied to cotton pawned their furniture, their Sunday clothes, since they could be done without, and even
their bedding in order to feed themselves. By now the shortage of cotton was becoming desperate for the industry, and the
Illustrated London News
printed headlines and pictures of the plight
of the Lancashire cotton towns and the great suffering of the people. Men and women were prepared to do anything rather than go on relief. One man advertised that he would shave other men, four for
a halfpenny. Another took to ‘chair-bottoming’ and many sold newspapers, religious tracts or back numbers of penny periodicals. Groups of young girls could be seen gathered on street
corners singing, some with musical instruments. They appeared shamefaced, sad and awkward, but their efforts could not last and by the end of April, just a year since the American Civil War had
begun, most were thrown entirely upon the Guardian and Relief Committees.

Scenes which had once been commonplace in Crossfold and which were thought to have gone forever, scenes going back to the days when the power loom took over from the domestic hand loom, throwing
thousands of men from their ancient profession, returned and multiplied. Sallow-faced, half-naked women lounged about in doorways listlessly watching sickly children in half-hearted play, the two
shillings per head or less each family was allowed from relief failing completely to keep them in anything but the poorest of health. They lived on bread, oatmeal and potatoes and had it not been
for the tireless work of Mrs Tessa Greenwood and her equally tireless helper, Miss Beale, it was doubtful, so it was said, that they would get through this crisis.

‘We have to have some kind of organisation, Annie, and the only way to achieve it, I think, is for you to devote your time to setting up a committee to make sure that those who are in need
get at least one decent meal a day. Our own operatives are still able to manage, even on two-thirds of their usual income though how long that will last remains to be seen. They say there are a
quarter of a million unemployed, and the cotton which is coming from India is of a poor quality – mixed with an even poorer! They have not the machines to clean away the filth which it
contains. Will tells me they are forming a cotton company in Manchester with the intention of raising a million pounds to buy such machinery and send it out there but whether anything will come of
it is pure speculation. And even then the price will be exorbitant. They say in Manchester it will be no more than a stopgap measure until the war in America is over but in the meanwhile we must do
what we can to alleviate the hardships of those who have depended on us. D’you know, when I was visiting some spinners who were thrown out by the Moorhouse mill there was a woman living in
the most appalling conditions in one of those awful courts at the back of Jagger Lane. Everything in the house had been sold except the bed and one cooking pot. Her five children were in the last
stages of malnutrition and her husband was in gaol. He had obtained some provisions for them on credit, no more than four and elevenpence halfpenny but when he was unable to pay the debt they took
him away . . .’

‘An’ tha’ got ’im out?’

‘Oh, yes, and provided them with bedding, clothing, coal, flour, I believe, and other items of food to see them through until you could get round to them. Here is their name and
address.’

‘An, what of Chapman mills? ’Ow much longer can tha’ keep on four days?’

‘I bought up a cargo of cotton last week through an agent in Liverpool. It had got by the blockade out of New Orleans, don’t ask me how for they say that only two out of six ships
get through. The Union navy has a blockading squadron stationed off each port to prevent ships taking cotton out of the South and returning with essential supplies. Last year we imported 1,261
million pounds of cotton and this year it has fallen to less than half. Eighty per cent of it was from America, Annie, and now we shall be forced to accept the Indian, despite its poor
quality.’

The two friends were sitting in Tessa’s office, both gazing out on to the strange and empty silence of the Chapmanstown mill yard. It was Friday and last night the machines and engines had
been turned off and the boilers allowed to go out. They would not be switched on again until the bales of raw cotton Tessa had purchased arrived at the Chapman warehouses. Only a fifth of those
employed in the cotton industry were fully employed, the rest were on short time or with no work at all, and the exact figures were stamped indelibly in the mind of Tessa Greenwood. Once she had
been concerned with nothing more complicated than the number of shots it took to bring down fifty birds on the Squire’s moor, with how many gowns she should order for the season’s hunt
balls and how many sovereigns Drew gambled away in one evening, none of which mattered in the least.

Annie seemed to find nothing unusual in the conversation and it was evident that this different aspect of Tessa Greenwood was nothing new to her. Tessa had been chairman of the board of
directors of the Chapman mills for two years now, perhaps the most difficult in the history of the company since it was begun so long ago by her husband’s great-grandfather. In the last year
she had seen so many businesses falter and fall, but not once had she turned her back on her own to return to the pleasures her husband seemingly enjoyed without her.

‘I called on Mrs Poynton yesterday,’ Annie said, sipping her coffee, her straight back an inch from the back of the chair on which she sat, unlike Tessa who lounged carelessly with
the wide skirts of her muslin gown, a lovely shade of soft rose, in a circle about her feet. She wore no bonnet and her hair was piled haphazardly into an untidy coil on the top of her head. She
had tied it up herself with a wide velvet ribbon in the same colour as her dress that morning, ignoring Emma’s pleas to be allowed to arrange it for her.

‘I’ve no time, Emma, and no, I cannot stop to choose a bonnet. I must be in Crossfold by nine to meet Mr Bradley and then Miss Beale and I are to inspect that old mill in Hardacre
Street to see if it is suitable for a school and a kitchen for . . . Stop fussing, Emma. No, I can’t be bothered with a parasol. If the sun comes out I shall ask Thomas to put up the hood on
the carriage. Oh, and Emma . . .’

Her voice dropped and Emma leaned forward to hear what her mistress was saying. ‘Don’t . . . don’t disturb the master. He is still sleeping and . . . well, there is no need to
wake him so early.’

Emma nodded respectfully, then turned to look in the direction of the closed door of the dressing-room where Mr Drew slept on most nights now. You could hear him snoring, even through the solid
wood of the door. They were the snores of a man who had come home in the early hours of the morning so drunk he really should not have been in charge of that fancy cabriolet he drove. Right across
the lawn, Percy said he had ploughed, and through Miss Laurel’s roses, leaving a trail of destruction six feet wide and singing so loudly the whole household, including the children in the
nursery, had been awakened. Laughing at nothing, he’d been, his horse and vehicle left to droop at the front step and Mr Briggs and Hibberson compelled to carry him up to his bed whilst he
begged them to join in some bawdy song he and his wild friends had heard at a music hall in Manchester. He’d sleep the best part of the day, coming down to the small back parlour to sprawl
before the fire, avoiding Miss Laurel and her callers in the drawing-room, his lovely blue eyes narrowed to increasingly puffy slits, his mouth hard and ill-humoured, his temper short and
unpredictable and, if Miss Tessa was not there, his voice hoarse and his words offensively rude.

Where had he gone, Emma mused as she watched her mistress climb into her carriage, that handsome, good-natured, recklessly laughing young man they had once known? Him and his brother, both of
them up to all kinds of pranks but with good hearts and no malice in them, merry as larks providing no one tried to harness them. And now one was dead and the other killing himself, they said, in
his search for something even his wife couldn’t seem to provide. All his time was spent riding to hounds, shooting grouse and pheasant, drinking brandy and claret until he could hardly see to
play cards in the often-dubious company he and his friends kept.

And Miss Tessa toiling all the hours God sent in an effort to keep not only her own mills working and her own operatives from the poor house, but taking in the down-and-outs from the whole of
Lancashire, it was rumoured. Her and that Annie Beale.

‘Oh, and what was the outcome?’ Tessa questioned Annie. ‘Will she sit on our committee?’

‘Aye, an’ that Mrs Bayly an’ all. They’ve promised ter speak to as many ladies as they can about the soup kitchen an’ Mrs Bayly knows a Miss Gaunt as she
reckoned’d teach school fer nowt. Not just childer but any man or woman as wants ter learn. I’ve bin round most o’t manufacturers an’ though some were ready ter show
me’t door, I managed ter persuade ’em ter remit rents on’t workers’ cottages. I told ’em if you could do it so could they. Mrs Poynton says as ’ow she knows
t’parson at parish church an’ all them as goes ter’t Sunday school, an’ believe me it’ll be every bairn in Crossfold an’ Chapmanstown by’t time I’ve
done wi’ em, will be given petticoats an’ shirts, blankets an’ such fer their mams, an’ a bit o’ brass ’as bin set aside fer the mendin’ of boots.
An’ Doctor Salter ses as ’ow ’e’ll give ’is services free to them what needs ’em.’

‘Heavens, Annie, you have been busy.’

‘I’ve nowt else ter do wi’ me time.’

‘No.’ Tessa put a compassionate hand on her friend’s arm, then smiled when it was snatched away from her. Annie would never change. As long as she had breath in her body she
would use it to help anyone she thought to be in need of it. Many of the ladies of the town moved amongst the destitute cotton workers helping those they called the ‘deserving poor’,
those they considered worthy of assistance by the measure of the respectful gratitude they displayed.

But there were others in utter poverty who were proud, who would not bow their heads for charity and they showed these same ladies the door saying they wanted no busybodies interfering in their
household arrangements. And there were others, in order to get more than their entitlement of relief, who included children recently dead in their list of the needy, or who ‘borrowed’
children to make up their family numbers and so ‘diddled’ another two shillings per head for each one. There were husbands who were found drunk in bed and starving children in the
gutter. Annie saw them all, helped them all, sorted them into some kind of order and intended keeping them there, choose how, until the mills were opened again and woe betide
any
who fell by
the wayside when she was in charge!

But they were indebted to her and to Mrs Greenwood as in increasing numbers young men and women, youths, adults who had never been to school in their lives, unemployed hands with time hanging
heavy, were encouraged to attend the Working Men’s Institutes. There they were taught reading, writing and simple arithmetic for they needed an occupation of some sort to fill their empty
days.

Mr Will Broadbent, the largest stockholder in his own mill and therefore the worst hit, was struggling to keep open for a couple of days a week. On the days when the mill was closed, he used the
silent and empty rooms to hold classes for his women operatives in sewing and the cooking of cheap and nourishing dishes, and an industrial class for his men in tailoring, boot-making and similar
crafts, all of which would come in useful when the present crisis was over and they had returned to their spinning mules.

But in other parts of Lancashire out-of-work millworkers fared a great deal worse. There was widespread bitterness over the ‘Labour Test’ where the poor who applied for relief had to
show their willingness to work. The cotton operatives disliked being classed as ordinary paupers by the Guardians and felt that more lenient rules should govern the granting of relief to decent
workmen who were only temporarily unemployed through no fault of their own. They objected to the manner in which the so-called Labour Test was enforced. Men who were indoor workers, badly clothed
and close to starvation, were sent out in that first bitter winter on jobs such as stone-breaking, a task which was not only cruel, they said, but often fatal. A man who had worked in a cotton mill
required delicacy of touch, and his hands were singularly soft from working in high temperatures and by continual contact with oil and cotton-wool. The stone hammer blistered his flesh and the
oakum many were compelled to ‘pick’ galled his fingers. Flesh and fingers which would soon, please God and the good sense of the people of America, be back at work in the spinning mills
and the weaving sheds of Lancashire.

Discussion of the Public Works Bill began in quarters where the relief of the increasingly large numbers of the poor was of particular concern. The hot weather of that summer brought swarms of
flies and rats into the alleyways and back streets which meandered through the old part of Crossfold. The cotton famine had caused whole families to move in with another in the same circumstances
in order to save rent and, in the previous winter, economise on fuel. Windows had been boarded up and doors padded to retain what little heat there was. Bodies lay close together for warmth and
even when the weather became kinder as spring and summer approached, they still squeezed together since they had no chance to do otherwise. Cleaning materials were low on their list of priorities
as women watched their children starve and the filth, the mud and raw sewage which seeped through the uneven ground, the overflowing middens and foul pools of dung and rotting garbage became one
huge, stinking cesspit. It was a breeding ground for the fevers, typhus, typhoid, scarletina and smallpox which the swarming flies and rats carried assiduously from one house to the next, from one
street to the next, from one town to the next.