Luddite Spring: 19 - Deadly Machines
...As the machines went faster, the workers became more frenetic. They had to dodge bone-crushing cogs, arm breaking sleys, and shuttles flying at almost sightless speed from one end of the sley to the other and back in hypnotic rhythm, too fast for tired eyes in dim surroundings to follow...
Ronnie Bray continues his novel based on the rebellion of mill workers in he early days of the industrial revolution.
Outcote Mill had a wooden water wheel forty-five feet in diameter and six feet wide that straddled the narrow end of the mill goit, whose water was diverted from the River Holme, a well supplied waterway that had attracted people to settle on its banks for more years than anyone could remember.
For those that worked in the mill, the wheel was the biggest cause of trouble they had ever known. Primarily because it drove the mill’s machinery at a pace they didn’t imagined possible. The massive wheel drove the nightmares of their lives because they had to go flat out to keep up with its frantic rush and attend their machines without getting into mullocks.
As the machines went faster, the workers became more frenetic. They had to dodge bone-crushing cogs, arm breaking sleys, and shuttles flying at almost sightless speed from one end of the sley to the other and back in hypnotic rhythm, too fast for tired eyes in dim surroundings to follow. When a shuttle caught its conical iron nose on a slack strand of warp as it flew across, it was redirected and left the loom at murderous speed rendering it liable to penetrate the skull of any unfortunate that happened to be in its trajectory. Injuries, minor, serious, and fatal were commonplace. But, what was a calamity for the injured was only a minor irritation to Staithes.
When in their proper courses, the speed at which shuttles shot back and forth used up their coils of weft in short time. The loom was then stopped so that new cops of weft could be put into the empty shuttle, and the whole clamour and clatter begun again with the least amount of stoppage time possible.
One weaver said it was like being chased by the Devil himself, and that he had never known peace from the day he walked in to Staithes’ mill. Most mill hands felt the same way. Those that did not were said to live in Faeryland.
Going into the weaving shed when the looms were up and running, was to be overwhelmed by the slam and clack of shuttles and leather-faced hickory picking sticks that propel shuttles from one end of the sley to the other, and then back again a hundred times a minute with resounding thwacks. When a hundred and more looms are doing the same the noise is staggering. It has to be experienced. It cannot be imagined or described.
The reek of machine oil, grease, wetness, and wool oils saturate the hot air making breathing difficult and unpleasant. The hammering commotion of angry sounding machinery assails from every side, stupefying visitors until their ears have become acclimated. Workers sweat uncomfortably in the humidity and dim light of the overcrowded weaving shed.
Talking is forbidden, lest workers waste the master’s time gossiping or use stolen time to plot against them. What communication is necessary and permitted is executed silently, because workers in the weaving sheds are sooner or later deafened by the frightful roar of machinery. Questions and instructions are mouthed. By necessity, weavers become adept at lip reading. Other parts of the mill are noisy, although none is as loud as the weaving sheds. All textile machines are voracious. Each machine has a common fare in addition to the raw materials from which cloth is made, which is the employees that are set to serve them.
Some machines do quite literally consume workers. This poem describes an incident all too common in the case of children, some as young as three, sent to clean beneath the huge rapidly rotating drum set with teasels or steel teeth to straighten fibres to make them lie all the same way ready for spinning into yarn. The giant revolving bobbin is called a ‘swift,’ because of the extremely high speed at which it runs.
Young children crawl underneath it to retrieve fibres and dust gathered beneath it while the machine is operating. Many have been injured, some killed by becoming caught on the unforgiving teeth of the swift when they are torn to shreds in seconds with barely time to scream. A poem in the Broad Yorkshire Dialect tells of one such incident.
Yon Machine ‘As Et Me Bruther
Yon machine ‘as et me bruther
‘E were nobbut fahve years old.
‘E had to crawl beneath and cleyn
And do wot ‘e was told.
Yon spinnin’ creytur tore ‘is back
And pulled ‘im wi’ its teyth
Inter its belly just as soon
As he’d crawled underneyth.
It took a whahl to stop yon swift
‘Acooars it runned so ‘igh
An’ when it stood, there wer ‘is blud,
‘Is body noweear nigh.
Another babby sacrifahced
To Moloch’s greedy maw.
Another nameless child to add
To them as went afooare.
Nubdy said ‘sorry’ for ‘is loss
‘Is wages was denied.
Just one more babby sprung ter lahfe
An’ jest as quickly died.
