THE LABEL-LICKING LIFE
Leek, however, is a surprise to most travellers from the south; being a forerunner, a preliminary specimen in Staffordshire, of the typical Lancashire manufacturing town. Cobbles and setts and clogs, with factories and tall chimney-stacks, are its chiefest features, and the spinning of silk thread its principal business. The public in general know nothing of Leek, but it was discovered not many months ago by a Radical newspaper on the look-out for a sensation. It may be taken as a certain, sure thing that when a newspaper in these times wants a sensation, it is bound to have it, and this is how it was served up:
THE LABEL-LICKERS
How the Child Workers in
Factories Earn a
Pittance
MACHINES TOO SLOW
But why not use the thing for all it was alliteratively worth, “The Little Label Lickers of Leek.”
It was not much of a sensation, after all: resolving itself simply into the facts that among the hundreds of girls employed in the silk-thread factories there are many whose business is to pack and label the reels. They are paid a wage that is, it is true, almost incredibly small: one “full-timer” earning, by this account, only 2s. 9d. in five days, but others up to 10s. Among them there are many who refuse to use the mechanical dampers ready to hand, preferring, for sake of extra speed, to lick the labels. This is done with a speed bewildering to any one who has not himself licked and stuck labels for a living. One girl boxed-up twenty-five gross of reels and licked and stuck a like number of labels in a working day of nine hours and a half. It will be observed that no one was obliged to deal with the labels in this way, and that in some factories the use of a damper was even compulsory; but look at the “scare” headlines to be got!
LEEK.
In common with all other towns that witnessed the march of the Highlanders, and their subsequent retreat, in 1715, Leek long cherished memories of that time. It was an era from which everything else was dated. It was also an era in which the keeping of diaries was the resort of contemplative people, whose observations, entertaining in themselves, are additionally amusing by reason of the diarists’ quaint notions of grammar and spelling. Thus, Squire Mountford, of “the Grange,” is found remarking upon Prince Charlie’s forces as composed of “some very fine men and good horses, but the greater part was such poor, shabby, lowsy, deminutive creatures as never seen in England—one half of ’em without breches; some rid without sadles and halters ... they were expecting the duck’s army would be with them.” By “the duck” we are to understand the Duke of Cumberland, who, sure enough, was with them, later on.
Mountford’s remark as to the Highlanders being without breeches is especially amusing. He had obviously never before seen, or heard of, kilts, and appears to think they went without breeches because they were too poor to afford them. He was not alone in this view of the “petticoat men,” as the people styled them.