Hepplestall's

by Harold Brighouse

Reuben was guiltless of personal malignancy. He had decided that the Bradshaws must not be favorites, that they must do as others did, which was a judgment, not a spite, and Reuben did not control the system, but was controlled by it. He, like the Bradshaws, must do as others did. He could, of course, have got out: his difference from them was that he could abjure cotton. But he did not do that, and so long as he stayed in, a competitor with other manufacturers, he was obliged, if he would survive commercially, to use the methods of the rest. They may or may not have been methods that revolted him by their barbarity, and it is probable that, even in that callous age, what of the true gentleman was left in him was, in fact, revolted. That is, at least, to be deduced from the completely isolating veil he hung between Dorothy and the factory. His house was the old home of the Hepplestalls, near the factory but not, like many manufacturers’ houses, adjacent to it. It was sufficiently far away for him, practically, to live two lives which did not meet. He was a manufacturer and he was the husband of Dorothy’ Hepplestall; in the factory one man and at home another, not lying at home about steam because there he never spoke of it, preserving her romantic illusions about his work by keeping her remote from it. She might have had her curiosities, but she loved Reuben, she consented at his will to be incurious and the habit remained. It might have remained even if love had faded, but their love was not to fade. And the county took it that if Dorothy Verners had married a manufacturer, the factory was not to be mentioned before her. In the presence of ladies they did not mention it to Reuben, though, in the bad times, when the poor-rate rose and half the weavers came upon the parish, Reuben was roasted to his face with indignant heat after the ladies had left the table.

He was neither of the best nor of the worst. He was not patriarchal like the Strutts and the Gregs who, while conforming to the System, qualified it with school-houses and swimming baths, nor did he go to the extreme of ordering his people into the cottages he built and compelling them to pay rent for a cottage whether they occupied it or not. He didn’t run shops, charging high prices, at which his people had to buy or where they had to take goods in part payment of wages. Such devices, though general, seemed to him petty and extraneous to the factory; but in the factory he was a keen economist and one of the results of the System was that the masters looked on wages not as paid to individuals but to families. That was so much the normal view that a weaver was not allowed to go on the parish unless he proved that his wife and children worked in the mills and that the whole family wage was inadequate for their support.

Phoebe had to go and, when he was old enough, that is to say at five, John also went. The legal age for apprentices was seven—they were workhouse children bound to the master till they were twenty-one—but John was a “free” laborer, so, until the Act of 1819, which made nine years and twelve working hours the minimum, John was “free” to work at five, to be a breadwinner, to add his magnificent contribution to the family wage which kept the Bradshaws from the workhouse.

The factory bell was the leit motif of his life, but the Bradshaws had a relic of their past which made them envied. They had a clock, and the clock told them when it was time to get up to go to the factory. Others, clockless, got up long before they needed and waited in the chill of early morning, at five o’clock, for the door to open. The idea of ringing the bell as a warning half an hour before working hours began had not occurred to any one then, and people rose in panic and went out, cutting short sleep shorter, stamping in snow (or, if snow is sentimental, is it ever particularly joyous to rise, with a long day’s work ahead, at five and earlier?), waiting for the doors to let them in to warmth. No one was ever late. The fines made it expensive to be late, and the knocker-up, the man who went round and for a penny or tuppence a week rattled wires at the end of a clothes-prop against your bedroom window till you opened the window and sang out to him—the knocker-up was a late Victorian luxury. In John’s day, there was only the factory bell, and one was inside the factory when it rang. The bell was the symbol of the system, irritating the weavers especially, as the power-loom increased in efficiency, and drove more and more of them to the factories. The spinners, indeed, had had the interregnum of the water-factory: it was not, for them, a straight plunge into the tyranny of the system. The old hand-weaver, whose engine was his arms, began and stopped work at will, which is not to say that he was a lazy fellow, but is to say that he had time to grow potatoes in a garden, to take a share in country sports and, on the whole, to lead a reasonable life: and his wife had the art and the time to cook food for him. When she worked in the factory, she had no time to cook, and there was nothing to cook, either, and if she had worked from childhood, she had never learned how to cook, and there was no need. They lived on bread and cheese, with precious little cheese. They rarely lived to see forty.

John, son of Reuben (though he did not know that), came to the factory at five in the morning and left it, at earliest, at seven or eight at night, being the while in a temperature of 75 to 85. As to meal-times, why, adults got their half hour or so for breakfast and their hour for dinner and the machinery was stopped so that was just the time for the children to nip under and over it, snatching their food while they cleaned a machine from dust and flue. Bad for the lungs, perhaps, but the work was so light and easy. John, who was small when he was five, crawled under the machines picking up cotton waste.

There was a school of manufacturers who held, apparently without hypocrisy, that this was a charming way to educate an infant into habits of industry: a sort of work in play, with the cotton waste substituted for a ball and the factory for the nursery. And they called the work light and easy.

John was promoted to be a piecer—he pieced together threads broken in the spinning machines, and, of course, the machine as a whole didn’t stop while he did it, and it was really rather skilled work, done very rapidly with a few exquisitely skilled movements: and that was hardly work at all, it was more amusement than toil. Only one Fielden, an employer who, many years later, tried the experiment for himself, found that in following the to-and-fro movements of a spinning machine for twelve hours, he walked no less than twenty miles! Fielden was a reformer; he didn’t call this light and easy work for a child, but others did.

It would happen that—one knows how play tires a child—John would feel sleepy towards evening. He didn’t go to sleep on a working machine, or he would have died, and John did not die that way: he didn’t go to sleep at all. He was beaten into wakefulness. Peter often beat him into wakefulness, and Peter did it not because he was cruel to John but because he was kind. If Peter had not beaten him lightly, other overseers would have beaten him heavily, not with a ferule, but with a billy-roller, which is a heavy iron stick. John also beat himself and pinched himself and bit his tongue to keep awake. As the evening wore on it became almost impossible to keep awake on any terms: sometimes, they sang. Song is the expression of gladness, but that was not why they sang. And they sang—hymns. It would have been most improper to sing profane songs in a factory.

As to John’s home life, he went to bed: and if it hadn’t been for Phoebe or Peter who carried him, he would often not have reached bed. He would have gone to sleep in the road, and because he had never known any other life than this, it was reasonable in him to suppose that the life he led, if not right, was inevitable.

He did not suppose it for long. You can spring surprises on human nature, you can de-humanize it for a time, but if you put faith in the permanent enslavement of men and women, you shall find yourself mistaken. Even while John was passing from a wretched childhood to a wretched adolescence, the reaction was preparing, and mutely, hardly consciously at all, he was questioning if the things that were, were necessarily the things that had to be. There was the death of Peter, in the factory, stopping to live as a machine stops functioning because it is worn out, and there was the drop in their family wages, though John was earning man’s pay then. And there was the human stir in the world, the efforts of workers to combine for better conditions, for Trade Unions, for Reformed Parliaments, and the efforts of the ruling classes, qualified by the liberalism of a Peel or the insurgency of a Cobbett, to repress. There were riots, machine-breaking, factory-burning, Peterloo, the end of a great war, peace and disbanded soldiery, people who starved and a panic-stricken Home Secretary who thought there was a revolution.