Bessbrook and Its Linen Mills: A Short Narrative of a Model Temperance Town

by J. Ewing Ritchie

A turn in the road, and we are at Bessbrook Mills. As we descend we see the works in all their extent, and the rising slope beyond, on which is planted the town in which the workmen live. “What an admirable situation!” you exclaim; and truly you are right. No poisonous exhalations load the air; all seems cheerful and healthy. Here you see a picture of factory life without factory abominations. No policeman is required to keep order, for you see no public-house to create disorder. The head of the place is a teetotaller. Most of the leading men in the concern are the same. There is no law to compel the workpeople to be such, but most of them are so, and great is the comfort of the wives and families in consequence, as most people are fully aware of the fact that the worst thing a working-man can do with his money is to spend it in the gin-palace or the public-house.

What immediately strikes the stranger is the substantial and comfortable appearance of the mill and its surroundings. At Bessbrook each house consists of from three to five rooms, according to the size of the family occupying it. Every arrangement necessary to promote cleanliness and health is resorted to. As you pass up, some of the first buildings you come to are the schoolrooms, which are for girls and boys, and for lads in the evening who are engaged during the day. The infant-school attached is the most interesting feature; but you will be pleased with the clean appearance of the boys and girls—with their intelligence and readiness to learn. The staff of masters and mistresses employed is evidently superior. This school is on the Irish national system, that is, it is undenominational, and people need but examine the results of these schools to prove the real value of unsectarian education bringing all classes together, and trusting to the Sabbath schools for religious instruction. Every householder has to send his children there, or whether he sends them or not he is charged a penny for the schooling of each child. £100 is subscribed annually, I believe, by the mills, and there is, besides, a Government grant. The playground attached to the school is an extensive one, and the view from it very fine.

A few doors further on, and we come to the Dispensary. There are ills to which all flesh is heir, and to remove which the services of a medical man are required. In Ireland the county is divided into districts, and the services of a medical man are given gratuitously; but this is pauperism, and the hands at Bessbrook are not paupers. All here are expected to subscribe to a medical club, and the Firm supplement the subscription with a handsome one of their own.

Thus a doctor is secured, who comes to his Dispensary on certain days of the week, and who also, of course, visits the serious cases in their own homes.

Further on, we come to a building which we ascertain to be the Temperance Hotel. This is the club and newsroom of the place. In the winter-time it is highly popular. Many Irish papers and a few English ones are taken in, and, I may add, most diligently perused. Here also are Punch and Zozimus, or the Dublin Punch. There also chess and draughts are played, and smoking is permitted. Boys are here indulging in games, while the advanced politician has his favourite organ—Conservative or Liberal; and those who care for neither, discuss matters connected with the neighbourhood, and the state of affairs at home. I may add, close to the mill itself is a large hall in which refreshments are provided at a cheap rate for those who come from a distance.

A little further on, and we come to a square, around which are workmen’s houses, some of them really most eligible habitations, with a few shops at the end nearest us. One of them is a co-operative store; another is a milliner’s shop, in which the latest fashions are as much sought after as in London; and then there is a butcher’s shop, a baker’s, a general shop, and a post-office. At right angles to the right of the principal street are two or three more streets, which also contain a shop or two; so that the good people at work here, if they have money to spare, can find little difficulty in parting with it. A farm of 300 acres, belonging to the Firm, must also be noted, by means of which that real luxury, pure milk—a thing unknown in our great metropolis—is placed within the reach of all. There are allotments in which the householders work on a summer’s evening, and at one end of the town are some better classes of houses, in which the gentlemen connected with the works or the estate—which belongs to the same proprietor—reside; just below these spreads out a picturesque sheet of water, which feeds the mill, and is here useful as well as ornamental. From thence the ground rises, and you get a good view of the surrounding hills. On one elevation, just before you enter the town, there is the Friends’ Meeting-house, and a comfortable villa in which Mr. Richardson resides when he visits the place. Indeed, though he lives some fourteen miles off, he is not long absent from Bessbrook. He and his wife are perfectly cognisant of its wants, material and spiritual, and are ready to relieve them. They feel that it is a serious thing to have such a community under their care, they realise all the solemn responsibility of such a charge. Mr. Richardson, jun., who lives near the works, entertains similar ideas, and conducts the Sabbath-school—a very flourishing one, held in the schoolroom on a Sunday afternoon. A little way out of the town you may see, near one another, three very substantial-looking buildings—one is a Roman Catholic, one is a Presbyterian, and another is an Episcopalian place of worship. Let me add, that all these seem well attended, and that in Bessbrook there is peace and harmony; the rival sects rarely interfere with each other, because the demon of strong drink inflames no root of bitterness, and fans no religious animosities into a fever heat.

I think I have now given an account of all the institutions of the place, with one exception—that of the Methodists, who meet in a temporary little hall, originally a photographic establishment. They are an infant cause as yet, but Mr. Richardson has recently granted a site for a place of worship for their accommodation. Such, then, are the institutions of Bessbrook. Let me repeat what they are—the school, the church, the dispensary, the shop, the reading-room, the mill. Let me add what they are not—the pawnbroker’s, the leaving-shop, the ragged-school, the petty lodging-house to which tramps resort in all our large towns, the public-house, and consequent police-station. Does it now dawn on you, intelligent reader, why, in the opinion of many, Bessbrook is deemed worthy to be called a model town?

Let me now speak of its origin. The concern has been in active operation about a quarter of a century. An estate of six thousand acres belonging to an Irish nobleman was in the market, and it was purchased by Mr. John G. Richardson, a wealthy, intelligent, and public-spirited member of the Society of Friends, partly with a view, of course, to the productive use of his capital, and partly to give the operative class a chance of living and working under conditions favourable, and not, as is too generally the case, opposed, to their physical and moral welfare. On the estate, on a site admirably adapted for the purpose, Bessbrook is situated. There is a beautiful blue granite found in one part of the estate, equal if not superior to that of Aberdeen as regards appearance and quality, which is gradually being introduced into England, where it needs but to be seen to be appreciated. It is now being used in the Manchester new Town Hall, and as it is better known we may expect to find it more largely in demand there. As at the mill, the same law holds good, that no public-house is to be tolerated. As a natural consequence, as I have already intimated, the police are unknown. All over the rest of Ireland you see them—wonderfully fine fellows, equal to any Prussians—the flower of the country—fully armed and ever active, as they may well be, for in Ireland there is little sympathy between the rulers and the ruled; even on the hills around Bessbrook the peasants illuminated when they heard of French successes, as if France was to come and fight on their behalf. There are public-houses around, and they bring with them the usual curses incident to such institutions among a people so excitable and passionate as the Irish. In Bessbrook, and in one or two other districts, the public-house is forbidden, and consequently the step of the policeman is never there heard. In its peaceful streets his martial figure is unknown. The operative has no fines to pay for being drunk and disorderly, and has no occasion to pawn his Sunday clothes to procure a meal for his starving family. Teetotallers flourish. There is a Band of Hope with nearly nine hundred members, a Temperance Society, and a flourishing society of Good Templars as well; and occasionally lecturers come there from the head-quarters in Dublin; but the place itself teaches a lesson better than any of them, inasmuch as Thomas Carlyle writes, “Silent divine action is better than any amount of speech or song,” and in this point of view the example of Bessbrook cannot be too much dwelt upon or too widely proclaimed. As long as the workman drinks it is in vain that you try to elevate him. I am not speaking of drinking to excess. As wages are, the workman who is but a moderate drinker wastes money and time which, if better employed, would enable him to do better for his family and himself. At Bessbrook this is clearly felt; the men and women who come there have no desire to leave it—the mild despotism of a paternal government suits them. From the villages all round, even from as far as Newry, people come to work at the mills. Tuesday is the day when fresh hands are taken on, and great is the joy when an application receives an affirmative reply. The crowd round the door is the best possible test of the popularity of the place: you get a better idea of its magnitude when I tell you that it employs upwards of 4,000 hands, and that it pays away in wages as much as £50,000 a year. I have said there is little of that troublesome discontent which seems chronic in Ireland in and around Bessbrook. I might say more—I might testify to the existence and skill of the Volunteer Brass Band, which performs on public occasions, and whose services are in request even beyond Bessbrook itself. One great characteristic of the place is the sober and moral air of the people. In dense communities outside, you hear of scandals which are rare at Bessbrook; the superior education given, the absence of intoxicating liquor, have of course much to do with this. But other agencies are at work. I refer in the first place to the family system initiated, or at any rate carried out here; the rule is to take on a whole family at a time. Here you have no young girls and lads at the most dangerous periods of their lives freed from parental control, and thrown uncared-for on the world. Where they are, we know too well what follows. Our great towns by night testify to the evils, moral and social, resulting from such a state of things. At Bessbrook the family is placed in one or other of the houses built for the operatives, and work is found for all. If the father cannot work in the mill, he is set to mend the roads, to work on the farm or at the quarries, to be a waggoner, or to make himself generally useful: and the services of such people are in request, as all the repairs of the mill-gear are done by workmen on the spot. There is no occasion to go out of the settlement for artificers of any kind. All the machinery of the place is set in motion by six engines consuming annually 10,000 tons of coal, which has all to be brought from Newry, and a water-turbine representing in all many hundred horse-power. It is clear, then, that paterfamilias will find plenty to do, and it is equally clear that the family living on temperance principles will be more decent, orderly, and comfortable than if the head of it frequented the public-house. I must say that as regards personal appearance, the Bessbrook mill-hand may challenge a comparison with any other mill-hands of a similar class. Some of the work I should fancy is not of the healthiest, at any rate there was a heat in some of the rooms, and a dusty condition of the atmosphere in others, not very desirable, but the hands looked well nevertheless; and on a Sunday it is scarcely necessary to observe that they are got up in a style regardless of expense.

Another cause of the good condition of the place may be found in the reward given under certain conditions to the deserving and to the saving—habits induced by the establishment of a bank, depositors in which receive interest at the rate of five per cent. That the men appreciate the advantage of such an institution is clear, when I state that some of them are depositors to the extent of £300 or £400.

After all, that which mainly distinguishes Bessbrook from other places of the same kind, are the religious agencies constantly brought to bear. Mr. Richardson himself is, as is well known, a member of the Society of Friends, and he and his lady—who possess, I may be allowed to state, many admirable qualifications for such work—devote much of their time to the promotion amongst all of the Christian life: but all are free to worship as conscience dictates; Quakerism has no monopoly of the place; Roman Catholics and Protestants abound, and the result is, every operative, with his family, makes a point of attending some place of worship, and on a Sunday all the churches and chapels in the district are well filled. You don’t see at Bessbrook what you may often see elsewhere—the intelligent and independent operative lounging about on a Sunday morning, ragged, unshaven, unwashed, a short pipe in his mouth, the penny radical newspaper in his pocket, an untaxed and ill-bred cur at his heels, waiting for the public to open and supply him with his beloved and pernicious beer. Sunday is a busy day at Bessbrook. At an early hour the Roman Catholics may be seen going to mass, and then, as the day wears on, the general public are visible marching to one place of worship or another. Few, very few, stop away. All the boys and the men are at a place of worship—if the mothers, and the infirm and the sick, have to stop at home. I don’t imagine they have got the millennium at Bessbrook, but I feel justified in saying that there people live in charity with each other, who, in other parts of Ireland, would be at work cracking each others’ skulls. How is this? I reply, the secret is to be found in the temperance character of the place. People discuss without the stimulating influence of the national drink, and the result is they never come to blows. The nearest public-house, outside the estate, is called Sebastopol, on account of the fighting of which it is too often the centre.