Tied up in bundles of a dozen, they are given to women, who do the ornamental work on the back of the gloves. Some of these women work on the premises, and others at home. Most of the tambouring, which is very popular, is done in cottage homes. Entering one of these cottages, you may see a woman rocking a cradle with one foot, and giving an occasional glance at the dinner cooking on the fire, while she bends over a frame on which the gloves are stretched, and with a crochet-hook, and apparently little more attention than a knitter gives to her stocking, she quickly adds those three times three rows of silk-work up what will be the back of the gloves. Carrying back the gloves to the factory, she will receive ninepence a dozen for her work.
The gloves are next given out to other women, who also work at home, to be stitched—that is, to have the fingers completed and the thumbs put in. This is now nearly all done by a recently invented and cleverly adapted sewing-machine, the needle of which comes down on the tip of an upright iron finger. Gloves are not all stitched in the immediate neighbourhood of the factories, but are often sent long distances into remote country villages, where, work being scarce, labour is cheap. And to facilitate this, a class of middle men (or women) has grown up—people who come in from the country to the factories, and take away a hundred or a hundred and fifty dozen a week, which they distribute among the women of the village in which they live, collect again when finished, and bring back to the factory. These putters-out or bagmen are paid the usual price, some half-crown a dozen for the stitching, and make their own bargain with the actual workers. They are generally supposed to make a profit of about threepence a dozen; but, as a matter of fact, being shopkeepers, they commonly make two profits—one on the gloves, and another on the goods the sewers purchase at their shops. These people have a somewhat difficult part to play, as they stand between two fires; but they are a most useful class, and carry work and its rewards into many villages where, but for them, they would never come. They have done much to stay the exodus of the population from this part of the agricultural districts, enabling parents to keep their young people, and especially their young women, at home, instead of sending them to the great towns to seek for employment.
Having come back from the stitchers, the gloves are sent out once more. If they are heavy winter gloves, they are sent out to be lined with warm soft cotton material. If they are lighter goods, they are at once despatched to be welted—that is, to have the binding put round the top and the opening at the wrist. The buttons or clasps, as the case may be, are next added; that done, they come back to the factory for the last time, and pass the final examination.
They have still a rough, tumbled, unfinished look, which would prove anything but tempting to a purchaser. They are now forwarded to the laying-out room, where they are stretched with ordinary glove-stretchers, and then put on heated steel hands, which take out all the creases and improve their appearance. Nothing now remains but to assort them, to put them up in neat bundles according to size, to pack them in boxes, and to send them to market.
The special gloves that we have been following through all their stages are those which are known in the trade as ‘grain’ goods, and are sold to the public under the name of dogskin, Cape, and other names, each name indicating some peculiarity in the quality and finish of the leather. Many other kinds of gloves are made in the district, such as calf and buck and doe skin; the calf gloves are made from English calf-skins, and the buck and doe from English lambskins. There is also a large manufacture of fabric gloves—in other words, of gloves made of cotton, woollen, silk, or merino material. Real kid, however, is nowhere made in this district. The processes through which leather gloves of every kind pass are very much the same as those described above, and the manufacture of fabric gloves differs only in the comparative fewness of its stages, beginning with the process of punching the material into the required shape. After that, its course is undistinguishable from that of the manufacture of leather gloves.
There are altogether about five-and-twenty factories in the district, ranging from one which claims to be the largest glove factory in the world, and is capable of turning out forty thousand pairs per week, to some which produce only from five hundred to a thousand pairs in the same time. These factories give employment to nearly ten thousand persons, five-sixths of whom are women. Only about a quarter of the employees work in the factories; the rest take the work home, and in many cases do it in time which would otherwise be wasted. By thus finding employment for the wives and daughters of an immense number of agricultural labourers—an employment which in no way interferes with their domestic duties—the gloving brings a large amount of comfort into the homes of the peasantry of the west, and alleviates a lot which would under other circumstances be hard and hopeless in the extreme.
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XIX.
It was the very next day when the governor’s wife came to call. In any case, Lady Modyford would have had to call on Marian; for etiquette demands, from the head of the colony at least, a strict disregard for distinctions of cuticle, real or imaginary. But Nora Dupuy had seen Lady Modyford that very morning, and had told her all the absurd story of the Hawthorns’ social disqualifications. Now, the governor’s wife was a woman of the world, accustomed to many colonial societies, big and small, as well as to the infinitely greater world of London; and she was naturally moved, at first hearing, rather to amusement than to indignation at the idea of Tom Dupuy setting himself up as the social superior of a fellow of Catherine’s and barrister of the Inner Temple. This point of view itself certainly lost nothing from Nora’s emphatic way of putting it; for, though Nora had herself a bountiful supply of fine old crusted West Indian prejudices, producible on occasion, and looked down upon ‘brown people’ of every shade with that peculiarly profound contempt possible only to a descendant of the old vanquished slave-owning oligarchy, yet her personal affection for Marian and Edward was quite strong enough to override all such abstract considerations of invisible colour; and her sense of humour was quite keen enough to make her feel the full ridiculousness of comparing such a man as Edward Hawthorn with her own loutish sugar-growing cousin. She had lived so long in England, as Tom Dupuy himself would have said, that she had begun to pick up at least some faint tincture of these newfangled Exeter Hall opinions; in other words, she had acquired a little ballast of common-sense and knowledge of life at large to weigh down in part her tolerably large original cargo of colonial prejudices.
But when Nora came to tell Lady Modyford, as far as she knew them, the indignities to which the Hawthorns had already been subjected by the pure blue blood of Trinidad, the governor’s wife began to perceive there was more in it than matter for mere laughter; and she bridled up a little haughtily at the mention of Mr Tom Dupuy’s free-spoken comments, as overheard by Nora on the Orange Grove piazza. ‘Nigger people!’ the fat, good-natured, motherly, little body echoed, angrily. ‘Did he say nigger people, my dear?—What! a daughter of General Ord of the Bengal infantry—why, I came home from Singapore in the same steamer with her mother, the year my father went away from the Straits Settlements to South Australia! Do you mean to say, my dear, they won’t call upon her, because she’s married a son of that nice old Mr Hawthorn with the white beard up at Agualta! A perfect gentleman, too! Dear me, how very abominable! You must excuse my saying it, my child, but really you West Indian people do mistake your own little hole and corner for the great world, in a most extraordinary sort of a fashion. Now, confess to me, don’t you?’