Details of the lives of a lost Cheshire community of cotton mill workers have been uncovered. Just a stone’s throw away from where Manchester Airport lies now was a thriving working class estate of purpose built cottages that remain to this day – even if the community doesn’t.
Now known as Styal Estate, the workers were housed here for their employment at Quarry Bank Mill. In the late 18th century, the piece of land within the tranquil valley on the banks of the River Bollin was selected by Samuel Greg as the site where the mill would be built.
Completed in 1784, it went on to employ generations of workers – including child apprentices – to work the looms. The limited accommodation on the estate that existed from when it was first built was soon exhausted as the cotton industry grew, reports the Manchester Evening News.
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And so to house the ever growing workforce, the Greg’s built the village of Styal in the 1820s, including shops and social spaces. However, details of harsh, often bleak personal stories of the workers lives have recently been uncovered by researchers at the genealogy website Find My Past.
Much of this was due to the working conditions at the mill, which remained similar from the early years of its operation to well over a century later. Workers in the 1920s were still subject to the same hazards of the time of the Industrial Revolution, when steam-powered machinery was first introduced.
They had to work in hot and dusty environment, with the deafening noise from the machines meaning lip-reading became a required skill to master. Workers’ health suffered as steam pumped into the mill to prevent the delicate cotton from breaking caused chest problems, while dust from its processing led to many developing lung disease. Oil spilling from the machines made the wooden floors slippery and highly flammable.
The mill was a place where whole families were employed doing different jobs, with many spending their entire lives there having started there as children. Many children as young as 10 would become full-time workers straight from school; this didn’t change until legislation was passed in 1918 to raise the school-leaving age to 14.
A source of cheap labour, their smaller size and nimbleness, meant children were usually taken on as ‘scavengers’ retrieving waste cotton from beneath working looms while trying not to get entangled in the machinery. ‘Scavenging’ was an incredibly dangerous job working in the worst conditions, and many children suffered serious injuries including having their fingers, hands, even heads, crushed by heavy moving parts.
In an 1840 novel The Life And Adventures Of Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy by Frances Trollope, the author described the dangerous working life of a scavenger.
“The miserable little creature… was a little girl about seven years old, whose office as ‘scavenger,’ was to collect incessantly from the machinery and from the floor, the flying fragments of cotton that might impede the work. In the performance of this duty, the child was obliged, from time to time, to stretch itself with sudden quickness on the ground, while the hissing machinery passed over her; and when this is skilfully done, and the head, body, and outstretched limbs carefully glued to the floor, the steady-moving, but threatening mass, may pass and repass over the dizzy head and trembling body without touching it. But accidents frequently occur; and many are the flaxen locks, rudely torn from infant heads, in the process.”
Among the stories recent research has uncovered has been that of James Moore, who had a longstanding connection to Quarry Bank and appears in every single census from 1841 to 1911. He worked at the mill for 52 years and died at the age of 90.
He had progressed from a weaver to overlooker [supervisor]. He once recalled what it was like having a meal at the mill in the early days: “At breakfast time we used to have a mess of porridge brought to the mill, at dinner-time butter-milk and potatoes, and if we wanted dessert we got treacle butty.”
The cotton industry having reached its peak in the 1890s found itself in a fatal decline by the 1920s. Quarry Bank was experiencing its own downturn as workers turned to agricultural work or other opportunities in nearby Manchester. However, the 1921 Census records show that out of the 45 households in Styal, most were home to people still working at the mill. Records also reveal many of these were women, employed as a cheaper form of labour during tough economic times.
Research has uncovered details of the lives of the last three ‘mill girls’ to be employed at Quarry Bank. Their stories highlight the experiences of women living and working at the mill during a turbulent period of changing working conditions, the tragic losses of the First World War and social and family duties.
In 1959 the mill stopped commercial production, but three years prior to this, the three ‘mill girls’ were the only remaining workers at the mill, alongside a general manager and his secretary.
From once producing tons of fabric every month, the mill was now reduced to manufacturing dishcloths. The last three ‘mill girls’ were Esther Cooper, 73, Isabella Kinghorn, 49, and Mary Evans, 47.
Esther was known as the “granny” and had worked at the mill since she left school at the age of 11. Having worked at the mill for 62-years, it was only at the age of 73 she decided to retire once the mill ceased production. In a newspaper report from the time, she said: “In all these years I have hardly ever missed a day’s work. I have been very happy here.”
She was married twice, firstly in 1938 to Henry Saunders, and then found love later in life at the tender age of 63 with William Foote, a gardener. She died in 1972 in Macclesfield at the age of 86. Another more tragic reason women increasingly found employment at the mill in the early part of the 20th century was the impact of the First World War. Many of the men had gone off to fight, leaving women to take up the roles they would usually have occupied.
A sad fact is that many of the young men’s names that appeared on the 1911 census didn’t appear again on the 1921 census a decade later, having been killed. Styal lost 24 men in the war and this profoundly affected the tight-knit village with deeply connected families.
With the end of the cotton industry at Quarry Bank came the end of its working community. With the estate now owned by the National Trust, the village is free to enter and walk around, but apart from trust members, visitors will need to pay to enter the buildings or be part of the trust’s historic tours on the estate.
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