Believe me, if you worked in the spinning end of the industry, I`m telling you it took you to have a faith, because with the dampness, and having to do as you were told, and very little money to live on and the conditions were not just as bad in the weaving end because you had not to stand on your bare feet, ankle deep in water in the weaving end.
Things in those days were very much tougher than they are now, you know the conditions were much tougher than they are, the spinning rooms were wetter than they are, the facilities for the spinners were all poorer than they are now. Most of the women wore shawls going to and from their work. They all worked in bare feet, but of course that’s the way they wanted. We from time to time had tried to persuade them to wear clogs, which we supplied but they were happier in their bare feet and they preferred it that way.
The shawls were hung all down the bottom of the stands, and you had to take your shawl every night and shake it well incase it was full of clock and many a time it was. But they wouldn’t have done you any harm, they were only wee yellow things, they weren’t cockroaches like, they were yellow. I started in the Blackstaffs when I was fifteen, in 1927, on which was wipe down day and I’m sure a lot will remember that. They took down all the frames to clean them, clean all the muck off them and I near died when I seen all the muck on the ground.
Its important that if you are making a product where you wanted to be sure for instance that no oil gets on the cloth, then you’ve got to make sure the machinery is kept clean, all the drips coming from the line shafting in the roof space and in these ways efficient management causes cleanliness and cleanliness and time causes fewer faults. Many things like that the manager would see to. I think that the approach was sometimes fairly tough, but the people were not unhappy, don’t think that it was a bad show, it wasn’t a bad show and it went very well.
There was one time a girl brought in a true romance, and we warned her you’ll not get reading that. I’ll get reading it she says when I get time and I said you’ll not get reading it, you’re not allowed to read it. But she read it and she got the sack.
When you had to go to the lavatory, you called it the wee house, and you weren’t allowed into the wee house, you could have been dying, you could have had gastroenteritis and you weren’t allowed into the wee house, unless you had all these ends tied up and all. And if you were too long in the wee house, say you were three minutes or something they came looking for you.
There was an abundance of labour, that was one thing, and it was possible then to achieve a high degree of efficiency and devotion to their work.
Well you see it’s very disheartening when you know you are only a pair of hands and that you don’t count and that nobody cared enough and in these early days are foremen were not trained in the way they are trained today. If you were appointed as a foreman or forewomen well you just kept a thumb on the workers and mid management and top management were really divorced from working people. You were very seldom allowed to speak to the manager. Well I don’t remember any allowances for any breaks in the linen field at all while I was there, only your lunch, you know your lunch time and then you would have went to a wee café round the corner and had your dinner, and there was a plate of rice. I just can’t remember the prices they had for it, it wasn’t very much and then back into work again.
The canteen was up a few yards from the mill, and in all the years I worked there, which was about seven, she made rice every day and tea, and that was the diet. Now that is one thing, young as I was, that impressed me that anyone never ever changed the diet from rice and why rice, nobody could understand. She never made stew, soup or any of the tasty things that was still available in those days, any types of sandwiches, tea and rice and at the end we couldn’t see who was buying the rice, cause we certainly didn’t, we brought our own lunch.
The men that took the cloth away, carted the cloth the carters as they called them, they drew it by house and cart into the town and drew more back out again and they used to give us laughs and all, you know we used to love when we were working in to get him to bring us up something nice for our tea at night, you know apples along with a bun. A bun was a novelty then.
I would say society in general did look down on the mill girls.
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