The Clatter of Time - Part II (by Luan Blake)

I had learnt about how clog dancing started in the Mills and Factories. Women wore clogs as it was the best footwear for the damp and hazardous floors. But clogging was not simply a way to relieve the monotony, it was actually a way to keep in time and keep up with the endless clobber of the machines. Through keeping in time with the rhythm, the women were more at one with the machine, in fact they were part of it. The workers were self-propelled automatons working in union with the pounding systems. Clog dancing steps often have names associated to the various parts of the machines or the working actions of the mill workers.

With such an interconnection between woman and machine, and within such noise, it is difficult to see how the workers could communicate with each other, but interaction was a vital way to cope with the conditions. ‘MEE MAW’ was a way that women communicated in the Mills and Factories of the North, each area having their own specific dialect. MEE- MAW was a form of sign language and exaggerated articulation of the mouth and face so that you could lip read someone on the other side of the room. This form of communication would relieve the sense of isolation and bring some humanity back into the workplace.

When the engines started up on that day that we visited, I looked at Mimi with a smile and a jolt, adrenaline rushing through me. When the overhead belt system kicked in, the noise permeated my core!

Within the inexhaustible clackety clack of the looms, I heard 400 cloggers clogging, a vast percussion of drummers drumming and an eternal inner metronome that whispered, “Keep going until the horn blows”.

The Spinning Jenny (by Mimi McGarry)

We were keen on Helmshore mill from the start, and this here is the infamous spinning jenny, stood in the middle of a big room, filled with several different machines doing various cotton thread producing tasks, at the core of the mill. First we are told about working conditions, imagine the deafening sounds from all the machinery, the oil trickling down the sides of the machines and then the horror stories we are told about the unstoppable machines and therefore action by the worker who was running them: "you just could not stop". Explosions, lost fingers or limbs, scalping, you name it. What would it have been like day in day out in this room with the machines cranking and screaming, where a wrong step or a slip of focus could lead to a lot of pain or even death?

It is the demonstration of the simple chain of physical human movement necessary when operating the spinning jenny, that grabs my complete attention. It is the barefoot worker in their own rhythm coping with all other work systems simultaneously happening in their surrounding; one long step forward to release a leaver, the arm stretching to do the same somewhere higher up, and then the body gently resuming a straight position. Once released the machine would begin marching backwards and then returning along the same path, screaming and muttering, spinning the thread and creating rows and rows of caps filled with cream cotton ready for weaving. Whilst the jenny was marching back and fro, the worker was always pacing up and down along the the travelling branch of the machine, following its movement with their own path set alongside. This moving connection of worker's path with the machine's path would repeat again and again, unless one of the strings tore. In this case the worker has to work all along the row finding which threads had torn and fixing those as quickly as possible, licking their fingers to do so and twisting together the torn stands of cotton.

What interests me is the never-ending pattern of paths, which is drawn out by the relationship of human and machine continuously moving as one entity inside a cotton storm, eerie, magic, crude, throat clogging. The movements required seem angular, geometric. It was a highly efficient continuous activity, no one ever stopped, everyone functioned. Machine and worker therefore appear like two cogs joining together to meet the requirements. It is this close relationship between the movement of machinery and its moving operator that in my mind defines the physicality of work.

The Clatter of Time - Part I (by Luan Blake)

A winding journey leads us to a tall chimney stack emerging from the hillside. Helmshore Mills in Rossendale is now a museum since its closure as a working mill in 1967. It was built in 1789, the same year as the French Revolution. From the outside, the building still retains its majesty. We went to watch a demonstration of the machines and their operations. Women and girls were the majority workforce in this vast room with rows of closely packed machines and looms, high windows, and uniformity. Lines fill the space. It’s an impressive and daunting sight.

We learn about the cotton processes, the daily working conditions, and the realities of hard graft. Due to the conditions required for the preservation of the cotton, temperatures had to be high, with constant humidity from overhead water vaporisers. This meant working in light flimsy clothes, so that if your dress or apron got caught in the machines, as it often would, the clothes would tear rather than drag you into the unstoppable, unforgiving mechanisms.

The room would have been engulfed in a snow storm blizzard of loose cotton, clogging up the throat and chest. I was drawn to the clocking in/out machine and thought about the long hours the workers would endure. Once the Mill horn went off and the machines cranked into life, there was no stopping, no respite from the gruntwork, the noise and the heat, until the end of a shift. How did women cope with this toil, what were their coping mechanisms?

port of call (by Luan Blake)

I visit my Nana, Kathleen Moores aged 92, who was born and bred in Oswaldtwistle. As dementia takes its grip, our conversations meander from this to that, from past to present. My nana was a weaver, a cleaner, a munitions worker, a laundry lass, a factory inspector, a school cook, and Mother to three daughters. She was also a tap dancer by night.

I am fascinated in the way that she can remember aspects of her past with such clarity in comparison to her short term memory. More over, how she forgets so quickly what I have just told her, yet she can remember tap dance steps, or the movements of her body from when she worked as a weaver.

Body memory, what does the body retain as well as the mind?

Our conversation triggers me to think about hard graft. My Nana was a grafter.

For now, here is a short sound edit of my Nana Moores.