machine women

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?