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.

Rising Chimney Steam (by Mimi McGarry)

As we drive and darkness falls,
shapes begin to show,
silhouettes grow,
then clouds cast over,
it gets dark, as dark as night,
a storm blows rain like threads from sky.
When rain has fallen, washed skies clear;
here we go again, suddenly appear
chimneys rising in the distance,
making sharp vertical lines,
showing their ready, yet switched off selves.
with the rose tinted background
of the setting sun,
leading to nostalgic thoughts of times long gone,
these chimneys here,
were meant to smoke.

My main feeling when I was driving to Oswaldwistle with Luan at my side, was excitement about getting to know this place. She had told me how amazing the sight will be as we drive in to this region, and so it was a shame it had suddenly turned very dark, so much so we had to believe the sun had already set. Worried we won't see the view she remembered so well from way back when she was a child and used to drive to this region with her family, she described the Lowry painting in the previous post to me. Then by chance the final light of day started to glow for another short moment just so we could see, in a red and black silhouette, the view we had waited for; arriving in Lancashire.

This was going to be my first visit ever to this landscape and its industrial buildings with their sharp outlines nestled within; representing the history of textiles in its glory and gloom, where working may have meant lives lived slaving away, drenched in steaming heat, amongst cream coloured cotton, with oil stained clothes and danger everywhere.

And then how the loss of the textile industry meant loss of work and purpose for so many. Why do I feel nostalgia for this industry? Arriving to start our research into women workers' stories, I felt moved by the symbolic chimneys without smoke, the textile industry gone elsewhere. Imagine us the next day walking along this path, finding a chimney tucked into the valley, this time with smoke billowing out.

Where have all the chimneys gone? (by Luan Blake)

The journey to Lanacashire was enveloped with nostalgia and anticiapation. On childhood trips to visit relatives, I always felt I was ‘coming home’.
I loved Barm cakes, I loved the dialect, I loved the fact my northern accent would come back, I loved the way my Aunty would call me ‘Cock’.

But It was really the poetry of the landscape that got me, carved out of valley and moor, factories and mills with their tall smoking stacks. Cobbled streets, viaducts and lines of working class houses with back alleys. It was this Industrial landscape in all its smokey glory that I loved, so different from Devon where I grew up.

So here we were travelling back to Oswaldtwistle to visit my Nana who worked in the Cotton Industry as a weaver, as well as working in munitions and other factories during her life. She would be my first port of call.

Oswaldtwistle is in the borough of Hyndburn in North West Lancashire. At one time, it had over 25 Mills, with Cotton Spinning and Printing being the chief industries. James Hargreaves was born in Oswaldtwistle, the inventor of the Spinning Jenny. The people of Oswaldtwistle were involved in the power-loom riots of 1826. The mechanisation of the textile industry with the introduction of looms powered by steam engines from the 1820s onwards resulted in redundancies, low wages, and starvation. On 26 April a large number of cotton workers attacked the White Ash factory (Brookside Mill) in Oswaldtwistle, about a mile from Hargreaves' workshop, destroying looms and other equipment. The riots went on for three days, extending to all cotton towns in central Lancashire.

Forward wind to today, and there are no chimneys left, no mills, no industry. The only remaining mill building is the old Moscow Mill, now turned into a miserable shopping complex called ‘Ossie Mills’ The town appears somewhat redundant now, like the mining towns of Wales, or the steel making towns of the North and the ship building areas of the North East. It seems to have been abandoned, it has lost its purpose, it is out of work.