General Chat

Am fascinated now!, what was life like in 't' mill!. Were those cotton mills the same as the woollen mills?. And that noise!..

I don't think it was just in the North darling.... children were sent out to work in god awful places at such young ages it must have been horrific!! D xx

Pretty much awful I should think and it is amazing that you do not have to go back too far before you can find relatives who were in those situations. My husbands grandfather and several brothers and sisters worked in both the cotton and woollen mills around Cullingworth in W Yorkshire, all of them under 15.

Life was very hard in any of the mills, they worked long hours and employed very young children who worked changing shuttles, fetching and carrying, mostly under the looms. some of the mills started their own schools to educate the children, one of which was Strutts Mill in in Derbyshire where my Gt Grandfather worked. Ann Glos

Must take a visit up there!, the most i've seen is from those drama serials on the t.v. interesting stuff!.

and what about kids in the coal mines? i cant imagine how terrifying that would have been.

I think seeing Bill Oddie's programme, really made you think about how grim it was in all those places, the stories they could tell..

Thanks for that Jenny, if you have some titles, I would be grateful, I can look around Borders bookshop for hours and not know which one to get!. Just found the programme interesting, and to think of the hardship and lifes ups and downs of those families, at that time!. (funny person,me!).

Hello Christine, I grew up in Lancashire in the 1950s, when the cotton mills were still open, and a lot of the parents of friends at primary school worked in them, as their parents had done before them. In fact several of my friends knew they were also destined to go down to the mills themselves in due course. When I visited the area several years later, they'd all closed. We visited a mill on one occasion on a school trip. Things i particularly remember are the big shiny machinery (a legacy of Victorian engineering), the heat and dust, and the closed in atmosphere. From school lessons, I recall that Lancashire prided itself on the cotton industry, being in the rain shadow of the Pennines, while the West Riding (as it used to be properly called) was the drier wool centre. Now it's all gone, of course. Where I lived in Colne, up country, was the head of the valley, where the weaving was concentrated, while the spinning took place down country nearer the ports. Philip

I visited the Kilhope leadmines last year with Liz ,it has been fully restored to it's heyday in the 18 th century ,and some of the conditions kids [and grownups ]worked in were unbelieveable,seven beds in one room where they slept and had their meals and spent their off duty hours[14 sleeping in 7 beds].No heating, and sacks for blankets. the conditions were so bad i think most haunted could do with a visit ,there must be many unhappy souls who died there for various reasons.The slate mines in Wales were no better,and neither were the coal mines up and down the country.Fred.ptfg.

Thanks for all these folks, very interesting!. Have discovered a very good site on all sorts of things during Victorian times, it goes from A-Z, listing all different topics!.(Victorian Times Project).