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Working hard and playing harder - Belper's "uncivilised" nailers |
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The nailers were heavy drinkers, and, as a rule, no work would take place on Mondays - or “Saint Mondays” as they were known – as the nailers recovered from the weekend’s excesses, or sometimes just continued them, occasionally even into “Saint Tuesday” and Wednesday as well! The nailers would then have to work even harder to get all their nails to the nailmaster by the end of the week.
This man was one of the last Belper nailers working in the 20th Century
© Belper Historical Society |
Pitched battles
Belper nailers were also famed for their violent behaviour. They were particularly fond of boxing, with the “Cross ‘o’ the Hands” a favourite place for fights, tucked away from the magistrates’ eyes. Fuelled by alcohol, arguments often spilled over into brawls and even pitched battles, where nailers fought with hammers as well as their fists. In 1837, for example, resentments against a group of navvies working on the nearby railway boiled over into the “Battle of Pease-Field”, where, according to newspaper reports, the nailers, “armed with their tommy hammers, resorted to blows to assert their rights”.
Of course there would have been many law abiding nailers as well, however, their general image was as the local “hell-raisers”. They were certainly extremely strong in character. One newspaper report on the nailers’ strike in 1861 said “Their capabilities of suffering the greatest hardships are notorious; ‘Never to be Beaten’ seems to be their watchword”.
Contrasting old and new
Reconstruction of a nailer's forge at Belper North Mill
© Mary Smedley |
The nailers’ fierce independence contrasted sharply with the new type of working life that was emerging at the end of the 18th Century in factories like Strutt’s cotton mills at Belper. Whereas the nailers had freedom to work when and as they chose, the mill workers were subject to the unforgiving timekeeping of the factory hooter.
The factory workers were also subject to strict discipline on the shop floor, risking fines and even imprisonment in the mill gaol if they broke the employer’s rules. In 1860, Dr Spencer Hall described the contrast in Belper between a “proverbially unrefined” race (the nailers) and those “given to intellectual aspirations”, who had arrived with the mills.
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