I see me myself coming out many a time of the factory, with a couple of inches of dust on top my head, on my hair. Well now it that was on your hair what was your lungs not like. Im telling you its no wonder the textile industry, it was a scurge - consumption in the textile industry because damp and dust, the heat would have roasted you, shrivelled you up you know.
You could have washed a pocket hanky and walked through that with it and come out at the other end, you were sweltering and it was dry. Before we found an answer for consumption, or TB as its called today, one in every ten had consumption and one of things that used to distress me was this, there is a term knowing in the weaving trade as kissing the shuttles not as an eye on a shuttle and you have to use your lips to draw the thread through. Now if a girl went into the sanitorium in the afternoon and another weaver started on her looms, those shuttles weren’t taken away to be disinfected and therefore you were sucking and breathing the thread and the shuttles that that other poor soul had. I remember getting severley reprimanded for going out to ask that this would be attended to, but it wasn’t until years afterwards that our girls were organised that we got this altered.
They had to work in order to eat and they were so glad to have a job whatever the job might be, that they didn’t feel that there was any loss of dignity in doing the work whatever it might be.
If you lived in a mill house or a factory house, you didn’t speak out of your turn when an injustice was done and they were being done day and daily. Because you could not only have lost your job, but you would have lost your home. You just don’t brush people off when an injustice is down because its like a cancer of the soul it eats in on people.
I lived in a little factory house, probably a kitchen house with a toilet a yard, two bedrooms and the linen lords of that day probably the lot of them owned the estates outside the town altogether and they lived in what the worker would describe as a mansion, and they employed their servants and they had coachmen and they had gardeners and some had a butler, mid servants and there was a lot of money made in the linen industry.”
We all got word when the owners were coming, “Gillespie, Gillespie is coming, get everything red up” got the whole thing the whole stands and all brushed, got red up and standing at your frame, if you weren’t doffing you’d to stand at your frame, nice you know, very nice and they came down and looked at all the frames and looked at all the workers, never spoke to anybody, very rarely they’d talk to any of the workers.
Mill Manager
It was a Cinderella trade, I can remember waking up one morning, and she was one of my workers and she fainted at her work shorlty after she’d come in, and one of the other women who had been there came to me a short time afterwards and she said “you wanted to know what was wrong with her” and I said “yes is she ill?” she said “Yes shes ill, shes ill with hunger” they were literally starving. I was horrified by it and I went down and I told Mr Larmour and I remember he said to me “ this is shocking, one of my workers actually falls off her feet with the weakness of hunger” and he said “ my dogs don’t fall of their feet”.
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