Coal Black Heart by John Demont Page B

owner observed in 1835. “The whole requires the service of but 750 workers. But these machines can produce as much yarn as formerly could have hardly been spun by 200,000 men.”
    Lancashire, damp enough to ensure the necessary moisture for raw cotton to be spun into yarns and made into clothes, became the centre of the world’s cotton trade. Manchester became England’s first industrial city. By 1830 it boasted 101 mills employing more than 28,000 people. Another 18,000 worked at Oldham’s 89 mills, 13,000 toiled at Rochdale’s 63 mills, and Ashton-under-Lyne’s 35 factories had a workforce of 8,400. Twenty years later, almost all of the cottage cotton weavers in Lancashire were working in “manufactories,” and there was undeniable truth when the county’s cotton masters bragged that they satisfied the home market before breakfast, and catered to the rest of the world afterwards. A decade later, an incredible 446,000 people toiled in Lancashire’s cotton mills, as country folk crowded into towns that had seldom known a second of prosperity. Peter Briers, with his son John, daughter-in-law Ellen and their five children (Ann, Elizabeth, Samuel, Ellen and John William), eventually moved north to one of them: Chorley, with its rolling roadways and grand old manor houses, at the foot of the haunting West Pennine Moors.

    Life changed, the world changed. The new, citified existence was better in so many ways than their old lives. Yet my heart still sinks when I picture the country folk arriving that first day in sprawling, soulless Liverpool or Manchester. Imagine them walking through mouldering landscapes unbroken by plants or green space, everything overlaid by a layer of soot. See their defeated body language when they discover that home is now some dirt-floor cellar with no light or ventilation, or a single room in a townhouse deserted by well-off owners anxious to put some distance between themselves and the encroaching lower classes.
    The squalor wasn’t limited to the metropolises. In the smaller towns of Lancashire a similar picture emerged; one writer described the cellars in Bolton as “the fever nests of town,” where people, donkeys and even pigs lived side-by-side. In Bury, a survey discovered sixty-three households where five members of the same family slept in one bed. In the Rossendale region, rows of back-to-back houses were built clinging to the steep valley sides, leaving them damp, dark and airless. In Bacup, tenants paid a shilling a week to rent small cheek-by-jowl dwellings with a view of a communal yard where mangy, diseased wildlife wandered. Historian Andrew Taylor writes that the single privy shared by several households was a 170-yard walk for some, and the nearest well a half-mile distant. Finding room in a lodging house left tenants in no better shape; investigators found one household where a whole family and their dogs shared one bed in a single room.
    Disease, as you can imagine, ran rampant. Housing conditions were so unsanitary that during the early part of the Industrial Revolution, 50 percent of infants died before the age of two. Work, the whole point of being there, provided no comfort. Skilled artisans suddenly found themselves reduced to routine labourers as machines began to mass-produce the products that, until then, hadalways been made by hand. Working in a cottage surrounded by family gave way to labouring on the factory floor among strangers. There, life was governed by the constant pumping of the combustion engine, and the employees’ need to produce as much as possible during their long working hours. To many, the transformation was something magical: the triumph of man over nature, city over country, middle-class capitalists over the landed class of nobility and gentry. Yet it’s the ghastly images of Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” Zola’s Germinal, Tocqueville’s Manchester—which he described as a “new hades” with its “heaps of dung, rubble from