The Urban and Rural Labour Force – Strategic Objectives

Research into the development of Derwent Valley communities has focused traditionally upon the 18th and 19th century cotton-workers’ communities that form key elements of the cultural heritage of the World Heritage Site. Conversely, significantly less emphasis has been placed on the impact upon post-medieval and later settlement of other important local industries – such as lead mining and ore-processing,¹ the iron, stone quarrying and timber industries,² and long-established manufacturing activities such as nail-making.³ This imbalance in knowledge contrasts with the neighbouring Peak District, where significantly more research has been conducted on agricultural and mining settlements and on landscapes impacted by extractive industries.⁴ Understanding of settlement development in the Valley and the social, economic and political interactions of community members is consequently biased strongly towards the industrial settlements that were constructed to accommodate and control the factory workers and their families, with significantly less emphasis upon the wider industrial framework.

Future research needs to redress this imbalance in knowledge, with more studies along the lines of a recent project by Jurecki that focused upon the socio-cultural, economic and political interactions between established agricultural and mining communities around Cromford and Belper during the early post-medieval period.⁵ In particular, further light needs to be shed upon the demographic changes that occurred within agricultural or mining communities and other settlements with an established industrial base as the factory system developed, with consideration of changes in community structure, land ownership and tenure arrangements, and the impacts of community movement. Consideration should be given to the evidence for social and political frictions between established and incoming communities: at Belper, for example, between immigrant mill workers and local nailmakers or between established groups and navvies brought in to work on railway, canal and other infrastructure projects.⁶ It would be worth highlighting too the difficulties of moving from one working sphere to another: nailmakers, for example, protected their industry fiercely and viewed outsiders with suspicion. To achieve these aims, research needs to be coordinated and systematic, with consideration not only of documentary sources but also of built environment and archaeological evidence. This should help to answer wider questions and elucidate further how established Derwent Valley communities developed as industrialisation progressed.

Suzanne Lilley

Fig.4.36. 8 Joseph Street, Belper: a rare survival of the nailshops that would once have been familiar features of the townscape. This building dates from the early 19th century, and was constructed of coursed gritstone with tile roof, brick chimney and cast iron windows (photograph © David Knight)

References

¹ With the notable exceptions of: Kiernan, D 1989 The Derbyshire Lead Industry in the Sixteenth Century. Chesterfield: Derbyshire Record Society; Crossley, D and Kiernan, D 1992 ‘The lead-smelting mills of Derbyshire’. DAJ 102, 6–47

² Riden, P 2015 ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Derwent Valley’ in Wrigley, C (ed) The Industrial Revolution: Cromford, the Derwent Valley and the Wider World. Cromford: Arkwright Society, 113–15

³ Giles, J, Power, G and Smith, M 1999 An Illustrated History of Belper and its Environs. Belper: Morris, 25–27

⁴ Eg Barnatt, J and Penny, R 2004 The Lead Legacy. Bakewell: PDNPA; Ford, T D and Rieuwerts, J H 2000 Lead Mining in the Peak District, 4 edn. Asbourne: Landmark; Willies, L and Parker, H 1999 Peak District Mining and Quarrying. Stroud: Tempus

⁵ Jurecki, K 2008 ‘Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site landscape project: Cromford and Belper survey Transects’. Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Sheffield.

⁶ Giles et al 1999, 27, 53

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, from the 16th to early 18th century, documentary sources indicate that most workers in key Derbyshire industries, such as lead mining or smelting, would have been born locally.¹  However, with the growth of water-powered factories from the 18th century onwards, especially at sites away from major centres of population, demands for labour with appropriate craft or mechanical skills and for unskilled workers to mind machines increasingly outstripped supply – as illustrated by the constant advertisements of Arkwright and Strutt for factory labour (Fig. 4.20).²

Male labourers were not required for machine-minding work as women and children provided more fruitful sources of cheap labour. In consequence, the 18th century witnessed significant changes in working patterns based upon gender and age. The reliance of mill owners upon women and children prompted imaginative solutions to the problem of achieving sufficient male employment to attract families, including the development of innovative terrace housing incorporating, in the uppermost storey, multiple windows to illuminate workshops to be used by male weavers or framework knitters whilst their wives and children toiled in the mills.³ These changes in working roles are likely to have imposed significant new pressures upon family relationships, and in particular upon the role of children.⁴ Currently, however, there is little evidence for how these tensions might have been resolved during these early years.

There is rather more scope for assessing how working patterns developed during the later 19th and 20th centuries, including study of the movements of professionals and other workers to elucidate migration patterns. Studies of 19th century census returns, data from family history studies and workers’ autobiographies may prove fruitful from this perspective, and should be scrutinised alongside papers associated with mill and estate owners with the additional aim of charting changes in working patterns. There is also more scope in these later centuries for interrogating documentary sources to establish the variety of factors encouraging labour mobility.⁵ It is generally presumed that there was a significant increase in population numbers and a shift from agriculturally-based rural dwellings to settlements close to factories as industrialisation progressed in the 18th and 19th centuries.⁶ However, the picture once portrayed of migrant workers leaving subsistence farming for the emerging manufacturing industries is an oversimplification, and needs to be tempered by consideration of other processes that might have spurred movement from the countryside; these include the impacts of the industrialisation of agriculture and the increasing pace of enclosure which, as in other areas of the Midlands, caused the displacement of agricultural workers and a swelling of the ranks of the landless rural poor.⁷

Robin Holgate

Fig. 4.37 Hopping Hill, Milford: end of the easternmost of two terraces, built on newly enclosed common land by Jedediah Strutt from 1792–7 as housing for his factory workforce (photograph: David Knight; Ó TPA) 

References

¹ Kiernan, D 1989 The Derbyshire Lead Industry in the Sixteenth Century. Chesterfield: Derbyshire Record Society, 25-36; Trinder, B 2013. Britain’s Industrial Revolution: The Making of a Manufacturing People. Lancaster: Carnegie, 371

² Fitton, R S and Wadsworth, A P 1958 The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830. Manchester: MUP, 103–5

³ Strategic Objective 4B; Trinder 2013, 425

⁴ Humphries, J 2015 Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: CUP

⁵ Pooley, C G and Turnbull, J 1996 ‘Migration and mobility in Britain from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries’. Local Population Studies 57, 50–71

⁶ Clark, P and Souden D (eds) 1987 Migration and Society in Early Modern England. London: Hutchinson

⁷ Hey, D 2008. Derbyshire: A History. Lancaster: Carnegie, 335–8; Knight, D et al 2012, East Midlands Heritage. Nottingham: University of Nottingham and York Archaeological Trust, 110, 130

The social and political impacts of mechanisation were explored by Friedrich Engels in his seminal study The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in Germany in 1845. His statement that the proletariat was ‘called into existence by the introduction of machinery’¹ has been echoed by many historians, including E.P. Thompson who, some 120 years later, wrote memorably that the English working class did not ‘rise like the sun at an appointed time’, but had been created and was present at its own making.² Thompson also argued that between 1780 and 1832 (coincident with the main period of growth of the factory system in the Derwent Valley), English working people ‘came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers’.³ The social and political consequences of the Industrial Revolution have been debated vigorously ever since Engels’ treatise, in some cases from more optimistic viewpoints that have identified winners as well as losers in the emerging working classes.⁴ A key element of many interpretations has been recognition of the impact upon working class consciousness of the far-reaching socio-cultural developments of the ‘Age of Improvement’: a time when England still remained a predominantly agricultural and trading nation, but from when huge changes in society may be traced.⁵

These interpretations provide a useful background to studies of the social and political impacts of industrialisation in the Derwent Valley in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and, in particular, of the impacts of factory development, changing modes of transportation and urbanisation upon family interrelationships, gender and age roles, popular culture, marriage and childbirth patterns. The cotton industry, described as ‘a lonely hare in a world of tortoises’,⁶ was a new industry unfettered by traditional organisation, and was a driver of significant socio-political as well as economic change. It also required the development of new management skills to guide successfully large industrial operations:⁷ a field in which it has long been recognised that Arkwright excelled.⁸ The Derwent Valley provides, therefore, a valuable case study for research into cultural change during the later 18th and 19th centuries. Particular subjects for research, which it is recommended be targeted during further documentary study, include the impact of factory-working upon family dynamics and age and gender roles,⁹ continuities with established rural traditions, the creation by mill owners of new social customs¹⁰ and the impacts upon workers of renouncing ‘their desultory habits of work…[and identifying]…themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton’.¹¹

Mark Suggitt

 Fig. 4.38 Boar’s Head Mills, Darley Abbey:  working the doubling-frame machines (Illustrated Times, July 1862; image courtesy of www.picturethepast.org.uk: DRBY004963)

References

¹ Engels, F 1979 The Condition of the Working Class in England. London: Panther, 50

² Thompson, E P 1963 The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 9

³ Thompson 1963, 12

4 Griffin, E 2013 Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. New Haven: YUP

⁵ Briggs, A 1975 The Age of Improvement. London: Longman, 17–22

⁶ Heaton, H 1951 The Industrial Revolution. Reprinted in Ausubel, H (ed) The Making of Modern Europe. New York: Dryden-Holt, 623

⁷ Pollard, S 1965 The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. London: Edward Arnold

⁸ Ure, A 1835 The Philosophy of Manufactures. London: Charles Knight, 13–16; Fitton, R S 1989 The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune. Manchester: MUP, Chapter 6: ’The Arkwright system’

⁹ See also Strategic Objective 7B

¹⁰ DVMP 2011. The Derwent Valley Mills and their Communities. Matlock: DVMP, 88–9

¹¹ Ure 1835, 15; see also Thompson, E P 1967 ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’. Past and Present 38, 56–97

The historically rich and archaeologically diverse industrial communities of the Derwent Valley offer an unparalleled insight into daily life in late 18th and early 19th century England, and provide a research resource of international significance. The importance of these communities has been highlighted by industrial, architectural and textile historians such as Adam Menuge¹ and Stanley Chapman² and, from the perspective of buildings conservation and research, is emphasised in documents such as Historic England’s Listing Selection Guide.³ However, research to date has focused principally upon the descriptions of these communities that are contained in surviving documentary sources and, in particular, upon the archive information that is provided by close reading of the important publications by Fitton and Wadsworth on the Strutts and the Arkwrights.^4-5 In consequence, there has been a tendency to focus on the welfare, cultural, educational, spiritual and housing provisions of the 19th century, coincident with the majority of the surviving documentation. This has resulted in a research bias towards the later history of these communities, and has fostered an interpretation that community development was planned and formulaic across the Derwent Valley.

Recent work by Peers⁶ and Lilley⁷ has begun to address these concerns through the study of the surviving building fabric in conjunction with documentary sources. This research has focused principally on workers’ housing and has highlighted the variations in living experiences within and between urban communities along the Derwent Valley. Additionally, it has demonstrated that the apparent temporal variation in settlement development indicated by these studies is not fully represented by previous historically led approaches, and that changes were often made organically rather than fully planned in advance. These studies demonstrate, therefore, the strength of an interdisciplinary methodology and provide an important lens for exploring these early industrial communities. There is significant scope to expand these multi-methodological studies to include other welfare, cultural, educational and spiritual provisions. A systematic and in-depth investigation of the late 18th and early 19th century building resource, including schools, churches, chapels, workshops, shops and farms, alongside further scrutiny of extant documentary sources, would provide valuable insights into the daily lives of workers and the intentions of the factory owners who invested in the industrial settlements that are especially well preserved in the historic cores of Cromford, Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey.

 Suzanne Lilley

Fig.4.39 Baptist Chapel, Chevin Road, Milford: one of many Nonconformist chapels that were constructed to service the spiritual needs of the Valley’s industrial communities. This small chapel with hipped slate roof was built in 1849 and was constructed of coursed stone on a high rusticated stone plinth (photograph © David Knight)

References

¹ Menuge, A 1993 ‘The textile mills of the Derbyshire Derwent and its tributaries’. IAR 16 (1), 38–61

² Chapman, S C 1976 ‘Workers’ housing in the cotton factory colonies, 1770–1850’. Textile History 7, 112–39

³ English Heritage 2011 Listing Selection Guide. Domestic 2: Town Houses, 8–9

⁴ Fitton, R S and Wadsworth, A P 1958 The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830: A Study of the Early Factory System. Manchester: MUP

⁵ Fitton, R S 1989 The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune. Manchester: MUP

⁶ Peers A 2010 ‘East and West Terrace, Hopping Hill, Milford, Derbyshire’. Transactions Ancient Monument Society 54, 83–119

⁷ Lilley, S 2015 ‘”Cottoning on” to workers’ housing: a historical archaeology of industrial accommodation in the Derwent Valley, 1776–1821’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of York

The beliefs of Derwent Valley communities immediately preceding the development of the factory system were principally of the Anglican persuasion,¹ but evidence for a growing tradition of dissent implies that from the religious perspective not all were ‘comfortable in their silent vegetation’.² The pioneering years of Arkwright, Strutt and the other factory masters coincided with the rise of Methodism³ which, despite its promotion of education and self-improvement, was essentially hierarchical and authoritarian. It was the religion of many industrialists and their workers, and its tenets chimed well with the mill owners’ requirements for docile and obedient workforces who were able to cope with the monotony of long hours of factory working.

The early mill owners of the Valley are known to have embraced a wide diversity of Christian beliefs, sometimes with great fervour, and it is interesting to speculate how their views might have impacted upon the ideologies of working communities. Sir Richard Arkwright, for example, was of Anglican persuasion and built for private worship St Mary’s Chapel,⁴ Jedediah Strutt converted from Presbyterianism to Unitarianism after his arrival in Belper,⁵ and the increasingly pious and eccentric John Smedley developed his own fiery version of Evangelicalism.⁶ All used religion and basic education to promote ‘industry, decorous behaviour, attendance on public worship and general good conduct’.⁷ Sunday Schools were provided for the education of workers’ children,8 notably at Boar’s Head Mill⁹ and Belper’s North Mill,¹⁰ while John Smedley’s workers had to endure his compulsory sermons ‘full of piety and brimstone’.¹¹ This emphasis upon religious instruction did not necessarily prevent political dissent, as shown by the collective action of workers during the 1833–34 Derby Silk Trades Lockout,¹² but such actions were not typical of areas upstream of Derby.

Many questions remain to be addressed by further study of the surviving mill records, amongst which the substantial archives compiled by the Strutts and John Smedley Ltd have perhaps the greatest potential for advancing understanding. In particular, to what extent did the religious beliefs of the mill owners impact upon the provision of places of worship?¹³ How far did the investment by the factory masters in Day Schools and Sunday Schools help to educate the working communities? Was the combination of education and religion successful in delivering a compliant workforce, or were the inducements of regular wages and good housing more effective? Finally, how engaged were the Derwent Valley’s working communities in the broader religious and cultural politics of the 19th century?

Mark Suggitt

Fig.4.40 Boar’s Head Mills, Darley Abbey: the attic storey of the Long Mill, converted by the Evans family for use as a Sunday School in 1792, provides the earliest known example of its kind in the Derwent Valley.⁹ This laser survey shows the condition of the building in 2014 (source: Derbyshire County Council)

References

¹ Austin, M R 2001 A Stage or Two Beyond Christendom: A Social History of the Church of England in Derbyshire. Cromford: Scarthin

² Engels, F 1979 The Condition of the English Working Class in England. London: Panther, 39

³ Hobsbawm, E J 1979 Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 23–33

⁴ Buxton, D and Charlton, C 2013 Cromford Revisited. Matlock: DVMWHS Educational Trust, 99–106

⁵ Fitton, R S and Wadsworth, A P 1958 The Strutts and the Arkwrights. Manchester: MUP, 2–3, 108–12

⁶ Oakes, J M 2009 A Window on John Smedley’s World. Bakewell: Country Books, 73–97

⁷ Select Committee on Children employed in Manufactories 1818. London: Parliamentary Papers 3, 217

⁸ Fitton and Wadsworth 1958, 102–4

⁹ Menuge, A 2006 Boar’s Head Mills: A Survey and Investigation of the Cotton Mills and Ancillary Buildings. Swindon: English Heritage, 30–2

¹⁰ Menuge, A 1993 ‘The cotton mills of the Derbyshire Derwent and its tributaries’. IAR 16 (1), 43–5

¹¹ Oakes 2009, 75

¹² Whitehead, B 2001 The Derby Lock-out of 1833–34 and the Origins of the Labour Movement. Derby: Unison

¹³ Buxton and Charlton 2013, 131–3