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Hazel Grant
Retired. Eldest of 3 daughters whose parents from different parts of UK and who+their siblings kept moving/emigrating, so FH a way of getting to know the family, past and present, better.
Location Warwickshire: work brought us here for 3 years. Still here 41 years later!
Activity
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@NormaAlmond Hello, Norma, yes you're probably right. I tend to use "political" in a broad sense of the struggle for influence/power to effect change/access to resources in society/communities, and "Political" in the formal "who governs or seeks to" sense. Does this fit? I became fairly disaffected with the unions when, during the 2nd half of the last century,...
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Trying to improve the lot of underpaid, disrespected workers (and of their families) facing awful injury/illness even death daily, all living in dirty, crowded, shockingly inadequate conditions - IS political. It's essentially requiring the boss class to share more of their ill-gotten gains with those toiling heroically for them, and to respect them more....
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Power corrupts....... @IanCawthra
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Hazel Grant replied to Pauline Round
I always belonged to a TU but was quite pleased I "never got anything back" - a bit like insurance, you really don't want the risk/disaster covered by the insurance to happen!
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I feel similar shame/discomfort/anger as felt by quite a few other participants about today's abuse of children, after being sharply reminded (in reading this course's material, and that of Factories & Mills) of Victorian cruelty and neglect. I don't think that is virtue signalling, we really do need to not avert our eyes from what our own contribution might...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
The 1842 report is only 3 years before the Irish potato famine began: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Parliament’s laisser-faire capitalism, absentee landlords with political leverage, historical restrictions on Catholics being allowed to acquire land, single-crop farming, protectionist Corn Laws: ultimately resulted in 1 million deaths... -
Hazel Grant made a comment
From the 1842 report: “The only way effectually to put an end to this and other evils in the present colliery system is to elevate the minds of the men...... to combine sound moral and religious training and industrial habits with a system of intellectual culture much more perfect than can at present be obtained by them………..This girl is an ignorant, filthy,...
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Hazel Grant replied to Susan Harris
Sebastian Faulk's novel "Birdsong" describes the "kickers" - miners who tunnelled under the enemy lines to place explosives and is quite powerful in describing the claustrophobic and terrifying conditions in such dangerous work. I've visited some of the enormous craters on the Somme front line that resulted from their successful explosions: the most...
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Hazel Grant replied to Marilyn McPhie
Could it have been Ormonde? https://www.heanorhistory.org.uk/v2ormondecolliery.html
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Hazel Grant replied to Phyllis Little
Mine too! I moved to Warwick as an adult for work. I used to drive regularly from Warwick to Nuneaton, Atherstone and Coleshill. The difference between north and south Warwickshire scenically and economically was significant: I remember a huge rounded "hill" (slag heap) in the north which always drew my attention. Warwickshire's coal mining has some coverage...
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Hazel Grant replied to Sue Rose
Progress isn't always forwards: today's politicians are more posh boys from entitled, rich, privileged backgrounds/Oxbridge PPEs/political intern-start than in the 1960s, when there was at least a sprinkling of working class/union MPs.
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Hazel Grant replied to Lee Scott
I'm not convinced that both sides realise that cooperation is of mutual benefit: there are some employers who understand enlightened self-interest, but I believe most employers, when push comes to shove, will put the employees' interests last on the list.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
Two independent remarks I heard years ago by knowledgeable folk:
1) Why English houses were so inefficient and the English middle class lagged so far behind similar economies was because labour was so cheap and plentiful, it was more cost-effective to hire domestic servants than modernise houses and housekeeping.
2) British industry has lagged behind eg... -
Hazel Grant made a comment
Earlier, paintings, prose articles (and even poetry in the Factories and Mills course) were greeted with some scepticism as to their accuracy/motivation, but it's intriguing that music got straight to the gut for apparently all those who commented. It got to me of course too, but so did the earlier poetry, art and prose. I think it's possible that prose,...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
It's hard for us to comprehend what life was like before there was a concept or experience of a safety net or welfare state, even the more austere one we have today: social security, universal health care (prevention as well as treatment), 12+ years of free universal education, social care, public health, health & safety legislation. If in the days of these...
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Hazel Grant replied to Elizabeth Bayly
Thank you for that Arley/New Arley reference. I live in Warwick, not a native but an incomer, so although I knew of the Warwickshire coal mining (O level Geography), I was ignorant of its precise details. Walking through Arley/New Arley on the Centenary Way/Heart of England Way last couple of years (can't remember which now!), I wondered about the...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I have a reasonable grasp of what mining was like; I read fact and fiction around it, researched my mining ancestors....... and yet Arthur's video still managed to shock. I read the comments more fully than usual. I was immensely touched by the many personal/family experiences of these disasters, accidents and chronic ill health. Immensely moving and angering....
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Hazel Grant replied to Norma Almond
I think it was Zola's journalism that informed and triggered his sense of outrage about injustice and social abuses of the poor by the rich and which also informed his politics (eg J'accuse), not his politics biasing his writing. @NormaAlmond
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Hazel Grant replied to Valerie Ralphs
Education was valued too by the many workers who were keen to educate themselves; education focused far more on writing, spelling and reading then, and the newspapers (no radio/social media/TV then) and books they read were more often the classics than the wider choices of today. There are collections of WW1 soldiers' (workers in civvy life) letters in print,...
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Hazel Grant replied to Paul Fisher
WW1 accounts blighted by middle class poets........? Really? Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, David Jones were among the most powerful of WW1 poets, but were from humble or modest enough homes. Max Arthur's "Forgotten Voices of the First World War" consists of accounts by "ordinary" people. There are anthologies too of working class soldier poets.
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Hazel Grant replied to ian sinclair
I think miners might, like soldiers in a platoon, look to each other for survival at times, a comradeship based on life and death: that can become more intense a relationship than the more day-today one in marriage. I don't decry marriage (I add hastily!) - I have a very close and happy one, but recall being struck by reading of the intense (mutual survival)...
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My Welsh AgLab ancestors moved from North Wales to the Rhondda to become miners in the 1880s/1890s. I'd love to know why exactly, but suspect seasonal/economic changes made agricultural work insecure and very low paid at times, mechanisation also doing AgLabs out of work as did the factories and mills for earlier cottage industry workers: hence the mines maybe...
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I so agree. I was an idealistic leftie in my student days, then "mellowed" into a sort of LibDemish state, but in my 70s I'm rediscovering my dormant inner socialist, solely as a result of the growing wealth divide, the dismantling of the Welfare State, the growing need for food banks, heaven help us, the degradation of workers through soulless, insecure,...
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Just listened to the song - stirring and moving.
@MarkHowell -
Hazel Grant replied to Steve Bamlett
Thank you again, Steve, for showing me this picture of Tom McGuinness' - I'd seen it a long time ago, but had forgotten it - so apt in this course.
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Hazel Grant replied to Steve Bamlett
@SteveBamlett Yes! Thank you for reminding me of the Pitmen Painters - such evocative pictures of life underground, and such artistic talent.
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Hazel Grant replied to Trevor Boggon
I am always interested to learn how people lived in the past, but as for Trevor and Terence, I have the personal incentive of finding a x2 great grandfather and several sons of his moved from N Wales as AgLabs to the Rhondda late 19th century to become miners.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
Having done the Genealogy and Working Lives/Factories & Mills courses (Working Lives most recently), I was keen to follow the Miners' course (mining ancestors in the Rhondda + political sympathies!), and very pleased to find it available. Will ty to catch up.
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Hazel Grant replied to Susan Osborn
Sounds like my paternal x2great grandfather's mining area. I knew he was an AgLab in Montgomeryshire, but only more recently that they moved to the Rhondda in the 1880s/1890s, presumably for better pay, though heaven help them with the change in work conditions.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
As for so many other participants, I've miners in my family tree (the Rhondda) about whom I've always vaguely known, but about whom I've remained remarkably incurious: as I've got older, I've discovered a real urge to understand what their lives were like, so different from my own safe and secure, post-WW2/Welfare State/far from Wales/grammar school &...
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Hello, Janet, I've come the same route too, a bit behind, because I just spent a week in a wi-fi dead zone, which was not only a nice change, but it delayed my completing the Factories and Mills Working Lives course. Hoping to catch up on this one which looks equally fascinating and illuminating.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
Have just hot-footed it from the Working Lives in the Factories and Mills course to this one. I've always been interested in history, plus more recently, genealogy, knowing I had some ancestors--> aunts who worked in the Lancashire cotton mills but also North Wales AgLabs who moved to the South Wales mins in the 1880s/1890s, so hope to learn more about what...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
Away last week where wi-fi was non-existent, so only just catching up/finishing now. Really enjoyed the course, the generous links and suggested other ref's, and the enthusiastic, knowledgeable and varied contributions of other participants. Thank you!
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We love Derbyshire, often go there to walk and enjoy the wonderful scenery (we live in Warwick, so only 90 mins north to Derbyshire!): loved Cromford, stayed in the landmark Trust's North Street weaver's house; walked the Limestone Way, Peak Pilgrimage..... lots of wild landscapes as well as fascinating industrial ones. Would recommend Tony Robinson's Walking...
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Hazel Grant replied to Jayne Tyler
I don't think bosses understood that: when profits/sales were down, it was always the workers whose wages were cut.@JayneTyler
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I remember seeing some early 20th century silent black and white movies where people move jerkily and too quickly, where the wicked, top-hatted villain ties the often chiffon-clad heroine to a railway line, to be rescued by the hero just in time........ or variations on that theme, but typically the acting is way OTT to compensate for the lack of dialogue....
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Yes, she did regard herself a a victim, but it's evident she was (stepfather's abuse seems fairly obvious, mother's beating her till she felt on fire, her first love abandoned her when others accused her of being a fallen woman, just when she might have been able to make a life for herself and her daughter, she had to support her stepfather and mother, she...
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Thank you for this further information.
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Hazel Grant replied to Margaret Morley
Second half of the 19th century, my maternal ancestors were apparently bobbing back and forth frequently between Belfast and Glasgow; Belfast and South Shields: fishing, shipbuilding and merchant navy mainly, even a South Shields bride becoming a Mollie Malone in Belfast selling her fish through streets brand and narrow...... the sea route between Belfast and...
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Hazel Grant replied to Colin Gillespie
It was a real treat to go into the Lyons Corner House on the rare occasion my parents brought us children up to London........ which is no more....... it's a pity, says my sentimental self, and just as well says my feminist one.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
Yikes! I know, it's the context of the time, but I'm so grateful not to live at a time when it seems the natural order was that my life's proper role was to train to be a domestic servant.......
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Hazel Grant replied to Hazel Grant
You're right, Ian, about single fathers, I have no disagreement with you on that, but you're also right, of course, for the most part the responsibility and disadvantages fall to the women. But I would also criticise our culture and social policy that sidelines fathers in maternity/paternity leave rights......... @IanCawthra
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Hazel Grant replied to Hazel Grant
@Morag1
About women taking time off to have children: not having children myself (choice, not tragedy!), I'm awed by those who do. They might take some time out of work, but the skills they have or develop as mothers/mostly chief carers (multi/tasking, time management, negotiation, educational, ingenuity, flexibility, Herculean endurance and commitment) are... -
Hazel Grant made a comment
The gender pay gap is alive and kicking: https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/equal-pay
The UK Equal Pay Act only came into being in 1968 thanks to the Dagenham women (stirringly dramatised in Made in Dagenham) striking for equal pay - and as you can see re Tesco and Asda, it's STILL not embedded in work practices. -
They wouldn't have known anything better themselves.
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Yes indeed! the fact that UK investors (though not slaves) were compensated when slavery was abolished in 1833 meant meticulous records were kept of those investors and their compensation - and their slaves' value as property for assessing compensation - and believe it or not, details of the scheme only became widely available to the public AFTER the 2020 BLM...
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Hazel Grant replied to Norma Almond
True, but the thing is, it'd be a bit of an ear worm, wouldn't it?
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I reckon, Elaine, that to right the disparity between rich and poor countries (the rich ones having significantly exploited, or destructively interfered in, the poor ones) will require us to do a LOT more than pay a bit more for goods. I think we'd have to be prepared to live much more modest lifestyles. But then again, that'd be better for environmental...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I think it could be effective written as if, if not by, a child millworker. Poetry was much more popular in Victorian culture than today, I think, and sentimentality mixed with pathos was very effective in Dickens' novels to raise awareness.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
Human beings can be amazing. Slaves from the southern USA and West Indies plantations have written many memoirs despite long working hours, abuse, all education forbidden; Holocaust survivors (and victims such as the teenage Anne Frank) have left powerful memoirs; working class boys with only rudimentary education have left haunting poetry and letters and...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I started reading the full version attached and was absolutely gripped. Got a 1/3 in and will definitely read the rest. His early work experiences are horrific, starting at age 6 (like 2 of his sisters) before his body was strong enough, the work crippled him for life. The master who encouraged his learning seems to have been an exception: William had callous...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I believe many workers who gained even this limited amount of education were inspired to go on with their learning at evening classes, the WEA etc. I count quite a few among my preceding generations. The children of the mills might be really quite proud that their grandchildren, great- and great-great-grandchildren did so much better than they did. But even...
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Like vaccinations, for example......
@Morag1 -
Hazel Grant made a comment
For the time, Owen was an enlightened innovator. Patronage might stick in the craw today, but his education programme would have been most welcome for my illiterate/innumerate Irish ancestors, still uneducated in the 1860/1870s, almost impossible to find in my family research efforts, so varied are the name spellings and ages on birth and wedding certificates!...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I think it would have had to be the mills. I had ancestors in domestic service and in mills, but the former meant sending your child away to unknown circumstances (Tess of the D'urbervilles springs to mind here); whereas at least with the mills, you and they might be in the same mill, where you would hope to be able to keep an eye on them, help avoid the worst...
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Infant mortality reduced family size. Poor economic circumstances and large numbers of children go together. Improved economic and educational circumstances --> higher standard of living --> smaller family size. Family history research is heart-breaking when you find so many deaths in 1 family of infants and young children.
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Hazel Grant replied to Hamish Morrison
I love the last 2 lines you quote. Why! Workers should clearly never leave the factory, the only certain and safe place to be, apparently. Implication being worker carelessness since accidents only occur in their limited free time.
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H&S legislation in the UK was for the most part piecemeal, responding to specific situations in specific industries. The following is a useful timeline of such developments. https://www.historyofosh.org.uk/timeline.html
But what is disconcerting is how late general and consistent standards were set across work in general: 1974. I'd been working by then for 14... -
Hazel Grant replied to Ann T
Absolutely with you on this!
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Hazel Grant made a comment
It's right to be appalled by historical abuse, but we can't mend that, only learn from it - but we perhaps owe it to those past victims not to perpetuate it:
Some stats about modern child labour:https://borgenproject.org/child-labor-in-bangladesh/
https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_766351/lang--en/index.htm
- and some about the... -
Hazel Grant made a comment
Children who have no choice about their fate, who experience abuse and exploitation:
See the Child Migration scheme which ran through the 1970s (yes the 1970s!) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/27/britains-child-migrant-programme-why-130000-children-were-shipped-abroad
See also:
https://www.childmigrantstrust.com
and the book "Empty Cradles"... -
@MaryEllenKerans I fervently agree.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I couldn't read 400 poems in one go, so chose rather arbitrarily "Conscience and Cotton" by Walter Anonym, whose subject is: faced with taking a principled stand and economic considerations, what would the perfidious British empire choose...... an uncomfortable theme, because, like any imperial (or global today) power, the British empire was no better than it...
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Hazel Grant replied to Steve Bamlett
Me too, Mary Ellen. Hardy's novels paint a vivid picture of life for the AgLabs (most of my ancestors were AgLabs, shipyard or cotton mill workers), though I must admit, after reading Jude the Obscure (....."because we are too many......" ), I've avoided Hardy rather! Too much relentless gloom at the time, I think, though I reckon I owe it to him to pick up...
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Hazel Grant replied to Steve Bamlett
@SteveBamlett
I remember being shocked by the descriptions of squalor and hunger when I read Mary Barton as a teenager. School history included the Ag and Id Revs, the subsequent legislation etc; I read Dickens; I sort of knew the facts of the disruption to lives, the poverty and squalor, but it took reading Mary Barton to really see it. -
Hazel Grant made a comment
I loved the poems and song. I think poetry is emotion and experience written in an economical, powerful and memorable way. Most important it is in the voice of the person concerned, not written by someone else about them.
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Many of the workers of the late 19th/early 20th centuries really valued the education, libraries, museums, galleries made available to them. The Workers' Educational Trust (WEA) founded 1903 I think, is still going strong. Those earlier workers didn't take it for granted, indeed the rote learning they had did have value (as it did for me in the 1950s). A lot...
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I recommend Ken Loach's film "Sorry We Missed You" about people in the gig economy and care work today, who DO end up paying the boss - and it's not a fiction.
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@AnnHolloway
Takes your breath away, doesn't it, folk thinking they don't need to pay much if anything for labour......... times don't change then. -
@JanetBrinsmead
Buying/consuming less is environmentally responsible, but it would lead to less work for those making the goods we no longer buy. Sophisticated production/mechanisation/robotisation and a healthier, longer-lived (ie larger) population would lead to far less production work for humans to share around, unless we reduce the population (oops!... -
@EleanorNess
I think it's laudable to resist buying goods whose cheapness derives from inadequately paid workers and unacceptable working conditions: but for me the problem is that those who can afford the more artisan goods are the better off. The English Tory politician Jacob Rees-Mogg (I must control myself here) in support of Brexit, argued it would lead... -
......except the church, school, boss, chattering classes, society kept telling them it was.
@EleanorNess -
Hazel Grant replied to Mary Ellen Kerans
When building Cromford cotton mill, Arkwight had to build houses in an undeveloped rural landscape for his workers, but he was only really interested in the women and children (smaller, more docile, cheaper, more use for his factory), but recognising he could hardly attract women and children without their spouses/fathers coming too, and knowing they too...
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@JanetPeacock Cragside yes! First house in the world to be electrified via hydroelectric power in 1878, the picture gallery was lit by an arc lamp, and as you say, in 1880 by Swan's incandescent bulbs. The kitchen must have seemed like science fiction in its day, with its many futuristic (for the time) mod cons. Cragside in Northumbria is a National Trust...
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Hazel Grant replied to Ann Holloway
If you're not keen on Jane Austen's novels, you might enjoy Longbourn even more - it paints a blunt picture of what life was probably like for those invisibles below stairs, especially interesting if you have a vague awareness of the plot of P&P.
@AnnHolloway -
Hazel Grant made a comment
I knew much of what has been covered: both school history (Ag & Ind Revs, 19th century social reforms) and family history research (6 generations so far of hand then machine weavers/Blackburn cotton mills) but also my own childhood memories of aunts working in that declining industry. But linking history, literature, cultural sites, participant comments and...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I saw a documentary a while ago, where a British journalist went to experience what it was like to work in a different job/country: in this instance, a pencil factory (sounds positively Victorian!) in Germany. His family went with him to experience family life there. His wife one day rang him on his mobile with a minor settling-in query. When he'd stopped...
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Hazel Grant replied to Ann Holloway
I love Jane Austen's novels, and dislike other people writing sequels and prequels as a rule: but I was charmed by a book described by the author as a subquel to Pride and Prejudice! Jo Baker's own ancestry included folk who had worked in service (as have some of mine), and she also loved P&P, but knew her ancestors would not have been like the Bennett girls,...
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Hazel Grant replied to Norma Almond
You've reminded me of the knocker-up and the sparking clogs my father described of the millworkers of his Blackburn childhood - thank you for those little gems. You're right about the women generally, my father didn't enter the mills, though several of his sisters did, though his father was an overlooker. You never hear of women overlookers, do you?
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Hazel Grant replied to Morag 1
A x2 Welsh great grandfather, according to census returns, was an Ag Lab in the 1850s-1880s, but after that he turned up as a south Wales miner, as did his sons. His daughter, my great-grandmother, turned up around the age of 12 in domestic service, later marrying my great grandfather who had his own small (90 acre) farm. By the 1890s, they were no longer on...
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Hazel Grant replied to Norma Almond
I don't disagree with you, your point is fair, but whilst I'm glad NOT to be living under even the most philanthropic boss's thumb, I see a lot wrong - and getting worse - with the working conditions for many of today's workers: exhausted young couples having to work to buy a home/repay huge university debts because the rental sector (remember social housing?)...
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Hazel Grant replied to Norma Almond
@NormaAlmond
My family history research has shown many of my working class ancestors in the 2nd half of the 19th century to be illiterate (marks not signatures on wedding registers, censuses etc). My grandfather born 1884 was working in a cotton mill at least by age 13. So I reckon 5 years of education at New Lanark decades earlier was probably a lot... -
Hazel Grant made a comment
I don't think Owen was unduly controlling of his workers' lives in the context of the time. Other course participants have mentioned a range of ways in which today's employers control/monitor/dictate employees' lives. David Eggers wrote a dystopian novel The Circle within the last decade which paints an intriguing picture of a "benevolent" employer taking over...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I can understand Dr Ure's eligibility as Mary Shelley's role model for Dr Frankenstein. His manipulation of Matthew Clydesdale's corpse, notwithstanding of scientific interest, was utterly chilling in depicting Ure's (to me) inhumanity. His inhumanity continued in his glowing description of factory life. He seems to me to be quite sociopathic, utterly...
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I wouldn't expect my employer NOT to be concerned about profit, but I would expect fairness in: his/her reasonable care of my health and safety at work; my income being sufficient (however you define that, but the ratio between that of the boss and the lowest paid worker has attracted a lot of discussion, so maybe 300 : 1 ratio is greedy and wrong, whereas 20...
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Hazel Grant replied to Janet Brinsmead
@IanCawthra Sorry, just queried Quakers rather than Methodists below before seeing your correction!
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Hazel Grant replied to Janet Brinsmead
I think Rowntree & Cadbury were Quakers?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17112572 -
Anyone read The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael Sandel, a very recent book? It says “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality ......was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them........It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope. We will make a truly...
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Hazel Grant replied to Sue Tangney
Thank you, Morag, I read the Hunterian article with interest: not keen on the job title, but I DID think the article spot on, for all of us, every Brit. I was surprised you learned no Scottish history, though mind you the history I studied (from the Stone Age to 1914 via Ur of the Chaldees, Ancient Rome, the ubiquitous Tudors (of course!), the Ag and Ind Revs:...
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Hazel Grant replied to Sue Tangney
I think there have been a lot of recent articles and programmes starting to identify in uncomfortable detail Britain's leading role in, dependency on, and use of, slavery as an economic tool - as well as giving perhaps a more nuanced view of the only topic we in Britain will readily admit to - abolition,...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
As I read, I became less tolerant of putting the Gregs’ Christian paternalism into historical context. They were wrong, but they could easily persuade themselves they were doing the right thing: after all, weren't they just sharing and reinforcing the dominant culture, beliefs, values around them, as preached from the pulpit every Sunday?
It’s true that... -
Hazel Grant replied to EILEEN DONNELLY
Agreed. I don't think Victorian industrialists were interested in education to liberate or improve the minds of their workers, but to become skilled workers with the "appropriate" respect for authority. I found it slightly hard to stomach the fact that Greg complained about mill owners having to foot the education bill too. Presumably "someone else" should...
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Hazel Grant replied to Ann Hebden
Couldn't agree more, but the uncomfortable fact is, we in the wealthy west want our cheap fashion items, white goods and technology. If we insisted on quality goods, environmental standards, global equality of worker rights...........
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Interestingly, Richard Arkwright found a suitable water supply for his revolutionary cotton mill in a valley empty of all but sheep, I think, (Derwent), so had to build his own town (Cromford) to house his workers: which rather trapped them there should they wish to change jobs. I believe part of his motivation was also to avoid the risk of Luddite attacks...
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Hazel Grant replied to Norma Almond
As soon as workhouse girls started work they'd no longer be a burden on the parish. And their employer would have little trouble from them, with no caring adult to protect them, they'd have been raised to be suitably grateful. And as you say, as children, they'd have been nice and cheap too.
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Hazel Grant made a comment
A few years ago, Channel 4 did a series "Walking Through History', fronted by Tony Robinson. The first episode, "Birth of industry" covered a 40 mile walk (over 3 days), starting in a "pre-industrial" landscape near Bakewell, continuing on to Arkwright's Cromford (World Heritage Site) and ending in Derby with the later expansion of mechanised industry. It's a...
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Hazel Grant made a comment
I appreciate some of the recommendations of IndRev historical sites to visit. Richard Arkwright's Cromford development is part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, and is (under non-pandemic conditions) a fascinating place to visit. We've spent a couple of weekends there. Arkwright built everything in what had been an untouched valley, including...
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Hazel Grant replied to Christine Green
I think AgLab joblessness thanks to technological developments, the weather cycles on farming at times, plus no welfare safety net acted in concert to encourage migration to the towns! It worked on one branch of my family to drive farmers to the Blackburn cotton mills; on another to drive northern Welsh AgLabs to the south Wales mines; Irish AgLabs to...
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Hazel Grant replied to Michael Sanders
@MichaelSanders
Charlotte' Brontë's friend Elizabeth Gaskell also wrote North and South (more from the factory owner's point of view) and Mary Barton, painting a grim picture of worker's living conditions. Both worth reading. -
Hazel Grant made a comment
My paternal grandfather worked in Blackburn's cotton mills from an early age from the end of the 19th century, as weaver / loom overlooker. Several of his daughters later worked there also. I recall my aunts' distinctive way of speaking, using emphatic mouth movements, to overcome the deafening noise in the mills. My interest in this course is to learn more...
