John had mentioned to Mr Wren "my acquaintance with your business connection" and this can clearly be seen in his chat with Thomas Eskrigge. Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that, like John, the partners of Kershaw & Leese were all Congregationalists. They were also good examples of the tough, energetic businessmen and industrialists who were forming a new type of ruling class in Manchester, to the fascination of outside observers.
James Kershaw (c1795-1864) was the son of a handloom weaver. As a boy, his first job had been sweeping up in a warehouse and had worked long and hard, from 6 o'clock in the morning till 8 o'clock at night, teaching himself the skills to become an office clerk then a sales representative and he had risen to be the best cotton buyer at the Manchester Exchange. He became a mill owner, Mayor of Manchester and Liberal MP for Stockport.
Joseph Leese (1783-1861) had begun as a draper but he had made his fortune in textile manufacture. He and his partners worked a twelve hour day with a break of 75 minutes for dinner. His character is caught in a conversation quoted in the Manchester City News of 21 January 1865 – he is talking to the Liberal industrialist and Unitarian Sir Thomas Potter (1774-1845)
I tell thee what, friend Tom, I wouldn't give thee sixpence for all thou knows, and I'll sell thee all I know for sixpence – the fact is, as your own experience has proved, that if a man wants to get on in Manchester, there's nothing for it but downright hard work, and sticking to it.
Joseph Leese's first wife Ann was buried in 1837 at the Nonconformist graveyard beside Rusholme Road Chapel – the Rusholme Road Cemetery, now a park called Gartside Gardens.
John's friendly adviser Thomas Eskrigge (1800-58) had become managing partner at Kershaw Leese & Co after he was bankrupted by a fire in his cotton factory in Warrington. He was an influential town councillor and, according to his political enemies, was not above dirty tricks. It was before the secret ballot was introduced and party allegiances were known in advance. A few months after the fatal accident at the India Mills, his son Thomas, it was alleged, "bottled" voters – that is, he kidnapped them and shut them away, well supplied with alcohol, until voting was over so that they couldn't vote against the Liberal candidate.
Mr Eskrigge has the dubious distinction of being named by Karl Marx, a frequent visitor to Manchester, in Das Kapital ("Ein gewisser Eskrigge, Baumwollspinner von der Firma Kershaw, Leese et Co") as an example of the control that millowners had as magistrates.
Even before John was born, anxiety had been growing about conditions in the new steam-powered textile factories. Sir Robert Peel in 1816 had told a Committee of the House of Commons that whenever he had visited his own factories he "was struck with the uniform appearance of bad health, and, in many cases, stinted growth of the children." The Parliamentary battle to regulate factory conditions had been under way since John Hopkinson was a little boy – a long struggle to establish an effective inspectorate and enforcement of regulations.
Medical men across Europe noted the physical effects of long hours standing working in the noisy, dusty, cramped conditions of the factories, constantly attending inexorable machinery – the physical deformities produced by the different types of work – the disruption of traditional family life from all members of the family working all hours – the exposure to contagious diseases in crowded conditions – the indiscriminate, unsafeguarded mixing of girls and women with all sorts of men and boys – the sheer length of hours constantly worked – the lack of normal childhood exercise – the lack of education for the children. In England, the question of their education was further complicated by the battle between Nonconformists and the Established Church as to who should run the schools. Male commentators found the fact of working women very unsettling – what had happened to the laws of nature and morality? How could a decent life be maintained? What was the link with prostitution?
Reformers concentrated their efforts on child labour, essential to the working of early mills, as restricting children's hours could lead to their goal, a ten-hour working day for adults.
Children worked as pieceners or piecers, joining broken threads. They walked all day alongside the spinning mule as it went constantly back and forward and when a thread broke on the whirling spindles as it was stretched and twisted, a child had to run forward at once and with skilful small hands join the broken ends together. The littlest children worked as scavengers, crawling under the machinery to clean oil and dirt from the working parts. The millowner and Radical MP John Fielden, who had started work himself as a child of ten and who drove the Ten Hours Bill through Parliament in 1847, calculated that a child in his factory walked 20 miles in its working day.
For the millowners, anxious for their companies' position in the competition for trade and keen to watch their profits, children suffered no lasting harm from this work – and, if there was harm, it was unavoidable. Children were small, nimble workers – their work was essential – they were cheap and kept costs down – their earnings supplemented the family income of the poorest parents.
On the one side, the millowner's interests – on the other, the parents' interest in maximising family income. There was nobody but the state to look out for the children's interests. Their position was pitiable. Reformers pointed out bitterly that, when slavery was abolished in the colonies, the Act provided that former slaves should work no more than a 45 hour week. Children in Britain were working 12 or 14 hours a day. As a spinner described to the parliamentary Commission in 1833
I find it difficult to keep my piecers awake the last hours of a winter's evening; have seen them fall asleep, and go on performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the billey had stopped, when their work was over; I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecening when they were fast asleep, when there was no work to do, and they were doing nothing; children at night are so fatigued that they are asleep often as soon as they sit down, so that it is impossible to wake them to sense enough to wash themselves, or even to eat a bit of supper, being so stupid in sleep
The early Factory Acts – because of the dependence on child labour – allowed for the children to work in shifts (the "relay" system) so that the adults could continue to work up to 15 hours a day.
A relay system was permitted if approved by the local magistrates. Meanwhile, some were using a "false relay" system to get round the legislation – when children were allowed to choose their own meal breaks, it was impossible to track the hours they worked.
Thomas Eskrigge proposed a relay system for his mill. The factory inspectors refused and a few months later, another mill owner called Robinson ("ein Individuum namens Robinson, ebenfalls Baumwollspinner, und wen nicht der Freitag, so jedenfalls der Verwandte des Eskrigge" – "if not his Man Friday, at all events related to Eskrigge") appeared before the local magistrates to face charges of operating a similar system.
Marx wrote that Robinson appeared before Stockport borough magistrates on the charge of introducing into his own mill the identical relay system invented by Eskrigge. Four magistrates were on the bench, three of them cotton spinners with Eskrigge at their head. Eskrigge acquitted Robinson and then introduced the system into his own factory. The composition of the bench in itself was in violation of the law, Marx pointed out – by Sir John Hobhouse's Factory Act, it was forbidden to any owner of a cotton-spinning or weaving mill, or the father, son, or brother of such owner, to act as Justice of the Peace in any inquiries that concerned the Factory Act.
We don't know John's thoughts on the hotly debated issues of the 1840s – but we do know that he spent decades of his adult life on Manchester Council working for civic improvements and was particularly remembered for ending the frequent flooding of the River Medlock with all the hardship that caused. And we know that he was deeply influenced by his guide and mentor the Revd James Griffin, who wrote movingly of his father's exhortation always to "consider the poor" and that, far from ignoring the slums inhabited by the poor, two of the young men of the Rusholme Road Chapel went into Little Ireland, which lay only about half a mile from the Chapel.
Friedrich Engels, who was sent as a very young man to work in the family firm in Salford in 1842, described Little Ireland vividly in his Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845), published after his return to Germany in 1844. (It was published in England in 1887 as The Condition of the Working Class in England):
in a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish ...
ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench …
in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on average twenty human beings live … in the whole region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided …
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| Plaque to Little Ireland: by Nick Harrison |
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