Monday, October 23, 2017

Contrasting Lifestyles - Part One

I promised in my last post to take you inside the two newly opened residences at Quarry Bank Mill.  As we visited the worker's cottage first that is the one I will write about first too.  All information is from my memory of what the guide told us on our tour and from the information boards and film in the hub plus information gleaned from their own website.

The cottages is known as the 'pickled' cottage as it has been kept just as it was found after the last, elderly resident left in the 1960s.   The cottage was one of many built in the 1820s by the Greg family to house their workforce .  Before the mill was built in the area Styal was a small agricultural village. You can see from the photo above that there was a cellar below the main cottage.


 Shall we look inside?  There are only about a dozen people allowed on each tour and only two at a time on the staircase.  We had a lovely guide who told us a lot about the cottage and who had lived there.

 Through the front door and into the living room.  Much of the research done has been into the first occupants of the cottage and I think plans are afoot to recreate the cottage as it would have looked in the 19th century but for now we were looking at the kind of dwelling that was familiar to many of us on the tour, all being of a certain age. Seven layers of wallpaper were found in this cottage showing that the families who lived there cared about how their houses looked and kept them clean and tidy.  An early 19th century wallpaper with bright green patterning was found to have arsenic in the green dye.

 We all remembered gas mantles and meters, coal ranges and lino covered floors. In the early days of the cottage this would have been the room where all the cooking, eating, sewing, darning and mending would have been done.  The first family recorded as living in the house in the 1841 census were Peter and Ann Nicklin a couple in their 50s.  There were no children living with them at that time but there were two lodgers who shared the back bedroom upstairs a Catherine Burn age 26, a dyer at the mill and later a Mary Brown who was a spinner at the mill.  The two women would have shared the bedroom, probably had their meals with the Nicklins but the etiquette of privacy and morality would prevent them from washing and mending their clothes, especially stockings and undergarments or washing themselves when a man was in the house.

 In the scullery was a sink and drainer, there would also have been a copper providing hot water in the opposite corner.  In here was a large hook on the ceiling used for either hanging meat or a dryer for laundry, no one was sure which.  There was also a cupboard under the stairs.  Outside, beyond the window, was an outside privy shared only by the occupants of the one cottage.  This was seen as a great improvement on the housing in the larger towns and cities where one or two  privies would have been shared by lots of families.

 The upstairs back bedroom which was rented to Catherine Burn and Mary Brown in the 1840s was small and had no heating. Whereas Peter and Ann Nicklin's bedroom had a small fireplace.  In the cellar there was a two roomed residence which was, at the time of the Nicklins, lived in by  William and Mary Bradbury and two children.  The cellar was closed as there were still safety issues with it but we could peer through the window and see a large brick fireplace with parts of a black range in it.

If you compare the two photos above and below you can see that over the fireplace new wallpaper recreated from the pattern on the old has been placed on the walls.

 On the floor were the indentations of a where a bed had stood with its head against the wall above.  The window on the opposite wall looks over the small allotments in front of the cottages where families like the Nicklins could grow their own vegetables, usually root vegetables, to supplement what they could afford from the shop which was provided by the Greg family.  This was run on the 'truck' system which meant that everything a family had from the shop during the week was tallied up and the amount stopped from their wages.

 The Gregs also built two chapels and a school for their workers so all of their daily lives were catered for.  Mrs Greg, especially, believed in education for all and later adult classes were available too.  I didn't take a photo of the school as it is still a primary school and children were playing in the playground but it is just a couple of doors away from 13 Oak Cottages.

 
The village shop became a Co-operative Store in 1873 and was run by the workers rather than the owners.
Above is Norcliffe Chapel one of the two chapels (the other a Methodist Chapel) built by the mill owners.  It is still used for services.

 Working at Quarry Bank Mill must have seemed a lot better than working in the huge cotton mills of cities like Manchester, working conditions may have been better and there was less disease caused by insanitary living conditions, plus the fresh air of the country around especially in the early days of the factory when water power was used to work the machinery in the mill.  But, there is always a but isn't there?  As our tour guide pointed out there was also a loss of personal freedom as workers were tied to the mill, chapel and the shop, if you joined any kind of group or society which promoted the rights of workers for example the Chartist Movement you would lose your job and therefore your home as well.  Some people may have found the choices and freedoms of a larger city more appealing. 

Shall we go and visit the owners now? Perhaps as this post is so long we'll visit next time.

20 comments:

  1. Loss of freedom, but I do think they were probably better off.

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    1. Yes they probably had a better standard of living than the city mill workers:)

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  2. Isn't it great to have the census information, it really brings it all to life. 😊

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    1. They had done a lot of research in the census returns to name the people living in the cottages at different times and matched them up to the pay books:)

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  3. Thank you for the tour Rosie. I must say that I prefer the outside of the house to how it is inside! I think had I lived there when it was newly built I would have felt quite fortunate though. x

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    1. It was strange to see inside the house as I remember house likes this from my childhood - flowery wallpaper, heating and cooking ranges, gas water heaters and meters etc, the cottages must have seemed like luxury in some cases:)

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  4. This is a fascinating post that you wrote, Rosie. It's amazing that you were able to tour this historical place in its actual condition. You are correct in that the workers were tied to their jobs with little freedom, yet they did have a place to live, food and security in some sense. I find it quite fascinating that you were able to find out about the occupants who lived here over a hundred years ago. Thank you for sharing. Pat xx

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    1. Thank you Pat, the people at the Mill had done the research I just remembered what the guide told us and made a few notes from the information boards, I think maybe if they were happy with what they had in the village and their working conditions they were content to live that way, others who questioned more would perhaps move on:)

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  5. How amazing that there was a record of the first occupants. A great tour, I am not sure that the loss of liberty would have suited me.

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    1. I think I may have resented some of the constrictions too. The staff there had done quite a lot of reserach into the occupants of the houses at various stages from the census Returns, parish records and of course their own archives with emplyment and pay records:)

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  6. What a fascinating post Rosie. It’s great to get a feel of who lived in a house and what their lives would have been like. Bet that shared bedroom was freezing in the winter. B x

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    1. Thanks, the guide did give us lots of information on the occupants which I found fascinating. That back bedroom would have been freezing, frost on both sides of the windows no doubt:)

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  7. How lovely to see inside and the chance to read about the people that once lived there. I remember frost on both sides of the window growing up.
    Amanda xx

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    1. Thanks Amanda. Thick frost with leaf like patterns in it! Brr!:)

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  8. Such and interesting post - wonderful to see the inside of the cottage and read about the people who lived there and their way of life. I was just thinking how well the mill owners had provided for their workers when I read your bit about loss of freedom - I don't think that would have suited me!

    I remember frost patterns on the inside of windows when I was a child too! I don't think we had central heating until I was about 20!

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    1. I must have been about the same age when we got radiators at home, we still didn't have a colour television though:) Oh those days of clinging to the fireside and putting a hot water bottle in bed half an hour before you went up to sleep and no one wanting to go into a cold kitchen to make an evening hot drink:)

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  9. This is a fascinating look into history, Rosie. When I think of the dearth of choices available to people like this in the 19th and early 20th centuries, I'm thankful for the opportunities that modern society currently enjoys. The workers at the mill would feel so tied to their position as it represented more than a wage, but living space and security.

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    1. Yes, indeed I think most of them would have abided by the rules and regulations to keep a roof over their head, especially if they had families. Life was so hard then wasn't it?:)

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  10. Truck system - Grrr! There is a Methodist Chapel where I lived which was full every Sunday in days gone by because the local employer attended and if he didn't see you there on Sunday, you were out of a job on Monday. That attitude still held good in living memory but thank goodness it's gone now. x

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    1. Dreadful really wasn't it? Same as the 'butty' system in the pits. I remember those days of it being 'who you knew' or 'what your father did' helping you, or not, to get a job:)

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