SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



formerly handloom cotton weavers, were employed in this industry at Man- 

 chester alone, and at Westleigh there were a great number similarly 

 employed.*" This industry was admitted to be flourishing in the thirties."^ 



The profits in all these branches of industry were made possible by the 

 extreme cheapness of human labour, which the now general employment of 

 machinery had greatly reduced in value. If the wages of an ordinary power- 

 loom weaver were low, what must be the remuneration of the handloom 

 weavers, whom no one now wished to employ ? Their condition was in 

 fact becoming desperate. The evidence of Mr. James Grimshaw, a manu- 

 facturer living at Barrowford near Colne, who employed about four hundred 

 handloom weavers, testified to the almost starving condition of the population 

 there, and handed in statements*" which show at a glance the straits of 

 poverty and wretchedness to which these handloom weavers were now 

 reduced. 



The Parliamentary Commission of 1834 went very closely into the 

 subject of the handloom weavers, and summoned many witnesses. One of 

 these, a woollen manufacturer ' able to speak ' to the condition of the hand- 

 loom weavers in the neighbourhood of Manchester and the surrounding 

 districts as well as further north, in the districts of Rossendale, Padiham, and 

 Burnley, found it ' very hard.' Even if a man and his wife and two children 

 were regularly employed in full work, they could not at the present prices of 

 labour make anything like a decent living. Their furniture was exceedingly 

 poor, in many houses there was hardly a chair. Their clothing was equally 

 bad. As for their beds, some had not a blanket, and the witness added that 

 they generally ' He upon straw.^ This he averred he had seen with his own 

 eyes. 



At Bolton another manufacturer gave testimony that there was full work 

 and yet wages were lower than he had ever known them at any former 

 period. Their food was chiefly oatmeal and potatoes, with butchers' meat 

 not more than once a week. The workers were literally clothed in rags, and 

 had no bedding or furniture beyond a chair and three-legged stool or a chest 

 to put their clothes in and to sit upon. Similar evidence was given by the 

 member for Oldham, who also mentioned the fact that many workers slept 

 upon straw. Their labour he said, was excessive, frequently sixteen hours a day. 

 This drove many to drink, or to embezzle the materials entrusted to them.*'* 

 This trade in ' receiving ' was further encouraged by a certain class of dis- 

 honourable manufacturers who bought from the wretched operatives at a low 

 price the weft thus stolen. 



The weavers could not change or better their condition, for they were 

 so abjectly poor that they must remain with the master who gave them work, 

 neither could they afford to change their weaving gear or implements to suit 

 the requirements of a new cloth.*" Further evidence showed how the hand- 

 loom weaver was handicapped by having to find not merely his loom and 



*" Rep. of Select Com. on Manuf. See. 557, par. 9226. 



*" Evidence of John Scott, broad silk weaver of Manchester, before the Committee of Handloom Weav- 

 ing (1833), Rej>. 171, par. 2401-2451 and 176, par. 2502. 



*" See in Appendix to this article Tables I and II, taken from Minutes of Evidence before Select Committee 

 on Manuf. Com. and Shipping (1833), 605-6. 



"' This charge of embezzlement was repudiated by the evidence of a silk weaver, who pointed out that 

 it was the warehousemen who did the pilfering, not the weavers. Pari. Rep. on Handloom Weaving, 225. 



*" Ibid. pt. i, sect. 8. 



3" 



