Cotton Mills | Living Museums

The Lancashire Cotton Industry

On this page, we present projects based on the history of the Lancashire cotton industry, focusing in particular on the town of Barnoldswick, and on the Apprentice House, Quarry Bank Mill.

First, we look at a three-day project led by Dorothy Heathcote in 1984, at Higher Mill Textile Museum in Helmshore, Lancashire.

The drama was about life for workers in a mill in the 19th century. Some of Dorothy's M.Ed. students worked in role.

Some 500 children took part. They were all given a role (or "frame"). There were three different “frames” for the older children (age 14-15):

1. Sociologists investigating the phenomenon of longevity “round here.”

2. Researchers resurrecting a 150 years-dead “woollen" ritual.

3. A group of “show-ers” who could re-enact small incidents around the mill, based on partial evidence.

The last frame suggests that the participants were acting as historical re-enactors, using evidence to demonstrate incidents or work practices – as museum workers in a “living history” museum might do. This may also have been the case with frame #2 – the participants were not “living through” an event, but recreating and demonstrating it (possibly with a future audience in mind). This is in accord with one of Dorothy’s principles in the teaching of history:

If you're going to study history, you can only do it from your own time. That’s all you've got… you can never know it as the people who lived there, then, knew it. That you can apply your imagination, you can scrutinise the evidence, but you belong to the 20th century... We cannot live the lives we didn’t. (1)

The younger children (10-11) already knew the mill. They were framed as mill workers and families; and as police officers on a refresher course, exercising their investigative skills on a 150-year-old “cold,” “unsolved case.”

This was the guiding principle behind the work: "All these frames enabled the mill to be investigated, not shown around."

This is a key element in Dorothy's approach: students should not simply be “shown round” museums or heritage sites, they should investigate.

Sources: “Two Mules Waiting” by Rick Lee, in Drama Broadsheet (NATD, Winter 1984), except (1) Making Drama Work: In the Classroom, Tape 2 (University of Newcastle, 1992).

Cotton Mill Workers

This image is taken from the Illustrated London News in 1862. It shows a range of cotton mill workers. We used it to familiarise students with some of the jobs of mill workers.

The students (from Trinity High School, Manchester) were in the frame of people creating a museum about the cotton industry. In groups, they recreated the tableau from the magazine. They were given a short description of the roles of the different mill workers - and they had to convert this to first-person narration. For example:

SCAVENGER: Swept up cotton fibres and dust that gathered on the floor under the machine, a very dangerous job. The wastage was seen as too valuable for the owners to leave, and one of the simplest solutions was to employ young children to work under the machinery

became

"I am a scavenger. My job is to sweep up dust and cotton fibres off the floor under the machines. It's a very dangerous job, usually done by children."

The students sometimes chose to add actions to the words. You can see examples in the video.

The story of Barnoldswick, and "Mr Barlick"

Barnoldswick (called “Barlick” by locals) is a town about 35 miles north of Manchester. In the 19th century, the town was transformed, from a village to a thriving industrial town; and the man who was behind this transformation was William Bracewell. Local people even called him “Mr Barlick.” He was also called "Owd Billycock" because of the bowler hat he wore (which were called "billycocks.") He was typical of male industrialists in Lancashire in the 19th century, who were making money, but also changing the lives of ordinary people forever.

A key text for us, in planning this work, was My Days are Swifter than a Weaver's Shuttle by Ken Wilson.

This contains extracts from a diary written in 1862-3 by Richard Ryley, a mill worker at Bracewell's mills. It also contains illustrations of buildings in the town; and maps, showing how the town has changed over the years.

We began the project on Barlick, by asking the students to imagine that in the centre of the town, there is a statue to William Bracewell. We added an "epitaph" (written on a poster):

William Bracewell

1813 - 1885

“Mr. Barlick”

“Behold - my legacy is all around you.”

“We sleep, but the loom of life never stops.”

Our actor, Robert Lane, represented the statue. We asked the students to consider what they made of him, and of the "epitaph."

Next, we looked at a map of Barlick in 1862, taken from My Days are Swifter than a Weaver's Shuttle.

We took some images of the town from the book (such as the ones above), and invited students to locate the images on the map. Only a few images showed life as it was before Bracewell arrived in the town.

Then, we gave them some facts about William Bracewell, for them to add to the map - for example:

The idea was to demonstrate the impact that Bracewell had on Barlick - how much of the town was, indeed, his "legacy."

We invited students to arrange Bracewell's desk in his office at the mill, for our "museum." We used some objects - pages from a ledger, an egg timer made from an old bobbin, a mug with a motto from John Wesley on it (Bracewell was a Methodist), and a copy of the Illustrated London News from 1862, which featured news of the cotton famine.

The students then worked with the actor Robert Lane. They placed him in position behind the desk, and coached him on how they thought he should speak to visitors, to introduce himself in role to visitors to the "museum."

They focused on the issue of the cotton famine, and on how Bracewell might view the situation. They tried a range of reactions - from making him a man who was angry at the impact on his business, to one who was more sympathetic and concerned about the plight of his workers. (See video.)

Focusing on the story of Barnoldswick and the cotton industry can open up the history of the era: the Industrial Revolution, the role of industrialists, migration from the countryside to the towns and cities, the change in people's lives, the question of child labour, the cotton famine and the dependence of the cotton industry on slavery, and so on. But it is also history with a human dimension, looking through the personal stories of William Bracewell, and his employee, Richard Ryley.

Ryley's diary - reproduced in Ken Smith's book - offers us a glimpse of the struggles he faced throughout the cotton famine, in dealing with hardship, ill health, the "Relief Committee," etc. Again, his personal story reflects the wider history of the time, and the experiences of working people.

Mill Owners and the American Civil War

How should we view mill owners like Mr Bracewell, and their attitude to the American Civil War? And how should we portray them in drama?

During the war, the Northern states blockaded exports of cotton from the South, and this led to shortages in supply, decimating the British cotton industry. Many - but not all - mill owners supported the South against the North, calling on the British government to intervene militarily and break the Union blockade to restore the flow of raw cotton and their profits. We know that, many working-class people in Lancashire supported the Union, but some of them supported the South. It was a difficult economic situation, with many driven into poverty; and this was a major factor influencing people's views. So it's simplistic to see the mill owners simply as "pro-South" and "pro slavery." There are many situations around us today, where people - individuals and governments - make compromises with "evil" regimes, and turn a blind eye to abuses, for economic reasons.

Bracewell was a Methodist. We don't know what his own views were on the Civil War, but we know that the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, was an ardent opponent of slavery. British Methodists held a staunch abolitionist stance, and maintained this position during the American Civil War. So it might have been difficult for someone like Bracewell to go against his faith, and support the South.

This is why we introduced the mug in our reconstruction of Bracewell's desk, with a motto by Wesley on it ("Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can"). It complicated the view of Bracewell that the students might have, and introduced a moral problem into the drama: What would he do in this situation? Would he choose to follow his faith, or his economic self-interest?

The way that the students coached Robert Lane to portray Bracewell in the "museum" reflects their ambivalence towards him, as they explored some of the range of views he might hold.

(In Richard Ryley's diary, Bracewell appears as a quite benevolent man, concerned about Ryley's health and welfare.)

Apprentice House

The Apprentice House at Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, near Manchester, was built in the 1790s, to house child workers as young as eight or nine, who were sent to work in the mill. These children, often from workhouses, lived there for years, up to 90 at a time. They worked long hours; the youngest began their working lives picking cotton, scavenging, cleaning, and doffing bobbins, before moving on to become machine minders and piecers.

In our drama, we again worked with students from Trinity School, Manchester. We looked at some images of the Apprentice House, to familiarise the students with some of the different spaces - the kitchen / dining room, the school room, the medical room, and the bedrooms.

The students were again in the frame of people preparing a museum on the cotton industry. They worked in groups. Each group was allocated one of the rooms in the House, and created a "freeze frame," to show what visitors might encounter in the "museum," with "apprentices" occupied in different activities. They brought these "freeze frames" briefly to life.

We wanted to introduce some information about the lives of the apprentices. In 1807, two of the apprentices - Thomas Priestley and Joseph Sefton - ran away to London, but they were caught, and they made statements in front of a Magistrate about their lives at the mill. We combined details from the two statements to form one statement.

Using materials like this is in line with Dorothy's principle - to wokr with authentic resources, rather than standard school "text books": "I have an instinct that my input material must be of the real world, not done for school children. My job is to make it interpretable by school children." (1)

(1) From: “Making Drama Work: In the Classroom”, Tape 2 (University of Newcastle, 1992)

We were concerned that the text was informative but long, and might be difficult for some students to access. We worked with delegates from the Dorothy Heathcote Now 2025 conference, to find a way to make the material accessible.

We used some of Dorothy's conventions of dramatic action. One of them is a letter, or text, "read in the voice of the writer". Another is: "A report of an event but formalised by authority or ritual." And a third one is: a letter or text which "is read by another with no attempt to portray the person who wrote it, but still expressing feeling."

The delegates staged a scene, which was introduced to the students as a "tableau" in the planned "museum." One delegate represented Thomas Priestley, standing in the dock facing two magistrates. He read his own statement to the court. At a certain point, we said that there was a "change of lightning" and a "crossfade" to another scene, showing a priest reading Thomas' statement to the boy's mother, as if it had been published in a newspaper, but she could not read.

The use of the conventions created, in effect, a piece of theatre - and this made it gripping for the students.

There are other ways which could be used to make a text like this accessible to students. Here's one example.

We took Thomas Priestley's statement, and we turned it into what looked like an authentic document which you might find in an archive.

(The original document exists in the Manchester Archive, but we felt that the writing style would make it difficult for students to read - see image - so we created our own version.)

Next, we attached the statement to a larger sheet, and made it seem as if it had been "filed" this way at some point in the past by an archivist. There was an "Archive Number" at the top, and it seemed that notes and observations had been added by the archivist in the margins.

This was a method which Dorothy herself used, as a way of breaking up a text for students, and drawing attention to things in it. She observed:

You see, this is what archivists do: when people take shoeboxes of documents to them, the first thing they do is give them a number; they scrutinise them, and they allow other archivists a shortcut into what they might be about…

Somebody's had to interfere with this [document], to partially interpret it, so that children cannot be utterly defeated by it - which is what a teacher always does. A teacher enables people to get at a text.

(Dorothy Heathcote Video Archive, A:1 (University of Central England, 1991)

Here, for example, is a document that Dorothy produced, for a project about the Cherokee Nation. A page from a "diary" has been "filed" by an "archivist," and notes added, such as "XXX" and "XXX." The notes do not explain the text but raise questions about it.

Delegates at the Dorothy Heathcote Now conference created this version of Thomas Priestley's statement, with an "archivist's notes."

To return to the drama with students at Trinity School. Now that, after listening to Thomas Priestley's statement, the students were armed with more information about the lives of the apprentices, they were asked to make some decisions about themselves as "apprentices": how old they are, when they arrived at the mill, where they came from, etc.; and also to decide what kinds of information from Thomas Priestley's statement (e.g. about food, working hours etc.) they might incorporate into their role-work.