SHEFFIELD IN 1845
Sheffield's position as a center of steel production was a function of local geology and geography. The area offered ample supplies of iron ore for smelting, charcoal and coal for firing, and millstones for grinding. In the days before steam power, Sheffield's rivers provided the water power needed for the grinding. Man-made improvements in the local waterways allowed for the more efficient movement of raw materials and finished products. The River Don was made navigable to Tinsley in 1751, and then a canal was opened from Tinsley to Sheffield in 1819. [White, Sheffield Directory, pp. 9-10]. With the debut of the Sheffield and Rotherdam Railway in 1838, the North Midland Railway in 1840, and the Sheffield Manchester Railway in 1845, the canals eventually became obsolete. [ibid]. 
William White's 1845 edition of his General Directory of Sheffield begins by identifying Sheffield as "the great seat of cutlery and other hardware manufactures." That claim is borne out by the sheer number of Sheffielders named in the Directory who were involved in this business. [White, Sheffield Directory, p. 7] Tellingly the entries in the "Classification of Trades and Professions" section of the Directory that pertain to cutlery are broken down into many specialized subdivisions: "Cutlery--Fork manufacturers" (28), "Cutlery--Lancet and Fleam Manufacturers" (17), "Cutlery--Pen & Pocketknife manufacturers" (359), "Cutlery--Razor manufacturers" (108), "Cutlery--Scissor manufacturers" (123), "Cutlery--Shoe, Butcher, Bread, & Cook knife manufacturers" (35), "Cutlery--Silver Fruit & Dessert Knife manufacturers" (28), "Cutlery--Silver Handle, Cap, Ferrule, &c manufacturers" (4), "Cutlery--Table Knife, &c manufacturers" (208), and, of course, "Cutlery and Hardware Dealers" (28). Altogether these entries take up nine pages (each with approximately 100 names) of the seventy-four dedicated to Sheffield businesses. It should be noted that the names listed in the Directoryare those of the owners of the businesses, not their employees.
As a steel city, Sheffield was subject to the whims of a volatile global market, and this had a palpable effect on the morphology of the city. White observed: "The number of houses in 1821 was only 15,045; but in 1831, they had increased to 19,713.... The great number of unoccupied houses in 1841 was chiefly attributable to the extraordinary mania for building, which existed in the years 1835 and 1836, during a season of unparalleled prosperity, which was followed by a long period of commercial depression." [White, Sheffield Directory, pp. 8-9] By the time White was writing in 1845, he felt confident that the dampening effects of the wars in America and France were a thing of the past, though he remained chary about the ongoing threats of over speculation and labor unrest. [White, Sheffield Directory, p. 10]. As it turned out, Sheffield dominance in the steel industry would remain unchallenged until the early twentieth century, when German and American production took off. Ultimately foreign competition led to the closure of Sheffield's remaining steel plants in the 1980s. The 1997 movie, The Full Monty is set in Sheffield against the backdrop of the plight of unemployed steel workers.
24. General Street Nuisances.—That if any person shall, within the said borough, shake, beat, or dust after ten o'clock in the morning, any carpet, drugget, floor cloth, mat, rug, furniture, sack, soot bag, or sooty clothes, in any street, or from any door or window opening into, or adjoining the same, or wash after ten o'clock in the morning, any window opening into or adjoining any street, or if any person shall roll, draw, drive, drag, or carry on any footpath, any carriage, ladder, pole, timber, stone, bars of iron or steel, furniture, sack, bag, or bulky article, or any carcass or part of a carcass of any animal, burthens [i.e., burdens] carried by two or more persons, or burthens suspended on both sides of the carrier (except for the necessary purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footpath,) or ride, or drive any horse or other animal upon any footpath, or hang, or fasten any horse or other animal to any building, door, wall, post, rail, tree, or other thing, so that it can or shall go or stand upon or across any footpath, or deposit, place, or leave on any footpath, any furniture, goods, wares, or merchandise, or any cask, tub, barrel, box, package, hamper, basket, bag, sack, pail, bucket, stool, bench, stall, show-board, or any other article, matter, or thing, which shall or may be dangerous, or incommodious to, or liable to hurt or injure persons or passengers on such footpath, or set up, or place, or permit, or suffer to be set up or placed, any blind, shade, frame, covering, or awning, over, across, or along any footpath, unless such blind, shade, frame, covering, or awning, shall be seven feet in height at the least, in every part thereof, including the brackets or supports thereof, from the surface of such footpath, and shall, if the same be supported in any way from the ground, extend over the whole breadth of such footpath; or place, hang out, or otherwise expose for sale or exhibition, any goods, wares, merchandise, matter, or thing whatsoever, so as to project into or over any footpath or street and obstruct or incommode any person or passenger, or roll any cask, hogshead, barrel, or tub, on any street or footpath, except for the purpose of crossing the same, or wilfully, negligently, or carelessly throw, cast, slop, or spill any water or other liquid, or any other matter or thing, liquid or otherwise, upon or against any person in any street, so as to injure, damage, dirty, or wet his person, clothes, or property, or shall in or upon any street within the said borough, trundle any wheel, hoop, or girth; or make, trim, fire, burn out, hoop, cleanse, wash, or scald any cask, (coopering casks when required, in case of accident, to be done on the spot only excepted;) or run or walk any race or match, or fly any kite, or skate, or make or use any slide, or play at foot ball, cricket, bowls, fives, pitch and toss, skip rope, trip, quoits, or any other game or pastime, which may be troublesome, offensive, dangerous, or annoying to passengers or to inhabitants of the said borough; or wantonly throw any stone, snow ball, or missile; or empty any cask, tub, barrel, or other vessel ; or bind, make, or repair any coach wheel or spring; or feed or fodder any horse or other animal, except out of a bag suspended from the head of such horse or other animal, or with food which he shall hold or deliver with his hand; or shoe, bleed, dress, cleanse, or farry any horse or other animal, except in cases of accident; or wash, clean, make, or repair any carriage, or any part thereof, except immediate repair on the spot is necessary to the same on account of accident ; or slake, sift, or screen any lime; or make, or assist in making any bonfire; or set, let off, or throw any fireworks, or shall in any street, or within one hunched yards of the centre of any street, discharge any gun or fire arms (except in case of necessity or for self-defence,) or shall carry or exhibit upon any footpath, or in any street, any placard or advertisement upon boards, poles, or sticks, or otherwise, to the annoyance of passengers or inhabitants; or hang out, place, or expose for sale or otherwise, any cloth, linen, or wearing apparel, or any fish, fruit, butchers' meat, victuals, vegetables, or other article or thing at the outside of any house, shop, building, window, door, or balcony, or in any street, so as to interfere with the free passage upon or over any street; or fix or place any line, cord, or pole across any street (except the Surveyors of the Highways, during the necessary repairs of any street;) or wilfully and wantonly disturb any inhabitant by pulling or ringing any door-bell, or knocking at any door without lawful excuse; or who shall wilfully extinguish the light of any lamp for the lighting of any street, or for the convenience of the inhabitants; or burn any effigy in any street; or sell, or offer to sell by auction, any animal, goods, wares, merchandizes, or other matter or thing, in any street, without the license or permission of the Mayor or two Justices; or sell, or shew, or offer, or expose for sale, any horse or other animal, or expose or shew any stallion, in any street, except in such place or places as shall be appointed or allowed for that purpose by the Mayor, and except in the regular markets or fairs, and then during the time of such markets and fairs only; or blow any horn, or use any other noisy instrument in any street, for the purpose of calling persons together, or of announcing any show or entertainment, or for the purpose of hawking, selling, distributing, or collecting any article whatsoever, or of obtaining money or alms; or sound or play upon any musical instrument, or sing in any street, near any house, after being required by or on behalf of any householder to depart from the neighbourhood of the house of such householder, on account of illness of any inmate of such house, or for other reasonable cause; every person so respectively offending, shall pay the fine of 2s. 6d.; and for a second offence, alleged and proved as such, and not committed on the same day as such first offence, shall pay the fine of 5s.; and for every offence, being subsequent to a second offence, and alleged and proved as such, and not committed on the same day as any prior offence, shall pay the fine of 10s. [Sheffield City Directory, 1845, p. 41]
Though "General Nuisances" is the most fulsome of the single ordinances, those related to Hackney Coaches, the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent to taxi cabs, are among the most numerous, meriting their own subheading. This is, a convenient segue into the Stuart family of Sheffield.
The local newspaper actually published a brief notice of this union, alongside with all the other ones that were celebrated that week. The corresponding entry in the marriage register tells us that the ceremony took place in the "parish church," that is to say, the church of Peter and Paul in Sheffield, the same church that has served as the city's cathedral since 1914. The Rev. William Harris performed the ceremony. We happen to know that he was one of three who held the position of assistant minister, and that his yearly salary was £400. [White, Sheffield Directory, p. 11]. The same marriage record also identifies the two fathers-in-law: a "painter" named, like his son, James Stuart, and a coach maker, named Thomas Twigg.
Horsedrawn coaches were much in demand at the time despite the inexorable spread of the railroad, which cut into the long-distance coach business. They would remain important for local transport until the 1920s when automobile use began to spread. [In the United Kingdom there approximately 800 automobiles in 1900; by 1930, there were about one million. From A Short History of British Carriages.] A passing reference in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South (1854-55), helps us appreciate the social standing of carriage makers at the time. The mother of the book's protagonist, Margaret Hale, refers to members of the Gorman family as being "neither butchers nor bakers, but very respectable coach builders," suggesting that practitioners of this trade were considered to be "a cut above" other tradesmen. Unfortunately coach building as an occupation in this period has not garnered as much in the way of scholarly attention as the heavy industries of the time. 
THE STUART-BLACKTIN CONNECTION
Henry, Jr. (age 14) is the oldest of the three children listed, presumably because his four older brothers had by then set up their own households. That allowed Henry to replace John as an apprentice saw maker. Incidentally, it is from this census--the 1851 version including places of birth for the first time--that we learn that Henry Jr.'s parents were products of Sheffield, as were his two youngest siblings, Emma (11) and David (5). 
The marriage certificate identifies the groom as a 37-year-old widower and "saw manufacturer," like his father, and the bride as an 18-year-old "spinster" and daughter of James Stuart, "coach builder." At the time of the marriage, Henry still resided at 7 Upper Hanover Street, where he had been living with Ellen when she died, while Jessie lived with the Stuart family on Broomspring Lane. Their union resulted in the birth of only one child, James Stuart Blacktin (1/5/1875--8/13/1941), sixteen months later.
The testimony continues: "after she returned he continued to treat her with great unkindness and cruelty frequently drinking and stepping out late and abusing and threatening her. He refused to allow her sufficient food and forced her for some time to attend at his work shop and to work in his business as a saw manufacturer in cutting the teeth of the saws and other things for which she was physically unfit and whereby she became very ill. He refused to allow her to see her friends, threatened to smash her brains out if she told of his behaviour, locked her up in the house when he was away, and would not suffer her to go out without him. He persisted in asserting his marital rights after he had been told by the Doctor that her health would not allow it, whereby she was made very ill."
Jessie's testimony concludes with a list of additional instances of abuse, all of which took place outside of Sheffield. "In May 1874 at Sunderland he told her as [sic] the fact was that the six months recognizance was at an end and that he would now do as he liked and frightened your petitioner so that she endeavoured to telegraph for assistance but he prevented her doing so by force and he threatened to murder her if she tried to do so again. At Glasgow in July 1874 he falsely accused her of improper conduct and threatened to throw her into the river if she would not write a confession and on her refusing to do so struck her in the chest, seized her by the throat, and held a pillow over her mouth for some time. In August 1874 at Dundee he assaulted and struck your petitioner and said that if he could not pay off her father he would do so through her. That in the said month of August at Dundee he administered to her certain deleterious drugs." Jessie testified that as a result of this treatment and the fear it instilled in her, "she fell down insensible in the street in Dundee and contrary to express medical injunction he insisted on her going out with him next day when she again fell down insensible." That was on August 8, 1874, at which point Jessie would have been four months pregnant, though the testimony makes no mention of her condition in this regard. Twelve days later, Jessie left Henry in Dundee and returned home to her family in Sheffield. Since that time Henry "has continued to watch the house...and has sent or caused to be sent threatening letters" to her and her family members. On February 3, 1875, when little James would have been almost a month old, the Stuart family managed to secure another restraining order. Finally, on March 18, lawyers representing Jessie Blacktin filed a petition so that she might be "judicially separated from the said Henry Blacktin and have the custody of her said child...." The petition is signed "Jessie Blacktin."
A second, more tantalizing glimpse into the Stuart family at this time has come down to us in James Stuart Blackton's unpublished memoire, "Hollywood with Its Hair Down," which he wrote sometime between 1938 and his death in August, 1941. [This terminus a quo is based on his mention of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was released in February 1938]. Early in the text Blackton recounts a trip that he took as a boy with his maternal grandfather to Blackpool on the west coast of England. 
There, in a makeshift amusement park on the beach, little James experienced the wonders of a camera obscura, a novelty that was all the rage at that time. In Blackton's own words:
As a boy of about nine [that is, c. 1884], walking along the ocean promenade in Blackpool, England, with my grandfather, James Stuart, a sturdy Scot, we noticed a small round building bearing the legend "Camera Obscura, admission sixpense, children half price." A definite air of mystery seemed to surround this funny little circular structure having an entrance door, but no windows visible. "Let’s go in Grandpa." Ninepense was a lot of money to a Scotchman. Grandpa hesitated and finally said—-producing three large copper pennies—-"You go in Jamie, it’s half price for bairns." Quickly inside, I found myself in a dark room in the centre of which was a round table; on its white surface a glowing fairy-like picture was spread. There before me lay in miniature, a panorama of the surrounding scenery. The crowds on the promenade, the blue cloud flecked sky, the seaside villas, hotels and show places, the waves rolling in on the beach, the bathers and the boats with their red and brown sails. I could even pick out Grandpa leaning on the sea wall, smoking his pipe, but most wonderful of all, and I can see it in my mind’s eye today, a fisherman rowing his boat towards the shore, tiny liquid flashes of iridescence flashing from his oars as he pulled. Veritable fairyland! I walked slowly around the magic table, and I remember putting a small finger on the water to see if it was wet. Although of course, I didn’t realize it then, those lifelike pictures were to play a vitally important part in my future. I was more impressed and fascinated with that threepenny show than with all the other attractions in that pleasant seaside resort. No other thrill ever compared with that uncanny marvel, until in another dark room some ten years later I stood beside the Wizard of Menlo Park [i.e., Thomas Edison], and saw the essence of life and motion projected on a white screen by Edison's Vitascope. [J. Stuart Blackton, "Hollywood with Its Hair Down, or Hollywood Memories: Forty Years of Movies," pp. 4-5; my thanks to the The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for providing me with access to this typescript.]
By chance, a seperate description of the Blackpool camera obscura has survived in the 1970 autobiography Silvester Gordon Boswell (1895-1977), a British Romany Gypsy, who was born in a camp outside Blackpool.My father, at that time, had what they called a camera obscura. It was a six-squared building, and there was a white sheet inside, and a mirror at the top, and if anybody lost a child on the beach they could come to our camera obscura and Father used to charge 'em sixpense, and you could regulate this mirror on the top and say: "Is this your child?" and she could pick that child out. And my father would keep a Gypsy boy--a little Gypsy boy--to show her where that particular part was, and they were so pleased that my father used to get money like this. [The Book of Boswell: Autobiography of a Gypsy, ed. John Seymour, London, 1979, p. 23]
Boswell's autobiography describes other attractions on the beach of Blackpool at the time. Among them was a carousel, which he referred to as a "roundabout" or a "set of Gallopers," complete with a golden ring that, if grabbed, would yield a free ride. A different but similar amusement involved bicycles ("three abreast") powered by its pedaling riders. On his father's gypsy wagon was also "one of the first gramophones," featuring a selection of "Edison Bell Records." It is worth nothing that, while the Romani were the first to offer such attractions at Blackpool, it was Alderman William George Bean who, in 1896 (a dozen years after the Stuart visit), founded the Blackpool Pleasure Beach that exists to this day. It was Bean's visit to Coney Island, while trying to make it as an advertising executive in New York City, that inspired him to create something similar in Blackpool.Fortunately I did. My Scottish grandfather had a line of stories almost equal to the repertoire of Sir Thomas Lipton, [the Scottish founder of the famous tea company] with whose friendship Fate was to bless me in years to come. I told the one about the thrifty Scotch mother and her large family of bairns, eating their porridge at breakfast. The watchful maternal eye detected a fly struggling in little Jock's bowl. "Jock" cried she, "there's a fly in your milk." Oatmeal porridge was plentiful and milk scarce and expensive, so the bairns had plenty of oatmeal and not so much milk. Jock turning a jaundiced eye upon the tiny puddle of milk in the middle of the bowl replies--"Dinna fash yersel' mither, it'll nae droon" ["Don't worry yourself mother, it will not drown"]. Mr. Edison clapped his knees and roared. [Blackton, "Hollywood with Its Hair Down," p. 33]
These two anecdotes about the Stuart family in England are, unfortunately, the only ones that James Stuart Blackton recorded in "Hollywood with Its Hair Down." But we are grateful to have them.
Like everyone else at the time, the Stuarts would have embarked from Princes Landing Stage, a half-mile-long floating pontoon along the bank of the River Mersey that was built in 1857.
A month before, he had learned that Fanny Vandergrift, an American woman whom he had met in France and fallen in love with, was not only about to secure a long-anticipated divorce but was seriously ill. That prompted the twenty-nine-year-old Stevenson to set out for California despite his own chronic health problems. His wonderfully detailed and beautifully written account of his ten-day crossing occupies the first part of The Amateur Emigrant, the other two sections covering his cross-country train ride and his stay in California, where he finally married Fanny. Stevenson titled the transatlantic portion of the book "From the Clyde to Sandy Hook," the Clyde being the river that connects Glasgow to the Ocean, and Sandy Hook, the New Jersey harbor where ships would stop in preparation for entering New York harbor. Stevenson's account is particularly valuable for recreating the Stuarts' experiences seven years later because he approached the project the way an anthropologist might, intent on understanding what actual emigrants endured to get to America. 
Stevenson had originally intended to make the crossing in steerage, but ultimately decided to pay the extra two guineas to secure a berth in the "second-class cabin." [From Scotland to Silverado, ed. James D. Hart (Harvard Press, 1966), 6] This decision prompted an extended apologia from Stevenson, as if to dispel the notion that this little extravagance compromised his data as a student of emigration. "I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger," he confessed. "Although anxious to see the worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table at command." [Ibid., 4]. While he considered this advice "excellent," the resulting guilt for not having chosen steerage led him to set down every difference between the two levels of service, differences that he deemed to be minimal for the purposes of his study. This is what makes Stevenson's account so valuable for anyone interested in recreating the onboard experience of actual emigrants of the time. ... to understand the choice [between steerage and second class], and what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition of the ship will first be necessary. In her very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs. A little abaft, another companion [a raised wooden framework or structural hood built over a deck opening], labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives admission to three galleries, two running forward towards Steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The starboard forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second [class] cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement. [Ibid., 4]
The point of this detailed description of the "below decks" layout was to show that his second-class cabin was surrounded by steerage compartments, to which he had easy access and from which he was not insulated. The auditory intrusions that he listed were nothing compared to the olfactory ones. At one point, Stevenson described the air in "Steerage No. 1" as "hot" even though "it struck a chill with its fœtor," while "the scarcely human voices of the sick joined into a kind of farmyard chorus." [Ibid., 24]. Coupled with the stench of vomit was that of the human waste. The toilets for the lower-class passengers were few in number and located on the deck, which meant they were accessible only when weather permitted. When the decks were closed due to a storm, people resorted to buckets, which, between the pitching of the ship and the cramped quarters, were often sloshed or spilled. "Some cleaning process" seems to have been attempted every morning, but the poor lighting and the many tight spaces between the partitions, tables, and benches that were fixed to the floor meant that "dirt might lie there for years without disturbance." Furthermore, when the eight "pens" of "Steerage No. 1", each of which featured sixteen bunks, were occupied with "live human animals, more or less unwashed, lying immersed together in the same close air all night, and their litter of meat, dirty dishes and rank bedding tumbled all day together in foul disorder, the merest possibilities of health or cleanliness were absent." [Ibid., 22] And then there were the passengers themselves. "All ablution below was rigorously forbidden. A man might give his hands a scour at the pump beside the galley, but that was exactly all. ... Thus, even if the majority of passengers came clean aboard at Greenock, long ere the ten days were out or the shores of America in sight, all were reduced to a common level, all, who here stewed together in their own exhalations, were uncompromisingly unclean." [Ibid., 23] The effects of this lack of "ablution" were most apparent in the early mornings. "With so many people worming themselves into their clothes," and thus releasing their collective body odor all at once, "each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese." [Ibid., 52]. En route, Stevenson befriended a former North Sea fisherman who was used to standing in a boat waist-deep in herring, but even he was unprepared for ten days in steerage. Soon discovering--independent of Stevenson's own investigations--that "the second cabin" was just "another edition of the steerage," the man swore he would make his return in first class. [Ibid., 54] For his part, Stephenson quickly made a habit of sleeping on the deck whenever the weather permitted, there being otherwise no relief from the "lack of air" even in his "decent second-class berth," [Ibid., 14]In the way of eatables at the same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes rissoles [little meatloaf patties]. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk [salted beef], and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding days, instead of duff [a stiff flour dough that was boiled or steamed, making for an economical sort of pudding], we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of a plum-pudding. At tea we were served with some broken meat [meat scraps] from the saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form of spare patties or rissoles; but as a general thing, mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish neither hot nor cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage; so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I might as well have been in the steerage outright. Had they given me porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly contented with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark. [Ibid., 4-5]
As if to burnish his credentials as a steerage passenger in spirit, Stevenson claimed to have lived those ten days "almost enclusively on bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to [those in third class], and found it, if not luxurious, at leasts sufficient." [Ibid., 13-14]The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck. Who could tell whether I housed on the port or starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was only there that my superiority became practical; everywhere else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat to tea. Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate.[Ibid., 5-6]
Once again, as we saw when he was describing the quarters and the food, Stevenson manages to erode this class distinction in the very process of describing it. The nominal boundary that separated the "gentleman" Stevenson from the "males" in steerage was effectively erased by their daily, unregulated interactions. The porousness of this frontier stood in sharp contrast to that which divided the passengers in first class from all the others. It is indicative of this division that Stevenson had nothing to say about the "first cabin" in his account. But he could not resist lashing out at the "three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies," who once strolled into his world.It was astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon [i.e., first-class], and then hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage. We were in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of their squire. Not a word was said ... but we were all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the course of our enjoyment. We had been made to feel ourselves a sort of comical lower animal. Such a fine thing it is to have manners! One compliment I must make to the Saloon passengers: this was the only invasion of our territory that I witnessed from beginning to end of the voyage. It was a piece of very natural and needful delicacy. We were not allowed upon their part of the ship; and so they were, and ought, to be chary of intruding upon ours. Reciprocity can alone justify such a privilege. I do not say but that a cabin passenger may once in a while slink forward under cover of night, just as some careful house-holders, when the servants are once in bed, descend to the kitchen for a cigar. We also, when night had fallen, installed ourselves along the hot water pipes with our backs to the saloon deckhouse. But except in some exceptional, anonymous or apologetic fashion, I give it as my experience, the visit of a cabin passenger, will be regarded as an intrusion in the steerage. [Ibid., 28]
Stevenson's self-ascribed role as a student of emigration made it natural for him to rise up in defense of the denizens of steerage. But one should not forget that he was voluntarily "slumming it" on the voyage. After all, his father, Thomas Stevenson, was a promiment Scottish civil engineer and designer of more than thirty lighthouses. Such a family connection alone would have made Robert a welcome addition to first-class, had he wished to travel that way; and had his allowance not been reduced once he abandoned the career in engineering that his father had laid out for him. In any case, his "us against them" tone one again contrubuted to the sense that the differences between second class and steerage were less significant than one might otherwise think.For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember that the steerage passenger must supply [his own] bedding and dishes, and, in five cases out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately pays the steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes almost nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively varied, and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman, may thus be had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers in the second cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it was an experiment not to be repeated. As I go on to tell about my steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone in their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence until they could afford to bring them by saloon [another way of referring to first class]. [Ibid., 6]
When all is said and done, Stevenson seems to have landed--rather inconclusively--somewhere between his sense of having been cheated out of the two extra guineas he paid for second class, and his sense of relief for having steered clear of steerage.
We were indeed a musical ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations. Night after night we gathered at the aftermost limit of our domain, where it bordered on that of the saloon [that is, first class]. 
Performers were called up with acclamation, some shame-faced and hanging the head, others willing and as bold as brass. Good, bad, or indifferent--Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse,--the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin. ...The impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even the inclemencies of the sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night, we got together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck, and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we were thus disposed, sang to our hearts content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggerel of the music-hall... sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully silly. ... I observed a Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to the general effect.... Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each. "The Anchor's Weighed" was true for us. We were indeed "Rocked on the bosom of the stormy deep" How many of us could say with the singer, "I'm lonely to-night, love, without you," or "Go, some one, and tell them from me, to write me a letter from home!" And when was there a more appropriate moment for "Auld Lang Syne" than now, when the land, the friends, and the affections of that mingled but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the vessel's wake? [Ibid., 15-17]
Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort. Down one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space, the centre occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the carpenter's bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more. The canteen, or steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on the other, a no less attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter. I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a barrel, and many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells [10:30 p.m.], when the lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to roost. [Ibid., 19]
Anyone who could play an instrument risked becoming a slave to a captive, queasy audience in need of something to take their minds off their situation.It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard, who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of white-faced women. It was as much as he could do to play, and some of his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had crawled from their bunks at the first experimental flourish, and found better than medicine in the music. Some of the heaviest heads began to nod in time, and a degree of animation looked from some of the palest eyes. Humanly speaking, it is a more important matter to play the fiddle, even badly, than to write huge works upon recondite subjects. What could Mr. Darwin have done for these sick women? But this fellow scraped away; and the world was positively a better place for all who heard him. [Ibid., 19]
Later Stevenson tipped his hat to another musician who offered up some verses from the famous English ballad, The Death of Nelson. "For to sing in such a place and in such a state of health is cheerfully heroic. Like a modern Theseus, he thus cambatted bad air, disease and darkness, and threw abroad among his fellows some pleasant and courageous thoughts." [Ibid., 24]We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love [that is, without wagering]. Feats of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as more conspicuously well done than the former.... We had a regular daily competition to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve o'clock, when the result was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment of considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner, which we had rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and Four Corners, was my own favourite game; but there were many who preferred another, nameless as far as I know, which was diverting enough to the onlookers, but must have developed a tendency to headache in those who played. The humour of the thing was to box a person's ears until he found out who had cuffed him. The harder the smacks, the better we were all pleased. I have watched it for half an hour at time; nor do I think it was a sense of personal dignity alone which moved me to refrain from joining.[Ibid., 27]
In the midst of all these activities, Stevenson "was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than moderate skill was heartily admired." [Ibid., 27]I heard a man run wild with terror beseeching his friend for encouragement. "The ship's going down!" he cried with a thrill of agony. "The ship's going down!" he repeated, now in a blank whisper, now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might reassure him, reason with him, joke at him — all was in vain, and the old cry came back, "The ship's going down!" There was something panic and catching in the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship. If this whole parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses would the newspaper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of our corporate human life would be rent across for ever![Ibid., 26]
Though false alarms such as this were not the norm, Stevenson's latent fears never fully subsided. Many times each night he found solace in "the clear note of the clapper on the brass," proclaiming the nocturnal hour at half-hour intervals, and that "beautiful sea-cry, 'All's well!'" He had to admit that he knew "nothing, whether for poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of those two syllables in the darkness of a night at sea." [Ibid., 14-15]As I walked the deck and looked round my fellow-passengers, thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the passage ... this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the young men enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the bo'sun's whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man. This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance. [Ibid., 10-11]
The emigrant amalgam that Stevenson offers here was a male over forty, which, in the case of the Stuarts, could only have been achieved by averaging the ages of grandfather and grandson! In fact, the Stuart party was dominated by two women in their thirties, one of whom was, to some unknown degree, "broken by adversity" in the form of an abusive marriage, and had certainly "seen better days." Stevenson continued in the same vein:We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England. Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter. [Ibid., 11-12]
Mary and Jessie did not qualify in any obvious way as "failures"--though Jessie had experienced a failed marriage--nor would any of Stevenson's adjectives seem to apply. But we can be fairly certain, given what we know from the younger James' memoir later half a century later, that his grandfather would have been very popular on board, ready to regale his fellow passengers with his almost unmatched "line of stories." [Blackton, "Hollywood with Its Hair Down," p. 33].
Precious little is known about the Stuarts after her arrival in New York on August 16, 1886. All that can be reliably ascertained comes from a marriage certificate, affirming that Jessie Stuart Blacktin married Thomas Adams (1852--12/4/1912) in a ceremony held on Christmas Day, 1888 at 1074 Washington Avenue in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx (about a mile west of the site of the future Yankee Stadium). Jessie, who was 33 years old at the time, was living at 2272 Second Avenue (East Harlem) in Manhattan. The marriage record accurately identifies her parents as James Stuart and Mary Twigg, and her place of birth as Sheffield. It also indicates that while this was a second marriage for Jessie, it was 37-year-old Thomas Adams' first. His address is given as 617 Courtlandt Ave in the Bronx neighborhood of Melrose, just south of Morrisania. He is identified as a "manufacturer," a native of Rowley Regis, and the son of Thomas Adams, Sr. and Nancy Plant. This information about Thomas Adams' parents and birthplace is precious to is, allowing us to distinguish him from the many other New Yorkers answering to the name of Thomas Adams. It also opens up a fascinating door on the lives of the Adams and Plant families of Rowley Regis (better known by its inhabitants as "Rowley") in the nineteenth century.
Rowley Regis lies in the Rowley Hills seven miles west of the heart of Birmingham and two miles southeast of the market town of Dudley. These geographical coordinates, in conjunction with the year of Thomas Adams, Jr.'s birth (1851), makes him a bona fide product of the Black Country, that chunk of South Staffordshire and North Worcestershire--more or less bounded by Wolverhampton and Walsall in the north and by Stourbridge and Smethwick in the south--that, by the end of the eighteenth century, had surrendered itself to mining and smelting and all the environmental degradation that went with them. The very geology of the area predestined it to become a laboratory for unparalled industrialization as soon as technological progress, capital, and cheap labor came together in the interests of satisfying the insatiable demand for iron products across the British Empire. From his vantage point as the United States Consul to Birmingham (1865-1870), Elihu Burritt put it this way: "Nature did for the ironmasters of the Black Country all she could; indeed, everything except literally building the furnaces themselves. She brought together all that was needed to set and keep them in blast: The iron ore, coal, and lime, the very lining of the furnaces, were all deposited close at hand for the operation." [Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country (London, 1868), p. 3]. In South Staffordshire, a dozen or more separate seams coalesce in a uniquely rich bed known as the 'Ten Yard Seam' or 'Thick Coal.' Nowhere else in Great Britain has coal of such quality and quantity been available at relatively shallow depth. Veins within the Thick Coal were given their own names by miners. Although there were variations from area to area, among those in widespread use in the 17th century, starting from the upper layer and working down, were: Dun-Dicks, Roof or Top Floor, Top or Over Slipper, sometimes known as Spires, Jays, Lambs, Kitt's, Tow or Heath, Benches, Brazils or the Kernel, Bottom-Slipper or Foot Coal, Slip-bat, John Coal, Stone Coal or Long Coal, Great Patch, Springs or Sawyer, Slippers, and the Humphries or Bottom Bench. Above the Thick Coal and even closer to the surface, a separate thin seam of superior, fast-burning household coal called the 'Brooch was largely ignored until the late 18th century. Below the main measures, a lower quality vein identified by the name 'Heathing-coal, or more commonly 'Heathen, was mined to access underlying beds of iron ore. Approaching the Bentley Faults [near Wednesfield] the Thick Coal seams begin to separate. Outcrops in the Upper Gornal area were known as the 'Flying Reed Coal. To the north, beyond the faults, the seams diverge even further and plunge much deeper. [Richard Stone, The Collieries and Coalminers of Staffordshire (Phillimore, 2007), p. 3]
This remarkable coalfield--in conjunction with ample deposits of ironstone and lime, not to mention clay for brickmaking--helped drive the Industrial Revolution, albeit at the expense of the surrounding landscape and its atmosphere. That said, in those places where the deposits were not as accessible or where transport was a challenge, the countryside remained as green as it had been before the furnaces and mines took over. Hence the dichotomy so neatly captured in the title of Elihu Burritt's book: Walks in the Black Country and Its Green Border-Land (1868). Burritt's perambulations were divided between the green regions where, as he put it, nature still had "the upper-hand," and the blackened areas, where Nature had "the under-hand."
Nowadays it is hard to appreciate just how damaged the Black Country landscape was when Thomas Adams, Sr. inhabited it (1820-1887). The demise of the coal and iron industries in the region, followed by the construction of modern residential developments and concerted efforts to rescue the area from its former blight have erased virtually all of the Black Country's most notorious characteristics [see Chitham, Rowley Regis, 56]. In the process, lamented Nigel Chapman, "we have, over the last century, lost an amazing amount of our industrial heritage to light industry and housing." [Chapman, South Staffordshire Coalfield (2011), back cover]. The most significant extant industrial remnant in the Rowley area is the Cobbs Engine House (1830), part of the former Windmill End Colliery and now a part of the Bumble Hole and Warrens Hall Local Nature Reserve. Two miles north of this preserve lies the Black Country Living Museum (founded in 1975), where formerly derelict industrial buildings were moved from their original sites and reconstructed in one place to allow tourists the chance to experience the area's mining and manufacturing heritage. Two miles south of Rowley is the abandoned New Hawne Colliery (1864), the most complete set of nineteenth-century colliery surface buildings in the Black Country still to be found in its original location. Unfortunately, it is closed to visitors. A long suburb of red brick houses--some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself--a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring, where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black road-side. Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud. But night-time in this dreadful spot!--night, when the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spirited up its flame; and places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot.... [Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, chapter 45]
Two decades later, Walter White (1811–1893), the itinerant English travel writer and Assistant Secretary to the Royal Society, published the following description based on a trip he made west out of Birmingham.The name [Black Country] is eminently descriptive, for blackness everywhere prevails; the ground is black, the atmosphere is black, and the underground is honey-combed by mining galleries stretching in utter blackness for many a league. The scene is marvellous, and to one who beholds it for the first time by night, terrific. Then the roaring-furnaces are seen for miles around pouring forth their fierce throbbing flames like volcanoes; then the hundred chimneys of iron-works display their blazing crests, or sheafs of fery tongues ; then the dull gleam of heaps of roasting ironstone makes you fancy that the old globe itself is here smouldering away; overhead dense clouds of smoke reflect & lurid light, rolling fitfully before the wind; while the hissing and rushing of steam, the clang and clatter of machinery, the roaring blasts, and the shook of ponderous hammer-strokes, all intensified by the presence of night, complete an effect which amazes alike the eye and the ear. The effect is one that vividly excites the imagination, and is not easily forgotten. By day, as the train speeds across, you hear the same noises, and see the fires divested of their nightly terrors, yet find it difficult to believe that a scene of so much havoc and seeming confusion represents prosperous industry, and one of the most important departments of British trade. Perhaps for the first time you become aware of the omnipotence of coal and iron; even the stations, walls, and bridges, are built of bricks that have the appearance of iron. You catch glimpses of smoking heaps, of muddy canals, complications of locks, bridges, tramways; boats moving, trains rolling; of coal-pits where the iron arm projects from the little engine-house working busily up and down, while the whimseys creak as the long rope passes over; of abandoned workings where office and engine-house are in ruin, and scraps of ragged hedgerow look very miserable, and the tall posts stand up skeleton-like, and fragments of machinery lie about devoured by rust; of heaps, nay hills, that resemble brick rubbish, of gigantic oyster-shells which a lady's hoop would hardly encircle, and big slaty-looking slabs--accumulations of refuse which cumber the ground. And amid all this are the cottages of artisans and miners: English homes, whence sun and stars are seen darkly, situate in a region devoid of repose and beauty, which looks as if smitten by desolation, notwithstanding that here and there grow patches of wheat and plots of potatoes. And so it continues for thirteen miles, all the way from Birmingham to Wolverhampton; but whatever may be the gloom, havoc, havoc, and confusion elsewhere, you only see the worst when passing through Bilston [five miles north of Diudley]. Walter White, All Round the Wrekin (London, 1860), pp. 6-7.
Another eight years later (1868), Elihu Burritt, whom we met above, followed White's lead, and provided an even more elaborate description of the Black Country, based on the view that awaited him from the tower of Dudley Castle. There he visualized Mother Nature, sprawled out, abused, and "bleeding" before him, like a modern-day martyr to industry.... from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot she is scourged with cat-o'-nine-tails of red-hot wire, and marred and scarred and fretted, and smoked half to death day and night, year and year, even on Sundays. Almost every square inch of her form is reddened, blackend, and distorted by the terrible tractoration of a hot blister. But all this cutaneous eruption is nothing compare with the internal violence and agonies she has to endure. Never was animal being subjected to such merciless and ceaseless vivisection. The very sky and clouds above are moved to sympathy with her sufferings and shed black tears in token of their emotion. [Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country, 164-165.
But Burritt was the American consul of Birmingham and as such he was predisposed to see things through the lens of economic opportunity. He could not suppress his pride in the undeniable evidence of industrial dominance that lay before him. To him it seemed like a battlefield, where an irresistible army of industrialists was overwhelming everything that stood in the way of its progress.
For an unpoetical man like myself, it is difficult to get hold of similes which would enable the reader to picture the scene in his mind. A writer of a military turn of fancy might say that it was the sublimest battle-scene ever enacted on earth; that ten thousand Titans were essaying to breach heaven with a thousand mortars, each charged with a small red-hot hill. It might look like that not only to General Grant or Sherman, but even to men who never wore a sword. There was an embattled amphitheatre of twenty miles span ridged to the purple clouds.
Planted at artillery intervals on this encircling ridge, and at musketshot spaces in the dark valley between, a thousand batteries, mounted with huge ordnance, white at the mouth with the fury of the bombardment, were pouring their cross-fires of shot and shell into the cloud-works of the lower heavens. Wolverhampton, on the extreme left, stood by her black mortars which shot their red volleys into the night. Coseley and Bilston and Wednesbury replied bomb for bomb, and set the clouds on fire above with their lighted matches. Dudley, Oldbury, Albion, and Smethwick, on the right, plied their heavy breachers at the iron-works on the other side; while West Bromwich and distant Walsall showed that their men were standing as bravely to their guns, and that their guns were charged to the muzzle with the grape and canister of the mine. The canals twisting and crossing through the field of battle, showed by patches in the light like bleeding veins. There were no clouds except of smoke over the scene ; but there were large strips of darkness floating with crimson fringes into the red sea, on which the white moon rode like an ermined angel of peace. For all that glowing empire was peace. Peace has her battle-fields as well as war, and this was her Waterloo. Here she had mustered fifty regiments of her swart veterans, armed with all the weapons of her exhaustless arsenal — with Minié picks and Schneider hammers [a reference to the Minié and Snider-Enfield rifles of the time], and file-edged swords that cut at their sides. Those great-mouthed mortars, belching forth globes of fire, were her huge muzzle-loaders. And all this was the thick of one of her great battles by night — only one of the three hundred a year she fights in that dark valley with the elements. What are all the mines and counter-mines of war compared with the hundreds her sappers have dug fifty fathoms below the visible surface of this battle scene! Where or when did war ever dig such deep trenches or fill them with such battalions, or bring its land and sea forces into action with such united and concentrated power! Here were 10,000 pickmen sending up from holds, 500 feet deep, cartridges for loading the cupola cannon that were reddening the night with their blaze. Here were the deck or surface brigades standing to their batteries, and making each look like the old picture of "The Defence of Gibraltar" [by Boston-born artist, John Singleton Copley]. There were the Brades Works [a steel factory in Oldbury specializing in trowels and hoes] at the right centre of the line, discharging a thousand spades, hoes, trowels, and pruning-hooks an hour. Further down toward Birmingham there was a well-manned battery that poured forth a shower of bolts and nuts; and Chance's great fortress [Chance Brothers Glass Works of Smethwick] was all ablaze, with its hot fountains sending out acres of glass to be parcelled into panes of every size. To the right of us, to the left and front of us, the whole amphitheatre was in close action, working out for the world the thousand small arms of peace — cotton hoes for Brazil and harpoons for Behring's Straits, and, for all the countries between, every tool used in honest labour. The moon rode up with its bland face a little flushed over the scene, and the whole heavens were suffused with the red illumination, as if in honour of human industry. [Burritt, Walks in the Black Country, 142-144. Compare Francis Brett Young,
The Brades Iron and Steel Works are situated in Oldbury..., and are the growth of a century or more of accretion, each decade of the century seemingly adding its independent structure, so that the whole looks like a small village of buildings annexed to each other by narrower roads between them than the public streets of a town. It is truly a representative establishment, embracing in itself nearly all the industries and productions of the district. I doubt if such another can be found in England or the world for this remarkable variety of enterprise. In the first place, the company have sunk seven pairs of coal mines around their works. Most of the good coal they sell, using themselves the refuse for their furnaces and forges. They also own and work their own iron ore. Then from the furnace to the forge, from pig to bar, goes this raw material of their manufactures. The iron, now ready for its hundred uses, parts company for several stages of manipulation, then unites again in infinite shapes and relations. [Burritt, Walks in the Black Country (1868), pp. 173-174]
The Brades was only one of many such industrial sites in the area around Rowley. Together they made their presence known to all the senses of each member of the Adams and Plant families from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.
It turns out that Rev. Dowty (c. 1803-1840) was a Wesleyan Methodist minister who performed "chapel circuit" duties in the Midlands. The Wesleyan Methodists had formally separated from the Church of England in 1795, authorizing its itinerant ministers to preach from makeshift "preaching houses" and to administer the sacraments in provisional chapels that were springing up all over Britain. These Methodists competed not only with the Anglican church but with the so-called Primitive Methodists, a.k.a., "Prims" or "Ranters," who had (c. 1807) launched their own religious revival, seeking to return to the simple, fervent, open-air preaching of early Methodism. Both forms of Methodism proved particularly attractive to the industrial working class, whose distinctive spiritual needs were largely ignored by the Anglicans. The Non-parochial register in which Dowty recorded Thomas Adams' baptism does not indicate where the ceremony took place, but one assumes that the saving waters were administered to little Thomas Adams in a Methodist chapel somewhere in Rowley.
Strangely enough, the same Thomas Adams (with the same birth date) turns up again, five and a half years later in another baptismal register, this one belonging to St. Giles parish. Thomas' name was entered in it, along with that of his new-born sister, Hannah Adams, indicating that both were baptized on the same day: January 15, 1826. This joint baptism was performed by the curate of St. Giles, the Reverend George Barrs, an Evangelical Anglican. It is odd that young Thomas would undergo a second baptism, for the Anglicans officially recognized sacraments performed by Methodists. After all, Methodism had originated as a movement within the Church of England, and John Wesley (1703-1791) was himself an Anglican priest who upheld the traditional Trinitarian form of baptism. It should be noted that Barrs' parishioners were themselves a mixed bag, religiously speaking. 70% of them were non-Anglican, and most of these were Methodists of one form or another. [Robson, "Churchgoing," p. 405]. Only three times in the Rowley parish register did Barrs indicate that a baptism he performed was a second baptism. These were the cases of John Stokes, who was baptized on November 24, 1811, and the brothers Samuel and John Richards, who were baptized on the following Christmas Day. In both cases the curate simply noted: "previously baptized by dissenters," which, in this context, most likely meant Methodists, who were historically part of the "New Dissent" movement of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Being such unusual cases, one might reasonably conclude that the impetus for the rebaptisms came not from Barrs but from the parents, who had their own reasons for requesting this service of him. Getting back to Thomas Adams, whatever prompted his rebaptism at St. Giles, we know that his family's connection to that church went back at least another generation, for on June 9, 1799, Benjamin Adams himself had undergone baptism there at the behest of his parents, William and Sarah Adams [Staffordshire Parish Register Society, Rowley Regis 1685-1771/1, p. 754]. Returning to the baptismal entries for Thomas and Hannah, they locate Benjamin Adams and his young family in the "Village," that is, Rowley Village, the historic center of Rowley Regis withing a stone's throw of St Giles.
The consecutive baptismal entries for Thomas and Hannah Adams in the Rowley parish register identify Benjamin Adams as a "nailer," that is, as a manufacturer of hand-wrought nails. Long before the process became fully mechanized--and, as we shall see, for decades afterward--nails were individually crafted, each one pounded into a point by hammers from the red-hot tips of long iron rods, before being excised from the rod and given a head. Price lists from the late 1700s reveal that no fewer than 27 different types of hand-wrought nails were produced in the West Midlands, each designed for a very specific purpose. [Henry George Calcraft, Report as to the Condition of Nail Makers and Small Chain Makers in South Staffordshire and East Worchestershire, by the Labour Correspondent of the Board of Trade(London, 1888), p. 4]. Each nailing district tended to specialize in one particular nail. In Rowley, the hobnail was the dominant form. It was a short, thick nail with a large head, designed to be driven into the leather soles of boots to provide traction and prolong their lifespan. [Willetts, The Black Country Nail Trade, p. 13]
Pastoral farming created an underemployed labour force: one boosted by an influx of labouring poor intent on taking advantage of the common land in the district. Readily available sources of coal and iron offered the opportunity of alternative employment in the production of nails and, as demand increased, the need for a form of overarching organisation was met by a network of locally-based iron producers who were able to take advantage of fast-flowing rivers and streams to power the forges and slitting mills. This network also incorporated the all-important nail-ironmongers who were to be found at the hub of the organisation. The nail-masters orchestrated not only the distribution of raw materials to the nailers scattered throughout the locality but also the supply of finished nails to the merchants and factors who, in turn, fed the voracious domestic and overseas markets. [Sjögren, "Entrepreneurship and Technological Change," 77]
Two technological innovations were essential for the mass production of hand-wrought nails. One was the slitting mill, which used water power to slice flattened slabs of iron into rods that could be easily distributed to nailmasters (also known as "nail ironmongers") and from them to individual nailers. The slitting mill seems to have been invented near Liège, Belgium, in the mid-sixteenth century, with the first English example appearing in Dartford, Kent in 1590. The original mills in the Black Country were those of Stourbridge, four miles southest of Dudley. They were established in the year 1627 by Richard "Fiddler" Foley (1580-1657), the Dudley-born ironmaster. [Hall, Cramped and Sooty, 5]. These mills, and many others to follow, were powered by the River Stour, a 25-mile tributary of the River Severn, that flows through the West Midlands, Worcestershire, and Staffordshire. A late-eighteenth-century nailmaster named Thomas Green estimated that by 1775 12,000 tons of iron were being rolled and slit every year in the Midlands, of which 8,000 tons were destined for the anvils of the 10,000 domestic nailers in the region. [Hall, In Cramped and Sooty, p. 7.] The introduction of the steam engine in the early nineteenth century allowed for the construction of slitting mills in places where there was no river nearby.at the prodigious number of blacksmith shops upon the road; and could not conceive how a country, though populous, could support so many people of the same occupation. In some of these shops I observed one, or more females, stript of their upper garment, and not overcharged with their lower, wielding the hammer with all the grace of the sex. The beauties of their face were rather ecipsed by the smut of the anvil; or, in poetical phrase, the tincture of the forge had taken possession of those lips, which might have been taken by the kiss. Struck with the novelty, I enquired, "Whether the ladies in this country shod horses?" but was answered, with a smile, "They are nailers." [Hutton, History of Birmingham, 84.]
Leaving this overt (and hardly unique) eroticization of female nailers aside, what Hutton referred to as "blacksmith shops" were, to be precise, nailshops or nailsheds--each with a forge, billows, and multiple small anvils (or "nail stiddies")--attached or adjacent to the very cottages in which the nailers lived. As the Scottish geologist, James Keir (1798) explained: "Of nails, the quantity manufactured in this district is perhaps greater than in any other part of the world; and, as this manufacture requires a very simple apparatus of a small hearth, bellows, anvil, and hammer, it is executed at the workman's own house, to each of which houses a small nailing shop is annexed, where the man with his wife and children can work together without going from home: and thus the existence is given to an uncommon multitude of small houses and cottages and to a great degree of population." [James Keir, "Minerology of the South-west part of Staffordshire," in Stebbing Shaw, The History and Antiquities of Staffordshire (London, 1798), p. 116]The greater portion of all these places has been built apparently for people engaged in making nails. The cottages, of two stories, are built in a very uniform fashion, and behind every street or terrace is to be found a fair proportion of small workshops, which are let with the houses. These shops are mostly reached through an open passage in the centre of the row to which they are attached; often they are open from behind or from all sides, but sometimes they are attached to and can only be entered through the dwelling-houses of their occupiers. [Henry G. Calcraft, Report as to the Condition of Nail Makers, etc. (London, 1888), p. 5]
The Midland Mining Commission Report of 1843 offers a rather darker view of these same nailer complexes.
The best forges are little brick shops of about 15 feet by 12 feet in which seven or eight individuals constantly work together with no ventilation except the door and two slits, a loop-hole in the wall; but the majority of these workplaces are very much smaller and filthily dirty and on looking in upon one of them when the fire is not lighted presents the appearance of a dilapidated coal-hole. In the dirty den there are commonly at work, a man and his wife and daughter, with a boy or girl hired by the year. Sometimes the wife carries on the forge with the aid of her children. The filthiness of the ground, the half-ragged, half-naked unwashed persons at work, and the hot smoke, ashes, water and clouds of dusts are really dreadful." [Quoted in Willetts, The Black Country Nail Trade, pp. 11-12]
There was nothing accidental about these living arrangements. The Rowley Regis Building Society had been established in 1794 with the intention of providing precisely this kind of housing for local workmen. The first of these cottages, each with its own nailshop, opened in 1795. Many more would follow, particularly with the "enclosure" of common land outside of the villages, which was sold for industrial development. As mines and foundries multiplied, so did the rows of these humble "live-work spaces." The push to build cheap, worker housing was by no means specific to Rowley or even to the Black Country at the time. The Industrial Revolution triggered a massive migration of laborers not only from adjacent rural areas, but from poorer regions like Ireland. As a result, Britain's population practically doubled over the first four decades of the nineteenth century. [Arthur Willetts, The Blackcountry Nailer's Riots of 1842 (Dudley, 1995), p. 1] And that demographic surge propelled the construction of nailer villages.Spasmodic Cholera. The dreadful pestilence has now reached this parish. For several weeks it had been in the adjoining parishes of West Bromwich, Tipton, and Dudley. Along the borders of this parish, adjoining those parishes, it seems to have got firm footing. Eleven persons who were each carried off by it in a few hours, were buried in the churchyard here yesterday and to-day, beside two on Monday, and two on Tuesday, making fifteen in four days. [Barrs, Four Sermons, 207-208].
By September 1, that number had grown to fifty-two. [Ibid, 211]
Though nail making was a grueling, poorly remunerated form of labor, it offered some advantages. For one thing, the manufacturing techniques were easy to master, even by children. Moreover, nailing required only a modest initial investment in tools, supplies, and space. The rental of a nailer's cottage typically included access to an adjacent nailshop with a forge and billows supplied by the landlord. It was understood that any unused space ("stalls") in the nailshop could be sublet to other nailers ("stallers") to help defray the costs of the rent and the coal. The nailer was expected to supply his own tool bench, equipped with a small anvil (the "stiddy") on which ends of red-hot ends of iron rods would be pounded into a point; a fixed chisel (the "hardy") for scoring the nail after it was pointed before striking it off with a hammer; a "bore" or "bolster" into which the severed nail was inserted in such a way as to expose the protruding, non-sharpened end to the blow of a hammer or an "oliver" (a heavy hammer worked by a treadle) for the purposes of producing the nail head. [Sherard, White Slaves (1897), pp. 86-88; Burritt, Walks, p. 230]. Moreover, nails were among the most portable forms of hardware, particularly in the relatively modest quantities in which they were produced under these domestic circumstances. The very title of Murray's novel, A Capful o' Nails (1896) refers to the way the protagonist delivered his seven pounds of nails to the would-be buyer. [Murray, A Capful of Nails, pp. 7, 11]. This level of portability meant that nailers could ply their trade almost anywhere and still deliver the fruit of their labor on foot; at that level, there was no need for a canal or railroad tracks. [Hall, Cramped and Sooty, p. 43]. As a result, as Elihu Burritt observed, nailshops in his day were not confined to nailer districts but could be found "scattered far and wide over the district, sometimes in little villages and hamlets, but often on high and breezy hills and behind the hedges of green and rural lanes." [Burritt, Walks (1868), 229] I awoke permanently to a knowledge of the world whilst mother was working at the anvil. I was fixed in a sort of cloth bag upon her shoulders, and I remember peering around her neck at the glow of the fire, watching the iron rod as it came white-hot from the white-hot coke, and seeing her shape the end with dexterous blows into a nail, and then plunge the rod back into the fire again [Murray, Capful o' Nails (1896), pp. 4-5].
Living and working in the same place also made it possible for children to contribute to the family business, depending on their age and physical stamina. Though the census takers typically assigned the "nailer" profession to the head of household, whole families were implicated in the process. The typical nail was the result of roughly 25 strikes with a two-pound hammer, making it reasonable for women and children to vie with adult males in terms of productivity. [Hall, In Cramped and Sooty Caverns (2015), p. 55; The author of "The Hand-Nailer" offered a slightly higher estimate of 33 blows per nail. Good Words 11 (Apr 1 1870), p. 254]. A magazine article from 1870 noted that "nailers' children are taught their parents' trade when they are nine years old--or even at as early an age as seven. On average it is eight months before the little hammerers can make a saleable nail." [Good Words 11 (Apr 1, 1870), p. 248]. Children too small to wield a hammer were still able to work the billows.
Still, no nail or rivet maker was ever truly in control of his or her own business. The nailmasters provided the raw materials--in particular, the iron rods and the coke (purified coal)--and set the prices for the nails that they expected in return. For their part, the nailers were required to transform a certain weight of rods into a certain number of nails within a certain period of time, typically less than a week. In practice, there was much variation.
Sometimes the masters do not give out the iron until the middle of the week, and when it is given out at the beginning, nailers often like to "play," i.e., take holiday for a day or two before they set to work. So long as they have accomplished their tale of nails by payment on Saturday, they can, of course, as they work in their own shops, choose their own work hours. ["The Hand-Nailer," Good Words 11 (Apr 1, 1870), p. 252]
In a system like this, middle men--referred to as "foggers"--inevitably found profitable niches, offering nailers access to rod iron as well as opportunities to redeem their nails for much-needed supplies outside the weekly cycle of the nailmasters. Foggers also helped fill in the supply of rod iron when there was none to be gotten from the nailmasters, for instance, when their warehouses were already overstocked with nails. The opportunities for exploitation under these circumstances were legion, especially when the nailmasters themselves began relying on foggers rather than dealing directly with the nailers. For one thing, the potential for fraud entered the picture when the foggers weighed the iron rods for sale to the nailers and then again when they weighed the nails for purchase from the nailers. This particular abuse supplied the tension in Murray's novel A Capful o' Nails (1896). After a frustrating interaction with a fogger named Sim, Jack Salter, the nailer/protagonist vows: "I'll neither tek short weight from any fogger nor give long weight, an' I'll buy in open market, wheer I can get best value for my money" [Murray, Capful o' Nails, p. 20; pp. 10-15, 18-19. Then there was the truck system, whereby the foggers paid the nailers in kind, or with tokens redeemable solely at their "tommy shops," which offered only a limited selection of goods at inflated prices. [Burritt, Walks, 232-235]. Nailers who insisted on being paid their wages in cash could be blacklisted, that is, prevented from doing further business with the fogger at all. The Truck Act of 1831, which mandated that workers of all sorts be paid in the coin of the realm rather than with commodities or tokens, was well-intentioned but notoriously hard to enforce. [Michael Hall, In Cramped and Sooty Caverns, 56]. The following court case from 1842 is illustrative of both the abuse and the efforts of the courts to address it. It shows how the enforcement of the Truck Act relied on the testimony of informants.JOSEPH CHANCE v. JOHN SMITH, JUN[IOR].--ANOTHER INFORMATION UNDER THE TRUCK ACT--Benjamin Bach proved that on the 26th March [1842] be took some nails to Smith's warehouse; they were weighed, and came to 10s. He was told to go into the house and his (Smith's) wife would pay him. He asked for money, and was told he could not have any, but must take goods. He then agreed to take goods to the amount of 4s. 10d., and sent his wife for them. Smith kept a beer-house. Witness went one day and sat drinking there from one o'clock till ten at night. He went several days, during which he drank beer to the amount of the balance of what was due to him for nails. That was 5s. All this was drank in beer at Smith's house. He had no money. He could not get any, although be asked for it. If the men wanted money they were obliged to sell the goods they took of the master, and that at a great loss.--Dinah Bache, the wife of the last witness, was sent to Smith's by her husband for some goods. She was to have goods to the amonat of 4s. 10d., or 4s. 10 1/2d. She received: One-half peck of flour (2s. d.), One-half lb. of sugar (4 1/2d.), One and a half lb. of bacon (1s. 1 1/2 d.) One-half lb, of butter (7d.), [for a total of] 4s. 10d. She said: "I asked for some money, but was told I could not have any, and was obliged to seel part of the above goods, at less than they cost, so that I might pay nursing and rent. My hashand was drinking at Smith's beer shop, while I and my children were starving at home."--Mary Clowes (a witness for Smith) stated that her busband worked for young Smith, and she had received his money for him. She had always been paid in money, if she required it. She and her husband had been enployed by Smith six years, and were always paid in money.—-Several objections were made by Mr. Shaw, as to the liability of the defendant, all of which were over-ruled by the Magistrates, who convicted him in the penalty of £5 and costs, and awarded 30s. (out of the fine) to the informer. [Willetts, The Blackcountry Nailer's Riots of 1842 (Dudley, 1995), p. 5].
The truck system was still making the lives of nailers difficult in 1868, when Elihu Burritt interviewed took the time to interview one and then transcribe his lengthy critique.The question will naturally be asked what is the cause of all this Poverty and Distress in the Trade. I answer to a vast extent the truck system which is a nefarious Robbery to the Workman and a Disgrace to the trade. This Worm has Been gnawing at the Root a great Number of years till he has assumed the Form of a giant. When the Workman goes to the Warehouse of this monster, be has to submit to an extra Balance on the Weight side, and sometimes he Robs him of his tale, a Practice known only too well by the Workman. He comes to the Books and then he has to suffer very often another injustice. Having done this business there, he [h]as to Find his Way to the tommy shop, and there he meets the giant, Who compells him to Buy his tommy [i.e., food] at ten sometimes fifteen per cent above market Price and of inferior quality. Some places this giant keeps a Public bouse, and then the Workman is Highly Blessed when seduced into the tap-room and is Riddled again. He tells him he must come on Monday for his Iron (another trick). He goes accordingly to order, but no Iron--you must go into my castle and have some beer to-day. So Monday is done. He applys on Tuesday--very often none that day. He is like the Fly and the Spider which he cannot extricate himself from. He is Bound hand and Foot by this modern Goliath. "I don't say that all tommy Masters keep Public houses--they do not, but a portion of them. Some are more humane than others. Now this Class of men have found their way into the market and are underselling our honourable, Ready money Paying Masters, and Ruining the trade. The question is asked What is to be done to save the trade from Destruction. If a Workman lays an information he is looked upon as a Rogue and Vagabond, in the mean time he is Protecting his Fellow Workmen as well as himself. I ask now is there any Wonder that Poverty and distress exists in the Nail trade. Our Government have made a law, but that law has failed to meet the Requirements Demanded by the trade, there is so many intricacies. We have officers of Excise and Inspectors of Nuisances and yet not an Inspector of tommy Shops to see that the law as it now stands is carried out to the very letter and crush and annilate this abominable and nefarious traffic which is bringing Hundreds to a Premature grave and is a Disgrace to the Nation."[Burritt, Walks, pp. 233-234]
The very nature of the industry, where each nailer had to contract individually with foggers and nailmasters, inhibited the kind of government oversight that was easier to apply to factories. The need for a Revised Truck Act in 1887 is indicative of how entrenched the problems with the foggers were. [Michael Hall, In Cramped and Sooty Caverns, 56].Amongst the many sad and haggard faces which the mere name of Bromsgrove evokes, I think the one that haunts me most is that of a very old man, with whom I conversed on the last morning of my stay in that idyllic town. He was a man of eighty-five, who started nailing at the age of seven. His memory was quite clear. He had worked at the trade for seventy-seven years, and only "giv' over" a year come Whitsuntide, because, though working six or seven hours a day, he could only earn 1s. 6d. (less 6d. for stalling) in the whole week. This was very much less than he earned before he was eight years of age [c. 1821], when, as he told me, he could make his 1s. a day, working from 7 a.m. till 8 p.m. "Times were then half as good again as now." In his good days, when he was rearing his nine children, he was earning his £1 a week. [Sherard, White Slaves (1898), p. 104]
Despite such dire assessments of the state of this cottage industry, hand-wrought nails were still widely produced to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. In some cases, this was in response to niche markets for particular types of nails, particularly in the shoe- and boot-making business. But mostly it was a matter of inertia. For all the reasons indicated above, the nail industry had been a feature of the Black Country from long before it had been blackened, occupying an important place in family economies all over the region, whether as as a primary or a secondary source of income. For lack of other viable options, families like the Adamses, with a long tradition of making nails and rivets, tended to continue making them as long as there was any money to be had from the effort at all. As Elihu Burritt observed in 1868, "it shows the superabundance and exigencies of labour that nails should be made at all by hand at this late date of mechanical improvements. But thousands of families in this district have inherited the trade from several generations of their ancestors, and they are born to it, apparently with a physical conformation to the work." [Burritt, Walks, p. 228]. The census data that we saw above confirms that the Adams family of Rowley Regis was typical in this regard, with at least four generations--and likely many more going back into the eighteenth century and probably even earlier--contributing to the inertia of this dying profession.
Thomas Adams, Jr. was thirty-five that summer of 1887 when he left Rowley for Liverpool and from there crossed the Atlantic for New York. We know the year of his crossing because Thomas' death certificate (more on this below) states that at the time of his demise (December 4, 1912) he had lived in the United States for 25 years, which translates to an immigration year of 1887. Immigration passenger lists from that year include a Thomas Adams, age 35, who made the crossing from Liverpool on the SS Alaska, traveling in "Steerage No. 5," and arrived in New York on August 15, 1887. Interestingly enough, the passenger list identified Thomas Adams as a "clerk," not a "nailer" or a "manufacturer," as he would later refer to himself on his New York marriage certificate. Within a few short years of his arrival in New York, Thomas Adams would parlay his onboard status as a "clerk" into a whole new career as an insurance agent!
According to the October 24, 1829 edition of the Staffordshire Advertiser, a man named William Arnold was caught "stealing a couple of ducks, the property of Pinson Plant, of Rowley." In the words of the journalist assigned to this story,
Plant’s wife had drove a flock of ducks out of the house into a brewhouse early in the morning of the 12th of August. In a few minutes the prisoner was seen to go into the brewhouse and to run off with a couple of the ducks. He was pursued immediately and taken, but in his flight he let go his booty. The prisoner had said to the constable 'If I get out of this scrape, I’ll never get in another.' A master shoe maker, from Birmingham, gave the prisoner a good character." [There is a brief reference to the same incident in the August 22, 1829 edition of the same paper.]
Despite the character refernce, William Arnold's efforts were in vain. He was found guilty and sentenced to one month in prison, with three days of solitary confinement.
It should be noted that domestic brewhouses like the one in which Phebe confined her ducks were ubiquitous at the time. Local water was often contaminated, making it unsafe to drink in its usual form. But the bacteria could not survive neither boiling (which was required for beer brewing) nor the alcohol produced by the brewing process. The resulting beverage, referred to as "small beer," provided essential hydration and calories, without a lot of alcohol; generally between one and two percent. Because brewing, like cooking, required a fire, it was typically done in a structure separate from the living quarters.
The 1841 census identifies Pinson Plant as a coal miner. He is one of fifteen heads of household in Rowley in that census that are identified as coal miners, or colliers, not counting the one "coal master" and the one colliery "engineer." As noted above, Rowley coal miners (6%) were far outnumbered by Rowley nailers (55%), based on the data from that census. Despite the fact that there were many coal mines in the vicinity of Rowley, it was Dudley, Tipton, Bilston, Wednesbury and West Bromwich that boasted the largest populations of miners.
By the 1840s, Pinson was doing well for himself professionally speaking. The Poll Book and Electoral Registers from 1842 through 1849 confirm that he owned property [see, for instance the Poll Book from 1845]. They show that he lived at Bullfield bridge, which crossed the Dudley No. 2 Canal, at Windmill End in Rowley Regis. His status as a voter in Parliamentary elections (and hence his mention in the Pool Book) stemmed from the fact that he co-owned "freehold houses" in Rowley Village. It was in this same period that Pinson had the pleasure of seeing both his son Joseph and his daughter Nancy married. The marriage entry for Joseph indicates that he was a miner. Pinson's new daughter-in-law, Ann Johnson, was the daughter of a "labourer" named Joseph Johnson. They married in the parish church of Dudley on January 9, 1843. It was two years after that, on May 15, 1845, that Nancy Plant married Thomas Adams.
It is not clear if Pinson's wife Phebe lived to attend these weddings. Though listed in the 1841 census, she is missing from the the 1851 one, which identifies Pinson as a widower. There are a number of "Phoebe Plants" who died within that timeframe, though none in Rowley. One who died in December 1844, did so in Stourbridge, which is only two miles to the west. [England and Wales Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915]. In any case, in 1851, the widower Pinson, age 61, is living in Rowley with his son Joseph (age 30) and his wife Ann (30), along with their two boys, Joseph Pinson Plant (8) and John Plant(6) . Both Pinson and Joseph are listed simply as "labourers," though in their case that was a shorthand for "mine labourers." We know that Pinson continued to work as an "engine man" up to the very last day of his life because he died in a mine-related tragedy consistent with that role. The accident occurred at the Titford Long Meadow Mine in Oldbury on Septmember 12, 1854. Oldbury was an important coal mining center, much of its activity centered on the shores of the Titford Pool, a reservoir built by James Brindley (1773-74) to supply water to the Birmingham Canal to keep its water level high enough to float coal barges.
According to the English Coal Mining Accidents and Deaths Index "P. Plant" got caught in the winding gear at Long Meadow mine. The succinctness of the accident description does little to mask its gruesome nature: "hand caught on chain and drawn over drum." The Civil Registration Death Index corroborates the demise of "Pinson Plant" without providing any details; only that it occurred in late 1854 in the district of "W. Bromwich." Note than Oldbury lay within the registration district boundaries of nearby West Bromwich for civil and census purposes.
In the early nineteenth century, Rowley Regis lay under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Clent, five miles to the south. The vicars of Clent traditionally delegated to curates the ecclesiastical responsibilities associated with St. Giles, which would only be granted independent status as a parish church in 1848. We know from the St. Giles parish register that the curate who baptized Joseph and Nancy Plant on May 30, 1824 and Thomas and Hannah Adams on January 15, 1826 was the Reverend George Barrs. His signature--"Geo[rge] Barrs, A[artium]M[agister], Curate"--next to each entry in the register is unmistakeable.My birthday. Sixty-five years have now passed over since I was ushered into this mortal, sinful life a senseless, helpless, guilty babe,—-guilty, not in act, but by imputation, and by a depraved nature. [As] such I grew up to youth from childhood; then to manhood. But before I reached the latter state, it pleased God to make me feel my lost condition, my need of a full and free salvation; and to make me see that all I needed was to be found in Jesus Christ alone. And soon his good pleasure was to reveal his Son Jesus Christ in me, that I might preach him among my fellow countrymen. In this, he separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace. Every atom of all this was as much his doing as in the case of St. Paul, though not done in a way of miracle, but of his ordinary proceeding in similar cases. To my mind, St. Paul's case presents not more of wonder and sovereign goodness than my own. But in no other particular the comparison holds. The Apostle was every thing a minister of the Gospel ought to be, but I am nothing. He was nothing in regard to the effectual ministering of the word, not at all more capable of new creating souls than I am; but, as a minister of the Gospel he was, perhaps, the most complete character the earth ever bore. I have to lament my numerous deficiencies, negligences, follies; and to adore the goodness of God that has so long borne with me, the grace that still keeps me willing to labour in his vineyard; and to admire the power and mercy that make my feeble ministrations, in any degree, profitable to souls. During more than thirty-six years my lot has been to labour in this part of the vineyard. I have done nothing; but Heaven has, by my instrumentality, made many souls spiritually alive that were dead, comforted and established mauy that were before quickened, and thus furthered his work. To have been so honoured on earth is a full reward, and much more than a reward, for even a longer period of much more intense labour and exertion. [Barrs, Four Sermons, 237]
This is the man who put his stamp on Rowley parish for four formative decades in the lives of Benjamin Adams and Pinson Plant.June 1, Whit-Sunday. Preached three times, with great power. Numbers attended, and God was with us of a truth. Surely there is something to be done here. There seems to be a thirst for, and a true relish of the gospel. I always feel myself unable to speak in the great cause, and yet God always strengthens me. How sweet are the counsels of Jesus! Every day's experience more fully convinces me how necessary it is that Christ should be the sum and substance of all my sermons. Husks will never satisfy the hungry soul. Lord, give me plain, solid food; and feed the souls of Thy people here with the same kind of food, by my instrumentality. [F. Barrs, Four Sermons, p. 79]
Three decades later, while reflecting on his pastoral career, Barrs admitted: "hundreds of times have I ascended the pulpit with a determination not to speak longer than three quarters of an hour, and as often found it next to impossible to desist, after speaking upwards of an hour." [Barrs, Four Sermons (1849), p. 180; see also pp. 220-21] One of Barr's oldest parishioners recalled how "many had blamed him for preaching so long, but they knew not what he felt; they did not know how his soul yearned over the people: he could not leave off." [Barrs, Four Sermons, xxi].My heart bleeds—-my soul weeps--at seeing so many of my fellow mortals, not only insensible of the value and suitableness of this Divine ordinance to man's best interests, but actually prostituting the sacred hours to mere worldly or carnal pursuits. Would that these deluded, enslaved beings could see the guilt they incur, the blessedness they miss, the danger that hangs over them! Well might the poet sing, concerning such a degraded, unhappy race, "Like brutes they live: like brutes they die." To them every day is alike, as to the brutes; except that many of them act, as though the Sabbath gave them a more favourable opportunity to indulge in sensual gratifications than any other day. So do not even brutes. In this, rational beings are more brutish than the very brutes themselves. Such had been my case, but that Sovereign grace has made the difference. [Barrs, Four Sermons, 225-226; quotation from the hymn, "Sweet is the Work, My God, My King," by Isaac Watts (1719).
Would that Barrs had been more specific about the "worldly or carnal pursuits" that kept these parishioners away, for knowing that would get us a little closer to understanding the range of local working class predilections at the time. If only Barrs could have been a little less enigmatic when he scornfully observed that "scarcely can one person be found who complains of an hour's sermon as too long, who would not sit, with great patience and attention, twice as long, to hear tales of fiction, or the ravings of a juggler." [Ibid., 228] What tales were those? Were jugglers that popular in Rowley at the time, or did he intend it as a metaphor? Unfortunately, vague allusions to Rowley life are much better represented in his writings than detailed descriptions. The Barrs corpus is simply not as forthcoming about the working class experiences of his congregation as modern social historians would have it be.
The most tangible of Barrs' contributions as curate was his successful effort to rebuild St. Giles, which was in an appalling state of disrepair when he first arrived in Rowley in the spring of 1800. Eight years later he established an exploratory committee, which determined that it would be cheaper to replace the church than to repair and expand it. With potential donors in mind, Barrs penned a detailed (and dismal!) assessment of St. Giles as he knew it in 1812. Barrs went so far as to accuse that damp, old church of hastening the demise of an elderly parishoner. Upon committing that man's name to the parish burial register, he added: "He took cold in the damp, cold, miserable church of this parish, during divine service, about three weeks ago, and attributed his death to that cause!!!" (November 29, 1810; Rowley Parish Register, vol. 3, p. 564). Still, it would take another twenty-five years for Barrs to secure the necessary funding. In the end he made up for the shortfall by his sale of glebe land--that is, church-owned agricultural property traditionally used to support local clergy--in Blackheath. [Chitham, Rowley Regis, pp. 47-48, 92] In all likelihood, that land was then given over to the construction of workers' cottages and shops. In the meantime Barrs was forced to contend with "opposers" of the new church, among whom was counted a man named Benjamin Timmins, Jr. Barrs was so exercised by Timmins' resistance to his project that he could not help but see the hand of God in the man's premature death. "Oh, that his end may prove an effectual warning to others!", wrote Barrs in his journal. [F. Barrs, Four Sermons, pp. 111-112; see also p. xvii and the Rowley Parish Register, 8 March 1812.] The following Sunday, Barrs actually took the time to describe Timmins' final days in detail to help his congregation visualize the "awful state of unregenerate souls." [Ibid.] Barrs ultimately prevailed in his push for a new church, one that promised three times the capacity of the old one. On November 24, 1839, on the eve of the demolition of old St. Giles, Barrs presided over its last Sunday service. Five months later (April 24, 1840), he laid one of the cornerstones for the new church, even though his respiratory problems were finally catching up with him. Sadly, Barrs died the following August 26, when his magnum opus was still only half built. His son Frederick would later reflect: "Like Moses, he saw with his eyes the promised land; but was not allowed to enter it." [Rowley Regis Parish Church Notes, August & September, 1923; based on Numbers 20:12].
Barrs' determination to replace the decaying fabric of St. Giles was surpassed only by his crusade to arrest what he saw as the moral corruption of its congregation. As Frederick Barrs put it, "The parish of Rowley Regis at the commencement of his [father's] labour was in a most deplorable condition: in many respects it was scarcely in a state of common civilization. Sunday schools had been recently established; the lower classes, with few exceptions, were extremely ignorant and wicked. Vice and immorality bore an unbounded sway." Because, as Frederick observed, "instances of the most tremendous and horrible depravity are found recorded in his [father's] writings," he did not see the need to further "outrage humanity by their relation." But Frederick did mention in passing the "horrid practice of bull-baiting," which, along with cock-fighting and bear-baiting, was popular even among "many who considered themselves far above the vulgar rabble." The younger Barrs also decried the other "daring habits of profanity and drunkenness" that contributed to the "desecration of the Sabbath day." These were once so prevelant" that his father appointed parish constables who had the authority to deliver such delinquents to the Magistrates. [Barrs, Four Sermons xiv-xv] In 1831 the number of inhabited houses in the parish was 1366, the number of families occupying them [was] 1420 made up of nearly 7500 individuals, an equal number of each sex, [or] within a very few, the males predominating by only 7 or 8. 82 homes were then without inhabitants and only 5 [were in the process of] building. Since then the state of trade has considerably improved, many houses have been built or are in progress but few unoccupied. Of the above number of families 140 were occupied in agriculture and 909 in manufacture, trade etc. Many however who are ranked as agriculturists are frequently engaged in some branch of trade or manufacture. A very large proportion of the manufacturers are nail makers and nearly all the women and girls; that being the chief pursuit of the operatives in this and surrounding parishes. Here chains of various descriptions and the making of gun barrels especially in time of war, find work for many hands. Here also the manufacture of Jews Harps is carried on and sometimes employs a considerable number of persons.
Barrs observations about the vocational distribution of his parishioners corroborate what we know about the dominance of nail making in Rowley, the over-representation of females among the nailers, and the role of nailing as a supplemental source of income for local farmers. What often gets missed is the fact that at that time Rowley (along with parts of Birmingham) led the world in the manufacture of Jew's harps, which were forged from iron rods much the way nails were. [Chitham, Rowley Regis, p. 70]. A great many of the manufacturers are very poor and their families frequently appear clad in rags, and as if they could obtain but a slender pittance of life’s comforts or even necessities. This however is not to be attributed to their being destitute of the means of procuring these comforts in a degree unknown to other manufacturers but in their want of frugality, domestic economy and good management. Their work is laborious but they can generally earn good wages, which, if discreetly applied would furnish them with a comfortable competence. Unhappily however many, from their very youth contract habits of idleness and prodigality and these are a certain and fruitful source of rags and wretchedness.
In the world according to Barrs, the local nailers et al. mostly had themselves to blame for their "rags and wretchedness." Still, he was not oblivious to certain external factors that negatively affected the workers. One of these was the government. Ever since that "national pest," that is, the "Beer Act" of 1830, was implemented "their manners have become more dissolute, their morals more corrupt, their habits more idle and unthrifty and of course neither their personal appearance nor their domestic comforts has much improved." Barrs must have understood the logic behind this legislation, designed as it was to encourage beer consumption so as to wean the working class off hard liquor, especially gin. But still he could not wrap his mind around Parliament actually facilitating what he regarded as the working-class vice par excellence. Barrs also acknowledged, at least in passing, the effects of marketplace instability on local standards of living. As we have just seen, he described the "state of trade" in 1834 as "improved" over 1831 based on higher levels of construction and habitation of worker housing. He also acknowledged the positive effects of war on Black Country manufacturing. Yet Barrs used this observation only to chastise Rowley workers for being too lazy to take advantage of the boom times while they lasted. In his own words,Such is the degraded and grovelling condition into which many of the nailers are sunk that during the late war when wages were high those who could make a miserable living by earning 2 shillings a day would not earn another 2 pence when they might by no great exertion have earned 2 shillings a day. Of all descriptions of individuals these appear most anxious to observe to the very letter that maxim of holy writ “take no thought for the morrow for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” The wretchedness that results from their conduct is indeed an undeniable proof of its criminality and of the enormous evil of such perversions.
Barr's unsympathetic appraisal of his congregation's work ethic, captured in this inventory, has done little to endear him to modern observers of his career. In an article from the 1968 edition of The Blackcountryman, Peter Barnsley summed up Barrs' forty-year ministry in Rowley this way:George Barrs was energetic, purposeful, narrow-minded, humourless, blinkered, and very brave. He was frequently insulted on the highway and even pelted with stones, cinders and dirt. On one occasion he dispersed a hostile mob, armed with bludgeons and bayonets on sticks, who had attacked a bake-house. His physical courage on this occasion is commendable, but he seems not to have considered, even remotely, that there was anything wrong with a society which drove men to such desperate extremes of hunger. [Peter Barnsley, "A 19th Century Curate," The Blackcountryman 1.4 (1968), p. 55]
Barrs' lack of sympathy for the plight of the workers is all the more remarkable, Barnsley added, in light of the fact that he, having spent most of his life in the Black Country, "must have been surrounded by such suffering. Those were the days of long hours, little pay and execrable working conditions, but he mentioned none of these things." [Ibid., 56] But in fairness to Barrs, he was a Calvinist whose sense of his own jurisdiction vis-à-vis his congregants would have begun and ended with their eternal souls. As Frederick Barrs put it, his father's "sole aim, as a preacher, was to convince the sinner of his own utter misery and helplessness; to point to Jesus Christ as the alone and self-sufficient Saviour, and to leave the rest to God." [Barrs, Four Sermons, p. xix] In George Barrs' own words, his "soul wept over lost sinners, and earnestly longed for their salvation." He made this crystal clear in the very first sermon he ever delivered from the pulpit of St. Giles: "All I have in view is the glory of my great and adorable Master, who has committed to me the 'ministry of reconciliation,' and made me his ambassador unto men, to beseech them to be reconciled to Him; my aim is the salvation of your souls." [Barrs, Four Sermons, pp. 3-4] For Barrs, the appalling living conditions of the workers were not an argument for social reform but a reminder that death, whether by disease or accident, lurked around every corner.Death, though unseen, is with his drawn dagger near every one of us, waiting the commission of "The God of the spirits of all flesh," "In whose hand is the soul of every living thing," to strike the blow, which shall separate body and soul, and open the door to an eternal, unalterable state. And how knowest thou, O sinner, that the dreadful blow is not at this moment aimed at thee? Oh think what an awful case thine is, if thou art as unprepared, as that blow is unexpected. No one of us knows but that the eternal fiat may now be gone forth concerning himself, " Cut him down;"--at all events the grave will, ere long, most assuredly open to receive all our bodies. [Barrs, Four Sermons, p. 4]
From his first sermon to his last, Barrs' self-appointed task was to make his congregants prioritize the state of their souls over their bodily conditions, and to make them realize that they had a key part to play in their own salvation, one that began with the recognition that they were hopelessly mired in sin and desperately in need of help to free themselves from it. The injustice of the economic system that made the lives of Rowley workers so miserable was, for Barrs, far less important than how they responded to that misery. All this to say that Barrs was theologically predisposed to hold each worker aaccountable for his own behavior, even in the face of such daily hardship; not to call out the nailmasters and mine owners for contributing to their laborers' plight.This morning, while engaged in the study of God's word, I was informed a mob had attacked a house in the village. Grieved, but not alarmed, I went out to look, when near a hundred of the rioters came to me. I expostulated with them, and pointed out the ill consequences sure to arise from such proceedings, and the heinous guilt they were incurring thereby. At length, after heavy complaints concerning their hardships, they agreed to go home. This success induced me to try what could be done among the great body of these deluded creatures; accordingly I went, made my way into the midst of some hundreds, who had broken into the house of a baker, and carried off a quantity of dough, just as it was ready to be put into the oven, and addressed them. Sometimes my voice could be heard, and sometimes not. Many were armed with bayonets, Many were armed with bayonets, fixed on long sticks; others with rusty sword blades; others, with instruments resembling large knives; others with bludgeons, &c. I was among them nearly two hours, talking with and persuading them to disperse. Some cursed; others threatened; some were in tears; but not a hand was laid upon me. Something was thrown at my head, but it did not touch me. All this time my mind was calm and collected, and I was wonderfully supported by Him who always keeps His in safety, even where dangers seem most imminent. Though every endeavour was used to irritate me, I felt not the slightest inclination to passion. I endeavoured, in such plain language as I thought an English mob could understand, to show them their civil and moral guilt. As God enabled, I spared them not at all, nor flattered their iniquities. At length they began to disperse, and in the space of three hours all was peace. They, however, did not go without leaving me their blessing; for they threatened with oaths and curses, to stone me to death next Sunday, when I go to preach at Cradley; but I feel not the least fear. O my God! what shall I render to thee for such inexpressible kindness? No protection like thine! Enable me evermore to place my whole trust in thee. [F. Barrs, Four Sermons, p. 81-82].
Note how Barrs refers to the "heavy complaints concerning the ... hardships" of these "deluded creatures," but never bothers to identify them. If only he had, it would have given us a better sense as to what life looked like for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Instead, he writes: "I endeavoured, in such plain language as I thought an English mob could understand, to show them their civil and moral guilt." In other words, Barrs offered an impromptu sermon to help the workers see that such disruptive behavior was not only illegal, but fatal to their souls. Note, too, how Barrs redirects his reader's attention from the angry "hundreds" to himself, as if to burnish his credentials as a worthy ally of Christ, as someone who never shrank in the face of the threats leveled against him. The self-serving narrative that he adopted for this purpose was a time-honored one, drawn from early church passiones, in which the Christian martyrs managed, with Jesus accompanying them in spirit every step of the way, to maintain their poise in the face of raging pagans hungry for their blood.This year is ending ... and it has brought to me new trials and difficulties. In the rage for revolution, a very large majority of the lower classes have been deceived and imposed on. They have been taught to consider every one, who did not coincide with their wild notions, as their enemy and oppressor. Because I endeavoured to show them their delusion, and to set them right, my life has been threatened, and my habitation marked for destruction. Slander and falsehood, of almost every kind, have been heaped upon me. Several persons who used to attend the church have forsaken it; and others have been threatened, because they continue to attend. I have been insulted on the highway, hissed and shouted at in different places, and even pelted with stones, cinders, and dirt. In the midst of all, my soul abides in peace. Threats have been mere breath. The hand of heaven has been my shield, and has made every bolt fall harmless to the ground. I have been enabled to pity, and to pray for my persecutors, and to preach that pure Gospel, which both marks out the way of salvation by Jesus Christ, and makes plain the path in which all professed Christians ought to aim at walking. Errors and follies have been exposed; delusions unfolded; the spirit and conduct of the times exhibited in their true colours; their effects and consequences portrayed; and the Gospel remedy for all, held up to full view. Still I continue witnessing to both small and great, saying only those things which the Scriptures warrant, and which my office requires. In all, I know, I have fallen short, and feel my insufficiency; but to Him, who often employs weak instruments for great purposes, be the glory of all he has enabled me to do. [F. Barrs, Four Sermons, p. 198]
In both these journal entries--the "bake-house riot" one of 1800 and the "rage for revolution" one of 1831--Barrs depicted himself not only as a good shepherd, "willing to lay down his life for his sheep," but as a model for what he wanted his working-class parishioners to do in the face of their own challenges: to see what was really going on below the surface of their careless actions; to see, that is to say, the incessant machinations of the devil that informed their "wild notions." Barrs laid this classic Christian hermeneutic bare in a journal entry written on June 19, 1831.The afternoon text was 1 Peter v. 8, 9, "Your adversary the devil, &c., whom resist steadfast in the faith." My object was to show, in various instances, how Satan seeks to destroy souls. For this purpose, his numerous devices on the subject of religion were adverted to. The multiplicity of erroneous doctrines held by different sects, particularly by Arminians, Socinians, Papists, &c., &c., were also noticed. The impositions, frauds, cheats, extortions, &c., practised in trade and commerce were brought forward, nor were the political evils which have produced revolutions abroad, and threaten similar results in our own country, overlooked. The murmuring, insubordination, and clamour, for what is called reform, (but which actually means revolution,) now heard from one end of the land to the other, were noticed. By all such means, Satan seeks to deceive and destroy souls. His baits are suited to the depraved or disordered palates of those whom he means to devour; and while they, with unsuspecting gust, are swallowing down his gilded berries, he springs on them like a lion from his lurking place, and seizes them with dreadful roar; nor can they disentangle themselves from his ferocious paws and bloody fangs. The sermon was heard with apparently much interest. [Barrs, Four Sermons, 195-196]
In forty years of journal entries, seemingly everything that roiled Barrs' world--from theological diversity to calls for governmental reform--was categorized by him under the rubric of Satan's many devices to "deceive and destroy souls."September 1, Saturday: The month just ended has been eventful indeed to multitudes in this neighbourhood. The pestilence has raged and made sad destruction. In this parish, not fewer than forty-six of its victims have been interred within the month, and six during the latter part of July, making a total of fifty-two. They were nearly all young, and in the meridian of life: perhaps very few of them had even entertained an idea that death was within many years march of them. The intelligence of this pestilence, making ravages in different places, was by many of them disbelieved; by others, treated with ridicule and contempt. In that part of the neighbourhood where it has found most victims, the people seemed to grow more hardened as the news of its approach was more frequently and fully confirmed. The infatuation which has long been evidenced among them, seemed to become ten-fold more strong, and awful to such a degree, that many could be convinced of their delusions only by feeling the attack which speedily numbered them with the dead. Eighteen were buried in three days. So malignant was the disease, that, in more than one instance, persons who were among the attendants at funerals, were seized on their return from the church, rendered unable to reach their places of abode without help, and brought next day, to be buried. [Barrs, Four Sermons, 211-212]
In the midst of all this, Barrs could not resist thinking that he, being the faithful agent of God, could perform all these burials without contracting the disease himself.In the midst of all this contagion, and all these deaths, it has not yet come nigh me. Surely this is because the hand of Heaven has been my shield and defence. He has disarmed the pestilence, as he did the destroying agent in Egypt. He has made that totally harmless to me, which was infectious to some of those among whom I stood, to read the burial service; yea, which conveyed to them the contagion of death. Why am I thus spared—thus enabled to pass among deadly things, and receive no hurt? Even because Jehovah has ordained that it should be so. Caution is mine, but preservation is his.[Barrs, Four Sermons, 211-212]
Every once in awhile, when illustrating how Satan "baited his hook" to entice people to their own damnation, Barrs shed some unexpected light on Rowley working-class culture. His entry for September 15, 1800 is a case in point.
Felt very much grieved, and in some degree angry, when I saw great numbers of people engaged in that unmanly, cruel, and devilish sport, bull-baiting! Their shouts, which I suppose were expressions of their fancied pleasure, somewhat resembled, in my idea, the horrid, triumphant yell which resounded through hell's dark caverns, when Satan betrayed our first parents into sın. I have had my ears torn, many times, by the shouts of mobs; but never heard such disgusting yells as these before: they made my very heart bleed, and drew tears from my eyes. O, that men were wise! Great God! have mercy on these beastly wretches, and let them see how they are led captive and baited by Satan. even as they chain and bait the bull. [F. Barrs, Four Sermons, pp. 82-83]
Bull-baiting, which already had a long history in Europe before Barrs expressed his opinions about it, pitted a tethered bull against dogs trained to bite at its nose and neck, often resulting in the bull's death. Barrs was one of many churchmen at the time who saw this "sport" as contributing to the moral degeneration of human beings, because it "hardened their hearts" and thus made it easier for them to commit violence against fellow humans. Barrs was certainly not alone in connecting bull-baiting to the sabbath breaking, gambling, drunkenness, and general debauchery of its participants. Though Barrs was hardly a fan of government-sponsored reforms, he must have welcomed the "Cruelty to Animals Act" of 1835, which outlawed bull-baiting in Britain, even though its enforcement remained an issue, especially in rural areas, for a long time.In the afternoon from James i. 15. "Then lust, having conceived, brought forth sin, and sin finished, bringeth forth death." This text was selected with special reference to the execution at Shrewsbury, on Monday week last, of William Steventon, for the murder of John Horton, one of the officers of the Court of Requests, at Oldbury. 
My intention was made known, and the church was crowded to suffocation some time before the service began. Many were on the outside, and numbers went away, because they could not get in. My object, from these words, was to show that the depraved nature of man is the source of all actual sin; and to mark out the operations of that depraved nature in producing actual sin, and also the progress of it, and its final issue. I consider actual sin, not merely that into which the sinner breaks out in the open act of commission, but that which is committed inwardly when the mind becomes employed and engaged in it. Lusting after a woman is as much an act of sin in the heart, as outward adultery is in the conduct. Perhaps the most monstrous birth produced by lust's conception is that act of the mind which rejects the Gospel plan of salvation by Jesus Christ alone, and substitutes one of human contrivance in its stead; unquestionably it is the most deadly. After discussing the topics suggested by the text, the case of an unhappy murderer was delineated, as illustrative and confirmatory of the awful truths presented by it to consideration. But very few instances so appropriate have occurred. From his very parentage and childhood he was addicted to whatever sins his depraved nature brought forth. To bull-baiting, cock-fighting, drunkenness, debauchery, and Sabbath breaking, he mainly attributed his ruin and untimely end. He was particularly desirous that his brothers and children should be warned against that course of conduct, which led to his crimes and punishment, and that his children should be brought up in the love and fear of God, and sent to the Sunday school. His career of sin, when finished, produced an ignominious death; and there we are obliged to leave him, not without fears, that the death in the text might be the final issue of it in the world to come. The discourse was continued an hour and a quarter; I never addressed a more attentive audience. Many appeared to be much impressed by the discussion of the topics in the text. Many tears trickled down the cheeks of different persons, when I spoke of the murderer. If one soul was profited, I have a rich reward. [F. Barrs, Four Sermons, p. 173].
This day was buried a man whose character was of no pleasing kind, and whose end was very awful. About three weeks ago he said to his companions, while at work, (his trade was that of a gunsmith,)--"When I die, I'll be carried home (a common expression here for being carried to the grave) by the gunsmiths, as there are enough of you, and I hope you'll all get drunk on that day!" This was accompanied by some very profane language. In less than an hour after, he was seized with illness, and obliged to be taken to his house by his companions. In a few days he got somewhat better, but never worked again. On Thursday last, being still better, he had walked out and returned hungry, when he desired some eggs and bacon to be fried for him, but while they were being made ready, he fell down dead from his chair. Awful exit of a vile character! Would to heaven it might be a warning to his comrades in wickedness. N.B. I have since been informed, that those who carried his corpse to the grave actually fulfilled his wish, and got intoxicated the same evening. Thus wicked men rush from the most solemn employments into the very depths of wickedness, and strive to drown their souls in everlasting perdition. Such is the iniquity of this neighbourhood! [F. Barrs, Four Sermons, pp. 94-95; see also 126-127 (a case of suicide)]
As we have seen, Barrs was no fan of drunkenness, which he seems to have regarded as the radix omnium peaccatorum of the working class. Judging from the Barrs corpus as a whole, drunkenness seems to have stood for a whole congeries of working class behaviors against which he, as curate, fought an endless, losing battle. His apoplectic response to Parliament's passage of the "Beerhouse Act," which we noted above, is "of a piece" with this way of understanding the specific challenges of his particular mission.In the afternoon my discourse had particular reference to the decease of William Mole a poor nailer, but a happy and highly-favoured son of the Aleim [a transliteration of the Hebrew "ben-ha-elohim," or "son of God"]. The text was Prov. xiv. 32, "The righteous hath hope in his death." This passage he found particularly comforting to him in the last conflict. Among his last sayings was a request, that I would make it the subject of a discourse, after his decease. The refreshment it afforded him did not arise from any vain notion of his own righteousness. While he had a most deep-felt conviction, that through grace he was a righteous man, yet was he as far as possible from valuing his own human righteousness, or trusting in it. All his righteousness was in Jesus Christ. In Him he possessed a righteousness complete and spotless; nor did he regard himself as righteous in any other way, than as he was one with Jesus, and a possessor of his righteousness imputed. [Ibid., 155; see also 95, 125-26, 158, 239-243, 244]
Though less likely than a "Billy Sugar" or a drunken gunsmith to titillate a crowd, a humble nailer like William Mole was their natural antithesis. The same could be said for Mary Carter, a fourteen-year-old burn victim, on whose awful fate Barrs reflected at unusual length in his journal entry for November 4, 1835.This day was buried Mary Carter, one of the Sunday Scholars, a girl about fourteen years of age. On Thursday evening last, her clothes took fire, and she was so dreadfully burned, that she died on the Sunday morning. It appears, she was nursing a babe of a few months old, and had reclined on a bench near the fire, and it is supposed, there fell asleep. A sister, about six years of age, was the only person present. She observed Mary's clothes on fire, and told her. The terrified girl rose up, ran out of doors, and was quickly enveloped in flames. The neighbours were alarmed, and, with some difficulty, the flames were extinguished, but not till all her clothing was consumed. All proper assistance was had for the poor sufferer, as soon as possible, but not a hope of recovery could be entertained. Her whole body, arms, and hands were scorched to a cinder; but her head, face, and even her hair, were untouched. During the short time she survived, her mind was employed, almost exclusively, on eternal things. She spoke frequently of Jesus, as her Saviour, and was much in prayer. The last words she uttered were, "Glory to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;" and, to use her father's expression, she seemed ready to jump out of the bed. Who can say, in that momentous crisis, that she was not, like Stephen, favoured with a sight of the opening heavens, and of Jesus Christ, in his own glorious kingdom? [Barrs, Four Sermons, 231-232; Acts 7:55-56; see also Ibid., 233-34: "On the Death of an Infant."]
Barrs did not need to go into this much detail to make his main point: that on her very last day, Mary, a "Sunday Scholar," subscribed fully to Barrs' world view. But we are happy he did elaborate, because this little vignette reinforces two observations we have already made about the lives of nailers: first, that girls were often employed by working mothers to watch their young children, and that over-populated worker cottages with adjacent nailsheds were ripe for this kind of disaster. More on this in due course.
While the circumstances that led to this outburst (complete with three exclamation points!) are unclear, the entry reminds us that Barrs' responsibilities as curate included overseeing the local workhouse, also known as the poorhouse. According to Edward Chitham, “The Rowley Poorhouse was situated at Tipperty Green where nowadays the Christadelphian church stands. It was a stone building, limewashed white and contained separate accommodation for men and women." [Edward Chitham, The Black Country (1972)] The principal activity of the inmates, male and female, was stone breaking. The primary purpose of this activity was to serve as a deterrent; to make life inside the workhouse considerably less desirable than the lowest-paid independent employment outside. It is significant, in this regard that, up until 1829, the Rowley workhouse had its own nailshop [Ibid.], which presumably did not have had the same deterring effect as stone breaking, given how many nailers there were in Rowley. In accordance with the Poor Relief Act of 1601 (a.k.a., the Elizabethan Poor Law"), poorhouses were overseen by parishes and administered by appointed "Overseers of the Poor," who, in turn, hired private "farmers (or contractors) of the poor" to run the workhouse for a fixed fee. Note the adjacent advertisement from Ariss's Birmingham Gazette. The temptation for workhouse farmers to abuse the system by minimizing their costs at the expense of the inmates was great. This accounts for the acerbic depiction in Dickens' Oliver Twist of everyone associated with the workhouse except the inmates themselves. Such abuses may have inspired Barrs' unflattering assessment of Joseph Windsor, a previous "governor" of the Rowley workhouse. In any case, Barrs lived long enough to witness the implementation of the "New Poor Law" of 1834, which established "unions" of parishes for the administration of workhouses, and which forbid the administration of relief to any poor person who was not enrolled in a workhouse. Barrs must have been part of the conversations that led to Rowley parish joining the Dudley Union, which eventually established a new, central workshouse in Sedgley (between Dudley and Wolverhampton). Ten of the burials over which Barrs presided at St. Giles--not to mention three baptisms and a marriage--involved workhouse inmates, but unfortunately these entries provide little information. As luck would have it, though, Rev. Barrs and the Rowley workhouse were featured in a newspaper report describing a coroner's inquest into the death of an elderly workhouse resident. 
The article, from the April 11, 1825 edition of the Ariss' Birmingham Gazette, reads:
A long examination took place on Saturday at Rowley Regis before Mr H Smith, Coroner, on the body of Jonathan Taylor, a pauper, upwards of 85 years of age. The deceased, who possessed excellent bodily health but whose mental faculties had for some time failed him, was an inmate of the poorhouse, and frequently became so unmanageable that he was obliged to be put under restraint. 
It was on an occasion of this kind that on Monday afternoon he was confined in a room called the dungeon where there was clean straw for him to lie on, and his victuals were regularly taken to him, and he made a hearty dinner on Tuesday with beef, bread and potatoes; but towards evening he stripped himself naked, and refused to eat his supper. At five o’clock on Wednesday morning he was heard to cough, and about seven he was found dead, lying on his side with his shirt under his head. Several of the paupers deposed to the kind and humane treatment which the deceased had always received, in common with themselves, from the Governor and Governess of the Workhouse, and it appears that the dungeon was dry and wholesome and had a boarded floor. The Rev. George Barrs, Minister of the parish, stated that he had often made enquiries from the poor as to their treatment and they always expressed themselves perfectly satisfied with it. Mr Kenrick, the surgeon, who opened and examined the body of the deceased, said there were no marks of injury whatever upon it, and that he had never before seen so healthy a subject, considering his extreme age, and that he had no doubt he died a natural death. The jury therefore returned a verdict to that effect. [Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette, 11 April 1825; quoted in "The Poorhouse in Rowley"]
The remarkably high incidence of domestic burnings or scaldings, which contributed the names of so many children to Barrs' burial register, reminds us how tight the living and working quarters would have been for the Rowley nailers who lived and worked in the recently-constructed cottage/nailshed complexes, especially when one considers the size of many worker families. Even though fires for cooking, brewing, and nailing tended to be confined to structures separate from the cottages themselves--a deliberate strategy to limit structural damage should one of the fires get out of control--there was little to inhibit children from wandering too close to the flames, especially during the colder months where families were inclined to sleep as close to the fires as they could. The October 27, 1841 edition of the Worcestershire Chronicle captures a particularly revealing account of just such a case in nearby Stourbridge (see adjacent image).1803 Oct 23 Henry, s. of Jno. [John] & Mary EDMANDS. He was killed in a coal pit near Brierly Hill [three miles west of Rowley]. His cloathes were caught by an hook, or something of that kind, of the skep, which took him up a considerable way; at length his cloathes tore, & he held by his hands till being unable to hang any longer, he fell & spoke no more.
There are some similarities here to the accident at Oldbury's Titford Long Meadow Colliery that, fifty-two years later, would claim the life of "engine man" Pinson Plant. Both victims were caught by the cable of the winding gear, Henry by his clothes and Pinson by his hand. But Henry died after his clothing tore and he fell into the shaft, whereas Pinson was pulled by the cable up and over the winding drum on the surface of the mine.On Tuesday evening last, the body of that glorified angel was committed to the ground, to await the period when it shall be raised " like Christ's glorious body." What a thought, consolatory—-astonishing! Shall it then remain a mere babe, and rise in the very same figure and dimensions which it now bears; or shall it rise a full-grown human frame, but spiritualized? Will the glorified bodies of the saints be those of all the different stages of human existence, or only like unto such as attain to manhood here? Perhaps the question is curious, and ought not to be pursued. I am not aware that the Scriptures afford any direct information on this very interesting subject; yet I am inclined to think, that though the glorified bodies of infants should remain infant bodies, they will be endued with the same powers and energies as the bodies of those who attain a state of manhood in this life. But what is not revealed belongs not to man.[Barrs, Four Sermons, 233]
For Elizabeth Smith's death to trigger this kind of response from Barrs suggests not only that he had prided himself on his theological reasoning, but that, by that late point in his career, he had presided over far too many children's funerals. But lest one think that Barrs was impervious to grief, consider his journal entry for October 8, 1836, where he laments the death of his daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Ann Barnes, who died of complications from childbirth.The dreaded moment is come. The sad, the afflicting event has taken place. Dear, highly-esteemed Elizabeth Anne has expired. Her blood-bought, blessed spirit has winged its way to that mansion on high, which Jesus had prepared for her; where she has met her two infant, happy spirits, with all the triumphant church, before the throne of Jeve and the Lamb! To her dear, disembodied spirit, this is a glorious day—an eternal day. To us who yet survive, it is a day of sad bereavement and heavy grief. And grieve we may, but not out of measure. Though Israel of old might not put on tokens of grief for the dead, Israel's Lord, when on earth, wept over a beloved friend in the grave. Whether love of Lazarus, or sympathy in the sorrow of his mourning sisters, called forth those tears, is of no great moment; "Jesus wept;" and we may follow his example and not offend. To lament so great a loss is one thing; to reproach the hand that has caused it is another. The former is, in a measure, unavoidable: from the latter I would hope to be preserved. Oh for stronger faith! more patience! meek and cheerful submission![Barrs, Four Sermons, 239]
Barrs' lament went on for pages, ending with his account of the funeral--which was performed by the vicar of Dudley--and the body's interrment in a plot that Barrs had been reserving for himself [Barrs, Four Sermons, 244]. "Severe as is my bereavement, heavy as is my loss, those of her once beloved husband are much more so; the weight and magnitude of them in his case, neither language can describe nor heart conceive. [Barrs, Four Sermons, 240]As he went to perform his ministerial duty, at the weekly lecture at Reddal Hill School, more than once, some hundreds of misguided and infatuated beings gathered together, for the purpose of insult and outrage, gnashing their teeth, and longing to fulfil the designs of their wretched instigators, who had represented [Barrs] as the enemy of the poor, because he had told them the truth; because he had told them, that the grand Reform Bill was a delusion, and would never produce the promised "Bread, Beef, and Beer!!" [Barrs, Four Sermons, xxv]
Confrontations like those at Reddal Hill School help us understand Barrs' journal entries describing the bakehouse "rioters" in 1800 and the workers "raging for revolution" in 1831. They are make sense of Barrs' reflections on the year 1835, when he decried "the vast change that has been effected on the public mind, in regard to their political views." Simply put, Barrs had no sympathy for "the reform yell and the revolutionary howl," which, as far as he was concerned, belonged to vultures who "long to prey on the property of others, and thirst for riot, rapine, and blood." [Barrs, Four Sermons, 232-233]
Which social reform movements might Barrs have had in mind when he wrote these words? One of the earliest was Owenism, the eponymous brainchild of Robert Owen (1771-1858), a Welsh cotton magnate turned utopian thinker, who was born the very same year as the curate of St. Giles. Owen was a product of Newtown, a major hub for the Welsh flannel and wollen textile industry. Though Robert left school at age ten to become an apprentice draper in Stamford (Lincolnshire), he was an avid reader. At eighteen, he moved to Manchester and worked for a draper there. Shortly thereafter, he became part owner of a small cotton mill, and then co-owner and manager of the new Chorlton Twist Company. During his time in Manchester, Owen was elected as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which was at the time steeped in Enlightenment ideas. In 1799, when Owen was twenty-eight and a newlywed, he and his partners purchased the New Lanark cotton mill, 25 miles southeast of Glasgow, from Owen's new father-in-law, David Dale. In was during this time when he was overseeing New Lanark that Owen produced two short publications which depicted the industrial labor force very differently than the way Barrs saw it. The acquisition of wealth, and the desire which it naturally creates for a continued increase, have introduced a fondness for essentially injurious luxuries among a numerous class of individuals, who formerly never thought of them, and they have also generated a disposition which strongly impels its possessors to sacrifice the best feelings of human nature to this love of accumulation. To succeed in this career, the industry of the lower orders, from whose labour this wealth is now drawn, has been carried by new competitors striving against those of longer standing, to a point of real oppression, reducing them by successive changes, as the spirit of competition increased, and the ease of acquiring wealth diminished, to a state more wretched than can be imagined by those who have not attentively observed the changes as they have gradually occurred. In consequence, they are at present in a situation infinitely more degraded and miserable than they were before the introduction of these manufactories, upon the success of which their bare subsistence now depends. [Ibid., 5-6]
One notorious symptom of this frenetic quest for material gain on the part of the working classes was, as Owen saw it, the long hours that even small children were obliged to spend in the factories just to help their families make ends meet. [Ibid, 8-10]. As a result, the young were deprived of sufficient access to "play and exercise in the open air" and to the beginnings of "book learning." This, Owen lamented, not only stunted their physical and mental growth, but made them vulnerable to the "seductive pleasures of the pot-house [a workers' pub] and inebriation," with predictable consequences for society as a whole. [Ibid., 10]The employer regards the employed as mere instruments of gain, while these acquire a gross, ferocity of character, which, if legislative measures shall not be judiciously devised to prevent its increase, and ameliorate the condition of this class, will sooner, or later plunge the country into a formidable and perhaps inextricable state of danger. The direct object of these observations is to effect the amelioration, and avert the danger. The only mode by which these objects can be accomplished is to obtain an Act of Parliament. [Owen, Observations, 11]
Considering the Observations of the Effect of the Manufacturing System as a whole, it is clear that Owen's proposed solution to the malaise of the new industrial working class rested on a number of presuppositions: first, that the character of a person is, by and large, a product of his enviroment; second, that the most propitious moment for shaping a person's character is in the earliest years of childhood [Owen, A New View, 28-29]; and third that the national government had the power and jurisdiction to reform the environment of the British people as a whole. These three foundational principles, which resonated with the Enlightenment ideas that he had embraced in Manchester, are on full display in Owen's closing appeal to Parliament, to whom Owen dedicated his book.I now therefore, in the name of the millions of the neglected poor and ignorant, whose habits and sentiments have been hitherto formed to render them wretched, call upon the British Government and the British Nation to unite their efforts, to arrange a system to train and instruct those, who for any good or useful purpose, are now untrained and uninstructed; and to arrest by a clear, easy, and practical system of prevention, the ignorance and consequent poverty vice and misery which are rapidly increasing throughout the empire; for, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." [Ibid., 20]
In a collection of essays written between 1813 and 1816 and later published as a book under the title, A New View of Society, Owen advanced the same basic agenda, but buttressed its provisions by drawing on data from his own experience at New Lanark. He was confident that the lessons learned there were applicable not only to other cotton mills but to Britain as a whole.When it was perceived that inanimate mechanism was greatly improved by being made firm and substantial; that it was the essence of economy to keep it neat, clean, regularly supplied with the best substance to prevent unnecessary friction, and by proper provision for the purpose to preserve it in good repair, it was natural to conclude that the more delicate, complex, living mechanism would be equally improved by being trained to strength and activity and that it would also prove true economy to keep it neat and clean; to treat it with kindness, that its mental movements might not experience too much irritating friction; to endeavour by every means to make it more perfect; to supply it regularly with a sufficient quantity of wholesome food and other necessaries of life, that the body might be preserved in good working condition, and prevented from being out of repair, or falling prematurely to decay. [ Owen, Ibid., 12]
From this paragraph, it is easy to tease out Owen's concerns about the factory work environment, and his ideas about how to make the "human machine" function at a more optimal level, by keeping it "neat and clean," providing it with "a sufficient quantity of wholesome food and other necessaries of life," and treating it "kindly." [Owen, Ibid., 12] All of this with an eye to enhancing the factory worker's "body and mind" and thereby promoting "happiness of self." [Owen, Ibid., 13; 22, 25]....Experience will soon teach us how to form character, individually and generally, so as to give the greatest sum of happiness to the individual and to mankind. These principles ... direct that the governing powers of all countries should establish rational plans for the education and general formation of the characters of their subjects. These plans must be devised to train children from their earliest infancy in good habits of every description which will of course prevent them from acquiring those of falsehood and deception. They must afterwards be rationally educated, and their labour be usefully directed. Such habits and education will impress them with an active and ardent desire to promote the happiness of every individual, and that without the shadow of exceptions for sect, or party, or country, or climate. They will also ensure, with the fewest possible exceptions, health, strength, and vigour of body; for the happiness of man can be erected only on the foundations of health of body and Peace of mind. [Owen, Ibid., 25; 28-30]
In the second essay of A New View of Society, Owen turned from theory to practice, describing the "very partial experiment" that he had been undertaking as a mill owner in Scotland. Founded by David Dale, in 1784, the New Lanark cotton mill was purchased fifteen years later by his new son-in-law and his partners. By Owen's own account, the mill that he had agreed to manage was in sorry shape. For lack of a resident labor force in the vicinity, Dale had been forced to employ workhouse orphans as young as six years of age and to keep them working for thirteen-hour days. As a result, Owen lamented, they became "dwarfs in body and mind." [Owen, Ibid., 35] Not surprisingly, many fled to Glasgow or Edinburgh, only to fall victim to the "innumerable temptations" offered by such cities. [Owen, Ibid., 36] As an outsider, it took Owen two years to make any headway in mobilizing his recalcitrant Scottish workforce. "It may with truth be said, that at this period they possessed almost all the vices and very few of the virtues of a social community. Theft and the receipt of stolen goods was their trade, idleness and drunkenness their habit, falsehood and deception their garb, dissensions, civil and religious, their daily practice; they united only in a zealous systematic opposition to their employers." [Owen, Ibid., 38] It is noteworthy that this list of vices might have just as easily been produced by George Barrs. What distinguished the mill owner from the curate was that they diagnosed the problems of the workers differently. Instead of blaming them for their own anti-social behaviors or seeing them as mired in original sin the way Barrs did, Owen took aim at their environment, welcoming the opportunity provided by this "fair field" of New Lanark "to try the efficacy in practice of principles supposed capable of altering any characters." [Owen, Ibid., 38] ...all difficulties in the way of future improvement vanished. They were taught to be rational, and they acted rationally. Thus both parties experienced the incalculable advantages of the system which had been adopted. Those employed became industrious, temperate, healthy, faithful to their employers, and kind to each other, while the proprietors were deriving services from their attachment, almost without inspection, far beyond those which could be obtained by any other means than those of mutual confidence and kindness. Such was the effect of these principles on the adults; on those whose previous habits had been as ill-formed as habits could be; and certainly the application of the principles to practice was made under the most unfavourable circumstances. [ Owen, Ibid., 42-43]
Based on the success of this experiment, involving a population of some 2,000 mill workers and their families, Owen felt confident asserting that the problems commonly associated with industrial labor in Britian ought to be blamed on the prevailing system, not on the workers themselves.Let it not, therefore, be longer said that evil or injurious actions cannot be prevented, or that the most rational habits in the rising generation cannot be universally formed. In those characters which now exhibit crime, the fault is obviously not in the individual, but the defects proceed from the system in which the individual was trained. Withdraw those circumstances which tend to create crime in the human character, and crime will not be created. Replace them with such as are calculated to form habits of order, regularity, temperance, industry; and these qualities will be formed. Adopt measures of fair equity and justice, and you will readily acquire the full and complete confidence of the lower orders. Proceed systematically on principles of undeviating persevering kindness, yet retaining and using, with the least possible severity, the means of restraining crime from immediately injuring society, and by degrees even the crimes now existing in the adults will also gradually disappear: for the worst formed disposition, short of incurable insanity, will not long resist a firm, determined, well-directed, persevering kindness. Such a proceeding, whenever practised, will be found the most powerful and effective corrector of crime, and of all injurious and improper habits. [ Owen, Ibid., 43]
Owen was confident that these tactics, tested at New Lanark could be considered "universal, and applicable to all times, persons, and circumstances." [Owen, Ibid., 44]. This being the case, there was nothing "to prevent such a system from being immediately adopted into national practice" except "a general destitution of the knowledge of the practice," a lacuna that he was trying to fill with his own writings [Ibid., 46] As Owen saw it, his reform was one in which "all men and all parties may join; that is, a reform in the training and in the management of the poor, the ignorant, the untaught and untrained, or ill-taught and ill-trained, among the whole mass of British population." This reform, he was convinced, offered a "plain, simple, practicable plan which would not contain the least danger to any individual, or to any part of society, may be devised for that purpose." [ibid, 46]... is frequently made ... from the opposite extremes of error, either a day of superstitious gloom and tyranny over the mind, or of the most destructive intemperance and licentiousness. The one of these has been the cause of the other; the latter the certain and natural consequence of the former. Relieve the human mind from useless and superstitious restraints; train it on those principles which facts, ascertained from the first knowledge of time to this day, demonstrate to be the only principles which are true; and intemperance and licentiousness will not exist; for such conduct in itself is neither the immediate nor the future interest of man; and he is ever governed by one or other of these considerations, according to the habits which have been given to him from infancy. [Ibid., 53]
Again, Robert Owen and George Barrs were in perfect agreement when it came to the "destructive intemperance and licentiousness" that tended to dominate that one day off that the industrial working class universally enjoyed. But far from mandating church attendance as the antidote, Owen saw it as barrier that kept people, "who are confined all week to sedentary occupations," from freely partaking, "without censure, of the air and exercise to which nature invites them, and which their health demands" [Ibid., 53]. Moreover, added Owen, the "superstition and bigotry" espoused in the churches on Sunday contributed to the very social problems he was trying to fix. Being "destructive of every open, honest, generous, and manly feeling, the typical sermon "disgusts many, and drives them to the opposite extreme." [Ibid., 53]In addition to the knowledge of the principle and practice of the above-mentioned precept, the boys and girls are to be taught in the school to read well, and to understand what they read; to write expeditiously a good legible hand; and to learn correctly, so that they may comprehend and use with facility the fundamental rules of arithmetic. The girls are also to be taught to sew, cut out, and make up useful family garments; and, after acquiring a sufficient knowledge of these, they are to attend in rotation in the public kitchen and eating rooms, to learn to prepare wholesome food in an economical manner, and to keep a house neat and well arranged. [Ibid., 60]
It is noteworthy that Owen singled out the girls as a means of improving the quality of the workers' households by assigning them additional lessons in the domestic arts. There is no mention of any parallel vocational training for the boys.It is intended that the lectures should be familiar discourses, delivered in plain impressive language, to instruct the adult part of the community in the most useful practical parts of knowledge in which they are deficient, particularly in the proper method of training their children to become rational creatures; how to expend the earnings of their own labour to advantage; and how to appropriate the surplus gains which will be left to them, in order to create a fund which will relieve them from the anxious fear of future want, and thus give them, under the many errors of the present system, that rational confidence in their own exertions and good conduct, without which, consistency of character or domestic comfort cannot be obtained, and ought not to be expected. ... In short, these lectures may be made to convey, in an amusing and agreeable manner, highly valuable and substantial information to those who are now the most ignorant in the community.[Ibid., 63]
The third function of Owen's New Institution, that of a church, would be tasked with nothing less than undoing all the harm caused by the actual churches of his day. Their misguided messaging had made it "utterly impossible for man to become rational, or enjoy the happiness he is capable of attaining, until those errors are exposed and annihiliated." [Ibid., 65]The doctrines which have been taught to every known sect, combined with the external circumstances by which they have been surrounded, have been directly calculated, and could not fail, to produce the characters which have existed. And the doctrines in which the inhabitants of the world are now instructed, combined with the external circumstances by which they are surrounded, form the characters which at present pervade society. The doctrines which have been and now are taught throughout the world, must necessarily create and perpetuate, and they do create and perpetuate, a total want of mental charity among men. They also generate superstitions, bigotry, hypocrisy, hatred, revenge, wars, and all their evil consequences. For it has been and is a fundamental principle in every system hitherto taught, with exceptions more nominal than real, "That man will possess merit, and receive eternal reward, by believing the doctrines of that peculiar system; that he will be eternally punished if he disbelieves them; that all those innumerable individuals also, who, through time, have been taught to believe other than the tenets of this system, must be doomed to eternal misery." Yet nature itself, in all its works, is perpetually operating to convince man of such gross absurdities. Ibid., 65-66]
In short, the Church aspect of the New Institution is perhaps best understood as an anti-church, or, put differently, an antidote to the Christian sermons of Owen's day. George Barrs may have been a little vague when he decried the "reform yells" and the "revolutionary howls" of his day, but this anti-religious diatribe by Owen is certainly a viable candidate."Labour without reward," then, or "labour without wages," is the grand test of slavery. True as gospel, Buxton, but why not apply this excellent test to slavery at home?--If labour without reward (adequate reward you mean) be slavery in the West Indies, by what name will you denominate that labour in England whose reward is not one half? The negro's reward for about nine or ten hours' moderate labour is: a full belly, wholesome food, medicine and medical aid when he wants it, a lot of land and cottage for his family, rent-free, and twenty-eight holidays in the year, besides Sundays. The Huddersfield weaver's reward for thirteen or fourteen hours' labour, is from seven to ten shillings a week (sometimes not half so much), without house or land rent-free, without medical attendance, and without 28 bolidays in the year, unless he takes them on condition of being starved! Is not this labour without reward? Again, if we go to the midland districts, we shall find in the vicinity of Halesowen some fifty thousand nailors obliged to live on eight shillings a week, of which they pay three for rent! and yet Buxton would as soon cut off his ears as call these men slaves. [Poor Man's Guardian, 17 Nov 1832, p. 1; see also Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 2: "Shall Christian eloquence be employed against every species of slavery, but such as is found in the fields, the factories, and workshops of Britain?"]
Whatever one thinks of the Hetherington's rosy assessment of American slavery, his argument is a classic example of essentializing and appropriating the plight of the nailers of Halesowen in the service of a Radical agenda. The other professions that he placed in this "slave-like" category are the weavers of Huddersfield; the straw-plait makers of Dunstable; the bobbin-net makers of Nottingham and Leicestershire; and the thread and pillow-lace makers in Bucks, Bedford, and Northampton counties. [Ibid., pp. 1-2]. Given the point of Hetherington's editorial, he must have anticipated general agreement from his readers that these occupations in these places truly represented the lowest of the low in terms of labor conditions at the time. Note that coal mining did not make Hetherington's cut.
Henry Hetherington and two other Radical publishers of the time named John Cleave and James Watson began collaborating with the like-minded William Lovett (1800-77), a self-educated, Cornish-born cabinet maker turned activist. In 1836, they founded the London Working Men's Association (LWMA), which served as the epicenter of the Chartist movement (1838-1860). Chartism was a direct response to the Great Reform Act of 1832, which had given voting rights to the middle class (more accurately to male "ratepayers" who paid a yearly minimal rental of £10) but not to the burgeoning industrial working class. The movement got its name from "The People's Charter," a parliamentary bill drafted by Lovett and other members of the LWMA. Beyond the demand for universal suffrage for all males over age 21, the Charter called for the abolition of property requirements for MPs and the introduction of salaries so that workers could afford to serve in Parliament when elected. LWMA "missionaries" were sent all over England during the winter of 1838-39 to collect signatures to pressure Parliament into implementing Chartist reforms. This effort was overseen by delegates to the newly formed "General Convention of the Industrious Classes," which met in February 1839 in London, electing Lovett as its first secretary. Note the use of the neologism "Industrious classes," coined by the Chartists as a way of uniting factory workers, artisans, small-scale shopkeepers and manufacturers; that is to say, all the actual producers of wealth in Britain as opposed to those (the aristocracy and landed gentry) whose wealth was inherited. John Collins (1802-52), a tool maker and Council member of the progressive Birmingham Political Union (BPU), served as one of the city's delegates to the Convention. Indeed, by May 7, the Convention actually moved its headquarters from London to Birmingham, which was deemed more sympathetic to Radical causes. On June 14 (1839), Birmingham MP Thomas Attwood presented to Parliament the first Chartist petition, endorsed by some 1,200,000 signatures, where it was quickly defeated. Violence followed in the heart of Birmingham on July 4, 1839, in what came to be known as the "Bull Ring Riots." The Riot Act was read and the police cleared the crowds. A day later, both Lovett and Collins were arrested for producing a poster condemning the police action. On July 12, 1839 a motion to consider the Chartist petition in Parliament was again voted down, which led to a bigger riot at the Bull Ring that was suppressed by the military.
The authors realized that one of the biggest obstacles to the enfranchisement of the working classes was the prevailing perception that they were not fit for political participation. Few could not get past the "drunken and profligate examples they daily witness" and therefore would be hesitant to trust "men of such demoralizing habits with the suffrage." [Ibid., 6]; compare Hetherington, who wrote, in his Penny Papers for the People: "The middling classes will never wish the poor and the despised 'mob,' as even they call the working classes, to have equal power with themselves."] Lovett and Collins wrote Chartism to undermine this perception. They hoped to do this by promoting empathy for the working poor, by contextualizing their plight in a way that exculpated them for their vices, and by proposing a long-term solution for restoring the human dignity that had been taken from them.For, what worse can those experience on earth who, from earliest morn to latest night, are toiling in misery, yet starving while they toil; who, possessing all the anxieties of fond parents, cannot satisfy their children with bread; who, susceptible of every domestic affection, perceive their hearths desolate, and little ones neglected, while the wives of their bosoms are exhausting every toiling faculty in the field or workshop, to add to the scanty portion which merely serves to protract their lives of care-worn wretchedness? Men thus steeped in misery, and standing on the very verge of existence, cannot philosophise on prudence; they are disposed to risk their lives on any chance which offers the prospect of immediate relief, as the only means of rendering life supportable, or helping them to escape death in its most agonizing forms. [Ibid., 21]
Under the circumstances, was is all that surprising that the working poor would turn to drink? As Lovett and Collins saw it, "the mental and physical debility arising from protracted and excessive toil, begets a craving appetite in some for stimulants to force them beyond (or to restore) their natural powers." At the same time, the more "wholesome and nutritious ones are not always within the reach or means of the poor." [Ibid., 6-7]The rich and the middle classes are said to be better educated than the poorer classes; but if by 'education' is understood the just development of all the faculties, to the end that men may be morally as well as intellectually endowed, we think the fruits of that great superiority would be more strikingly exhibited than they are. If, for instance, our titled and wealthy aristocracy were 'properly educated,' we should perceive its effects in a diminution of their luxury and extravagance; in their abhorrence of war, duelling, seduction, and adultery; in their renunciation of gambling, demoralizing sports, and brutal pastimes; in their giving up the dishonourable practices of bribery and political corruption.... [Chartism, 57; see also 5].
The solution that Lovett and Collins proposed was an ambitious one, involving nothing less than a nationwide educational "reboot," one that promised, over time, to rehabiliate the working class and prepare it to participate in politics. "...For if the rising generation can be properly educated, in a few years they will give such a healthy tone to society, and such an improving spirit to governments, that old prejudices, vices, and corruptions, must speedily give way before them." [Chartism, 64] To this end, Lovett and Collins proposed the creation of a new "national association" specifically tasked with the "political and social improvement of the people." [Ibid., 24]
The most visionary of this new association's goals was the third:
To erect Public Halls or schools for the people throughout the kingdom, upon the most approved principles, and in such districts as may be necessary. Such halls to be used during the day as infant, preparatory, and high schools, in which the children shall be educated on the most approved plans the association can devise; embracing physical, mental, moral, and political instruction;--and used of an evening for public lectures, on physical, moral, and political science; for readings, discussions, musical entertainments, dancing, and such other healthful and rational recreations as may serve to instruct and cheer the industrious classes after their hours of toil, and prevent the formation of vicious and intoxicating habits. Such halls to have two commodious playgrounds, and where practicable, a pleasure garden, attached to each; apartments for the teachers, rooms for hot and cold baths, for a small museum, a laboratory and general workshop, where the children may be taught experiments in science, as well as the first principles of the most useful trades. [Ibid., 25]
It is significant that these Public Halls, clearly informed by Owenist principles, were to serve as schools for children during the day and community centers for adults after work. In either case, the goal was the same: to offer a salubrious environment for the cultivation of future citizens. For Lovett and Collins, that meant attending not only to the intellectual but the moral education of the working class.A man's intellectual faculties may be highly cultivated, and yet he may be a very worthless and immoral member of society, for want of that moral education necessary to control his animal feelings, and to direct his intellect to the performance of his social and political duties. Another man may have his moral faculties disciplined to perform continuous acts of kindness and benevolence, and may possess the strongest feelings of awe and veneration; and yet, for the want of intellectual cultivation, may have his goodness of disposition daily imposed upon by knaves and impostors, and his credulity diverted to superstition and fanaticism. The animal faculties being in common with the brute creation, he who is without intellect to guide and morality to direct them, will differ little from the brutes in the gratification of them. [Ibid., 66]
Having described the workers as animals, Lovett and Collins took the comparison a step further, suggesting that the "brutishness" of the industrial laborer actually exceeded that of a beast in a state of nature because the formercannot even enjoy the same animal happiness in eating, drinking, and sleeping as the brute; for the demands society require from him in return for these enjoyments give him anxieties, cares, and toil, which the brute does not experience. The instinct, too, which nature has bestowed on the lower animals to guide their appetites, seems to give them superior advantages over a man destitute of knowledge. For, ignorant of his own nature, and needing the control of reason, he is continually marring his own happiness by his follies or his vices. Wanting moral perceptions, the temptations that surround him frequently seduce him to evil, and the penalties society inflict on him punish him without reclamation. Ignorant of the phenomena of nature, he becomes credulous, superstitious, and bigoted--an easy prey to the cunning and deceitful; and, bewildered by the phantoms of his own ignorant imaginings, he is miserable while living, and afraid of dying. [Ibid., 68]
As Lovett and Collins saw it, this corruption of the worker, robbing him even of his animal instincts, had pernicious consequences for his family and for society as a whole.If he is the father of a family, and desirous of promoting the happiness of his children by rendering them intelligent, moral, and useful, he cannot with all his anxiety guard them from the contaminating effects of social vice: the ears of his children are assailed by brutal and disgusting language in the midst of his dwelling, their eyes meet with corruption and evil in every street, and seductions and temptations await them at every corner. Should their youthful years be happily preserved from those influences, they are no sooner ushered into society, than they are beset with all its selfish, lying, defrauding, and mind-debasing vices; and they must be strong indeed in mind and steadfast in morality, to withstand these tests without pollution; - and many a fond parent who has reared up his children with tender solicitude, whose most cherished hopes have been centred in their welfare, has seen them all gradually engulphed in the vices and corruptions of social life. [Ibid., 70]
Lovett and Collins seem to have designed their Public Hall--the central feature of their new "national association for the political and social improvement of the people"--with an eye to the functions traditionally associated with three other British institutions of the time: the school, the pub, and the church. When cleansed of their "impurities," the three had important things to contribute to the formation of social and political consciousness of a citizen.The generality of people are so constituted as to seek, at times, cheerful society and lively enjoyments; and it should be the great object of all reformers to prepare legitimate means for the gratification of these feelings, without allowing them to be exposed to vicious associations. Many of those who frequent public-houses in their hours of relaxation, are not so much induced by the love of drink, as to spend their hours in cheerful society; and if places were provided (unassociated with the means of intoxication) where they could spend a pleasant and agreeable evening, we should have little cause for lamenting the prevalence of intemperance and its demoralizing consequences. [Ibid., 53; see also 37]
In their defense of dancing as a form of agreeable exercise, Lovett and Collins thought it unfair to hold the usual, pub-inspired "objections"--related to "badly ventilated rooms, late hours, bad characters, or improper conduct"-- against an otherwise healthy activity." [Chartism, 53] In a footnote to this paragraph, the authors add: "Those who could not join in the dance might be amused with the games of chess and drafts, which are both rational and instructive; but cards, dice, and all kinds of gambling, should be scrupulously excluded."As the primary object of the association is to unite the members in one bond of brotherhood, the more effectually to secure their political and social welfare, to train up their children to appreciate the excellence of knowledge and virtue, the spirit of universal benevolence and mutual forbearance ought to prevail among them regarding all religious creeds and doctrines. And as the attempt to introduce any particular forms of religion would tend to create dissensions among them, and lead all those whose own views had not been adopted to be jealous and distrustful of those of others, the aim of the general board should be carefully to exclude from their system of education all such questions of dispute. That great precept of "love one another" should be the basis of their educational discipline; and if the moral and intellectual virtues should be developed in the minds of the children, their parents would perceive that more genuine Christian charity would result, than if their children were drilled to the constant reading of what they could scarcely comprehend, or in repeating precepts by rote without their importance being exemplified by practice. Surely, when abundant time can be found for imparting religious instruction beyond that dedicated to the school, and when so many religious instructors, of all denominations, are most willing to impart their peculiar opinions, it would seem to be more in accordance with the precepts of Christ, mutually to unite in morally educating our children to dwell in peace and union, which are the great essentials of religion, than by our selfish desires and sectarian jealousies suffer ignorance, vice, and disunion to prevail. [Ibid., 40-41]
Beyond promoting Christian charity, peace, and unity, the Public Hall, in its effort to rehabilitate rather than punish the poor, would drastically reduce the need for the more notorious parish services of the day. "Can it any longer be doubted that ignorance and poverty, springing from careless, extravagant, and vicious rulers, originate the numerous and increasing demands for our gaols, bridewells, penitentiaries, treadmills, and other useless means of punishment, together with our workhouses, asylums, and infirmaries--institutions which the want of proper education and encouragement to industry and frugality mainly occasion?" [Ibid., 5-6; a bridewell was a type of house of correction used to punish and reform petty offenders through hard labor. The penal treadmill was a brutal device that forced inmates to step continuously on steps mounted around a massive rotating cylinder]. The closest Lovett and Collins come to proposing a parish service of their own was their proposal to establish "agricultural and industrial schools" for the purpose of "educating, supporting, and instructing in some useful trade or occupation the orphan children of the association." [Chartism, 25, 33]. In their system, even the vicar was to be repurposed, to serve as more of a "missionary," whose responsibility it would be "...to visit the different districts of the kingdom, for the purposes of explaining the views of the association, for promoting its efficient organization, for lecturing on its different objects, for visiting the different schools when erected, and otherwise seeing that the intentions of the general body are carried into effect in the several localities, according to the instructions they may receive from the general board."[Chartism, p. 26; see also 31, 54] Shall Christian eloquence be employed against every species of slavery, but such as is found in the fields, the factories, and workshops of Britain? Will those who esteem all mankind as "brethren, and all the nations of the earth as one great family"--whose golden rules of Christian duty are based on principles of brotherly love, equality, and justice, permit these glorious principles to be outraged by men of wealth and power, merely because they profess to tolerate the teaching of principles they once persecuted, and still scorn to practise? Will the followers of him who ever denounced extortion and injustice, and proclaimed that the poor and oppressed were the especial objects of his mission, remain silent spectators of oppression and injustice? Will the teachers and preachers of his inspired precepts be so far forgetful of their duty, as to side with the exclusive and oppressive few...? [Ibid., 2]
One can only imagine how George Barrs, who died right about the time that Chartism was published, would have responded to this biblically-grounded critique of his own biblically-reinforced Conservative agenda....how labour is required for the cultivation of the earth, in order to provide us with food, raiment, and habitation, as well as to convert its productions into articles for our necessity and comfort; and also that our bodies are so organized, that the exercise of moderate labour improves our health;--and, therefore, seeing that labour is necessary, and that all are benefitted by it, all ought to labour and be industrious, according to their abilities; and that all-those who, under any pretence, evade their fair share, act unjustly and dishonestly towards their brethren, by imposing on them such additional burthens of labour as to injure their health and diminish their happiness. While they should be taught to value and respect the acquisitions of honest industry, they should be made to perceive the injustice of ill-acquired possessions, and to despise every description of luxury, extravagance, and dissipation, which corrupts society, and diminishes the general amount of human enjoyment. [Chartism, 89-90]
The "dignity of work" theme was consistent with the Chartist disdain for the sterility and corruption associated with inherited, landed wealth; precisely the kind of wealth that the Haden family--and Barrs, by virtue of his marriage--enjoyed.In the Preparatory School the same habits of regularity and cleanliness should be enforced [as in the Infant School]. They should, as best fitting to their physical development, have sufficient time for healthful exercise and recreation. They should be carefully taught the laws of their organization, and the evils of infringing them; as forming the most important lessons to inculcate temperance in eating and drinking, and all their physical enjoyments. They should be equally taught the evils that are certain to arise to themselves and society from the infringement of the moral laws of their nature. It should be the duty of their teachers familiarly to acquaint them with the social and political relations that exist between them and their fellow-beings. They should be taught by the most simple explanations and experiments to perceive and discover the use, property and relationship of every object within their own locality, and learn to express in writing, and in correct language, the ideas they have received. The use and principles of arithmetic should be taught them by the most simple methods. They should be taught to understand the principles and practice of music, a gratification and a solace even in the hut of poverty. Their imagination should be sedulously cultivated, by directing their attention to everything lovely, grand, or stupendous, around them; as affording a wholesome stimulus to greatness of mind, and a powerful antidote against the grovelling vices so prevalent in society. In fact, the end and object of their teachers should be the equal and judicious development of all their faculties, and not the mere cultivation of the intellect. [Ibid., 39]
Note how virtually every sentence refers directly or indirectly to deficiencies that the authors associate with the working class; specifically, "regularity" (defined then as consistent attendance and strict adherence to a uniform schedule), cleanliness, temperance (specifically in eating and drinking), "healthful exercise and recreation," morality, "understanding of social and political relations," literacy, appropriate forms of self-expression, imagination, and finally exposure to culture in general ("as affording... a powerful antidote against the grovelling vices so prevalent in society.") and to music in particular ("a solace even in the hut of poverty")....a proper quantity of nutritious food, pure air, warm clothing, and sufficient exercise, are necessary to the proper developement or growth of a child; and if these essentials are denied him in infancy, he will be stunted in growth, and debilitated bodily and mentally; nor can any subsequent treatment effectually remedy the evil. Nay, not only in infancy, but at every period of our existence, are these conditions necessary to health and strength. We might here adduce a great number of facts, to prove the great physical injury sustained by infants and adults among the poorer classes from bad or scanty food, impure atmospheres, over exertion, and the evils attendant on ignorance and poverty.... The late Mr. Sadler has shown that as many persons die in manufacturing districts before their twentieth year, as in agricultural districts before their fortieth. These alarming facts should awaken the attention of the working classes in particular, and should lead them to investigate the more immediate cause of this lamentable sacrifice of life, and to devise some means by which the evil may be remedied. [Chartism, 65]; Michael Thomas Sadler (d. 1835) was the author of the so-called "Sadler Report of 1832," officially titled the Report of the Select Committee on Factory Children's Labour]
Such concerns about health and the environment were to be worked into the curricula of the Public Hall from the very beginning. Every student in the Infant School "should be made to understand, by the most simple explanations, why pure air is necessary to health, and how all kinds of animals linger and perish if they are deprived of it." [Chartism, 80] It is noteworthy that Barrs had very little to say on this subject despite the fac that he suffered his whole career from asthma, which ultimately took his life and the those of many other Rowley residents.The play-grounds shall be fenced round, and a border round each of them shall be tastefully laid out with plants, flowers, and such fruit and other trees as may be suited to the locality. There shall also be such gymnastic arrangements made, as may be considered necessary for the exercise of the children.... Whenever locality and circumstances will permit, a piece of ground shall be attached to the hall, for the purpose of teaching the children a knowledge of horticulture and gardening, as well as for the pleasure and amusement of the members of the association. [Chartism, 38; 93]
This is clearly not a playground designed for the children of rural England, or for children of those urban dwellers with the means to expose their children to country life on a regular basis.Nor must their imaginative powers be neglected; to develop which, their attention should be directed to the various points of beauty, grandeur, and sublimity which are seen in the glowing landscape, the flowing stream, the storm, the sunshine, and the fragile flower; and, above all, the radiant glory of a star-light night. Such lessons will teach them to soar beyond the grovelling pursuits of vice and sordid meanness. [Chartism, 90]
Lovett and Collins also felt obliged to address institutionally problems related to general cleanliness, which would have been endemic to the members of the industrial working class at the time. "As a means for cleanliness and health" at the Infant Schools "door-mats should be placed at each entrance, and cleanly habits in every particular must be scrupulously insisted upon." [Chartism, pp. 78-79] The same campaign against filthiness actually led the authors to propose "hot and cold baths" for every Public Hall.The difficulties our labouring population meet with in large towns and inland districts, in getting access to convenient bathing-places, are productive of more serious consequences than many persons imagine. We are told by medical men that the perspiration of the body, which is continually going on, causes a species of incrustation on the skin, which materially interferes with its functions, which, if not removed by frequent ablutions, occasions a weakness of body and depression of mind; and, further, that the evil is greatly increased when persons have to work at dusty employments and in unhealthy atmospheres.[Chartism, 53-54]
Cleanliness as an educational goal lived side-by-side in the minds of Lovett and Collins with punctuality. "Some little trouble," they feared, "will be necessary at first to enforce those two essentials, cleanliness and punctuality of attendance. But the effort would be worth it, especially because, "by judicious management, in a short time the public opinion of the school will extend to the homes of the children, and serve to awaken inattentive parents to their duties. [Chartism, pp. 78-79] In other words, the children themselves would pass these key attributes on to their parents.Mr. Samuel Cook was indicted for attending and assisting at a "riotous" meeting. Several witnesses disposed of his so-called "seditious" language in which he advocated doing without the House of Lords King or Queen offences of course, not to be overlooked. He had sent a bellman round the town to announce a Chartist meeting with instructions to end his speech with "God Save the People" instead of "God Save the Queen." The jury found him guilty and sentenced him to six months' imprisonment.[quoted by George Barnsby, Chartism in the Black Country (Wolverhampton, 1980), 4]
In January 1841, the Dudley National Charter Association was formed to help prepare the second Chartist petition to Parliament, and Cook served as its treasurer. The overaching goal of the Association was to collect signatures and elect delegates for a new Chartist Convention in London, scheduled for April 1842. This time Black Country signatures, largely absent from the 1839 petition, were well represented. Overall this second drive secured 3,317,702 signatures from all across Britain. Nevertheless, on May 2, 1842, Parliament again rejected the petition. The reaction to this setback proved to be more volatile, given the dire economic conditions that spring.
Even before Parliament rejected the second petition in May, the nailers of the Black Country were on the move. The situation in Bromsgrove and Stourbridge had grown so dire that "at the Petty Sessions, held on Tuesday [April 12] at the former place, the magistrates urged the surveyor to employ as many of the nailers upon the roads as he possibly could, remarking that they could not be permitted to starve, and that it was not relief for one day that was required, but everyday till the trade turned, though when that may be we do not know." [Worcester Chronicle, 16 April, 1842; quoted in Willetts, The Black Country Nail Trade, p. 6]. But this recommendation to employ the unemployed nailers for road work was too little and too late, given the gravity of the economic crisis. Thirteen days later, on Monday, April 25, 1842 a massive nailers' march made its way through Rowley en route to Dudley. The Saturday, April 30, 1842 edition of The Leeds Mercury had this to say.
The nailers in the district of Dudley turned out against a very large reduction of their wages, and on Monday morning, about five thousand of them marched in a body from Netherton to a place called Rowley Regis, where they attacked the house of Mr. Lewis, nail master, and afterwards captured that gentleman and led him off to Dudley, in the midst of the mob, a distance of about three miles. Another party attacked the warehouses belonging to Mr. Jones and another manufacturer, but without doing any serious damage. Having arrived at Dudley, they dragged Mr. Cox, another [nail] master, out of his house, and were marching him and Mr. Lewis, and a third employer, through the streets, when an attack was made upon them by the police, and Mr. Lewis [was] rescued and taken into the Dudley Arms Hotel. About two o'clock the mob proceeded to Mr. Badger's house, in Wolverhampton street, to make him agree to allow his workmen to go on at the old price. Mr. Badger met them in the street and told them that he could not consent to their wish, that his warehouse was then full of made goods, and that he could not continue adding to his stock, but that, sooner than they should be without any work, he would meet them half-way, and reduce only 2s.6d. in the place of 5s, the proposed reduction. This the leaders of the men refused to accede to, and Mr. Badger then said he for one should not require them to reduce the price, but he could assure them that as he had not a market for the product of their labour, he could not, nor would, continue making goods. [The Leeds Mercury, April 30, 1842, p. 8; for more on the timing of the nailmasters decision, see: Ball, "Hand-made Nail Trade," p. 113]
Both the number and the militancy of the marchers is impressive, a testimony to the frustration that enveloped the nail-making districts in the area. Compelling three nailmasters to accompany them to Dudley, they tried to pressure a fourth one named Thomas Badger (1782-1856), who also happened to be one of Dudley's JPs. His influence in and around the town was unparalleled, being not only a nailmaster, but a coal and ironmaster, a glassmaker, and the chairman of the Dudley and West Bromwich Bank. [Willetts, Blackcountry Nailer's Riots, p. 3]. According to the Leeds article, Badger refused to restore nailer wages to their earlier level on purely market grounds: at that time there were simply too few buyers for the nails that already filled the warehouses. His options were few, if he was intent on protecting his bottom line. He could either reduce the amount he paid for new nails or simply refuse to buy any new nails until his supplies needed to be replenished.This morning a body, consisting of several thousands of nailers from the surrounding country, came into this town [Dudley], for the purpose, as they stated, of remonstrating with the nail masters against the recent reduction in their wages, amounting to not less than 20 per cent. The poor creatures appeared in a most wretched and famishing condition, many of them carrying in their countenances undeniable attestation to their declaration, that they had not eaten a morsel of food for the last two days. Up to the time of the reduction the most expert men of the body could with difficulty earn four and sixpence a week each. But the proposed diminution, should it take place--an event most probable, from the condition of the masters themselves--will lead to suffering hitherto unparalleled in this district.[The Sun (27 April 1842)]
Compared to the Leeds article, the Sun's account of the negotiations between the two parties is less gentle on the nailmasters, who, it seemed, were acting in bad faith.The magistrates met for the purpose of consultation, after which a proposal was made to the hungry multitude to select twelve of their body to confer with their employers on the subject of complaint. It is much to be lamented that from some cause, not yet made public, this conference did not take place, as the people readily submitted to the proposition regarding it, and waited with exemplary patience the result. Meanwhile, a detachment of the 6th Dragoons arrived from Birmingham, and proceded at once, with drawn swords to disperse the people--a task they found no difficulty in accomplishing. Large numbers of the nailers are still in the neighbourhood, and as they suspect that [the] proposal for the conference was only a trick to obtain time to send for the troops, they are highly indignant...[The Sun (27 April 1842)]
The call for reinforcements from Birmingham was designed not only to protect the interests of the nailmasters, but to keep the hungry nailers from ravaging local businesses and fields in their search for food.... the inhabitants of the town are in a state of great alarm, lest the multitude may return when the military are removed, and under the influence of irritated feelings, proceed to violence! The Magistrates deserve all credit for their prompt attention to the circumstances, but it is thought by many that matters would have ended better, had argument and expostulation, with, if possible, a promise of some concession, been employed, before the troops proceeded to the business of dispersion. Though the town was greatly excited, the shops being closed, and business entirely suspended, yet the assembled multitude showed no disposition to riot....[The Sun (27 April 1842)]
Dudley's vicar--whom we know to have been Rev. William Henry Cartwright--also had a roll in this confrontation, and, like the nailmasters, seems to have under-delivered, at least as far as the Sun correspondent was concerned. He offered "an address suited to the occasion, expressive of sympathy with the people under their heavy sufferings." But, the reporter was quick to point out that his speech might have done more to "allay irritated feelings and to produce tranquillity" had the vicar not arrived "on horseback amongt the military." [The Sun (27 April 1842)]On the causes of this amount of pauperism it is not our intention to remark, nor have we time to notice the various circumstances which operate to prevent a settlement of the dispute between the masters and men; but it is an appalling fact that, up to the present time, 1306 applications for relief have been taken, and this in the first week of a cessation from labour of one trade.
In other words, based on the severity of the economic crisis, the reporter fully expected other industries to be hot with strikes, which would only increase an already unmanageable amount of need. He then continues, by addressing the possibility that the promise of free bread was a likely seed bed for fraud.No doubt many of the applicants have imposed on the Guardians, and obtained relief by fraudulent representations. Three or four have already been discovered, and will probably be made examples of to deter others from the like practices. But suppose, for the sake of argument, we strike off from the gross number three hundred and six, certainly a liberal allowance, there yet remain a thousand cases.
More compelling than the math was what the reporter was the behavior of the nailers, behavior that left no doubt that they were absolutely desperate.It will not be doubted by any person who saw these applicants remain on the spot without food the whole of one day to get their applications taken, and to its end in the hope of obtaining relief, and hundreds of them the whole of another [day] before they could obtain it, that they were absolutely in want of food, and had not the means of obtaining it; and the more so when they knew the utmost extent of relief afforded was only a loaf to each member of a family, we say it cannot be doubted that these persons and the families they represented, are in a state of destitution bordering on starvation.
Even the member of the Board of Guardians were shocked at what they were seeing.And that such was the opinion of the members of the Board who sat on Sunday, is proved by the fact that they ordered a number of loaves to be cut up about mid-day and distributed among them, and which were devoured with an avidity only equalled by a pack of hungry fox-hounds. Add to this the circumstance that it was found necessary to order immediate relief to the extent of 1291 loaves, that they were craved by men with tears starting from their eyes, declaring that themselves and families had not tasted bread for one and two days, and in several cases a longer period, and it will not be denied that these people are in a condition the most appalling—-a condition which it is utterly beyond the means of private charity (and it has been liberally extended to alleviate) or of parochial aid to relieve.
The reporter ended with his own long-term diagnosis of the problem.There is no relief but employment, and this only at such wages as will enable them to obtain the necessaries of life, and of holding the station of independent labourers in society--a station which the law requires them to hold, while at the same time a monopolizing oligarchy of bread taxers denies them the means of doing so, by circumscribing the field over which the produce of their labour might be diffused, and from which their means of support might be obtained.
[Worcestershire Chronicle 4 May 1842] What was needed, in other words, were jobs on the one hand and affordable bread on the other. The economy made the former unlikely, and the British Corn Laws of 1815, designed to protect British farm profits by applying tariffs to foreign grain imports, were still in effect. Only in 1846, amidst the famine in Ireland, were the Corn Laws repealed.On the morning of the 25th April, to the surprise of the whole district, and also unexpected by the masters, a meeting of fifteen to twenty thousand men took place. They went to several warehouses, taking out by force the principals, and marching them on foot a distance of three miles, to the town of Dudley; on arriving at Dudley they endeavoured to get the Dudley masters into their hands, but did not succeed for some hours. Those masters in their hands were at their mercy; at length the military arrived from Birmingham, the Riot Act was read, the masters released, and the mob driven out of the town.[Ball, "Hand-made Nail Trade," 113]
According to Ball, fifteen nailmasters met again on April 28, on which occasion they officially "withdrew the list of wages made on the 19th," and adopted the list from 1838, though "subject to ten per cent discount." They also "pledged themselves to use every effort to put down the truck system" and to combat the practice whereby nailers were blacklisted for whistleblowing or for refusing to "take their wages in truck" .[Timmins, Birmingham, 113]. Addressing the abuses of the truck system must have been, at least ostensibly, an easier fix than increasing nailer wages.The nail workmen in Dudley at this time were in a very excited and violent state, many masters were much afraid for the safety of their property and even of themselves. It is a fact worthy of notice that the men grossly illtreated some of the best "money" paying masters in the trade; for this treatment the nail workmen paid a heavy penalty; the trade was left to take its course, no meeting of masters to regulate wages took place for some time, and gradually reductions in wages were made, during two years, from twenty to thirty per cent. [Ball, "Hand-made Nail Trade," 113]
There is no way of knowing how involved Benjamin Adams or his son Thomas Adams (Sr.) were in these dramatic events. Both were in the prime of their careers at that time, Benjamin being about 43 and Thomas, 22. It is hard to imagine them standing on the sidelines, especially when the protesters passed through Rowley en route to Dudley. The Adamses, as nailers, were deeply affected by the economic down turn of the late 1830s and '40s. Family finances had already suffered when the nailmasters met in 1837 and again in 1838, and they would suffer more in 1842. After Benjamin's death in 1861 spared him from experiencing the "long strike" of 1863 as well as the ten-week strike of 1869, but his wife and children had to endure it. [Hall, Cramped and Sooty, p. 10.] The hand-wrought nail trade in its death throes ended up being the target of so many strikes in the later nineteenth century that "it has become a household word to say, 'What? another nailors' strike." [Ball, "Hand-made Nail Trade," 114]. Repeated collective action on the part the nailers not only turned off the "best money paying" nailmasters, but dampened investment in the industry altogether. "To a very considerable extent, [capital] has been frightened out of the trade by violence." [Good Works, "The Hand-Nailer" (April 1, 1870), p. 246]. The threat of violence against "scab" nailers who dared to work during a strike, coupled with the fear of vandalism directed against their nailshops, could only whittle away at worker support as well (see adjacent image). On Monday morning [July 25] part of the miners in the neighbourhood of Walsall proceeded to stop the work at the limestone and coalpits in the vicinity, compelling the workmen to join them in their progress, or be subject to ill usage, so that in the course of the day all was at a stand. Apprehensions being entertained that on the following day some disturbances might take place in the town, the Walsall Troop of Staffordshire Yeomanry attended Captain Forster to receive orders, as a precautionary measure, at six o'clock in the morning. The Earl of Dartmouth arrived on Tuesday morning [July 26], and, with the concurrence of C.S Forster, Esq. and other magistrates, dispatched a messenger to Birmingham for military aid: accordingly a troop of the 3d Dragoon Guards reached Walsall at three o'clock in the afternoon. The noble Earl has been on the spot every day since, and on Wednesday night [July 27] did not depart for Sandwell till near twelve o'clock. The colliers came in great numbers on Tuesday morning [July 26], but confined themselves to the solicitation, or rather demand from shopkeepers and others for money and food; many women have solicited alms, representing themselves as colliers' wives, but in some instances this has proved an imposition. The men again congregated on Wednesday and Thursday [July 27-28], but no breach of the peace occurred in the town. The Yeomanry and Dragoons have been on the alert, and ready to act on the shortest notice. A great aumber of colliers also perambulated Wolverhampton on Tuesday morning [July 26]; and in the course of Wednesday and Thursday bodies of the unemployed colliers visited several pits near to Bilston and Prince's End, and insisting on the miners who were at work quitting their employment; and in one or two instances ducked in the reservoir some of the men who wished to continue at their labour. In Bilston numbers of the colliers who are not at work visited three or four huckster's shops, and bread to the amount of four or five shillings' worth has been taken. On Thursday [July 28] one man, who is well known to the constables, was taken into custody, having in his possession the handle of a pick, which was heavily loaded with lead. He was conveyed to Wolverhampton, and in default of sureties committed to Stafford gaol for six months. On Thursday afternoon [July 28] the Dragoons marched from Walsall to Wednesbury, where they are now stationed, that town being considered the more central point. On the removal of the Dragoons the troop of Yeomanry were called upon to hold themselves in readiness. The colliers congregated outside the town on Friday morning [July 29], conversing among themselves, but without offering any molestation to passengers; indeed, no disposition to violence has yet been manifested, except compelling workmen to leave their employment and join the discontented parties. The Yeomanry were called out on Friday merely to receive orders. [Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser, Wed., 3 August 1842]
Over all, the reporter seemed more intent on assuring his readers that the situation was under control than he was on recounting the circumstances of the miners and their work-stopping tactics. As prepared as the troops were for violence, they found little beyond what appear to have been effective threats aimed at strike breakers. The poverty of the miners shines through this account despite the suggestions of fraud and the thin line he draws between seeking much-needed alms and stealing from local businesses.In the course of the same morning John Underwood, a miner, was convicted under the combination act of assaulting and intimidating, and preventing from his work, a miner employed at the Bentley Pits. The defendant, with about a hundred others, went to the works and insisted on their stopping. The men were forced to come up out of the pits, and the complainant was seized and held over a pit's mouth, the party, at the same time, threatening to drop him down. The prisoner was committed to hard labour for one calendar month. The issuing of a caution to persons begging or using threats to obtain relief was also determined upon.--The caution also earnestly advises the distressed colliers "not to listen to persons who, under pretense of giving friendly advice, are endeavouring to increase the difficulties arising to both master and men from the present state of trade." The Wolverhampton troop of Staffordshire Yeomanry, under the command of Lieutenant Crane, accompanied by Cornet Briscoe, marched into Walsall on Monday, to remain till further orders, the Walsall troop having been removed to Wednesbury. Public tranquillity at Walsall remains undisturbed: the market yesterday appeared well supplied, and fully attended. Parties of colliers, and woman and children, were about most of the day soliciting alms. [Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser, Wed., 3 August 1842]
The August 3 edition of the Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser also describes how the Chartists tried to insert themselves on behalf of the miners.Colliers Meeting ay West Bromwich.—This meeting took place on Monday last [July 25]: the number computed to be present was about 8,000 or 10,000. A place called Pit Piece was first selected; but an adjournment to Spon Lane was rendered necessary in consequence of the increasing numbers. The multitude were addressed by several Chartists, and other persons, the tenor of whose speeches (particularly to the colliers) was that they should keep the peace, and not return to work unless the masters gave them the compensation of 4s. per day; if this was refused, that they (the colliers) should separate themselves into bands of from 20 to 100, and go round the country with boxes soliciting alms.
A week later, the Wednesday, August 10 issue of the same paper offered additional insights into the Chartist role and, interesting enough, the suspicions of the miners.The meeting at West Bromwich on Monday (noticed in our last [edition]) was followed by one in this town on Wednesday [August 3] morning. It was held in a vacant space in Stafford street, and was attended by three or four thousand persons, who were addressed by several Chartists--(among them a black man)--urging them to maintain the struggle, but to do nothing violating the peace. The meeting, like its predecessor at West Bromwich, was uncommonly flat—-scarcely a cheer was raised—-the colliers appearing almost as impenetrable as a lump of coal to the eloqunce addressed to them. It is, in fact, evident notwithstanding the zeal of the Chartists, and their cunning in keeping their political principles in the background, that the colliers do not sympathise with them: the colliers, happily, know little of them, and appear to exhibit something like a feeling of surprise that men whom they do not know should take a lead in their disputes and summon them to attend public meetings.
This hesitation on the part of the miners to join forces with the Chartists is consistent with what we noted above with regard to Chartism: that although Lovett and Collins had the best interests of the working class in mind when they laid out their proposal for social reforn, it was a proposal crafted at a considerable distance from the working-class experience.Every precaution had been taken in case of disturbance, and the whole of the magistrates of the district were in attendance during the morning at the Public-office. Colonel Monckton arrived early in the morning, and remained till the afternoon. A large body of special constables was ready to act, and the two companies of the 12th foot, and the Himley troop of yeomanry, were also prepared to preserve the peace should any disturbance unfortunately occur. The meeting, however, broke up quietly between ten and eleven o'clock in the morning, and left no other sign of its occurrence than that of small companies of colliers going about the town begging during the day. On Thursday morning a rumour prevailed in the town that the colliers were cutting pit ropes and breaking ma-chinery, whimseys, &c. at pits near the Fighting Cocks. This, however, proved to be unfounded, the facts being that about 300 or 400 colliers visited an open work in the Park Field colliery, where about fourteen or fifteen men were at work, and insisted, with violent threats, on their discontinuing their labour. The men, who were completely intimidated, ran off, and escaped from the turn-outs, with the exception of two, whom the mob let off, upon their promise that they would not return to their work, threatening them, at the same time, that if they did, they (the mob) would return and murder then. Mr. Underhill, the managing partner of the works, fortunately, was on the premises, and happening to have a horse ready saddled, he rode among the mob, followed by several of the bailiffs, clerks, and others, employed at the colliery, and by this energetic conduct was enabled to identify several of the persons concerned in the outrage. Warrants being obtained, eight of the party were apprehended in the course of the day and during the night, and on Friday they were examined before the magistrates, when their participation in the offence was clearly proved, and Thomas Lewis, who appeared to be a leader, was sentenced to two months' imprisonment, with hard labour; and William Chatterton, Samuel Rose, James Crisp, George Lewis, George Young, Charles Fowke, and Charles Crisp, were all committed for one month, likewise with hard labour. Chatterton, it is stated is a Chartist, and a tailor in full work at Bilston, and consequently without the slightest excuse for going in the disturbance. Early in the morning a troop of the 3d Dragoons arrived, and continue in the town. In consequence of the unprotected state of the villages and farm houses in the neighbourhood, to which the colliers had in great numbers resorted, using threats when relief was not given, S. S. Briscoe, Esq. waited on the Earl of Dartmouth, the Vice-Lieutenant of the county, at six o'clock on Thursday morning, for the purpose of obtaining his lordship's sanction to the appointment of special constables, for the protection of the agricultural population and persons in lone farm houses in rural districts, when his lordship mentioned that the measure had been suggested in a letter from Sir James Graham, and promptly gave his sanction to it. In the course of the same morning Mr. Briscoe and Dr. Dehane met at the New Inn, Wombourn, when between forty and fifty persons were sworn in as special constables for Penn, Wombourn, Trysull, Bobbington, and Swindon, among whom were several gentlemen of the neighbourhood, who voluntarily offered their services. Mr. Briscoe and Dr. Dehane then proceeded to the Cross Inn, Kingswinford, where they were waited upon by Mr. Boydell, manager of the Oak Farm ironworks, who stated that the company employed about 600 puddlers, &c. and 250 pitmen, for all of whom they had full employment, at wages which had not been objected to by their own men; but in consequence of the hostile feeling evinced they were unwilling or unable to go to work. In consequence of this information Mr. Boydell was requested to send fifty or sixty of his steadiest men to be sworn in as special constables, which he did, and they were sworn in the same afternoon, assured that they would receive every protection in the execution of their duty from the Himley troop of Yeomanry, which had received orders to be in constant readiness. In addition, between forty and fifty more special constables were sworn in for the township of Kingswinford, and the neighbouring places. Handbills similar to those issued in Wolverhampton were directed to be posted up, and every other precaution taken which the undersettled state of the neighbourhood suggested. On Saturday morning, between fire and six o'elock, a riotous mob made their appearance at the Haden Hill colliery, worked by Messrs. Barrs and Best, in the parish of Rowley Regis: they were several hundreds in number, and the leading men were arranged in nine or ten rows, five or six in a row, and armed with thick sticks, hedge stakes, and pike helves, which they flourished about, demanding that the works should be stopped. Mr. A. H. Barrs, who--(some intimation of their coming having been received)-—stood at the entrance of the colliery, desired them to keep the peace, and not to interfere with their men or property: the mob immediately surrounded him, and appeared bent upon violence, flourishing their cudgels over his head and swearing they would knock his brains out, when he took a pistol from his pocket and threatened to shoot the first man who struck him. In the meantime the special constables came to his assistance, and the mob went off to the Cotsall pits, where again they were met by a body of special constables: they remained there about a quarter of an hour, and then went into another field, all along insisting that the works should be stopped. Here their progress was arrested by the arrival of Captain Bennitt and Lieutenant Edward Dixon, with a division of the Dudley troop of Woreestershire Yeomanry Cavalry, who, after capturing ten prisoners, dispersed the multitude. The prisoners were taken before the magistrates at Dudley, when Thomas Millership, William Morris, William Holyoake, William Francis, William Perry, and James Harley were committed for trial at the ensning Staffordshire sessions; the other fonr, whose conduct had not been violent, being discharged on proimising future good behaviour. The prisoners were sent off to Stafford, under an escort of the 3d Dragoons, the same eveuing, and passed through this town shortly after eight o'elock. Richard Davies, a forgeman at Spring Vale, was com-mitted, on Monday, for one month to hard labour, by H. Hill, Esq. and J. Dehane, Esq. for partieipating in a disturbance at the Park Field colliery on Thursday. On Tuesday (yesterday) James Morgan and William Morgan were committed by Henry Hill, Esg. and G. Holyoke, Esq. to the house of correction for one month, and William Lowe for fourteen days, for being with and assisting the mob which prevented the men from working at the Park Field works on Thursday last. An expectation prevails that the strike will not last abore a week or two at the utmost; many of the men baring expressed a desire to their masters to resume their work, intimating that they bare not yet done so solely because of the violence to which they expected to be exposed. [Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser, Wed., 10 August 1842]
In all likelhood, Mr. A. H. Barrs, who took a pistol from his pocket and threatened to shoot the miners, was of of the sons of our own George Barrs!
The third of the grand narratives that implicated the nailers, particularly in the late nineteenth century, was one of nostalgia for a profession--indeed a culture--that was on life support. The Birmingham-based architect John Cotton (1844-1934) waxed nostalgic in 1892 about the nail shops that he recalled as a boy in Bromsgrove forty years before. His creative point of departure was his the accidental discovery of a discarded nail.
ONLY an inch of old iron, headed and pointed, a NAIL!
Battered and bent and discarded; Shall I detail
The incidents pictured before me, as, roughened with rust,
By the roadway my roving eye noticed it, laid in the dust?
A product of labour and pains, a relic long wrought,
A sign of necessity conquered by man's scheming thought,
Let it not be despised though betrod 'neath the traveller's feet,
For service and usefulness merit appreciance meet.
Caught up from the path where it perished, alongside the ditch,
It pictures me stirring events, with rare interest rich.
Pricking Fancy it wakens remembrance and brings back the past,
Linking thought like a magnet to memories vanishing fast.
My childhood again is recalled, and a Mid-England town,—
Red houses beside the long street, with tiled roofs mossy-brown.
In mother-arms held at the window, I watch, o'er the way,
A turbaned Turk's head on an inn sign, fierce-whiskered and grey,
And back in the distance tall poplars that restlessly sway.
I hear, with the song that she sings me in lullaby tones,
The noise of the nailshops, the ringing of hammers, the groans
Of deep-heaving bellows, the "oliver's" thud on the die,
And deem it all music intended alone for my joy.
Peering out through the darkness at nightfall I see, in a stream,
Golden sparks flying upward to starland from chimneys that gleam.
Aglow are the numerous forge fires, astir too are folk by the score,
Out of the hot iron fashioning nails such as this one, galore.
My young eyes were then too entranced to see over all Want's sad sore.
As a boy, to the neighbouring nailshops I rove,
In search of fresh wonders, and there—
Through casements-behold wheezy bellows a-play,
The work-blocks and tools, battered walls grimy grey,
And amidst all the fire with its flare.
On tip-toe, sometimes, o'er the low doors I look
With delight at the toilers within;
Men, women, and children, a family band,
Stooping low to their labour with hammers in hand,
And with song adding cheer to the din.
I watch them lay hold on the bellows, to raise
The glow of the hearth-gleeds, and then
Draw quickly the rods from the fire, white with heat,
The ends into points on a small anvil beat,
Cut off, put a head to, and fashion complete
As a Nail, for the service of men.
A Nail! of all objects most useful, and yet—
Like its makers-but poorly esteemed;
Ah, who shall assess its true value, although
To be purchased so cheaply, or from the past show
Who may its inventor be deemed?
[John Cotton, “Nails Old and New, Some Memories and Suggestions (Written on picking one up during the Nailmakers’ Strike, 1892)," in Chimes and Rhymes: Romantic Tales of Bromsgrove Bells and Bromgrove Nails, with Other Verses on Local Themes (Bromsgrove, 1903), pp. 66-67; written May 1892.]
Despite our surpassing inventions.
These monstrous fruits of man's genius,
Strong giants designed to assist him
In tasks needing might past his powers,
Have grown now to masterful demons,
Enslaving too oft their creator:
Shall they be accounted as blessings?
To bless men they need better guidance;
For hosts are oppressed by the fury
And strife of their harsh competition.
They make poor men poorer, rich richer;
They brutalize too and degrade man;
So narrowing personal effort,
That pride and intelligent interest
In what he assists in producing
Is lost, for he is but 'a hand' now
The live tool of some cunning engine
Which has his own craft superseded.
[John Cotton, “Nails Old and New," p. 83]
I blame neither striking nor strikers,
If striking will help Labour's fortunes:
Yet what may avail the hard struggle
Of indigent spiritless Nailers
When nails, at twelve thousand a minute,
Are made my American engines?
Supplanting our wrought nails by millions.
[John Cotton, “Nails Old and New," p. 81]
A different sort of nostalgia pervades the article that suffragist Ada Heather-Bigg (1855-1944) contributed to the magazine, The Mother's Companion" (1890). The piece is an apologia for the participation of women in nailing and chain making, cottage industries that traditionally featured high levels of female participation.
One half the world, it is said, does not know how the other half lives, and the truth of this saying would be borne in very strongly upon any dainty town-bred lady who found herself suddenly standing in the middle of a nail and chain making village in the Black Country. On either side of her would stretch long rows of little red brick cottages, and in the tiny gardens attached to these, she would see innumerable small sheds. The sounds of continuous clinking coming from these might so far rouse her curiosity as to induce her to penetrate into one of them, when she would find to her astonishment that the shed was a kind of smithy, and that the whole family was grouped round a forge, all busily engaged in making nails or chains; the men and boys employed on the heavier kinds, the women and girls on the lighter. At first, there is no doubt our town lady would be horrified at the spectacle of a woman taking part in such work, would eye the begrimed, coarsely-clad female figures with a little shiver of disgust, and would make free use of the adjective "unwomanly." Then by degrees, as she watched the dexterity and apparent ease with which the glowing, red-hot rods of iron were transformed into nails or chains, her interest in the process would be aroused, and her distate to it, as an occupation for women, lessened. Finally, if she were a woman of sense, she would begin to think. She would ask herself whether after all there is anything unwomanly in turning out small nails and chains.... [reprinted in The Black Countryman 5.3 (1972), 55]
Heather-Bigg's target, in this article, are those civic leaders and politicians who emerged now and then, threatening to ban women from the nail and chain making cottage industries.When we seek to discover why some 10,000 women are to be deprived of their present mode of earning a living, quite regardless of the fact that for over 160 years they have been brought up to it, we are generally met with the vague assertion that the process of manufacturing nails and chains is not women's work.... that there is something exceedingly unhealthy, or peculiarly conducive to immorality in the trade alluded to. As a matter of fact, though, this industry, from a sanitary point of view, contrasts favourably with many others, while as regards the immorality said to follow on the mingling of the sexes in the nail shops, this charge is on the face of it absurd, seeing that, for the most part, it is only members of the same family who work together in the tiny smithies.... Without commenting on the injustice of such a proceeding, we will point out its futility. For if, when husband, wife, and the children are all working their hardest, the joint earnings of the family barely suffice for merest subsistence, it is self-evident that the enforced idleness of mothers and daughters would in no way mend matters, unless the males of the family could either (1) do as much work alone, as they and the women together had done before; or (2) earn as much for their particular proportion of it, as had been heretofore paid for the whole. [Ibid., 57-58]
But given the sorry state of the nail industry in 1890, these two conditions were no more than a pipe dream. "For day by day the machine-made nails are taking the place of the hand-made ones, and any rise in the price of the latter would drive these last out of the market, and effectively destroy a trade upon which some 25,000 or 30,000 persons depend. It is the competition of the machine-made nails, then, not the prevalence of female labour which is imperilling an industry doomed to inevitable decay." [Ibid, 58]
Getting back to the early years in New York, Billy's older half-brother James Stuart Blackton was already embarking on a career in entertainment, first as a "quick-draw" artist on stage. That talent served him well when, in the midst of his interview (1896) with Edison, his sketches became the subject of one of Edison's first movies [Blackton, "Hollywood with Its Hair Down," 34-35]. Two years later, Blackton finally secured one of Edison's projection machines for himself, which his friend and fellow stage entertainer, Albert E. Smith, managed to convert it into a movie camera [Ibid., 49]. 
This led to the production of their own films, and to the creation of the The American Vitagraph Company (1897). Blackton's meteoric rise in the movie business began with makeshift studios, notably on the roof of the Morse Building at 140 Nassau Street in Manhattan. Before long he and his partners constructed a dedicated studio complex in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1905 and 1906. The success of Vitagraph not only made "Commodore Blackton" (he was a proud member of both the Atlantic Yacht Club and the Motorboat Club of America) wealthy, but paved the way for his half-brother Billy's much less flashy career as a cameraman. But that was not until 1913, when Billy (age 21) worked as a cameraman for "The Wreck," which appeared in 1913. Even then, as Donald Dewey noted (Buccaneer, p. 10), Billy's name is conspicuously absent from the records his half-brother left behind. There is no reason to posit any bad blood between the two siblings. As we shall see, Blackton was the guest of honor at a festive gathering in honor of Billy's anniversary and daughter's christening in 1919, and he had very positive things to say about his younger brother's work when he was interviewed for a magazine article in 1927 (see below).
The registration form also includes a physical description of Billy. He was physically "short" and "stout" with "gray" eyes and "light brown" hair, though in the process of going bald. It also indicates that he suffered from "heart trouble," which helped keep him out of active duty in the war. Instead he served as an "employee of the Office of the Chief of Staff of the War department." His daughter Ruth remembered being told that during the war he had been charged by the army with the task of photographing documents.
Copies of three "passes" that Billy secured at the time have also survived. One of them, which is undated but has his signature on it, is headed "Enlistment Detachment: Purchase, Storage and Traffic Division--General Staff," and reads: "This is to certify that William S. Adams, whose signature appears hereon, is a member of the Enlisted Detachment serving with the General Staff, in Washington, D.C.; that he is not required to live in barracks, and has the freedom of the District of Columbia and its immediate environs, when not on duty." Another such pass, from November, 1918, indicates that he was 5' 4" tall, 153 lbs, with a "light complexion." A third one , the writing on which is for the most part too faint to read, includes a small photograph of him (see image on the left). Billy's discharge paperwork establishes that was honorably released from service on December 18, 1918, and that he never served overseas.
It is worth dwelling a bit on that Brooklyn Daily Eagle article (June 29, 1919), which recounts the combined anniversary and christening party. For one thing, it states that the celebration took place "at their home," 1645 East Ninth Street, Brooklyn, which was in fact the home of Billy's aunt, Mary Stuart; he, Ruth, and little Ruth shared the space with her. The article identifies each of the attendees, with special attention to Billy's half-brother, already a celebrity at the time. "J. Stuart Blackton was the guest of the evening and at the request of his aunt, Miss Mary Stuart, delighted the gathering with a dramatic recitation and a native Scotch song." James' presence at his half-brother's anniversary party is noteworthy primarily because, as Donald Dewey noted, neither Blackton in his writings nor his daughter in her biography offer much in the way of information about Billy Adams [Dewey, Buccaneer, p. 10]. Yet this little article shows that the half-brothers' relationship was more than solely a working one. Blackton even brought his son James Stuart Blackton, Jr. (age 21) along to share in the festivities. Also present were Ruth Owen's brothers, Ernest, Sam, and Alec Owen, as well as the three children of her half-sister, Gertrude Owen (by her father's first wife, Amelia): Ira Newton Fraim (age 24), Warren Willard Fraim, Jr. (age 15), and Alida Gertrude Fraim (age 20); here Alida is identified as Mrs. Noble Johnson, the couple having tied the knot themselves only four months before. For more on this see the Owen family page. There were also Stuarts present, inclusing Robert Stuart, Mary's younger brother, and his Irish wife, Delia O'Gorman. Unfortunately "George Stuart" and "Mrs. D.S. Stuart" are harder to identify, as is "Miss Jessie Stuart," who is not to be confused with Jessie Stuart Blacktin Adams, who is presumed dead by this time. One Stuart you was not present, Billy's Scottish grandfather James Stuart, may have made himself known in the choice of "native Scotch song" with which James Stuart Blackton regaled the assembled guests.
The 1920 US census corroborates some of the information from the article, listing "William S. Adams" (27) as a member of Mary Stuart's household at 1645 East 9th St, Brooklyn. Below him are listed his wife, "Ruth L. Adams" (25), and their baby daughter, Ruth (9 months). While Ruthie was still a toddler, the family moved a bit south to the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn. Then on St. Patrick's Day, 1922, three days short of her third birthday, Ruthie welcomed her sister and only sibling Jessamyn ("Jess") Stuart Adams (3/17/1922--7/18/2008) into the world. The two would be as close as can be to one another for the rest of their lives. 
After that he worked on a series of nine films directed by his half-brother, James Stuart Blackton, beginning with the film "The Moonshine Trail," which was released on October 19, 1919. The last of these, "The Forbidden Valley," premiered on October 10, 1920. Billy shot movies for Blackton again in 1925 ("Tides of Passion") and 1926 ("Bride of the Storm"), before working with director Bruce M. Mitchell on a string of "flying ace" movies: "Three Miles Up" (1927), "Sky-High Saunders" (1927), "The Air Patrol" (1928), "The Phantom Flier" (1928), "Won in the Clouds" (1928), "The Cloud Dodger" (1928), and "The Sky Skidder" (1929). Finally Billy shot a series of westerns directed by Joseph Levigard: "Grit Wins," "Born to the Saddle", and "The Smiling Terror," all of which were released in 1929. 
It is noteworthy that the timing of Billy's move predates Warner Brothers' acquisition of The Vitagraph Company of America on April 20, 1925. In any case, Billy's wife and two daughters remained for a time in Brooklyn, living with "Grandma Owen" (Elizabeth MacGregor Laing Owen), who by then had an apartment on the corner of Bedford and Martense in Brooklyn. There were already marital problems between Billy and Ruth. Their daughter Ruth remembered living with her mother and sister at Grandma Owen's place in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn even before the Bedford and Martense apartment. But ultimately Billy did send for his wife and the girls, apparently hoping for a fresh start in Los Angeles.
Three pages later in the magazine is a photo of Blackton directing a scene from the movie, The Flag Maker, the first film to benefit from this new technology. Another four pages later is a photo of three men and some of the equipment involved in this project. The two men on either side of "Big Bertha" (as the new camera was affectionately called) are Canrad Luperti and J. Marvin Spoor. To the right, standing by a smaller, conventional camera, is "William S. Adams." The article explains: "Because the director and company cannot see rushes [that is, the raw, unedited footage shot during the filmimg of a movie] of the natural vision film, there is a Bell and Howell camera on the set, too, which works beside Big Bertha. William S. Adams, who has ground the Commodore's cameras since 1908, is in charge [of the Bell and Howell]. Adams is also responsible for the lighting of the unusual sets. 'Bill' is the trouble shooter, the watch dog on the set, for a Bell and Howell camera cannot get the deep sets or the width of the wide sets, but it gives a general idea of what is going on. 'My rushes are like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, as there are no close-ups in the new method," explained Mr. Adams. 'My camera takes sixty feet of film to Big Bertha's ninety, so you can imagine the difference" (p. 8). Billy's name turns up again a few pages later (p. 17) in Blackton's "A Tribute to those who have made this marvelous production, the first stereoscopic motion picture, possible." The relevant line: "To 'Billy' Adams," Conrad Laperti, Marvin Spoor, Bob Spoor and Charles Kaufman--my techinal staff--who have served faithfully and well." Interestingly enough, there is no mention in the article of Billy's relationship to Blackton, despite the fact that the credits do little to obscure his personal relationships to "Marion Constance Blackton, my scenarist and inspiration" and "J. Stuart Blackton, Jr., (my son) and Production manager." The simple fact that Blackton is referred to in the article as "J. Stuart Blackton" and Adams, as "William S. Adams" had the effect of obscuring the common middle name they inherited from their mother's family.
They lived somewhere in the San Fernando valley (in the middle of potato fields) and there they would host the Adams' for weekend visits. Ruthie remembered the couple's two daughters, Joyce and "Teedy" (officially, Betty), who had such beautiful hair they were both featured in "White King" shampoo commercials. She also recalled watching Edna carefully washing the girls' hair in the sink. Ruth also remembered a large walnut tree, whose branches were covered with candles that the Newhards would light in the evenings. Another couple that came to her mind from those days was Charlie and Mabel Glouner, who had a peach orchard on Lankershim on North Hollywood; Ruthie could still taste taste those juicy, sun-warmed peaches, the best she had ever eaten.
Up to the end of her own life, Ruth still treasured two ivory earrings and four dolls from this time, one from China, one from (Yokohama) Japan, one from Fiji, and one (of a Native American) presumably from somewhere in the American southwest.
In the summer of 1940, Ruth Adams remarried. Her new husband, the Wisconsin-born but proudly German Carl Crueger (2/12/1888--2/2/1961), had long served as her insurance agent. Though Ruth and Carl had been a couple for some time, she had always insisted that they wait to marry until her girls were out of high school so that Carl would not be saddled with supporting step-daughters. Ruth Crueger moved into Carl's home on Manor Street in Altadena. Both of her daughters lived there for a time as well, with Ruthie earning her keep for a time as the couple's
housekeeper and Jessamyn Stuart working in a local bakery. On April 18, 1941 the Manor Street house became the venue for Ruthie's wedding reception. She had met Baxter Keyt Wolf (11/28/1917--6/16/1973) in 1935 after the Wolf family moved to a house on Idylwood Road close to the Adams' place on Graynold. Ruth actually befriended Baxter's sister Helen first, but because all of the Wolfs walked to school together, she got to know Baxter as well.
She remembers how, when she first met him, he was gallantly carrying the books of another girl from the neighborhood. But before long it was Ruth that was shown that courtesy. Not long after, Baxter put his prodigious talents as a ceramicist to work, making a cameo of the profile of his girl friend (both the cameo and the much larger "mock up" survive). His intention was to mount the cameo on a ring, but Ruth's mother intervened and so it ended up being made into a necklace instead. Baxter finally popped the question in December, 1940. Ruth remembers coming home late that night and waking her mother and step-father to tell them the news. Her mother's response: "You don't have to give him an answer right away!" She didn't realize that her daughter already had. Baxter and Ruth were married at the church of the Lighted Window in La Cañada the following April. The bride had a bouquet of orange blossoms and Easter lilies. 
books home from school. They often sat on the swing in the backyard of the Manor Street house and ate cookies that Jess's sister Ruthie baked. At that time Cliff grew chrysanthemums and regularly brought bouquets to Jess, to the point that Ruth Lillian chided him for taking up all the space in her house with flowers. It was some time before the young couple let Ruth see them holding hands and even longer before they divulged their plans to marry; only Ruthie knew what was going on. By then, Cliff was in the army, and when it looked like he would be shipped out, they hurried up the wedding date. Cliff was bold enough to ask Carl Cruegar for his step-daughter's hand, but he had to ask three times because Carl was listening to the radio and did not hear him. The young couple was married on October 25, 1942. Due to a heart attack, Carl was bedridden during the wedding ceremony. A small
reception was held at the home of Selena and "Brady" Bradshaw. Cliff had only a three-day pass so he and Jess honeymooned at Eaton's Hotel in Santa Anita and then went to Mt. Wilson. During the early weeks of their marriage, Cliff, who was stationed in Victorville, came home almost every weekend to visit Jess. He even secured a few fake passes along the way. In January 1943, Cliff enrolled in a meteorological course at Pomona College in Claremont. He was, in fact, part of a detachment of 225 enlisted men sent to the college in January 1943 to undergo pre-Meteorological training sponsored by the Air Force. But soon after he suffered an attack of appendicitis and was sent to March Field in San Bernardino for an appendectomy. After he recovered Cliff went north to the University of Oregon to complete meteorological school and Jess followed him there. A year later, Cliff graduated as a weather observer. He was then sent to Hondo Army Base near San Antonio, Texas, where he served in this capacity. He and Jess lived in a one-room apartment at the edge of town where they were bothered by one peeping tom and a number of drunken workers who went by at night, singing at the top of their lungs. Cliff applied for an advanced weather observer program and was assigned to Childress Army Airfield in the Texas panhandle. Knowing that Cliff would soon be shipped out, Jess returned home to live with her parents on Manor Street. Cliff became part of a mission that would have involved him being dropped behind enemy lines in Japan to get weather information prior to an imagined U.S. invasion. To prepare for this mission Cliff was sent to Harvard where he took post-engineering course work. After completing the course work, Cliff was sent to Brownsville, Texas to prepare for his deployment. While he was there the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, forcing its surrender and ending the need for the invasion. During Cliff's time at Harvard, Jess gave birth to their first child, Michael (May 2, 1945). Cliff kept in touch by phone, the calls benefiting from collections of coins orchestrated by his sympathetic freinds.
