A filthy story...
"I HAD seldom seen anything more ghastly." This is how a journalist described the women working in Batley's mills in 1849.
Angus Bethune Reach, a Scottish investigative journalist, toured the textile areas of the West Riding to report on the condition of the working class for the Morning Chronicle.
The account of his findings has just been re-published in the book Fabrics, Filth and Fairy Tents – The Yorkshire Textile Districts in 1849.
Among the mills he visited were Batley's Bridge Mill and Albion Mill, and he described in detail the scenes he saw two Irish women working in.
"They laboured in a sort of half-roofed outhouse, the floor littered with rags and heaped with dust, the walls and beams furred with wavy down-like masses of filament, as though they had been imbedded in clusters of cobwebs," he wrote.
And of the workers themselves: "The woman, with their squalid, dust-strewn garments, powdered to a dull greyish hue, and with their bandages tied over the greater part of their faces, moved like re- animated mummies in their swathings; I had seldom seen anything more ghastly."
He also talks about mills in Batley Carr, Dewsbury, Huddersfield, Leeds, Halifax and Bradford.
The book is edited by Chris Aspin and published by Royd Press of Hebden Bridge on 01422 845353 or email bookcase@btinternet.com. It costs 6.95. The isbn is 978-0-9556204-0-9.
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Weather for Batley
Sunday 05 February 2012
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