Industrial cities and the working day

Manchester, the centre of the cotton industry, more than tripled in population between 1800 and 1850.

Moving to town

In 1750 most people in Britain lived in villages and worked on the land. A century later, more than half lived in towns. Families moved to Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and dozens of smaller mill towns because the factories offered regular wages, even if they were low, and because changes in farming meant fewer jobs in the countryside. Towns grew faster than anyone could plan for them. Builders put up rows of cheap houses back to back, so that each house shared its rear wall with another and had windows on one side only. Whole families lived in a single room or a damp cellar. Several houses shared one outdoor privy, and waste ran into open drains and rivers that also supplied drinking water.

A working day set by the clock

In the home, a weaver could work hard one day and rest the next, as long as the cloth was ready when the merchant came. In the mill, the machines ran on the owner’s schedule. A bell or a factory hooter called workers in at dawn, the gates were locked when the shift began, and workers who arrived late or talked at the machines could be fined part of their wages. Days of twelve hours or more, six days a week, were common in the early mills. Machines did not tire, and the work around them was fast, repetitive and dangerous: loose clothing or hair caught in belts and rollers could cost a finger, an arm or a life. Cotton dust filled the air in the spinning rooms, and many workers developed lung disease.

Cholera and clean water

Crowded towns with dirty water were ideal for disease. Cholera, which can kill within a day through severe diarrhoea, reached Britain in 1831 and returned in waves. Most doctors blamed a “miasma”, bad air rising from filth. The London doctor John Snow suspected water instead. When cholera broke out in Soho in late August 1854, he traced more than 500 deaths in ten days and found that the victims had lived near, or drunk from, the public pump on Broad Street. Workers at a nearby brewery, who drank beer and had their own well, mostly escaped. Snow persuaded the local authorities to remove the pump’s handle. The outbreak was already fading as people fled the area, but Snow’s map of deaths became one of the founding pieces of evidence for the idea that cholera spreads through water. London’s great system of sewers, designed by Joseph Bazalgette, was built in the decades after the “Great Stink” of 1858, when the smell of the Thames drove MPs out of the rooms of Parliament that faced the river.

Breaking machines, building unions

Workers did not accept these changes quietly. In March 1811, in the villages around Nottingham, framework knitters began breaking the stocking frames of employers who cut prices or hired cheaper, less skilled workers. When the attacks returned on a larger scale in November, they signed threatening letters with the name of an imaginary leader, Ned Ludd, and became known as Luddites. The movement spread in 1812 to the woollen districts of Yorkshire and the cotton towns of Lancashire. Early in 1812 Parliament made frame-breaking a crime punishable by death, despite a speech against the bill by the young poet Lord Byron in the House of Lords on 27 February, and soldiers were sent to the troubled counties. The historian Eric Hobsbawm later called machine-breaking “collective bargaining by riot”: the Luddites were not against all machines but against the way they were being used to cut wages. Over the following decades workers organised trade unions, and from 1838 the Chartists campaigned for the vote for all men.