Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 10
CHAPTER VI.
BRICK-MAKING—HALESOWEN—NAIL TRADE—SHENSTONE AND THE LEASOWES.
SHENSTONE! what a classical sound that word has wherever the English language is spoken! Even if it had not been the name of a man who won such wide renown, it is in itself full of pleasant accent and significance, though one may not say why. A painter, poet, or statesman inheriting such a name finds half the battle fought and won for him at the outset of his career. A long distance must have been mastered on the high road of merit before Dobbin or Bobbin can overtake him at his starting point. A good Teutonic word it is, doubtless coming from Schwen-stein or Shining-stone. He was the poet lawnate of England, if it be admissible to coin a word, which the dictionary lacks, to give the distinguishing characteristic of his genius and works. I was not aware that he planted his little elysium on the near edge of the Black Country until I had been for some time in Birmingham. Capern had made his pilgrimage to it soon after he came to the town to reside; so we arranged to visit it together, and on the seventh of November we set out on our walk. Meeting an extensive brick-maker, we stopped to see his establishment near the Old Hill Station, but a little way from Halesowen. Here he was carrying on a large business in the manufacture of blue-black bricks of every size and pattern for coping of walls, stable floors, and other uses. He had expended £7,000 in buildings and machinery, and was turning out about 100,000 bricks a week. Here was another specimen of the riches and resources which Nature has stored away in the cellars of The Black Country. The space from which he had taken the clay for 100,000 bricks a week for several years would not measure over half an acre, embracing the whole compass of the pit's mouth. The crater is already sixty feet deep, and the clay, he thinks, will hold good for twice that depth. It is what we call in America "dyed in the wool," and not in the burning. The establishment embraces the latest improvements in brick-making, and all the mechanical forces are utilized to their utmost capacity. The steam-engine, for instance, draws up on an inclined tramway from the bottom of the pit a huge coal-scuttle full of the clay, enough to make 500 bricks, and tips it over at the top of the line into a hopper, whence it goes down through successive kneading-troughs, and is at last forced out of an iron cylinder by a piston all ready to be made into loaves for the oven. While the engine is doing all this multifarious work with one hand for the clay ovens, it is doing a similar work with the other for those of the common household. Behind a thin partition it is grinding grists of wheat and other grain for the farmers around, and for the proprietor of the works, who purchases enough to keep the mill running when local wants cannot do it. The partition wall is dust-tight, so that there is no possible transfusion of the clay on one side into the flour on the other; and "Mal y soit qui mal y pense" may be truly said of him who suspects a gritty association of these two elements incompatible with well-leavened bread. The ovens or kilns are of prodigious capacity, and the heat necessary to produce bricks almost as hard as cast-iron, is equal to that of the furnaces in which that metal is fused from the ore. One of these is a smaller oven, in which a little batch of two or three thousand of any pattern may be baked at the shortest notice to supply a special order. The long kneading sheds and the operations within them attracted our particular and almost painful attention. The domestic simile I have carried through this notice was justified by what we saw here. What woman is to dough in a private household, she is to clay in these sheds. Whether the wives and daughters of Israel under the Pharaohs were also consigned to this unwomanly work in the brick-yards of Egypt, is a question which the Scriptures do not enable us to decide. If they were not sentenced to the same toil as their husbands and brothers, then the brick-makers of The Black Country have improved upon the industrial ethics and economy of the Egyptians, and availed themselves of the cheapness and necessities of female labour, in producing the building material of the country. A writer, who visited the different brick-making establishments of the district, estimates that seventy-five per cent of the persons employed are females; and perhaps two-thirds of these are young girls from nine to twelve years of age. We saw one set of these hands at work at the moulding bench, and watched with special interest the several parts they performed. A middle-aged woman, as we took her to be from some dress indications of her sex, was standing at the bench, butter-stick in hand. Apparently she had on only a single garment reaching to her feet. But this appearance may have come from her clothes being so bespattered and weighted with wet clay that they adhered so closely to her person that it was as fully developed through them as the female form of some marble statues through the thin drapery in which they are clad by the sculptor. She wore a turban on her head of the same colour; for only one colour or consistency was possible at her work. The only thing feminine in her appearance was a pair of ear-drops she wore as a token of her sex and of its tastes under any circumstances. With two or three moulds she formed the clay dough into loaves with wonderful tact and celerity. With a dash, splash, and a blow one was perfectly shaped. One little girl then took it away and shed it out upon the drying-floor with the greatest precision to keep the rows in perfect line. Another girl, a little older, brought the clay to the bench. This was a heavier task, and we watched her appearance and movements very closely. She was a girl apparently about thirteen. Washed and well clad, and with a little sportive life in her, she would have been almost pretty in face and form. But though there was some colour in her cheeks, it was the flitting flush of exhaustion. She moved in a kind of swaying, sliding way, as if muscle and joint did not fit and act together naturally. She first took up a mass of the cold clay, weighing about twenty-five pounds, upon her head, and while balancing it there, she squatted to the heap without bending her body, and took up a mass of equal weight with both hands against her stomach, and with the two burdens walked about a rod and deposited them on the moulding bench. No wonder, we thought, that the colour in her checks was an unhealthy flush. With a mass of cold clay held against her stomach, and bending under another on her head, for ten or twelve hours in a day, it seemed a marvel that there could be any red blood in her veins at all. How such a child could ever grow an inch in any direction after being put to this occupation, was another mystery. Certainly not an inch could be added to her stature in all the working days of her life. She could only grow at night and on Sundays.
Each moulding woman has two, sometimes three, of these girls to serve her, one to bring the clay, the other to carry away the bricks when formed. What may be just, but equally unfortunate, they are generally her own children if she has any of suitable size and strength; but, for lack of such, she employs the children of equally unfortunate mothers. Whether in cruel or good-natured satire, they are called pages, as if waiting upon a queen. And she, perhaps, is the most directly aimed at in this witticism. Some irreverent wag, looking at her standing by her four-legged throne, with her broad wooden sceptre in her hand, and her yellow turban on her head, might call her the Sultana of Edom, or the queen of red clay, and not travel far from the line of resemblance. Still, there is something painful and cruel in this mock crowning of innocent misfortune. It savours a little of the taunting irony of those ignorant Roman soldiers who platted a crown of thorns for the sublimest brow that ever bore the stamp of humanity or beamed on its weaknesses.
A woman with her two or three pages will mould 3,000 bricks in a day by extra exertion; she is paid 2s. 8d. per thousand. Out of this she pays about 2s. per day to the girls that serve her; so she can really earn large wages at this man's work, when well hardened to it, with requisite skill. Indeed she has the easiest task of the three at the moulding bench. For there is really but little heavy lifting or tiresome bending for her to do. She stands upright, and has only to handle a small lump of clay at a time while the girl that supplies her moulds has to bring on her head and in her arms 30,000 lbs, of clay daily, in loads averaging fifty pounds each. For the brick when formed weighs eleven pounds.
The proprietor of the establishment was exceedingly courteous to us, and showed us every department and operation, and answered any question with the greatest good-will, and we have no doubt he is as thoughtful towards his hands as the other brick manufacturers in the district. So we felt a little embarrassed by his very civilities in intimating a wish to know the morale of his employées. Indeed, he seemed to be taken a little aback when we asked what proportion of them could read. He evidently had never stopped to ask that question of himself and could not answer it for us. When Capern suggested that the new Factory Act would probably bring the subject of the education of the children he employed before him, in a new light, he replied with much apparent satisfaction that the Act would not affect him, as it applied to ornamental brick-making, and that he had discontinued that branch of the business. As we were leaving the last moulding shed we visited, a little boy came up to the bench who was but a little taller than one of its legs. I asked him his age, and was surprised when he said he was seventeen. I almost mechanically put my umbrella up against him, and found he exceeded its length by full nine inches; so that he must have been quite three feet and a half on his bare feet although he at first looked shorter. He probably had found no other time to grow except when a-bed at night or on the Sunday. This enterprising manufacturer makes the hardest and best bricks to be found in the market. The canal passes close to his kilns on one side and the railway on the other; so that he has ready and cheap means of transporting them in any direction or to any distance in the country. His establishment represents the most improved system that has yet been adopted, and he works it energetically and successfully. So, having seen it thoroughly, I had reason to regard it the best average example of the brick trade in The Black Country.
I have already cited a statement from a good authority as to the percentage of female labour employed. The same writer says: "The average hours of labour are from six a.m, to six p.m., and the girls are seldom required to work overtime, but the men who fire the kilns are engaged all night. In all the brick-fields the girls are required to turn on Sunday morning the bricks made on the previous day. The wages paid to the young girls vary from 8d, to 10d, per day, according to the amount of work they are able to perform, for the piece-work system generally prevails in the brick-yards. In the red and blue brick-works the girls are harder worked and worse paid than in the white brick-yards, which are not nearly so numerous. In the latter, the clay instead of being ground in a mill, has to be tempered by the women with their lands and naked feet. It is estimated that upwards of 1,200 females are employed at the various brick-fields of the district.
Leaving this scene of motley labour, so novel and strange to an American eye, we continued our walk to Halesowen, an ancient town squatting down among the hills on the little Stour. Here hammers, from a thousand pounds to one in weight, make the picturesque valley echo with the heavy bass and sharp treble of their music night and day. The click of the nail-makers rather predominates in these iron voices of labour. The sun was fast declining in the west, so there was less time than I could have wished for visiting these little domestic workshops. We called in at one, however, and had a long talk with the woman at her anvil. She was the head of the establishment, and a cheery, pleasant-spoken mother of four children, two of which were twins. One of these she had set upon a piece of canvas on her forge, and it was looking very attentively at
"The burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor."
Her husband was a collier, and she alone carried on the nail-making in the little shop, which is an apartment or addendum to every nailer's house as much as his kitchen. She could only be four days of the week at the forge, because, as she said, she had to "fettle" about the house, washing and mending for the family and doing other wife's work. Indeed, she remarked that she sometimes thought that what was gained in the shop was lost in*the house. She could only earn between three and four shillings a week at the anvil; but that was a great help to them, and helped out her husband's wages. One of her elder children, a girl of seven years, came in and we asked her if she could read. The little thing looked up brightly and said she was learning, and could already do some short words. The mother observed that she was determined that her children should have a little schooling, for she had seen the want of it herself. She had been set to work with the hammer when only eight years old, and had never been able to learn to read since.
I always love to walk about in the villages of the nail-makers. The clinking of hundreds of their little hammers supply the aria to the great concerts and oratorios of mechanical industry. They are poorly-paid and have to work long and hard to earn bread in competition with machinery. Indeed, it shows the superabundance and exigencies of labour that nails should be made at all by hand at this late day 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. Then thousands of cottages are equally conformed to it in their structure. For each has a little shoproom attached to it generally under the same roof. Thus the whole business becomes a domestic industry or house employment for the family, and frequently every member, male or female, young or old, has his or her rod in the fire all the day long and often far into the night. Although they earn but little, they earn it at home, and the whole social operation and aspect of their industry is rather interesting. These little house-shops are 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. So they in the majority of cases really make comfortable little homes for honest and contented labourers, far better and more morally healthy than most of the tenements of better-paid mechanics in large towns. It is for this and similar reasons, and even without any intelligible reason. I always love to visit their busy hamlets and hear the music of their little clicking hammers, which do not disturb the birds, but seem to set them singing around the lowly roofs and cosy little gardens of the nailers with extra glee. Then sometimes you see potted flowers not only in the window of the living-room of the cottage but also in that of the forge-room, and other signs of comfort and social enjoyment. Perhaps this favourable impression of their condition I am now expressing may be a little enhanced by the immediate contrast with that of the female brick-makers I have noticed. Still, compared with many forms of congregate or factory labour, the nail-makers, even with their small earnings, are quite on an even footing as to physical comfort and moral surroundings.
The nail-maker pays on an average 2s. 6d, a week for his cottage and shop. He must find his own tools, which are rather simple and few in number. His anvil is generally a small piece of hardened steel driven into a cast-iron block, and not more than twice as large as the face of his hammer. As he and his family generally make only one size of nails all their lives, he needs only one heading-tool to each hammer. He utilizes every square foot of space at and around his forge. If he and his wife or daughter are the only members of his family to use it, he often lets one or two stalls to his neighbours for 8d. each per week. That is, for this rate of rentage he lets a neighbour heat his rod in the same fire and make nails on the other side of the forge. I have seen four girls of about sixteen years of age standing around the same forge at once, each with her rod in the fire. The coal used must be lighter and more smokeless than the common sea-coal, which is apt to form a crust over the fire, which does not admit small rods easily. They, therefore, use a kind of coke, or what they call breezes, but which doubtless should be spelt brisées, or broken bits of coal that has already passed through the fire. They pay from 6d. to 7d. per sack for these brisées, each sack containing three bushels. The nail-master or merchant furnishes the iron in bundles to the nail-maker, weighing sixty pounds each, and allows him from six to twenty-eight pounds for waste per bundle, according to the size of the nails; the largest size, of course, wasting less iron per pound produced. The nailer has to run his own risk as to the quality of iron furnished him. Sometimes several rods will be almost useless.
The land-made nail trade has been sadly depressed for nearly half a century, and from various causes. First, the competition with machinery has greatly diminished the production of the hammer, as well as depressed its price. In 1830 it was estimated that about 50,000 persons were employed in the manufacture; whereas, the present number thus employed is put at 20,000. The earnings of a family of man, wife, son or daughter will possibly average about twenty shillings per week, out of which they must pay for their coal, and the extra rent charged for their shop. Many skilled and industrious men will earn this amount alone without other labour; but perhaps one pound a week would be a fair average, taking year after year, for the earnings of each family. The nailers have "struck" for higher wages frequently, and endeavoured to win them by virtue of self-imposed suffering, but apparently in this age of machinery and cheaper foreign labour, there is but little improvement possible. In the United States almost every kind of what we call "wrought," or hand-made nail has disappeared. Even our horse-nails, which most need to be hammered, are coming to be produced largely by machinery. Then cheap and abundant as is hand labour in England, in every other country in Europe it is cheaper. Especially the competition of Belgian operatives presses more and more heavily upon the English workman in the nail trade. In 1851, it was estimated that they produced hand-made nails to the amount of from eight to nine thousand tons per annum, and it is said to have been increasing since that time. The manufacture of tea-chest nails used to be a large business in itself for this district; but machinery has greatly cheapened and monopolized their production. Before 1830 the East India Dock Company contracted for about ninety tons of hand-made tea-chest nails annually; but now they order but a small quantity.
The truck system was another screw that was turned down with relentless cruelty upon the poor nailer's earnings. This differs from what is called the order system in America. Here the manufacturer set up a grocery, provision, or beer-shop, frequently on his own premises, and paid the nail-makers in his own "spurious coin," or in articles on which he charged a profit up to the uncertain limitations of his own conscience. Parliament has endeavoured to put a stop to this practice; but it is difficult to suppress it in another form. Small dealers, "on their own hook," continue to intercept the nailers' small earnings, by taking advantage of their pressing necessities. A writer thoroughly acquainted with their present condition and habits, states that "Numerous workmen prefer to sell their nails at the truck-shop every day, and in many instances at every meal. It is a well-known fact that, at present, more than one-half of the handmade nails are paid for in 'truck;' but such nails are of very inferior quality, thereby injuring the prestige of the English hand-made nails in foreign markets."
As no one can know the operation of this truck system better than a nailer himself. I subjoin an extract from a letter written by one of the craft on the subject. It will serve as a good average specimen of their literary ability as well as a statement of the grievance; and as such it is given literatim.
"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, he 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 Work-man. He comes to the Books and then he has to suffer very often another injustice. Having done this business there, he as to find his Way to the tommy shop, and there he meets the giant. Who compells him to Buy his tommy at ten sometimes fifteen per cent, above market Price and of inferior quality. Some places this giant keeps a Public house, and the Workman 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 Goliah.
"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 25 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."
It is almost painful to see how patient human labour clings to a sinking industry, as drowning men to the last rope and plank of a wrecked ship. These changes must come, but thousands must suffer in the transition. It is probable that all the nails now made by hand in this district will be manufactured by machinery twenty-five years hence. Temporary distress and poverty must attend the change, but it will work well for another generation.
The church of Halesowen is truly a venerable old structure, with five or six centuries chronicled in its outer walls. It is a kind of arch-deaconal cathedral over which Archdeacon Hone presides. The great burial-yard which surrounds it holds an unwritten census of the dead outnumbering the living population of the town. In its low forest of monuments we found a plain slab bearing this simple inscription:
"WIL. S. SHENSTONE,
OB. II FEBRUARY, 1763,
ÆT. 49."
Under this humble stone sleeps the dust of one of England's most favourite and favoured poets. In the church, close to the pulpit, a more elaborate and ornate monument is created to his memory, bearing a poetical tribute to his worth, in which the various qualities of his genius and character are given in rather happy verse for monumental literature. It is rather remarkable that wit in his day, and in that before him, was numbered even on the tombstone of a writer or statesman as one of the first graces of human intellect.
But near this monument to the poet is another which is really a fuller testimony to his worth and its appreciation. It is the largest and most elaborately sculptured tablet in the church, erected to the memory of a Maj. Halliday, who once occupied Shenstone's mansion, and made it the central and culminating merit of his life, as inscribed in his long epitaph, that he kept the poet's grounds as a sacred trust and as he left them. He seemed to have felt himself honoured by the charge, as if it were a national trust confided to his keeping.
The sun was looking its last half hour upon the scene as we reached the Leasowes, and ascended the winding walks over stream and pool and under overarching trees, which the artistic poet laid out with so much genius and taste more than a hundred years ago. Our imagination was stimulated naturally to picturesque conception, and if the grounds were not all we could have fancied, we were confident they were that and more in the poet's day. It was evident that men had occupied them who could not honestly have written on their monuments what Maj. Halliday's epitaph stated to the reader in Halesowen Church. Grounds which had been lawns of exquisite surface and verdure had been found more profitable for pasturage of cows as well as sheep, and now presented that warty, humpy surface of cropped and uncropped herbage which such grazing always produces without the requisite attention in early spring. Still, we could trace the artistic contour of the estate, the plan of the trees, fountains, cascades, the east and west windows in the woods and groves for views of distant landscapes. The open grounds were not pastured all the way up to the door-stone of the house, but between it and the rough space allotted to sheep there was a real lawn of considerable size, pretty well kept, with a fountain in the centre, and walks in good order. The house itself is of moderate dimensions, with outside walls of what some call dash-and-splash work, or a coarse brick surface rough-cast with small pebbles and sand and then painted. In a word, it was a comfortable looking mansion, which a prosperous ironmaster would be satisfied with for its intrinsic worth and convenience as a residence; though if building anew he would make the two storeys higher between joints. Ascending to the eastern boundary of the grounds, we sat on a stile and looked down over the estate and to the world beyond, and discussed the groundwork of the poet's predilection for this site on which to concentrate his taste, genius, and fortune. He was born in Halesowen in 1714, and this was his paternal estate. A natural attachment to the locality was doubtless one strong motive in the preference. Then The Black Country was not so black and noisy in his time as now. The valley of the Stour, lying between his mansion door and the grand old spire of the parish church, did not send up the thunder of such heavy hammers, nor such thick dun clouds of coal smoke. The industries of the district sounded more like the chirruping of crickets on cottage hearths behind the tall hedges of the scattered village. Then the great distinctive features of his scenery were the softly-rounded Clent Hills just at the right distance to get that veil of misty blue that painters love to imitate on canvas. And at the western foot of one of those hills lived Shenstone's intimate friend and patron, the distinguished Lord Lyttelton, who was then a kind of central celebrity in the literary world, attracting into his companionship and circle of influence men who were making their mark and reputation as writers, painters, sculptors, actors, or as any other members of the universal brotherhood of the arts and sciences. It was perhaps the making of Shenstone that he lived when and where he did. He was brought out under the most auspicious circumstances, and found powerful helpers in each of the departments in which he won his reputation. As a poet, living and writing at the present day, his thoughts would have burned dimly under the luminous shade of Tennyson, Browning, and Longfellow. His "Schoolmistress" is probably his only production that will live; as it is to all his other poems what Gray's "Elegy" is to the remembrance and reputation of that writer. The distinction he attained as a landscape and garden artist, indicates how common and tasteless must have been the best ornamental grounds in England when he first brought his genius to bear upon them. The parks of Hagley and Enville contain monuments erected to his memory by Lords Lyttelton and Stamford, which may testify to their appreciation of his work in laying out their grounds, in grouping trees, shrubbery, and flowers, and beautiful walks, pools, and fountains. If the best productions of his genius in this branch of art would fall far short of what hundreds of modern gardeners have accomplished in England, he was their teacher, and they never would have reached their present status if he had not preceded them when and how he did. For half a century after his death his reputation as what may be called a landscape architect was worldwide. One of the most striking and honourable tributes of respect to his genius was paid him by Fisher Ames, perhaps the most eloquent lawyer that New England ever produced. In his celebrated speech about sixty years ago in defence of Blennerhassett, who was mixed up in Aaron Burrs's great conspiracy, he gave a most graphic description of the peace, innocence, and beauty of the Eden which that unfortunate Irishman had made for his home on the banks of the Ohio. This poetical description was one of the pieces that composed a reading-book for our schools, called "The American Orator;"[1] and on special reading days, the boys in the first class were sure to compete with each other for this extract, on which to practise elocution. One feature of this little elysium into which "the serpent stole," was "a shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied." How we boys wondered who Shenstone was and where he lived, and what kind of shrubbery he really had around his garden! Then it made our voices quaver with emotion when the orator told us how Blennerhassett's young and lovely wife was driven out of their little Eden in the dead of winter, while "her tears froze as they fell."
If the poet saw many such sunsets in the year from his door as we witnessed from the rising ground overlooking his house from the east, they would account for his choice of locality. The Clent Hills were tinged with the rich purple mist in which the setting sun was sinking in the west. Neither of us ever saw it stand out in such fully-developed rotundity before. Instead of being apparently set in the face of the sky like an eye, it seemed to come out bodily, and to descend like a large round balloon, and we imagined we could see the surface behind it, as plainly as behind a stereoscopic object. Linking fancy to fancy in their instantaneous flashes, Peter's vision suggested, but instead of four-footed creatures coming down in a sheet looped up by the four corners, the imagination darted off to the figure of a vast hollow orb of sapphire filled with angels and illuminated with the light of their faces as they approached the earth on an evening visit. We verily thought it would alight between us and the Clent Hills, it seemed so near and balloon-like, and we watched it from the stile until they dropped their purple veil before it, and the ruddy Evening bade it "good night." We then turned our steps homeward and reached Harborne, where we reside as neighbours, about dark, having seen much that was enjoyable as well as suggestive of serious reflection.
- ↑ See Chapter II, Section VI: "Burr and Blennerhassett", in Increase Cooke (ed.), "The American Orator", which attributes the speech to "Mr. Wirt" (Wikisource contributor note)