I lead small group tours throughout Britain and parts of Europe. Seymour Travels, my own company, provides this.
10/05/2025
Today I spoke briefly about the Industrial Revolution…. How it started and the repercussions…positive and negative.
I wrote this short tale about three years ago and as it touches upon the same subject, I thought that you may enjoy reading it too.
…….
In the smoke-hung town of Oldham, beneath the towering chimneys and within the thunder of machines, young Billy Cartwright walked to work before dawn. The year was 1834, and Billy was twelve years old.
Billy’s feet, calloused and sore, padded along the cobbled road. He passed by rows of soot-blackened brick terraces where families like his lived six to a room. Inside, a thousand mothers stirred porridge over coal stoves and wrapped shawls around coughing children. The industrial heart of England beat not with rhythm, but with roars … metal teeth gnashing cotton into coin.
He had worked at the Parkfield Cotton Mill since he was eight. His father, a handloom weaver once proud and self-reliant, had lost his trade to the machines. When the spinning jennies and power looms arrived, men like Joseph Cartwright were forced to send their children to the very mills that ruined them.
Billy was paid just two shillings a week. Not enough to fill a coal scuttle, but it kept bread on the table and it was much more than he would have expected just a generation before. His fingers were nimble, quick enough to dart between the spindles and retrieve snapped threads before the overseer could raise his strap.
The mill doors opened at 5 a.m. sharp. Latecomers were locked out or beaten. Billy slipped inside, eyes stinging from lack of sleep, and took his place near a whirring frame.
“Move smartly, lad,” said Tom Rymer, the overlooker, a man with a twisted leg from some past accident. “Mr. Clough don’t pay idlers.”
Mr. Clough, the mill owner, had never set foot on the spinning floor. He lived in a grand house up the hill, where the smoke never reached and he had a reputation for cruelty.
Billy’s job was that of a piecer. It was his duty to mend broken threads on the spinning frames. Each time one snapped, the machine groaned, and production slowed. That was money lost. So Billy, like dozens of other children, ran up and down the aisles, arms aching, feet bleeding, air thick with lint.
The noise was constant… deafening. After two years, Billy barely noticed the ringing in his ears. Older workers were already half-deaf. They shouted, lip-read, and used signs like miners underground.
There were dangers too. Sometimes a girl’s hair got caught in the spinning rollers. Once, Billy saw a boy’s sleeve snag on a bobbin. The machine swallowed his arm up to the elbow before anyone could stop it. He never came back.
Break time came at 12:00, a thirty-minute pause. Billy took his bread and dripping from a tin pail and sat on a bench outside with his friend Alfie, a boy with red hair and no shoes.
“Think they’ll let us out early today?” Alfie asked.
“For what?” said Billy, chewing slowly. “It’s Tuesday.”
“Mrs. Ashcroft’s funeral. She were buried this morning. Caught a cough, turned to fever.”
“Too many die lately,” Billy muttered.
“She were only twenty-five,” Alfie added. “Like my sister.”
They both stared at the smoke curling from the chimneys. The air was cold and sharp, but it was cleaner than inside.
The bell rang again. They returned to the frame.
Billy’s mother, Margaret, worked at a mangle behind a laundry in the next alley. His father hadn’t worked in two years. A slow cough ate at him. He sat most days staring into the fireplace with blank eyes, coughing into a cloth stained with red.
It fell to Billy to feed the family. At night, when his back ached and the skin between his fingers peeled, he still fetched water, chopped kindling, and lit the stove. His sister Lottie, nine years old, had just begun half-time work at the mill… mornings at school, afternoons with the looms.
“Billy,” she said one night as he tucked her into bed. “Why do the rich folk never help us?”
He paused. “They say they help us by giving us work.”
“But they don’t do the work.”
“No,” Billy said quietly. “They don’t.”
The winter of 1834 was bitter. Coal was expensive,and one morning in January, the river that powered the mill froze over, and the machines went silent. The workers stood idle for a day, unpaid and cold.
It was then that rumors spread. There was unrest in Manchester, strike talk in Bolton. Men met in Oldhams chapels and pubs, muttering about wages, hours, and rights.
One evening, Billy accompanied his father to a meeting. They met in the back of the Red Lion, huddled around a small fire.
“Brothers,” said a weaver named Mr. Partridge. “The Factories Act may have passed, but they don’t enforce it. Children still work twelve hours or more. It ain’t right.”
“Aye,” said another. “Lord Ashley’s Bill says ten hours, but Clough don’t care.”
Billy listened. He didn’t understand it all, but he knew this: something in these men was burning, and it wasn’t just the fire.
A man in a dark coat stood. “We demand inspections. We demand safety. And we must organize.”
The word hung in the air. Dangerous. Illegal, perhaps. It was ‘Union’ talk.
Billy looked at his father. The old man nodded faintly. His hands, once skilled, now trembled on his lap.
By spring, protests swept through the mill towns. Billy saw men march past the gates with signs, chanting for shorter hours. Some mills gave in. Some owners hired watchmen and constables to break up the rallies, but Parkfield Mill stood firm. Mr. Clough’s overseers cracked down harder. The beatings increased. One day, Billy saw Alfie struck across the face for dropping a bobbin. He bled all day, but still worked his shift.
Yet change was coming.
In June, a man named Robert Stephens, a factory inspector from London, came to Parkfield. The workers whispered, “He’s from Parliament.”
He watched the children work, asked questions, took notes. Tom Rymer scowled behind him. Mr. Stephens spoke with Billy.
“How many hours do you work, son?”
“From five to eight, sir.”
“Thirteen hours a day?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Do you attend school?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you have time to play?”
Billy blinked. “What’s that mean, sir?”
Mr. Stephens’s pen paused. He shook his head solemnly.
That night, Billy heard that inspectors might force changes. Mr. Clough was furious. He called a meeting of the overseers. Wages were cut by a half-penny per day. “If Parliament wants less work,” he spat, “they can pay for it.”
In August, the mills were hot and airless. A fever swept through the workers’ housing. Billy’s mother collapsed on the steps. Billy fetched a doctor, but he wouldn’t come without coin.
“She’ll need rest,” said the apothecary, glancing briefly at her. “And clean water.”
Billy looked around their one-room home. The walls were damp. The water came from a pump shared by forty families and filth was everywhere.
She died three days later.
Billy never cried in front of Lottie. But that night, after she slept, he went to the pump and punched the bricks until his knuckles bled.
Autumn brought real change. A new Act passed. Factory inspectors had teeth now. Children under thirteen could only work eight hours. Education became mandatory. Owners were forced to record work hours, submit reports.
Parkfield Mill tried to ignore it, but the threat of fines loomed. Billy, now thirteen, moved to full-time work and Lottie was given a half-day at school.
At first, Mr. Clough found ways around the rules. He forged ledgers. He bribed inspectors. But the workers knew. And they began to talk.
In November, after a cousin was mangled in a machine accident and given no compensation, Billy stood in the break yard and shouted: “We ain’t animals!”
Fifty heads turned.
He expected punishment, but none came.
That winter, Mr. Clough was fined five pounds for violating the new act. He sacked the overseer, Rymer, in frustration. A new man came… quieter, less violent.
Billy kept working. But something had changed. There were limits now. The machines still roared, the air was still black, but the children were fewer. They learned letters in the mornings. Some, like Lottie, learned poetry.
At night, Billy began to read and he enjoyed his new pastime…. But he knew it could improve his life… he knew and he hoped.
By 1841, Billy was nineteen. His father had passed. Lottie worked as a school assistant and was being paid almost as much as Billy. He still worked at the mill, but only ten hours now. He wore boots, and he earned more.
He’d saved enough to rent a better room. There was a little more space and it had a window that faced the east.
One morning, he stood there watching the sun rise. The sky was pink, and the mills began to wake. But the smoke didn’t seem so thick.
He thought of his mother’s hands, of Alfie’s grin, of the time the machines had gone silent in the freeze.
Then he went to work.
Not because he had to, but because he chose to.
(Billy Cartwright is fictional, but every detail of his life is based on historical truth. Children in the 1800s were often employed as piecers, scavengers, and doffers in cotton mills. The Factory Act of 1833, enforced by Robert Stephens and others, was a turning point in labor reform. Life was harsh, but voices like Billy’s helped change the world. Your life and mine is better because of his experiences)
I have hundreds of short stories archived here….. join me if you’d like to,read more.
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