Country Images Magazine May 2015 - North Edition | Page 46

horrendous conditions
Needham of Hargate Hall near Tideswell, together with his partner Thomas
Firth a farmer who also came from Tideswell. It is hard to realise what
conditions the pauper children, some as young as eight had to endure. Paid
an absolute pittance of a few pence a week, they worked for fifteen hours a
day from Monday to Friday until nine or ten at night. Not for them a five
day week, it was sixteen hours on Saturday, the extra hour being devoted to
cleaning the dangerous machinery they were expected to work on and under,
at the beck and call of cruel overseers. Housed in the ‘Prentice House’, a
building now disappeared, but originally on the far side of the river from the
present mill, they slept in two-tiered bunks, three to a bed, with boys on one
floor and girls below. Woken at 5 a.m., they began work with a breakfast of
thin porridge, working until lunch break of oatcake and black treacle and
maybe weak broth for lunch, when the water wheel stopped for half an hour.
The only respite to this drudgery came on Sunday when a local preacher
would read to the children and during the last meal of the working day
when one of the Needham sons or maybe Mrs Needham would lead them in
prayer. A replacement Prentice House, slightly better than the original, once
used as stables, stands at the left of the far end of the mill yard.
Enduring such horrendous conditions it is hardly surprising that epidemics
broke out and children were frequently maimed or killed while working the

Litton Mill Yard

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primitive spinning machinery, especially as skilled medical attention was
hard to come by. Bodies of children who died this way were secreted away
often under cover of darkness and buried in unmarked graves in local church
yards. A small plaque in Tideswell churchyard commemorates this fact.
Corporal punishment was meted out for the simplest of misdemeanours
and ranged from a beating until blood poured from the child’s back, or
heavy weights hung about their bodies, or being hoisted in a flimsy cage high
above dangerous machinery. As a further twist to this horrific tale, when
children reached their late teens they were deemed to have completed their
apprenticeship. Rather than be taken on as fully skilled workers they were
dismissed and thrown out to try and find work in an already over crowded
workplace. Their only salvation was to return to the tender mercies of the
Poor House.
Cressbrook Mill further downstream was originally owned by Sir Richard
Arkwright, but he sold it to William Newton, a self educated poet and
millwright, known as the Minstrel of the Peak. He was also head carpenter
during the Duke of Devonshire’s building of the crescent in Buxton. Folk
lore compares Newton favourably with his fellow mill owner Ellis Needham,
making him sound like an ideal employer, but by reading reports left
by his apprentices later in their lives, they were treated just as harshly as