T’Mill
When I left school at the age of fourteen, I went to
work in the mill, my mother and sister were already working there and it was
the trend in those days for families, especially girls, to follow their mothers
as mill hands.
The cotton mill where I worked is still standing although it ceased to be a working mill long ago.
Inside the mill was always extremely warm, as heat was needed to spin the cotton at a high temperature, I worked in a room called the Cardroom. I learned to operate a machine called an Intermediary my job title was “Tenter” and my job involved replacing the bobbins which had become full with the twisted and fined cotton, I took the bobbins off the spindles and put empty ones on, the process was called “Doffing”. The bobbins were passed on to another machine called a Jack, this made the cotton finer still.
It was always very noisy with so many machines being used at the same time, and virtually impossible to hear what other people were saying to you, it became one of the arts of the cotton trade to be able to lip-read in order to carry on a conversation.
At the end of the day we would go home covered in bits
of fibre from head to toe. Our clothes had to be brushed and even though we
wore a turban, the fibres still got into our hair, so a good hairbrush was necessary.
