5a. Consumer manufacturing: What was it like in the factories?
Apart from the terribly unsanitary conditions that many people experienced in their home life, factory conditions were the other great iniquity of the age. Child labour was common and many people were crippled either by standing too long or simply as a result of the inadequate safeguards in the use of machinery, chemicals and poisonous metals.
In the early 19th century, workers in Shrewsbury did not experience the same terrible conditions as their co-workers in Lancashire, but there was a sufficiently poor environment to cause two local mill owners to comment. John Marshall, owner of the flax mill, and Charles Hulbert, owner of the linen factory in Coleham, were two of the first factory reformers. Marshall was one of the first people to realise that treating the workforce decently produced far better results, and it is only fair to say, more profit. He believed '... that in the shorter time people work, the harder they work.' This he applied to his own workforce, as did Hulbert, who even converted part of his mill into dwellings for fifty of his employees. In the flax mill, Marshall added ventilation and heating, with baths and changing rooms added later.
Were Hulbert and Marshall successful?
Both Hulbert and Marshall realised the value of good industrial health, but were up against a society that still treated the manual worker as a slave. Although they were able to raise the standards of their own workers, they could do little in the wider industrial world other than pave the way for later reformers.
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Flax Mill, showing the spacious construction, and its later use as a maltings
[Secret Shropshire Ref: Archive/Malcolm Dick/PM S 13 M1/media/resource/31.jpg]
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