Mill Workers and Owners
Activity 1: Ask the workers
Working conditions
Most people in the mills, including children, worked twelve-hour shifts, from 6pm to 6 am or 6am to 6pm. This would include a one hour break at mid day and a short break in the morning and afternoon for breakfast and tea.
At Cromford, the bell for work would start ringing half an hour before the start of the shift. Anyone arriving after the bell stopped ringing would not have been allowed to work.
Much of the work was hard and dangerous with many safety risks such as hair and clothing getting caught in fast moving machines. Hands could be trapped; the air was laden with dust and there were dangers of slipping into fast moving water. Because of the noise in the factories, the workers were expert lip readers and developed their own sign language.
However, the conditions in the Derwent Valley mills were seen to be favourable to those in the North of England. Arkwright was viewed well locally and considered a model employer.
Activity
This should be approached as a teacher-led, whole-class starter activity based around an interactive whiteboard.
Display the images of Derby Silk Mill, Strutt’s North Mill , Belper, Cromford Mill and Masson Mill featured on this page. Ask pupils to work in pairs to think of a question about conditions that they would like to ask the people working in the mills.
Discuss the questions with pupils and display the photograph of the Mill workers, Belper, 1896. If using an interactive whiteboard pupils can write the questions directly onto this image using a board marker. Pupils can also work at individual monitors to write the questions on to an editable version of the 'Belper mill workers' image.