News

News feeds |

Photo Studio

Sold into slavery

Many people will have enjoyed the recent BBC television adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations filmed (in part) at Nottinghamshire's Thoresby Hall.

Another Dickens favourite - and one which receives regular TV airings through the film version of Lionel Bart's musical, is the story of Oliver Twist.

Dickens' second novel tells the story of an orphan, the eponymous hero who is raised in the workhouse before falling in with the evil Fagin and his band of boy pickpockets.

Speculation over the inspiration behind Dickens' characters has always excited interest among scholars, and in Nottinghamshire parallels have been drawn between Oliver's cruel treatment at the hands of the workhouse masters and the experiences of real-life workhouse boy, Robert Blincoe.

Blincoe's life story was first published in book form in 1832, just a few years before Dickens brought out Oliver Twist, in 1837 - 38.

Blincoe too was an orphan and was brought up in the St. Pancras workhouse in London before being sold into forced labour at the cotton mill in Lowdham.

There is no evidence to suggest that Dickens knew of Blincoe's memoir, but there can be no doubt that the subject matter would have interested him greatly; it is a classic Reformist Tract, exposing both the shortcomings in the workhouse system and the barbarity of factory masters who allowed children as young as seven to be put to work for 14 hours a day in cotton mills.

Such is the historical importance of Blincoe's testimony that it is frequently quoted by social historians and has been reprinted in book form more than once.

Robert Blincoe was born around 1792 and by 1796 was already an inmate of the St. Pancras workhouse. He was placed there as an orphan and had no recollection of any father or mother.

It was in August 1799, at the age of seven, that Blincoe left St. Pancras and came to Lowdham to work in C. W. and F. Lambert's watermill making stockings and lace.

The mill, generally known as Gonalston Mill, had been founded by Richard Lambert in 1784 on the site of a former flour mill. It was when the business was taken over by Lambert's three sons that it diversified into fancy hosiery and lace, with a new factory being established in Nottingham.

Blincoe relates how a deal was struck between Lamberts and the overseers of the St. Pancras workhouse whereby 80 boys and girls aged seven would be 'indentured' as parish apprentices at the mill.

It was not within the authority of the workhouse to compel children to leave, so the overseers began to foster the belief that life at the mill would be far more pleasurable than their current situation.

It was suggested that once at Lowdham the children would be educated, paid handsomely, and all but transformed into ladies and gentlemen. Little did the children realise (as Blincoe later put it) that they were actually being sold into a kind of legalised slavery.

The 80 children from St. Pancras travelled to Lowdham by road, locked into a convoy of wagons with only small barred windows. The journey lasted five days.

As they arrived at Lowdham any hopes that Blincoe and his fellow seven year olds may have had a better life were soon dispelled.

The smell of untreated cotton, the oil from the frames and the overbearing heat and noise inside the mill were instantly nauseating.

They found that they were to sleep in a dormitory, two to a bunk, with no effective facilities for cleaning or washing, and that their food was to be of the very meanest; porridge and black bread, sometimes with potatoes.

Each morning they were wakened at 5am by the governor carrying a horsewhip. At 5.30am the tolling of a bell marked the start of a 14 hour working day, six days a week. Blincoe's first job at Lowdham Mill was to pick up loose cotton waste from around the spinning frames.

This work was carried on while the machines were in operation and many of the children soon became injured. As Blincoe wrote: "Some had the skin scraped off the knuckles, clean to the bone; others a finger crushed or a joint or two nipped off in the cogs of the spinning frame wheels."

He himself lost half a finger, but was obliged to continue working at the frame once the 'surgeon' had stemmed the bleeding. His life was wholly dependent upon the mercy of the overlookers whom he found to be "a set of brutal, ferocious, illiterate ruffians alike void of understanding as of humanity."

If he did not work fast enough he was cursed, pulled by the hair or beaten with a stick. Before he was eight years old, Blincoe declares he had "been tempted many times to throw himself out of one of the upper windows of the factory - but when he came to look at the leap...his courage failed him."

Instead he decided to run away and beg his way back to London. He got as far as Burton Joyce before a tailor who sometimes worked for Lamberts recognised and apprehended him. Blincoe fought with his captor, but to no avail.

Although Robert Blincoe's experiences of mill life were harsh beyond measure, he was actually working through a time when the first attempts at factory reform were coming into effect.

Sir Robert Peel's Act for the Preservation of the Health and Morals of Apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills was passed in 1802 introducing restrictions in working hours and attempts to improve factory conditions.

It was to form the basis of all subsequent factory legislation. For many such as Blincoe, however, the passing of the Act meant very little.

Many mill owners simply ignored it and when the Lowdham Mill closed in about 1802 Blincoe was sent straight on to Litton Mill near Tideswell in Derbyshire where the abuses of children were to be even greater.

The barbaric, even sadistic, treatment that the ten-year-old Blincoe endured at Litton and the subsequent events of his life can still be read in the book A Memoir of Robert Blincoe which is available for loan through the Nottinghamshire library service.

In compiling this article I am indebted to the Lowdham Local History Society for information supplied.

ABOVE: Lowdham Mill (generally known as Gonalston Mill), the place to which workhouse pauper Robert Blincoe was brought in 1799 aged seven. The building still stands, but was converted to a private house in the 1980s. Picture courtesy of David Ottewell.

<Back