Escape to Continue

Dark Satanic Mill

“The overlookers allowed their thumb and fore-finger nails to grow to an extreme length, in order that when they pinched ears, they might make their nails meet.”

Pinching through the flesh of children’s ears was just one of the practices at Litton Mill in the early eighteen hundreds. The children working in this cotton mill were beaten with leather belts (using the buckle end), kicked, punched and used for entertainment in bone-shattering encounters with the machinery. They were overworked, underfed and left crippled or worked to death. The mill’s owner, Ellis Needham, was aware of what was going on, and was himself one of the keenest and most inspirational abusers of his work force.

Bridge on Monsal Trail

This suffering is revealed in the testimony of one of the survivors of his time at Litton, Robert Blincoe, who some think was the inspiration behind “Oliver”. As he was held down and had his teeth forcibly filed in punishment for some real or imagined misdemeanour, it would have been scant consolation that his suffering would become, less than two hundred years later, so unimportant that it was set to music.

Blincoe had been sent to work and live in the cotton mills by the Church, under an “indenture” agreement. The church at St Pancras had in turn been handed the parentless child when he was about 4. He was possibly the illegitimate son of a clergyman, although the abandoned Blincoe was never actually clear on what his name was so it’s hard to know.

Blincoe’s life at the Mill has more to do with slavery than workplace bullying, and writers at the time thought it worse than slavery. Like many workplace bullies, Needham was under pressure. He had failed to pay attention in the Geography lesson which explains how to locate your factory close to a labour supply, power, transport and the rest. Even today Litton Mill feels a remote spot, a long way from people and good roads. As his business failed he beat the daylights out of his conscripted workforce.

It should be no surprise that many of the people dishing out the beatings had themselves been on the receiving end as children at the mill. Such institutionalised behaviour from one generation to the next doesn’t happen so much in the workplace these days but people may still adopt behaviours from those that they see demonstrating “success”. I’m talking about Dragon’s Den, The Apprentice, Gordon Ramsay and the like. Noticed an increase in people bellowing in your face at work? Have you been invited to explain yourself in front of a braying panel of managers? Is ridicule a common form of address? To some ambitious and impressionable people, reality TV is real.

Litton Mill Today

Litton Mill has now been converted into flats, aspirational types are probably welcome.

Gordon Ramsay was almost bankrupt in early 2009. Yes?

The Route

I’ve finally come to the difficult conclusion that I’ve been overtraining or I have a virus. I’m knackered. So I took a rest from running and did this stroll instead.

The Pub

I’d wanted to try the Three Stags Heads in Wardlow, but it wasn’t open in the daytime. Instead I went to the Anchor Inn at Four Lanes End outside Tideswell. It has an unusually cheery exterior for a Robinson’s pub, with hanging baskets and tubs of flowers instead of the usual bleak permafilth rendering. A good pint of Hartley’s XB, a steak sandwich with chips, really friendly, good service. Couldn’t fault it.

The Anchor