When we were expecting our first child, someone jokingly suggested we called him or her Arkwright… well, we didn’t! Many British people will associate the name with the comedy series ‘Open All Hours’ starring Ronnie Barker and David Jason; ‘Uncle’ Ron, as we called him because he actually was the uncle of a friend of ours, played the part of Arkwright who had a corner shop which was literally open all hours.
On the radio this morning there was a programme about Sir Richard Arkwright; there had been an Industrial revolution of sorts in Britain in Tudor Times, but it was in the eighteenth century that industrialisation on a modern scale swept first this country and then the world. Richard Arkwright came from a very ordinary home; his father was a not very well-off barber, and Richard was taught to read and write by a cousin because there were no funds to send him to school. He was born in Preston in Lancashire in 1732 and followed his father into being a barber. However, sad though it was that his first wife died, his second wife had some money which enabled him to move up from being someone who just shaved people and cut and styled hair, to someone who was interested in making wigs and dying hair. He invented or found a way of dying hair more successfully and became through this business came into contact with textile manufactures which in those days were simple spinners and weavers in what was basically a cottage industry.
He must have become interesting in using machinery rather than hand spinners and hand-loom weavers, and he must have quickly realised the potential for a change in production with the invention of such ‘modern’ manufacturing machines such as one for carding cotton which had arrived in 1767, and Hargreaves’ ‘spinning jenny’. It must have been such an exciting time! The former barber now collaborated with a clock maker, John Kay. Arkwright discovered how to make yarn strong enough to be woven mechanically and he got a patent for his own carding machine in 1775.
Arkwright built mills, factories to produce cotton, and changed the world forever. The old cottage industries had people working in their own homes with the raw materials they received, and then selling what they produced. Now in the new hydro-powered, candle-lit, twenty-four hour, six-day week factories thousands of people, mostly women and children, worked for wages that enabled them to buy the food and other items they no longer produced themselves. They were housed in company cottages, and although we may see the factory owners as paternalistic, there was a sense in those early days of responsibility and a duty of care for their workers. Things changed in the nineteenth century where the ruthless brutality of factory owners and their managers and overseers is chronicled in the literature of the time.
Maybe this was also the start of what led to Britons’ poor and ill-deserved reputation of being bad cooks and indifferent to food. If you were now housed with thousands of others in a town away from where food was produced, if you worked twelve and more hour shifts including during the night, maybe here was not the leisure, the time or the money to do more than produce food as fuel. The desire for ordinary people to grow and produce and eat their own food was never lost, and eventually the 1908 the Small Holdings and Allotments Act placed a duty on local authorities to provide suitable land for ordinary people to have as their own allotment.
Arkwright… a comedy TV show… the birth of the industrial revolution… food… cooking… Somehow it always comes back to food!
This was the programme I listened to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040lnd2
Lois Elsden 