Liverpool

This past weekend has been what I like to affectionately refer to as "Ellen-Palooza weekend." I won't lie, I was a little stressed out about going on this field trip. Our bus was leaving at 7:30am Friday morning and we didn't get back until 11pm Sunday night, so she was literally hijacking our entire weekend. But she still assigned several hours worth of homework for the weekend! She justified it by saying that we had a 6 hour bus ride where we could do work, but I can't read in a moving vehicle. I got sick on the ride anyway even without trying to concentrate on a book!

Anyway, it turned out to be really great.

Right outside of Liverpool is the Quary Bank Mill, the first cotton mill that was built. We've been looking at Marx in class and talking about his discussion of division and specialization of labor, so we went on a pretty extensive tour through the mill to get a feel for the original "factory" process.

First we went to the counting room. Those little tin cups were what the workers got their wages in, and they passed to them through that little sliding door on the wall.

The mill owner's office.

A beautiful view of the outdoor life!

This is how the cotton arrives at the mill.

They pull it off and put it in these bins.

This is the first step in turning the cotton into fabric. Basically, you're getting the fibers of the cotton to all (or mostly all) line up in the same direction. So you put a clump of it on one of these brushes, and you brush it back and forth between the brushes until it behaves.

Then you roll it together and put it on the wheel to be spun into thread. Twisting the roll as you spin helps the fibers latch onto each other. The tighter you twist, the thinner (and stronger) the thread.

Now the thread is ready to be put on the weaving machine and woven into fabric.



This was the process for families who produced cotton fabric at home to sell and make a living.

Then the process moved to the mill setting.



This is a giant machine that does the "brushing job" much more efficiently.

Now they can spin several threads at once.

 

 








All in all, a much faster process.





However, working in the cotton mill was a very dangerous job. The average life expectancy of the workers was 25 (though it was 31 at this particular mill because the owner was very conscious of working conditions).

When they started work, the workers had to take their shoes off so they wouldn't spark the wood floor with their metal soled shoes. This meant that it was common for people to cut up their feet and slice their toes off if they dropped equipment.

There would also be just a few workers manning several large machines, and so the bustle of it all occasionally resulted in serious accidents. We were told about a boy who got his skull crushed in-between a machine he was trying to fix. Not good.

There also was just the strain of a long (usually 12 hour) work day. And the workers would soon lose a lot of their hearing capacity because of the loud machines.

The biggest danger to working in a mill, though, was the fiber inhalation that caused many of the workers to get lung and mouth cancer. It was best to work with cotton above a certain humidity, so the windows were closed tightly and the fibers just stayed in the air to be absorbed into the workers' lungs. This is the main reason for the low life expectancy.

These are some of the inner-workings of the power center for the mill.

Giant water wheel!








After the mill, we went into the actual city of Liverpool.

We went to the Cavern Club on Matthew St. which is where the Beatles were first discovered.

We made some Irish friends.

And then we went to a "boogie" club that played 70s, 80s, and 90s music.

Let me tell you, I boogied up and down that dance floor ;)

The next day we went to the International Slavery Museum and listened to a pretty fantastic lecturer talk about the history of slave trade in Liverpool. Then we got some free time and I went to the Tate Museum of Modern Art in Liverpool! I actually liked the exhibits in this one even more than I like the ones in the Tate in London.