Cotton

Early in our visit to England we took a tour of Liverpool, a city whose strikingly large buildings were constructed with profits accumulated by traders.  British magnates financed ships to England's West African colonies to pack slaves into ships.  Ship captains dropped those that survived The Middle Passage onto British colonies in the Caribbean and onto British colonies we now call the southern states.

Enslaved Africans picked cotton that went back into the empty holds.  It arrived in Liverpool's port from where it was transported to textile mills.  Lancashire Country, where we are located, at one time had nearly 2,000 mills and more than 300,000 mill workers.  We visited one preserved mill called Quarry Bank, a National Trust site near Manchester.

A bale of cotton looks like this and while admiring its mass it is sobering to consider how many enslaved people it must have taken to produce millions of these bales.

A bale of cotton weighs 500 pounds.  Slaves would have picked 216,000 bolls for every bale.

A still active waterwheel turned an axle to power the mill machinery before the age of coal-powered steam engines.  

The axle was this large.

Quarry Bank mill looks like this on the outside.

Inside Quarry Bank still has working machinery.

Wads of cotton are stretched and twisted.

Children were responsible for cleaning machines.

The fibers were pulled and twisted into tiny threads.

Those threads were spindled.

Threads collected on spindles at left are drawn toward a textile on the right.

And weaving machines went to work.

Here is what the first machine-made fabrics looked like.

The factory floor would have been deafening.

Men, women, and children worked 12-hour days.  Quarry Bank had a home for children who worked in the factory.  The children were taken from orphanages or from so-called "work houses" where parents who were too poor to care for them left them.  It was the job of children to run under the moving machines to reattach broken threads.  

A docent calls in tourists.  She was brilliant.

She made it very clear that children this age would have been living in this room with scores of others.

Today, there are also beautiful gardens.

 

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For those of you wondering, yes, I'm still baking breads.   

This sourdough focaccia is made with feta, sprigs of rosemary picked from the neighbor's front garden, meaty green olives, and fresh olive oil just imported from Greece.