Cotton Mill Workers in Scotland Irish in Modern Scotland by James Edmund Handley, Cork University Press, Oxford, 1947 (pages 130-132)

Labour for the bleaching and dyeing works of the textile industry was recruited from Irish and Highland girls. Only women of the robust constitution found among farming stock could stand up to the conditions of work. Tremenheere, the parliamentary commissioner, who visited in 1855 thirty-eight of the fifty or so bleach and dye works in the west of Scotland employing some 4,000 females out of a total of 5,200 workers found that most of them were engaged at the drying-stoves.: "The drying-stoves are, with a few exceptions, of two kinds: one in which the goods are stretched upon frames in long rooms, heated to a temperature of from 90 to 130 degrees of Fahrenheit. In these, by far the greater number of the females are employed, and they remain in them during the entire working hours. The nature of their work requires them to be moving about with little intermission. The usual number in each room are from fifteen or twenty to about thirty or forty. They are necessarily lightly clad; nevertheless, the temperature and the movements required cause, except where the heat is very dry, profuse perspiration, and the aspect of the majority betokens the exhausting effect of such employment. In the drying rooms for the finest descriptions of muslin, employing also a large number of females, the temperature varies from about 70 degrees in the coolest part of the room to about 100 degrees or 105 degrees near the stove, and towards the inner projection of the room. In these rooms the females remain for about ten minutes at a time, spreading and waving about the pieces in the hot air until they are partially dry ; they then repeat the process in an adjoining cool room for five or ten minutes, when they return to the hot room. They are thus alternatively for those periods in the hot and the cool rooms. They are clad nearly as lightly as those in the stoves first mentioned. The frequent change into the cool room gives this species of work a great advantage over the former. The age of these females appeared to be generally between fifteen and twenty-five; but in several works I observed in the stove-rooms many girls and a few boys from about eleven or twelve to fifteen. Previously to the autumn of 1853 the recognized hours of work at the largest proportion of these bleach-works were from 67 to upwards of 70 hours per week; in addition to which, both at those works and at others where the ordinary hours of work were more moderate, overtime was not uncommon . . . I beg to direct attention to the instances of excessive overtime shown, in the evidence, to have been of very recent and long continued occurrence; and also to the cases of night-work for females including young girls of ten, eleven and twelve years of age, who work occasionally twenty hours out of the twenty-four in a temperature of about 110 degrees." (pp. 130-131) Much of the evidence on working conditions in the cotton bleaching-works of the west of Scotland makes unpleasant reading. One witness, manager of a bleach-works at Burnbank, Paisley, stated that the hours ran from six a.m. to nine p.m. with half-an-hour off for breakfast and for dinner. In summer the girls worked for at least fifteen hours a day on alternate days, but sometimes were employed for fifteen hours every day of the week and occasionally worked from six a.m. to twelve o'clock midnight the whole week through. "We did that last summer several times. Three days we worked twenty hours each day. The age of most of our girls is from ten to eighteen. The stove-rooms in which they work are in winter heated up to 100 to 110 degrees; in summer the heat is from 120 to 130 degrees . . . I feel, when I am urging females to work these long hours, I am doing what is not right, but I have been urged to do it to get a lot of goods finished . . . Sometimes they stay here all night, and then we make a place for them to lie down upon in a store-room upon the pieces of goods unfinished. Sometimes fourteen or more girls will pass the night in this manner, after working nineteen hours, and coming out of those hot places dripping with perspiration, and their clothes wet through with it." Evidence from other bleaching houses and Turkey-red works was of a similar nature. A Mr. McKinlay, mill-owner, Glenmill, Campsie, near Glasgow, stated that almost all of his hundred and fourteen female workers were from Ireland. Of those working at the drying-stoves, only seven were under fourteen. He had cut down the hours of labour from sixty-nine to sixty-six, according to the trade agreement, but so far as the workers were concerned he did not think that legislative interference was required. He would not like to adopt a sixty-hours week instead of a sixty-six hours one for he had already raised his prices when the hours dropped to sixty-six, and a further increase would be disadvantageous to the trade in general. For his factory girls he had established a school, opening three evenings a week, but wished that they would make more use of it than they did. " As our work is light they have not the excuse of being overfatigued." In the report for 1857 a Paisley surgeon, with reference to the common complaint of varicose veins among employees in the local bleaching mills, said: "I have known the workers bleed almost to death in a very short time . . . Rupture is another thing that is very common in consequence of the constant standing. Then next, as to artificial heat, most of these females are young girls from the Highlands and from Ireland; they frequently come with a plump and healthy appearance but that very soon disappears ; they become thin and weakly." He spoke also of numerous stomach and lung complaints and of the prevalence of nervous diseases among them. (pp. 131-132)

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