The chainmakers of Hallow Heath, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This report appeared in a national newspaper in 1889, as part of an investigation into poorly paid work done by women at home.

The road to Hallow Heath runs between cinder heaps and brickyards, and long before you reach the village you hear it: a ringing of hammers on every side, sharp and quick, like a hundred clocks all striking at once and none of them agreeing. It is the sound of the women at work. In Hallow Heath the men go to the ironworks, and the women make chain.

Each forge is a brick shed at the back of a cottage, scarcely bigger than a coal house, with a hearth at one end, an anvil in the middle and a bellows worked by a rope. I visited eleven of them on Wednesday. In the first, a woman of perhaps sixty was making the light chain used for harrows and dog leads. She took a rod of iron from the fire, bent it round the anvil, cut it, threaded it through the last link, closed it with three blows and returned to the fire, in less time than it has taken me to write the sentence. She had done so, she told me, since she was seven years old.

The rate for this chain is four shillings and sixpence the hundredweight. Out of this the woman must buy her own fuel, and pay a penny in the shilling to the middleman, or ‘fogger’, who brings the iron rods and carries the finished chain away. By working from six in the morning until eight at night, the best of them may earn seven shillings in a week. A great many earn five. In one shed a girl of nine was working the bellows, and in an orange box beside the hearth, wrapped in a shawl and within a yard of the sparks, lay a baby a few months old, asleep.

I expected to find them crushed and silent. I found nothing of the kind. They laughed at my clean hands, and one of them made a single link while I watched and gave it to me as a keepsake, saying that it was the only chain in Hallow Heath that would never be sold by weight. In the evening I went to a meeting in the schoolroom, where some sixty of the women had come, still in their leather aprons, to hear about forming a union. A Mrs Pardoe, who has made chain for forty years, stood on a bench and told them that the fogger was no more their master than the weather was, and that if they all put down their hammers on the same day he would soon find it out. They cheered her until the windows rattled.

Whether they will find the courage to do it, I cannot say. Hunger is a hard master, and a patient one. But I came away convinced of one thing. These women are not asking for pity. They are asking for a fair price for their labour, and I do not think a country that hangs their chain on its farm carts and its ships has any right to refuse it.

“The writer presents the women chainmakers as helpless and defeated.”

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