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“The Cradley Heath Chain Makersâ€
Cradley Heath in 1890 was the centre of the chain making industry. Over 1000 tons of chain were made in the district each week, ranging from the smallest pendulum chain for grandfather clocks to huge ships’ mooring cables. It was very much an industrial town of the Black Country – dirty, squalid and depressing, but prosperous.
This prosperity did not, however, reach as far as the chainmakers themselves. Every link of chain was made almost entirely by hand on the blacksmith’s hearth and working conditions were, even for 1890, appalling. Earnings were virtually at subsistence level. Chronic hunger was commonplace. To scrape even a bare existence both men and women were obliged to work a twelve hour day, six days a week.
Women normally made the smaller chains, often operating their own hand bellows and tending infant offspring all at the same time. In the more advanced and larger forges older children or old men were regularly employed to power the mechanisms which supplied air blast to the fires. It was long, hard, physically exhausting labour and distinctly unhealthy.
Burns from the ever-present showers of sparks, dust and fumes from burning coke and extremes of temperature conspired with a woefully inadequate diet. In these circumstances the predilection towards alcohol is hardly surprising, the favoured tipple “Burton Returns†being beer returned as undrinkable by more fastidious customers. Living and working conditions were so pitifully poor that in 1896 a series of articles published in “Pearson’s Magazine†referred to Cradley Heath chain makers as “The White Slaves of Britainâ€.
These appalling circumstances were a direct result of the system. Chain making still largely remained a cottage industry. There were a number of large factories in general manufacturing heavy ships’ chains and employing workers in their forges. Most of their production, however, still originated in the back-yard chain shops owned by their out-workers. Here a family, perhaps with one or two others, worked together, their livelihoods subject to the vagaries of trade and the goodwill of their employers. Wherever they worked, however, the method of payment was the same. The employer, or “masterâ€, paid a sum for chain produced, having first deducted the cost of the iron (which he supplied) and sums to cover provision of coke and possibly air blast. Workers in both factories and chain shops were effectively selling labour only. The masters used the services of “foggers†– middlemen (often women) who acted as go-betweens for a supposedly fixed commission.
In practice many foggers were patently dishonest, and the workers were the ones who suffered as a result of their fraudulent practices. Bradney Chain and Engineering Company Limited was established in 1890 by just such a family of out-workers in a Cradley Heath back-yard chain shop.
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