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By Root 4217 0

then weaving it. The first machine was for spinning. Since long before the Shockleys first opened their fulling mill, only two major innovations had taken place in the process of spinning yarn. The first was an elementary spinning wheel on which the yarn could be wound, the second, which had only come the previous century, was an improvement on the spinning wheel – the jenny – on which multiple spindles could be set. But now this improvement on the old spinning wheel was fast disappearing. For hardly surprisingly, the principle of the jenny had been extended. By means of a powered system to drive it, the basic spinning wheel, now become a monster machine, could drive eighty, a hundred or more spindles. The familiar whirr and click of the spinster in her cottage was passing forever from the countryside of England, leaving behind it only a name, applied for some reason to unmarried rather than married women. This was the first part of the story.

The reason for Manchester’s triumph lay in a development of the jenny. At first, the yarn from the jenny, lacking the careful handling of the old spinning wheel, was not so strong. It was good enough for the cross thread, the weft, but not for the warp – the lengthwise thread which took the strain of the loom. Then came Arkwright’s water frame; an improvement on an earlier machine which, by a system of rollers spinning at different speeds could stretch and then twist a yarn which was, though a little coarse, consistent and strong enough for warp and weft. In order to produce a cotton to rival the finest imported from India, one further refinement was needed: a machine to produce yarn that was both fine and strong. It had appeared in the 1780s, a combination of the jenny and Arkwright’s water frame. It was invented by Samuel Crompton. And, being a combination of exciting inventions, it was called the Mule.

It drove all before it.

“The Mule and the power loom will change everything,” Forest told him.

It was this that Shockley was about to see.

For the second invention that had ensured the triumph of the north was the mechanical loom. For centuries the business of weaving had been done by hand. When Shockley and Moody, two and a half centuries before, had organised their weavers into a primitive factory, it had still been no more than a collection of men, sitting in pairs at a loom, tossing the shuttlecock between them that threaded the weft across the warp. But now, Edmund Cartwright had set up a steam-driven power-loom.

“So,” Lord Forest remarked, “to make cotton we hardly need weavers any more.”

And the two minerals that were about to transform the world? Iron and coal, which together produced machines, driven by steam.

It was all this that Ralph Shockley saw as he entered the cotton mill.

But it was not the huge machines, the seemingly endless lines of thread that turned and clicked like so many soldiers on an eternal parade ground; it was not the monotonous thumping of the great steam engine that, in another area, drove the looms: it was not the fact that, as he saw for the first time a full-scale northern factory at work and understood, at that instant, what it really meant – that the old ways, the Wessex ways his ancestors had always known, would soon be gone for ever: it was not even the terrible, mechanical din and inhumanity of the place that turned his stomach.

It was the fact that half the machines were manned by ragged children.

Forest glanced at him.

“Children are cheaper,” he remarked calmly. “We treat them better here than in other factories. I won’t allow them to be flogged.”

And for once Ralph Shockley had the sense to be silent. As he looked about the huge, pulsating monster he realised also, for the first time, that he personally was completely powerless.

“As powerless,” he would afterwards recall sadly, “as those children.”

Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel had no illusions.

“It will be many months before Porteus allows him to return,” he told Agnes. “And Porteus will decide everything.”

The canon, indeed, was only reflecting the mood of the city at that