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Sir Robert Peel’s committee never heard the testimony that mattered most. Joseph Rayner Stephens, owner of the Ashton Chronicle, wrote it years later. He documented firsthand accounts of factory children who had labored during the same years as Agnes. Sarah Carpenter, a young adult in 1849, described to Stephens her experiences as a mill girl, including an account of a supervisor known to the children as Tom the Devil: “I have often seen him pull up the clothes of big girls, seventeen or eighteen years of age, and throw them across his knee, and then flog them with his hand in the sight of both men and boys. Everybody was frightened of him.”27 “Tom the Devil” had pummeled one girl into insanity and beaten two others to death. Another young mill slave by the name of Samuel Davy described the suffering he had witnessed: “Irons were used as with felons in gaols, and these were often fastened on young women, in the most indecent manner, by keeping them nearly in a state of nudity, in the depth of winter, for several days together.”28

The powerful in Parliament turned a blind eye toward these abuses because the textile trade helped feed their fortunes as it spurred the empire’s economy. Forced apprenticeship was ideal for the factory owner because the purchased children were paid substantially less than adults. Men earned about seven shillings a week, boys and girls just one or two. Juvenile thieves like Agnes and Janet were a bargain. They weren’t paid at all except for a small contribution to the local “parish,” the county government under the sheriff ’s jurisdiction.

By the summer of 1834, the child who had entered Mr. Green’s mill eighteen months before was now a woman of almost fourteen. In a blur of yesterdays and tomorrows that all looked the same, Agnes completed her sentence. With stupefying repetition, 548 days, 8,222 hours of picking wool, had somehow passed. Strand by strand, the fifteen-hour days toughened her hands and fingers. She’d had enough of Glasgow. Agnes and Janet launched a new plan the day the left the mill. They would save their coins for lodging in Kilmarnock, a lovely town where Agnes’s mother Mary had once lived.

2

Crown of Thieves

Glasgow Green

Agnes felt light-headed as she stepped across the threshold defining the boundary between the mill and the street. Over and done at last; the sooner forgotten, the better. Eagerly she took in Glasgow’s June breeze, a welcome relief from the stale air in Mr. Green’s bothy. Today even a whiff of coal dust smelled like freedom. Her shabby shift felt comfortable and familiar compared to the coarse factory uniform she had tossed behind her. Relief, however, was fleeting. Her newly found liberty was sweet, yet it quickly left a bitter aftertaste.

Agnes’s hair was a dead giveaway to her status as thief. The thirteen-year-old was marked, and there was little she could do about it. Her closely shorn locks invited suspicious looks from shopkeepers and street vendors alike, who knew all too well what such short hair meant. It would be months before it grew back to a length that allowed her to blend into her surroundings. Even a bonnet was only a temporary disguise. Her workhouse haircut effectively barred her from any honest occupation. Nobody had any interest in listening to an ex-mill girl sing. What’s more, her spot by the Glasgow Green had been taken over by another anonymous young balladeer, and it would take a tussle to get it back. Everything had changed, and nothing had changed.

In 1834, a young girl came of age when her “crowning glory” grew long enough for an up-do, complete with layers and layers of cascading ringlets. So valued was a woman’s hair that the wealthy saved every strand to weave into ornamental bracelets, hair adornments, and watch fobs. Agnes, however, wore the crown of thieves, branded for as long as it took her hair to grow back. The shorter a lass’s locks were, the more recent her gaol time.

During her eighteen months at the mill, Agnes had, in the eyes of society, graduated from ragtag orphan to reprehensible thief.