Catherine Cookson by The Dwelling Place

Author:The Dwelling Place
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-08-27T22:40:44+00:00

BOOK FIVE 1853

Full Circle

The miller of Brockdale died on Christmas Day, 1851, aged forty-four years, and just when people said he was about to do big things.

It was around 1842 when the name of Miller Turnbull first began to be associated with causes, and not only in Shields and Jarrow and the smaller towns, but in the City of Newcastle. The miller, it was said, was a forward-looking man, quiet, stubborn, and not afraid to speak his mind. Through him, lesser men came to know the name of Lord Ashley Cooper, one of the gentry who strongly supported the Ten Hours Act, the man who in 1824 got through the Bill forbid ding the employment of women and children under ground in the mines, the man who was all for education, even of the poor.

With regards to education, it was said that the miller's brothers and sisters-in-law made up the best- educated family in that quarter of the countryside; it was also said that he had not only taught his wife, that is his second wife, to read and write, but had made her so damned learned she'd have no truck with ordinary folks.

Those who had visited the mill said the house was more like a mechanic's library than an ordinary home, with books in every room, and the younger girls talking of Goldsmith, Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley as if they were ladies bred, instead of one-time fell scum.

There was no doubt about it, the miller did a lot of good; but it was also said he could have done more if he had kept his wife's family on an even keel and not allowed them to get high-faluting ideas about themselves. It was this fact that made the miller suspect in the very quarters in which he should have been trusted, that of the agricultural worker.

The farm worker in the North was better oil than his brother in the South and the West Country at the time, because in the North, the living-in system still prevailed; laborers were bonded for the year and paid partly in kind with milk, meat, barley, peas, and bread, and in some cases butter, cheese, and vegetables, as well as bacon at the killings, and they had all the slack coal they wanted for a few coppers, if they could carry it from the pit. Whereas in the South the wage of a man on the land still did not reach ten shillings a week, and coal was a luxury even in the depth of winter, and since the famous Tolpuddle business of '34 it would seem that gags had been put in the mouth of every man who worked on the land. In some places where a man dared to spit the gag out, the squire or the parson saw that that man was penalized It was the fear of injustice and deportation that kept the farm laborer mute and stamped agricultural workers on the whole as a dull, half-witted lot of men.

But

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