Abstract

"Reconstructing a Factory Workforce: The Strutt Mills of Belper, 1881–1911"

Emma Diduch, University of Cambridge (egd28@cam.ac.uk)

The cotton spinning mills in Belper were established in the late eighteenth century by Jedediah Strutt, a sometime hosiery manufacturer and early partner of Richard Arkwright. Though dwarfed in size by the growing textile centres of Lancashire and the Yorkshire West Riding, the Strutt mills remained in operation well into the twentieth century, helped by a merger with other small firms in 1897 to form the English Sewing Cotton Company. The surviving archive of W. G. & J. Strutt and Co. (renamed when Jedediah’s sons took over the business) includes several series of records for the period between 1881 and 1911, including daily time books, weekly wages books, and registers of children and young persons. Given the rich detail and density of some of these sources, it has generally not been possible to collect and transcribe complete series. However, several types of sources which allow the identification of individual workers have been sampled and linked to census data for the same period. Links to the census data for more than 3,000 individuals reveal a lot about the workforce which, unlike gender, cannot be inferred from the factory records alone – including age, marital status, and relationship to other factory workers. In addition, the factory records reveal the extent to which the recording of occupations in the census is an accurate or complete representation of lifetime work experience. The factory records provide insight into changes to the workforce across three decades and, to some extent, into the duration of employment. In addition to exploration of the structure of the factory workforce, I use these data to provide insight into role of the labour of women and children in the family wage economy.