David
Dale, A Life by David J. McLaren, Stenlake Publisher,
Ayrshire, 2015 – a truly beautiful new book rich with photos, docs, maps, all
supporting Dr. McLaren’s extensive research on David Dale, 1739-1806. Dale was
one of the first “Captains of Industry” at the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution with his new cotton yarn mill in New Lanark, Scotland beginning in
1786. I found this book fascinating for a few reasons, here’s one.
In
1799, Dale’s oldest daughter, Anne Caroline, married Robert Owen. RO married
into a pot of money. In 1825, RO purchased a town from a departing Lutheran
cult in the new state of Indiana and renamed it New Harmony. RO took his
passion for social engineering, six of his well-educated adult children, were
joined by other dreamers, and attempted to create a ridiculous communal experiment
that failed two years later. RO could talk the talk, he couldn’t walk the walk.
Flash
forward to 1995 and my new job in New Harmony as private secretary to Jane
Blaffer Owen. She married Kenneth Dale Owen, KDO, in 1940 and I worked for her
when she was in her 80s. She brought great wealth to the marriage as her
Blaffer/Texas roots were in Humble Oil which morphed to Exxon. KDO was a
descendant of David Dale and Robert Owen, through Richard Dale Owen, who
remained in Indiana after his father’s big dream crashed. Wealth from the
Dale/Owen legacy had evaporated by KDO’s time, leaving KDO with a prestigious
name and no wealth. Young Jane Blaffer appreciated that this suitor was not
from the lazy wealthy class she grew up with and she was impressed that he had
worked his way through college. That credential and his notable name sealed the
deal.
This
wing of the Owen family continued with the tradition of honoring David Dale. Kenneth
and Jane gave the Dale name as middle name to two of their daughters. The
Blaffer wealth saved an interesting portion of American history as Jane Blaffer
Owen poured herself into the restoration and renovation of historic New Harmony
for over 70 years. I helped.
All
page references from David Dale, A Life. Buy it! It’s
valuable.
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David
Dale of New Lanark by David J. McLaren, Caring Books,
Glasgow, 1999, my copy autographed!
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David Dale of New Lanark by
David J. McLaren, Milngavie: Heatherbank Press, 1983. This research regarding
Dale and New Lanark is the basis for my letter to my young nephews now on my
blog and also an appendix of The Other
Woman, Private Secretary to a Daughter of Exxon Oil. I seek an
agent/publisher for this work.
* * * * * * * *
Gratitude to Dr. David J.
McLaren and Dougie MacLean, Dunkeld Records, Perthshire
August
8, 1787
Dear
Jean,
I got a new job, sister! Me and the
kids all got hired in the new yarn mill in New Lanark {p. 47-66} last month. We’re
a Mill Village family now. The owner, Mr. David Dale, looked us over good. He was a bit grumpy that Mary is only 8, I
told him she’ll be 9 in a couple months. He was not one bit happy about Janie’s
age, 6, {p. 55} but since I got no family to watch her, he understood. He was
impressed with Tommy, he’s 9 and a strong smart boy. Mr. Dale gave me a big
smile when I told him we go to church every Sunday, then he hired us.
I had to sign contracts for me and the
kids, promising I’ll work here for 10 years {p. 81} for 6 shillings a week, and
if I miss a day of work, they’ll dock my pay for two days of work. Same for the
kids, {p. 84} except $, and except when they turn 16, they might not get
offered more work here. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Tommy gets 2
shillings a week, the girls get 1 shilling a week, we’ll be rich!
Yep, cotton yarn mill, long story
short, we get raw cotton from lots of places, our former colonies now United
States of America, the West Indies, even Brazil, some call it slave cotton {p.
156-9}, not sure what that means - how can a plant be a slave? - and turn it into huge spools of yarn. TONS of
hard work, and mostly only small kids can get in under the machinery when stuff
jams the machine and kids have to crawl under and pick apart the glopped-up
mess. Mary almost lost a finger last week. Once the glop stuff is out, the
machine starts up so fast it can take a finger, lots of kid workers find out
the hard way. Once we get the cotton into strands, then we put them through
more stages to finally get to the spools of yarn. The mill has thousands of
spindles and lots of jennies that are water powered. It’s busy here and we’ve
got a lot to learn {p. 53}.
Mr. Dale and mill manager Mr. William Kelly
then sell that to the places who use the yarn to weave fabric, weft and warp. Remember
Uncle Duncan and those other men doing that hand loom weaving in the back shed
behind Grannies house? We do the hard
part, the weavers have it easy. Well, we usually work with cotton, sometimes
flax plant material to make linen yarn, and once in a while, sheep wool to
yarn, baaaaaa!
OK, I admit it – the Highlanders who
work at the dyehouse doing that Turkey Red have it waaaaaay hard. The owner
only hires Highlanders ‘cause they only
speak Gaelic and owner wants the secret process kept secret, they live and work
behind a 10 ft. wall {p. 143}. My John’s cousin works there, and he hates it.
You do NOT want to know how they turn cotton yarn red, but it sells good. Hint
– we get to sell our pee pee!
Right now, Mill #1 is up and running,
and Mill #2 is being built right next door {p. 53}. We may be 500 workers.
About 1/2 are the kids, Mr. D starts the pauper apprentices at 6 yrs. old but
usually starts Village youngsters at 9, he made an exception for us. Some are
kids like mine, part of a family, but most of them, over 275 children {p. 53-4},
also known as Glasgow Town’s Hospital and West Kirk Charity Workhouse in
Edinburgh orphans or kids put there because their parents can’t take care of
them. Mr. D calls them “boarders” because they live at a mill building until
they are adult at 16 yrs. old. Much better than the English mill owners. They
start orphans at 5 yr. old. Whew.
Let ‘em grow up a little, 6 is plenty
early. I’d rather them here being productive in the mill than me working here
and them idle in the streets or home? Definitely that would be TROUBLE. With
our parents dead and my John’s family all Highlanders, I got no sweet family to
tend my kids, not like being tenant farmers and the kids can just be around and
helping. I’m glad my little loves are right here somewhere on premises working
right now. We can do it, we’re strong and grateful for the chance to be a
beginning part of this “factory” deal {p.79}. First time in human history I
hear. Me and kids, cutting edge!
Mr. Dale rents us two rooms of our own
to live in, too, just across the lane and 2 blocks from where we work, I love
it! After my John died last year, the pox, and for us, no doctor, that’s what
the Uppers do. John died, it was really shitty. You left Scotland when you were
17, I was 12, so we don’t have some
family history that would help us understand each other, things like me meeting
my man, you meeting your man, and all the rest. When me and my John got
married, we lost two babies right at the start, I didn’t think anything could
be worse. Losing my John was the worst. Little Darling Janie got bad sick at
the same time, probably the pox too. A few old wifeys on the next farms helped
as they could, the landowner gave us some breaks, but it was still awful. I
couldn’t have managed except Tommy and Mary were my little helper angels, thank
God Janie is ok now. I was carrying another one just then, lost that one, too.
Since that, we were really having a problem with a place to live but now we have
our very own rooms with coal stove, too. Lots of other people live there too,
they call them rowhouses, we call ‘em row rooms!
We get up early, like we did when we
were tenant farmers, and we start at the mill at 6 in the morning. We all go
our separate ways for the jobs, sometimes I don’t see the kids the whole shift.
Here’s the good part, about 9 in the morning we get a ½ hr. break and everybody
in the mill gets free breakfast, usually oatmeal porridge and a cup of coffee,
it perks us up, for sure. Once a week we each get a spoonful of molasses to add
to either the porridge or the coffee, and which one do you think I pick every time?!
Slurp slurp!
It gets better. About 2 in the
afternoon, we get an hour break and a hot dinner, usually potatoes and a piece
of cheese, or other times, pease porridge with a little cinnamon, and sometimes
a little piece of butcher meat, kinda like chewing leather if you ask me, but
it’s free, and cooked and ready to eat, and I’m not complaining. Mill Village
workers, like us, can rush home for that hour, but that’s a struggle, esp. that
Mr. D and Mr. Kelly HATES any tardy anybody and when the town clock messes up,
well, trouble. The boarder kids of course always eat right where we all get the
food, they don’t get much change of scenery. Sometimes a boarder sneaks away
and we never see that kid again {p. 100-3}.
I get to leave at 7 at night, and the
kids stay for 2 more hours {p.96-7} for the FREE school! All the kids, hundreds
of boarders and Mill Village kids, get a fast supper, 1/2hr. at most, then
reading, writing and arithmetic until 9 o’clock. Girls take instruction on
sewing and making thread lace. {McLaren says, “This was elementary education on
an industrial scale for the first time.” EVER} Once a week the “scholars” get
singing, religious music, and Mr. D loves to stop by and listen. Tommy and the
girls walk the two blocks home together.
So much better than the parish school
you and I went to and Dad had to pay for us to learn reading and arithmetic and
then pay extra {p. 98} for us to get the writing class. Dad and Mom cut a lot
of corners, so you and I could get educated, and here we are, thanks Mom and Dad!
Ain’t it good that we can write to each other?
We’re just getting things figured out
here, and what fun to go to a ceilidh, “kay-lee” last Saturday, me and the kids
had a ball. We really needed it, I’ve been so stressed with all the changes.
But the Mill Village and local town folks , folks who work on the farms, the
toughs, the old wifeys, everybody was so
warm and welcoming, even got us up to dance, we really needed that. This was my
first ceilidh since my John died, I cried a bit wishing he was with us, but the
music soothed my weary soul. Watching sweet little Mary teach darling Janie to
dance was such fun! Nobody can say Tommy is shy! Mr. D even paid for the
musicians, so we danced to Dougie MacLean and his mates. My favorite song was “Thundering
In,” I went to bed remembering Davie Duncan’s AMAZING harmonica riff with that
tune. So funny, Lowlanders don’t know Gaelic, but everybody knows when the next
ceilidh is! I hope Dougie had a good time and comes back, he writes his own
songs, I could listen to him all the night. Somebody said that “Thundering In”
might be about that Englishman, Richard Arkwright, showing up and thinking he
could outsmart Mr. D when they started plans for New Lanark Cotton Mill. Well,
the song does fit, and Mr. D sent the Arkwright fellow on his way. Arkwright
might be the father of mill engineering {p.36}, but Mr. D’s love of Scotland
and our values won the day. Even some of the English mill workers don’t like
Mr. Arkwright {p. 38}, riots and the such. But Mr. D handled that business so
well, Mr. Arkwright was still willing to train several of our men and boys in
one of his mills {p. 275} so our folks could handle the new work here.
The Mill Village is easy street, we
even have our own store, and the shopkeeper’s wife, Janet, reads the newspapers
for free. She told me that Samuel Johnson, from London, wrote {p.172} about
your new country, USA, about the slave business that’s so big there, “How is it
that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of the negroes?”
And some Quaker man said it this way, “The Americans have the sword of liberty
in one hand and the whip in the other hand.”
You’re in Virginya, Jean, do you see
this to be true? Didn’t you say that you were a domestic in the Washington
family for five years? I hope the English treated you fair, sister. They had
tobacco money, I hear that’s not as big as cotton money now. They say here that
Mr. Washington has slaves, doesn’t he want them to have their own lives? Why
can’t he do the indentured servant or apprentice contract with the people from
Africa? I just don’t understand, the only time we’re in something for life is
marriage, how can anyone stand to be forced to a job for life? And what kind of
wicked evil person would want to force people to work for life? How do they
look at themselves on Sunday morning?
Well, it’s terribly complicated here,
too. Maybe you were too young when you left Scotland to know that we have Scot
slaves {p. 160} right here, right now. Yes, the Scot colliers and saltpanners
are slaves to those owners. Worse, if they have a baby, and the owner offers $
for a “gift” to new parents and if they accept the $, that baby is also a slave
for life. Sure sounds criminal, should be a crime, but it happens. Makes me
sick just thinking about it. Some Uppers have no concern for anything but
money.
Hey, gotta go, but will have some
juicy items in the next letter, I just found out our cousin Annabel is maid in Mr.
D’s house in Glasgow, she’s got something she really needs to tell me, ok. We’re
gonna meet ½ way between New Lanark and Glasgow, only a 12 mile walk for each
of us, for a picnic and lots of catching up to do next Sunday after church. Well,
then 12 miles to get back home, there’s that! Me and kids will do it barefoot,
then no blisters from our Sunday church tight shoes. Why do kids grow so fast?
Oh! I forgot to tell you! We work that
schedule 6 days a week! Yep 72 hours! Tenant farmers would LOVE to have a day
off a week, I count our blessings. I’m so glad the shopkeep has a mail bag to
Virginya, and your shopkeep gets our bag. Whew! Be sure to address your reply
with all that address, otherwise it’ll go to the Mill Manager and mail kinda
gathers dust there.
Soon, Cheers, Love, sis k
The kids came home singing this last night:
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old
PS – Fiction! This letter is fiction! All page references point to the reality of
the time, please refer to title mentioned first, yet know these letters are
fiction! I’m not a Scot yet am so moved by Dr. McLaren’s thorough research on
David Dale.
Please know that New
Lanark Mills are now a World
Heritage Site, and destination for visitors seeking tours, accommodations
within the Mill complex, and yes, a gift shop! Contact them: trust@newlanark.org
Certainly, this piece of history fits with a piece of my
history. My life and work in New Harmony, Indiana are all of a weave. I seek a literary agent for my non-fiction
work, The Other Woman, Private Secretary
to a Daughter of Exxon Oil.
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