One of the many hazards of textile mill work was dust from the fibres being processed. Whether wool, flax or cotton being carded, blended and spun into yarn, or rags torn apart to be re-made into shoddy, the air would be thick with fibre dust, and for a great many years in the industry there would be no filtering or even open windows.
This was a cause of significant illness and disability, not just in the 18th and 19th centuries, but well into the 20th. This includes asthma, respiratory irritations and diseases such as environmental lung disease, bronchitis, pulmonary diseases, as well as varied nose and eye irritations and infections. The pulmonary disease byssinosis, known as brown lung disease, was widely recognised in the 19th century in the cotton industry, but is still a hazard for textile workers around the world today. It can be fatal and is caused by excessive exposure to cotton or flax dust, particularly if the worker has been exposed to high concentrations for many years.
While much of the questioning and evidence of the various factory commissions focused on the effects on mill work on people’s legs, and on accidents, some spoke of breathing difficulties caused by working in hot, dusty environments.
In the 1832 Sadler commission, Joshua Drake told of his daughter’s asthma, from working in a flax mill:
981. Does not it sometimes affect the health permanently? – It is the case with mine; she has never been able to breathe like other children since.
982. How long was she so employed? – About six weeks; and then the over- looker beat her severely, and I took her away.
983. What is the matter with her? – She is deficient in her breathing, as though she was troubled with a kind of asthma.
Daniel Kenworthy of Leeds was father to William who had also given evidence. The commissioners almost incidentally asked Daniel about his own health:
2078. What is your opinion of the effect of these hours of labour early in life, commencing as you did as a cotton-spinner, and continuing in the different branches of business for so many years; what has been the effect on your own health? – I think it has done me a great deal of harm. I am very ill to do for many years.
2079. What is the nature of your complaint? – I am troubled with an asthma.
2080. You consider that a complaint people are frequently troubled with in cotton mills ? – It is a very smothering unhealthy job altogether.
2081. I think you said you were a stretcher and rover in cotton mills? – Yes.
2082 There is very little dust in stretching and roving? – Why, not so much, but it is very hot.
In the following year’s Factories Inquiry Commission, Elizabeth Bentley of Leeds said:
Working in the card room at Benyon’s caused me to have very bad health. I was there more than four years. I was never very strong. When I went there I was in pretty good health. I soon felt it did not agree with me; my breath was obstructed; I breathed quite short; I staid at home now and then from sickness.
Janet Greenlees, in her 2016 paper, Workplace Health and Gender among Cotton Workers in America and Britain, c.1880s–1940s, observes that:
In the mid-twentieth century, Lancashire mill workers’ knowledge about biomedical and legislative developments concerning dust inhalation, its regulation, and the term byssinosis remained limited. They did not realize the potential for cotton dust to permanently damage health. For example, Mona Morgan worked in the cardroom between the 1930s and 1970s and, at the time of her interview, suffered from byssinosis. She claimed that: “If anyone would have told me this would happen, I wouldn’t have gone in”. Fellow byssinosis sufferer and ring room worker between the 1940s and 1980s, Ethel Fielding noted, “We were never told anything like that. You never dreamt of work hazards”. Cardroom worker May Mitchell, employed in the 1930s and 1940s, confirmed that she had “Never heard the word [byssinosis], never heard the word till years after come out of t’ mill”.
Despite this, governments and employers could not, or would not, recognise the workplace health issues that trade unions were demanding needed preventative measures as well as treatment and compensation for workers. As the women quoted by Greenlees show, it would be many years before these were taken seriously. And this remains a serious problem for global textile workers to this day.
Shoddy exhibition 