Fox hunts and Spinning Jennies… Mr Reach and me: Retracing steps of Victorian Saddleworth (Part 3)

This is the third article in a short series.

Nearly 200 years ago, London journalist Angus Reach toured manufacturing districts in the UK. His aim: to investigate and report on the conditions of the Victorian working classes. From 1849, his letter from Saddleworth is a mine of detail and reads almost like a novel, as he examines the area, then known for its production of woollen cloth. In this parallel narrative, I write my own experiences of the places he visited, across space and time, on the other side of the Industrial Revolution.

“At one end of a straggling village called Upper Mills, I entered a small factory…”

“…a straggling, yet substantially-built hamlet…”

On the day of my visit to the village we now call ‘Uppermill’, the word ‘straggling’ plays like a stuck record player in my head. The high street’s jumbled and stretching character must really have left an impression on Mr Reach, if he chose to use this same word twice. Does Uppermill still feel ‘straggling’ today? I enter with the purpose of finding out.

Making your way through Uppermill is comparable to performing some sort of dance. My pace is forced to slow, I perpetually find myself sliding into nooks and crannies to let people pass, or hopping momentarily into the road to keep my sensible distance – I smile and nod and mutter ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ in a high-spirited, chirpy and clipped manner. Here, on this narrow pavement, I feel the smallest I’ve felt during my retracing of Mr Reach’s journey so far: this place is loud and busy, and I’m like a temporary soap-bubble in a huge bath.

Taking quick glances at the buildings around me, I’m struck by their colours. I see different shades of stonework splashed with unique shop signs, and a bizarre amount of Christmas lights still floating overhead (not that I’m complaining, I love them!). The different eras of architecture jump out and form a sort of patchwork quilt for the eyes. In this way, I realise, Uppermill is, in at least one way,  ‘straggling’; it’s a medley of buildings whose construction spans three centuries without rhyme or rhythm – and it’s still developing now.

“Sometimes (the houses) stand alone, backed by steep banks of grass and stunted trees; sometimes they are clustered together with narrow courts and passages leading from the high way.”

I sink into the setting and immerse myself in the many stories around me, past and present. Mr Reach is walking through a quiet, spaced-out hamlet, and the more I find my feet and pay attention, the more I realise just how few buildings our respective views have got in common. I notice that the Catholic church (Sacred Heart and St William) bears the date 1873, a year Mr Reach sadly doesn’t even live to see – and I’d previously imagined it to be one of the oldest buildings on the street! On the other hand, the Methodist church reads 1811 (although this date references its original building, not the same as the one we see today), so is visible to Mr Reach. From here, I study the brickwork on the rest of the buildings, mentally filing which ones I suppose to have been built post-1849 (the vast majority). Growing up in Saddleworth, the fusion of buildings is pre-programmed into my visual expectation and it takes manual observation (i.e., standing and staring and getting in everyone’s way) to be able to pick out the old from the new. However, when I do have a collection of pre-1849 contenders, I further understand Mr Reach’s perception of this place as ‘straggling’. Not only would these random eruptions of the oldest cottages have appeared just as jumbled as they do today, but they would have had substantial gaps between them too, of nothing but field and trees. In that respect, I reconsider Mr Reach’s favourite word and decide that Uppermill, now, is not quite straggling alone –  it’s densely straggling.

Leaving the constant hum and pressure of the main road, I wind through the backstreets, on a mission to find a mill. Mr Reach doesn’t give a lot of clues about which one he visits, calling it a ‘small factory’, ‘rudely and clumsily built’ and referring to it as a ‘house’. He mentions that ‘carding’ and ‘slubbing’ were performed there and that it was ‘at one end’ of the village. I’ve a few ideas in mind: Buckley Mill, now the site of Kenworthy Gardens, near the turning circle? Dam Head Mill, where the large Willowbank Mill housing now stands, near the pond of the same name? A mill whose name I cannot even seem to uncover, now clearly converted into housing, near the Civic Hall? Brownhill Bridge Mill, now just over the Dobcross border but once perhaps considered to be in Uppermill? Or is it a building that no longer even exists? I wind through the most historic parts of the village, fervently narrating my thoughts into the voice recorder on my phone, and taking all the photos I can, when there’s an unexpected buzz. I pause mid-sentence and check the device. It’s run out of charge. I stand on the pavement exasperated and consider what to do. It doesn’t take me long to realise that without the ability to take photos, there’s little point in my scouting out more and more suspected mills. So, I end up walking home again, research half-completed. Wildly, halfway back, it begins to rain – it’s as if I’m being told to cease my investigations and focus on something else.  It might be questioned as to why I’m including this little episode, but here’s the thing, it makes me think: sometimes, the most realistic narration just isn’t so linear! Mr Reach, in empirical Victorian fashion, loves to travel with his reader chronologically, listing his findings and encompassing visual detail along the way, but I’m more privileged than him – if life gets in the way, that’s simply the way I’ll represent it in my writing. Mr Reach doesn’t have time for anything to go wrong on his trip to Saddleworth, and I get the feeling he is a very prepared man. Although I have time and freedom that Mr Reach doesn’t, I still think that maybe in future I ought to take a leaf out of his book and use a good old pen and paper when I’m wandering, instead.

“’Do you see,’ said my conductor, ‘that jolly-looking old fellow, loading a horse with a pack of goods? Well, he’s rather a good specimen of the domestic manufacturer of Saddleworth. I warrant you he’s worth not less than two or three thousand pounds? We’ll go and see his place.’”

Home, dry, resolved to tackle the mill situation another day, I startle as I read this sentence: it’s the first piece of direct speech I’ve come across through my whole endeavour so far! Mr Reach has questioned his above informant (a mill owner) on where he might be able to see a Spinning Jenny machine, to which this man delivers the above reply. Though it’s undoubtedly twinged with hyperbole, I’m reminded, through this jaunty reimagination of the man’s words, of Saddleworth’s absolute locality – you couldn’t leave the house without seeing someone you knew, and it’s almost still true today. How prevalent that must have been to Mr Reach, 28 years old, and living in the vast metropolis of London.

“…(we) ascended a ladder to the work-room.”

I mentally follow Mr Reach up the ladder. Here to see a Spinning Jenny, we are now inside the small space of a local family’s cottage. The place is “not by any means particularly cleanly” according to our man, and to me the whole place reads like a relic. The Spinning Jenny machine was invented between 1764 and 1770, was already rapidly declining in the 1780s, going out of common use in around 1810. Essentially, the Jenny was a super-efficient spinning wheel, with eight spindles powered by one wheel, meaning that the operator could produce eight threads where they’d normally produce one. It was a huge innovation…but only until more spindles were added to it. Suddenly, machines existed which could power 16, 24, 80, 120 and eventually 1000 spindles. Machines of this capacity could only be operated in large factory rooms, and far fewer workers were needed. Saddleworth, in 1849, seems archaic, maintaining the domestic system inside little anonymous cottages, characterised by “oblong ranges of windows…denoting the nature of the occupation carried on within them” – using machines long ago swept away in the current of the Industrial Revolution.

“…but wool spinning would soon be performed altogether by steam and machinery, because steam and machinery could do it much faster and much cheaper than men or women.”

Definitely, hidden away, within the cramped, top floor of our cottage, there is an uncomfortable consciousness shared by visitors and inhabitants alike: that this place is representative of a dead era, and its decay has long begun. In the above line, Mr Reach replicates the words of the worker he interviews, before slipping away from these people in the full knowledge that, soon, nothing would be the same for them.

“I got into conversation with the slubber…He worked ten hours a day. The little piecer was his daughter…Another of his daughters worked under his eyes as a carding-feeder…”

It’s now a week later, and its’ time for ‘mill-ssion impossible’ part 2. Although I wound my way through most of Uppermill on my initial quest, this trip gives me more time to think – plus my phone is fully charged and I’ve brought a notebook just for the fun of it. After photographing my suspect mills, I shelter under a tree from the rain and speak into my phone (having tried the notebook I can confirm that voice notes are easier). I reach two conclusions. The first is that the mill in question is most likely not one of our obvious factories, but instead a building now resembling a cottage or house (my eye is on Brownhill Bridge Mill). It’s very fitting, I realise, recalling Mr Reach’s above words; working there was clearly a family affair. The second conclusion comes to me as I balance my phone, notebook and pen, speckled with raindrops and in danger of ending up in mud. Indeed, whilst I stand, conscious of anyone giving me weird looks for apparently juggling three items under a tree on a wet day, my conclusion is that it has to have been easier for Mr Reach to document his travels… if he needed to, he could shelter inside!

“The carding-feeder, an intelligent girl about 16 years of age, observed that the prices of provisions had very much fallen within the last two years…Tea and coffee were also cheaper…These groceries were purchased at Mosley, a small town not far from Staleybridge, to which one of the family went weekly for the purpose.”

This section really does make me smile. As indirect as it is, a girl only two or three years younger than me has her voice heard. Her consciousness of the world will have changed so much in a concentrated amount of time, she knows fully what life it is that she’s living, and I’m glad that she features in this London newspaper’s exposé, albeit for one line only. Interesting also is the emphasis on tea and coffee. A little research tells me that in 1851, annual tea consumption per person was approximately 2Ibs or 900g per head, half of what it is today. Tea was less of a delicate luxury and more of a hot necessity. Workers at this time were beginning to have their main meal of the day in the evening rather than at noon, due to the growth of factory work. They would take ‘high tea’, essentially hot, strong tea, along with a main meal. Even if their food happened to be cold, the tea would make it seem hot. Coffee was generally more of a morning drink. Mr Reach’s friend, Henry Mayhew, the Morning Chronicle’s reporter for the investigation of London, running parallel to Mr Reach’s investigation, said that workers in the city would drink coffee very early, on the street. We don’t know if the same trend made its way up here, but either way, Mr Reach seems far more preoccupied with describing Saddleworth ale during in his time here (“…a capital nutty flavoured beverage it is”), thus it can be assumed that this was still the drink most prominently associated with the area.

Our simple super-market purchase of these beverages, that most of us are fortunate enough to call ‘everyday drinks’, makes a weekly expedition to Mossley for “the purpose” of a tea and coffee hunt sound somehow like an extreme sport. The idea of venturing on foot slightly further than the boundaries of their own parish was a weekly necessity for this family, and was probably weekly enjoyed by them too, injecting variety into their lives. It’s not so dissimilar from wandering a little further from home on a daily sanctioned walk in 2021 – about as out-of-the-ordinary as it’s possible to get.

“From this place we proceeded by a steep path up the hill side to a cluster of old-fashioned houses called Saddleworth-fold…amongst the first, stone buildings erected in the district…The hamlet was a curious irregular clump of old-fashioned houses, looking as if they had been flung accidentally together up and down a little group of knolls.”

Putting all thoughts of mills out of my mind, I follow the curve of the grey tarmac of Church Road to have a little look at Saddleworth Fold. There’s no longer a direct steep path up – swarms of modern streets have settled and the hillside is completely drenched in housing, so that Saddleworth Fold is hidden from view. It’s just as well, because people still live in these cottages and I don’t want to be tempted to snoop, so I just head up for a small glance and a quick photo of the road sign. Apt is Mr Reach’s description, “flung accidentally” – not so much in relation to Saddleworth Fold specifically, but to Uppermill in general. No one could have planned this place, it’s paths are tangled like spaghetti.

“The man whose establishment we had come to see was a splendid specimen of humanity – tall, stalwart, with a grip like a vice, and a back as upright as a pump-bolt, although he was between 70 and 80 years of age…The old man had never travelled further than Derby. He had thought of going to London once, but his heart failed him, and he had given up the idea.”

Mr Reach paints the inhabitant vividly, even using images denoting manufacturing to describe his physique (“vice”, “pump-bolt”). He totally fits the vibe of Saddleworth we’ve had described to us so far; hardy, authentic, and staunch. The man seems a product of the very landscape, firm and unfaltering even under the weight of industry, formidable in his age and representative of a lost time. However, he’s also a flourishing “weaver” and “farmer”, his health vigorously persisting and driving him through his own modernity, during an era of high mortality (for example, Mr Reach himself died aged approximately 35).

“He thought the seasons had somehow changed in Saddleworth, for snow never lay upon the ground as it used to do…”

I believe the man’s meteorological sentiment is one most of us subscribe to. I’m only 18, and the weather I remember from my childhood is different to what I see today. I remember some winters of very deep snow (or were my legs just shorter?) and some summers hot enough to forgo wearing your cardigan in the school playground for weeks on end (but wasn’t last summer just as hot?). A lot of us exaggerate the weather of the past, maybe because it’s such a sensory way of recalling how we felt at the time. This man’s statement strikes a very human chord, showing how little we have changed.

Of course, however, there is a climate crisis. A lot of the weather we’re currently experiencing is genuinely different from the weather experienced 20 years ago and in that time alone the planet has altered hugely – no wonder I feel a dichotomy between the weather now and the weather when I was little, because some of it’s true. There are more floods, more heatwaves, the UK is expected to see “warmer, wetter winters; hotter, drier summers,”¹ and snowfall is expected to lessen. Part of the reason our carbon dioxide emissions are now so high is due to the use of coal, oil, and natural gas in the Industrial Revolution, which our characters here live in the thick of. As someone not inclined in the way of science, it’s difficult for me to tell whether the man’s testimony of less snow could be in any way scientific and an early effect of industry. I feel it’s more likely that he merely romanticised the weather of his past, rose-tinting it like many of us do.

But it’s important to remember that the climate is changing, and unlike Mr Reach and ‘Mr Snow’, as I’ll dub him, we can still do something about it.

“We entered the principal room of his house; it was a chamber which a novelist would love to paint – …old-fashioned, with its nicely-sanded floor, its great rough beams, hung with goodly flitches of bacon, its quaint latticed windows, its high mantel-piece, reaching almost to the roof, over the roaring coal fire’ its ancient, yet strong and substantial furniture,”

I love the description of Mr Snow’s cottage. Without Mr Reach’s disclaimer that it is clearly a quintessential literary English cottage, adored by “novelists”, I’d think he were overexaggerating in his stereotypical depiction of the place, but as it is, I believe his words. He’s keenly aware that this place completely lives up to the national stereotype of ‘cosy, backwoods Northern cottage’. He affirms that the English literary canon romanticises rural space, and for that reason I trust that the cottage really did look this way. Importantly, Mr Reach recognises how much work the inhabitants of Saddleworth do, and doesn’t allow the pastoral setting to dilute the reality of hard-working life here.

“I may as well state here that the country weavers of Saddleworth are, like Nimrod, mighty hunters.”

Due to a brief conversation with Mr Snow about the hunting habits of his sons, Mr Reach decides to pass on to us what he’s learnt about Saddleworth’s hunting culture. Mostly, it was weavers who enjoyed hunting (male, of course). They pursued on foot rather than on horseback, and used beagle dogs during the chase. Hares and various birds were hunted, but not foxes, Saddleworth not being urban enough to attract them. Hilariously, Mr Reach mentions that whenever a rumour circulated that a hunt had been organised, mill workers would bunk off work to take part, and face little to no retribution because the mill owners loved hunting just as much! Allegedly, on one occasion, “several mills were left standing, and…more than 500 carders, slubbers, spinners, and weavers formed the field”. It’s a fascinating thing to picture, and perhaps the most alien concept I’ve come across so far in Mr Reach’s journey – it’s so far removed from our behaviour today.

In 2004, fox hunting and hare hunting were both made illegal. I find myself pleased and grateful that this vigorous sport, fuelled by mass hedonism, and somehow seen by these Victorians as one of the only acceptable reasons to neglect other duties, is no longer performed, and now hunting only really extends to birds, which may actually be used for food, not just sport.

“A year or two ago, a gentleman, resident there, purchased a fox at Huddersfield, and turned him loose at Upper Mill…There started on the trail upwards of 300 sportsmen on foot. Reynard led the chace nearly to Manchester, a distance of about twenty miles, and then doubled back almost to the place where he was unbagged…”

Finally, I come to the part of Mr Reach’s narrative that I have been dying to talk about ever since I started these articles. Mr Reach, whilst I’ve been sitting at home googling and typing, has made his way down from Saddleworth Fold and is back in the central hub of Uppermill. Clearly, he feels he’ll glean more information on the hunting topic via vox pops, and true enough, a pretty legendary tale is revealed to him. Mr Reach and the reader learn the story of a fox hunt, where a fox was brought from Huddersfield to Uppermill, set loose, pursued to Manchester and back, and then finally caught…with the involvement of over 300 people! The mental image this evokes is near-mythical: crowds of voracious assailants sprinting across moors in delight, a single red pinpoint tearing ahead of them, standing out against the green and brown like a temporary beacon, drawing them into its orbit, exotic and novel, flashing before their eyes as so very separate to them, so different, so attractive. It’s a mythical story of predator and prey, adventure and triumph, wild landscape and the crossing of borders, worthy of being told and retold over pints of ale until the fox becomes a bear and the hunters multiply to 3000.

“Of the 300 starters, upwards of 25 were in at the death. My informant had reason to remember the chace, for it cost him the bursting of a blood-vessel.”

Yes, it’s mythical, amazing, and hilarious to picture – but it’s bonkers. From Saddleworth to Manchester and back on foot is a long way and I’m not sure how entirely either Mr Reach or his informant grasp that. The idea of a sole fox being able to draw out a chase that long is both an uncomfortable and unlikely one when I look at it from the perspective of that poor animal, and nowhere at all can I find any other reference to this event having taken place. The tale is like something out of a dream, and as I said before, I feel that this section of Mr Reach’s account is the most distancing from modern-day Saddleworth so far. None of that ruckus would be legal or accepted today, and as I sit here in the quiet of a Sunday morning, only the small sounds of birds and chatter outside, the history I’ve become so close to over the past few months begins to peel at the edges like a fraying children’s storybook.

I love the story of the fox hunt because there are so many ways to feel about it and its telling: I’ve laughed my socks off reading about it, I’ve felt seriously awful about the fox involved, I’ve cynically wondered why Mr Reach decides to include something so very dubious, but it all ends up with me realising something that gives me a newfound appreciation for his attitude. I realise that it would have been so easy for the man to disregard the anecdotes given to him by Saddleworth locals as folktales and non-sensical, uneducated gossip – but he doesn’t. Despite his class and education, both enormous dividing lines in the Victorian era, he doesn’t speculate on the credibility of what he hears. He puts authenticity and respect for others before his own ideals or agenda. Mr Reach doesn’t judge Mr Snow for his feelings on the weather, he doesn’t mock the family who still own the Spinning Jenny, he makes light of the anonymous man in my previous article who elects to stay in bed, not questioning his motives, and although the story of the fox hunt is probably at least a little bit exaggerated, he narrates it as he hears it. He simply chooses to believe (at least for the purpose of his writing) the peoples’ accounts of their lives. Of course, it’s part of his Victorian duty to get the least biased and most holistic view of everything he possibly can, and of course, he’s by no means the perfect progressive (remember his description of the “fine, fat, hearty-looking dame of sixty”?), but I do believe Angus Reach is very unjudgmental, foregrounding the people he’s come to meet rather than overwriting them with his predominant middle-class views. It’s refreshing, and it’s important.

Reading back over what I’ve written, I actually reckon he’d be pretty annoyed with me for focusing on him so much…

In my next article for Saddleworth Life (and the final one in this series!), we follow Mr Reach through Dobcross and into Delph for a harshly real account of uncertainties faced by weavers, an interesting mention of Standedge railway tunnel, and a concluding look at the surprising response Mr Reach’s journeys elicited from his readers. Until then!

¹ Dr Lizzie Kendon. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55179603

Featured fox image credit: Zhan Zhang

If you’ve enjoyed reading and learning from our articles please help the site continue to grow. We are a group of volunteers who enjoy sharing the good news, interesting articles about the area and supporting local charities and organisations. Costs include website hosting fees, computers and coffee.

PLEASE CLICK HERE to donate just the price of a coffee

Author: Megan Bruton

.