[All Rights Reserved.] LITTLE MASTERS

Otago Witness, Issue 2801, 20 November 1907, Page 81

[All Rights Reserved.] LITTLE MASTERS

(Br J. Hi VoxMXi' M.P., author of "Alain' : %anger\g Wife," etc' "Litt-le'.Tileetera" they are' colloquially failed ii\ "South Yorkshire, where vowels still keep an antique sound -of their own. "Aw'm gooing. to be a little mester, lass," said Alfred Alflat tbe cutler Q»e evening outside &c, etectro-plate works in a Sheffield street

ueiu BvreevK ' . ■ - Interest^ folk, . "little masters" ; they represent a part of that romance ©f trade which stilL»w^it« its novelist, its historian, and its poet... The "iittle^master" in the army of industrialism, is what the "ranker" is in military parlance. He has risen from - the ranks. -to a commission — from, being * private he has come -.to be a captain of in- ' duetry ; from < being "labour" he has come to be "capital" in a small way: he is no longer "a hand," though sometimes he still j works with his fingers at his trade. j Interesting people, the "little masters." ; Let me chat about them* awhile, and tell the love story of one of tfeem* 30 year* ago. As a class the "little masters" are diminishing" i* ; number: thfe economic tendency «of the time is to squeeae t-hem out. ' Just as great emporiums are ousting small shopkeepers in certain walks, of business, compelling them to serve customers from behind other people** counter*" and not from behind' their own, so the great limited liability manufacturing concerns are straliowing ur/'mafiy "little masters" who now exist, arict discouraging the self-making of new onei. ! And I think ' ~ —That is a Pity.— It is always a pity when rungs in a ladder are broken away, and the mounting foot finds ' gaps -in the way of ascension. 'Economic tendency is not a- thing one can argue with, or a force one can arrest by Jaws or by-laws ; but we may deplore it all the same. The management of a great concern may become a tyranny. What 1b . an Alflat to do if, unjustly hoisted' 6iit of a subaltern employ, , he cannot find an opening to "set up in business for him- - eelf." ■ ' , Alflat was kicked out into little masterdom, as many an able but insufficiently conceited man has been; lifted by unmerited misfortune and injustice out of a groove. This tendency is a pity, too, in the interests of the community, I think. The able and thrifty **hand" who made himself into a 'little master" a generation ago, .who began with a- morsel of capital and - worked side by side with his own few men and apprentices, often went flourishing on till he became quite a considerable mas- | ter. 'As a. rule, he could only do that by ( showing more energy, more aptness, more skill in device, and more "push" than manufacturers who were already high up the ladder at the time thought it needful for themselves to do. Little masterdom meant new energy, fresh competition, and improved production in a trade ; big concerns, especially when they federate with each other too often mean the crystallisa"tion and fossilising of what is, the discouragement of new departures, and the standardisation of monotony. , — The New Discontent. — < When Alflat was dismissed from employ because Jenny Newsome loved him, if he could not have set up in business for himself I think he would have "punched" (to use a Sheffield word) the life out of the foreman who got him dismissed. And a good deal of the industrial discontent now being made dramatically manifest is due. •I fancy, to the difficulty of a gocd "hand" becoming a "little master" nowadays. That is true of industrial districts,, and something like it is true -of agricultural regions also. Much of the "rush to the towns " and the apathy of the labourers wJh> remain in the villages is due to the ■lack of reasonable opportunities for labourers to rise into "little masters" of land. But that is by the bye — this sketch ■" is concerned with industrial districts technically so called ; and though I paas for i the moment from Sheffield to Worcester- ; •hire I will confine it to -workers in steel. — The Little Needle-master. — La Kedditch and around it, in the old villages of Studley and the mysteriously- . gamed Headless Cross, in the old town of Alcester, and round about Astwood Bank, the needle-making industry settled itself several centuries back. A hundred years ago a Redditch needle, hand migrated to Hat her sage, a few miles into Derbyshire, from Sheffield ; and presently the mill of a little needle-master rose on the bank of a tributary of the Sheffield river, the Don. • It was in this old mill, 50 years afterwards, 4 that Alflat "set up in business for himself." Forty years ago in the Redditch neighbourhood it was not difficult to "set up in ■business for yourself" as a little needlemaster. A shed of a workshop, three or Jour hands (some of them lads, apprentices), a simple equipment of tools and uncostly machinery, a small amount of credit ifrom the needle-wire maker, and there you ■were! 'In business for yourself." The ' little needle-master did not usually iora- , plete in his shop all the many distinct , processes — I think there are^ 40 of .them — , through which a needle pasties on its way ftom being a bit of wire to becoming a "best gold-eyed, blue-pointed" needle: a man became a master-pointer, or a masterstamper, or a master-hardener, according jto his particular craft. He was a "little" man, but he was his own man ; he worked ' like Hal o* the Wyud, "for his own hand." And there was romance about his small Establishment, there was something individual and original about it. It shared romance with the village smithy and , the wheelwright's fascinating yard. Adam j (Bcde at the bench, singing hymns among ; tht shavings, was not more of a village | figure than the little needle-master could < be. — Doctor Greenfields. — | ffhe " little master" could house his

young enterprise and (as Alflat did) his young wife in pleasant rural place when " power" was mainly manual. Now that it is mainly steam, he cannot ; and that is one cause why little masterdbm is passing •away.- .Perhaps wjien "power" has come to. be mainly electrical, little factories may push out of the back streets in citieE into green fields again. The country workshop used to be built at the rear of the little master's little house, not far from the smaller house of that paying _ animal the pig. Rent was low, living ' was cheap, rates hardly existed, and children could be born and

brought up in 'fresh-air places. Alna could "set up in' business for himself" in the old mill on the edge of the purple moor, within sound of the rippling Tittle river Rivelin, which Ebenezer Elliott, the .Corn-law Rhymer, loved. Let us hope that before long a system of cables for electric power may send little masters and their households out to Doctor Greenfields again. . If you press one hand, with its Angers extended radially, into a small hfcap of damp sand, you configure the^ district of Sheffield. The sand which rises between the fingers represents the hills over which the city of Sheffield has spread ; the sand nnder the fingers represents the rivered valleys of the region ; and the flattened sand under the palm represents the plain where the great iron and steel works hammer and fume all day and all night. It was to a spot about six miles up one of the riveted valleys that Alfred Alflat took his hopes, his enterprise, and his Jfeloved buffer-girl. — Buffer-girls. — Buffer-girl ? What on earth is a buffergirl ? A very picturesque and often pretty girl indeed. Artists who scour abroad for romantic and unusual costumes — the Breton caps, the Dutch sleeves and headdresses — might very well take as a model a pretty Sheffield buffer-girl. A buffer-girl is a girl who works in a Sheffield factory at "buffing " or polishing bright metal by means of a wheel covered with leather and slightly roughened by a kind of emery powder. Her working costume is uncommon and picturesque. To keep the soiled buffing dust out of her hr' <the ties her head in a red hand-

hair she ties op her head in a red handkerchief — not too tightly, not in any stiff or ugly way, but often very gracefully and coquettisbly. And she is loosely laced, to give her freedom at work; and a soft calico bodice, not too tight, not too , flowing, drapes the upper part of her form. The calico falls into natural curves and artistic lines, as the Greek chlamys did; and the powder which gathers on the worn calico accentuates the lines. Alflat was a " hand," a.cutler, i in a factory where buffer-girls worked. 1 And Alflat thought he had never seen 1 anything so beautiful as Jenny Newsome in her costume as a buffer-girl. He told her so. "Canst tha' luve me, lass?" he said, in a while. And she said " Yea" — a Quakerish word which still in general use in South Yorkshire. __ — The Malignant Foreman. — She was in love with Alflat, and the foreman of the buffing department of the factory thought he was in love with her. She was terribly pretty at all times, and her workaday dress made her specially tempting. The foreman's arm longed to go round that supple bodice and waist. The arm went round them suddenly, one dusky April afternoon, when work hours were nearly over; and crack Jenny Newsome had smacked the foreman's face. She waited outside the works, and told Alflat what had happened. Alflat waited for the foreman to emerge; and crack ! Alflat had punched the foreman's head. —The "Bag."— After the cracks the sacks — the foreman "sacked" Jenny Newsome that weekend. And he got the foreman of the cutlers to dismiss Alfred Alflat the same day. Lover and sweetheart met outside the factory ; the sweetheart was discons olate. But, " Ne'er mind, lass !" the tover said. I "Wilta' wed me at once? Aw've saved ' a bit o' brass. Aw'll walk whoam wi thee, lass, an' tell thee my plan." —The Great Idea.— His plan was to become a little master. , His idea was to produce pocket-knives with nickel or German silver hafts. Not hafts of stag-horn or ivory, which were then the rule, but hafts of metal, polished. The blades would have to be fitted together and hinged into the hafts : Alflat was a cutler, and himself could do that. The hafts would have to be "buffed" into a rare polish : Jenny was a buffer-girl, and . herself could do that. A double partner- : ship, of lives and hands, was what the i lover proposed. He married Jenny with the shortest possible delay, and they went to live and work in part of the old needlemill. I The ripple of the Eivelin lulled them to sleep after each day of happy industry for their own benefit, and the flash of sunrise from the surface of the mill-pond in at their bedroom window woke them to another long day of prosperous toil. At I first they bought the blades, which Alflat put together ; but presently he hired a 1 pocket-knife blade-forger, and became in ' truth a "little master." forging and finishing the blades and the knives in his own shop. — The Buffer-girl's Little Girl. — Presently, too, Jenny Alflat took to herself an apprentice — a very young apprentice indeed : a Jenny in miniature, a - daughter; and now the "little mistress" must cease to help the "little master" for a time. A buffer-girl from the employ of the insulting foreman came to biff the hafts at the Eivelin mill for a while. She had to continue there, for in a year a real "little master" arrived one winter night, j with a squall. And so the family and the . household grew. j — Success. — Character, perseverance, mutual help, . the blessing of children, who grew up to j help, and the benison of Heaven upon all toil produced for the Alflats success and

happiness. The " little master" was a ' proud man as he saw his business grow, — the little mistress was a protid woman as she saw her family grow. And I, who knew them 30 years ago, reflect vrith some sorrow that, . like .the yeomen, , the small shopkeepers, "and .other, happy ami", useful petty folk, the "little master" class, is passing .and must pass away. „ ;