THE DISTRESS IN THE COTTON DISTRICTS.

Wellington Independent, Volume XVII, Issue 1785, 30 October 1862, Page 3

THE DISTRESS IN THE COTTON DISTRICTS.

(From the Time's Reporter.) Pbeston, August 22. I began with Preston, because it was the town which was described as having received the severest blow from the stoppage of the supply of cotton. For this there are several causes. From the peculiar quality of the manufacture, which for the most part requires cotton of a vory fine quality, which lias hitherto been supplied almost entirely from one source — New Orleans — it suffered'immediately from the first straitening of the supplies, and it is now clos* upon twelve months since the want of employment began to be felt. The great strike which took place here nine years ago, and the panic of 1857, which stopped many mills, wasted the resources of the operatives, and they had hardly han time to recover themselves when the present pressure came on. Of the total population of Preston, 82,900, it is calculated that 26,000 are.in one way or other, engaged in the cotton mills, and of these 12,460 are altogether out of employment, 5697 are working half time, 3020 four days a week, and 6070 are at present working full time. To put it in a more striking form, there are now 10,553 persona receiving relief from the parish funds, of whom more than 8000 are due to the present distress, and the Relief Committee has on its books. 22,690 persona, some of whom receive relief from the parish, arid some do not. Taking the two lists together, 1 believe it is under the mark to say that there are at least 23,000 in the town out of a population of 8^,90u, who live entirely on chanty, and the number is daily increaseing. But even this is not all — for 1 very soon found that the relief lists by no means measured the whole amount of p.ivation and suffering, foi the greater part of those working half tima are scarcely, if at all, better off than the absolute paupers. A large proportion of Indian cotton is now being used at the mills which still continue to run, but being unsuited to the machinery it is extremely difficult to work, and. the hands can make hardly any wages with it. " Half time "is by no means synonymous with half wages. I was in not a few houses where a whole family depended on a pittance of 55., 65., or Bs., earned by one of its members, and where to all appearances the distress was as severe as if all of them had been totally unemployed. Fortunately the worst of such cases as these are included in the opeiations of the Relief Committee. The whole amount of wages lost to the operatives by the failure of em ploy mentis calculated at. £13,000 a week the place of which is supplied by, a .weekly dole, which last week amounted to. a little over .fiK'OO; so that, in round numbers, each of the relieved population, including men, women, and

children, is deprived of as many of the necessaries and comforts of life— to say nothing of saving and provision for the future-s-as can be purchased for something short of 10s. a-week. These general figures, though startling enough, but faintly express the actual privation which many poor creatures are suffering here. If I had confined my visits to the poorest quarter of the town — to places where good wages are Bpent recklessly on the belly and back, and where there is always more or less of poverty and no thinking of to-morrow— l 'night easily pile up cases of squalid misery hardly to be equalled in the most degraded dena of tho metropolis. For instance, in one court I found a poor woman with three children whose husband had three days' parish work and an extra relief of three shillings, in all six shillings a-week for the five. All their furniture was gone but a table and two chairs, and all five slept in one bed, which was placed in a dark hole with not a ray of light finding its way into it— such as we should hardly think too good to store coals in. All their clothes had been pawned, and most bitterly of all lid the poor woman lament a good black suit of her husband which was " in" for 10s:, and which they could never hope to redeem. Their earnings in good times had been about 255. a week. In the same court was another family in equalj straits. Six people had to live on Bs. a week, which the husband earned in working half-time; all were reduced to one bed, the other two having been long ago sold to keep the wolf from the door, and the whole family had just one sheet to lie on and a quilt to cover them. In another house I saw a sight which will be before my eyes for many a day to come. It was a little low stone-floored room, its only furniture a table, a stool, and a bed. On the bed was stretched a wretched object, I could not tell whether it was a man or a woman, worn to the bone — a very skeleton, iv fact, her body covered with putrid sores, with not a rag on her,— literally naked but for the coarse sheet which was spread over her. The bed on which, she lav was a rough brown sacking stuffed with a handful of straw. She had lain there I don't know how long ; her husband had lain there before her, and died on the same bed. She was the mother of two girls, factory-operatives., who earned or were relieved with a few shillings— l forgot how many, for I own I was too much shocked at what I saw to listen to figures. One can only hope, for the credit of the relieving officer, that this terrible case had escaped his notice, .otherwise', he would surely have straiued or broken a rule, or had this miserable creature removed from the wretched den in which I found her. Even among a somewhat better class the suffering is hardly less extreme, and sad were the tales to which I had to listen of the gradual descent from comfort to utter destitution. In one little house, huddled altogether, was a family of IJ, all of whom had been 28 weeks out of work, and for 15 of these they had existed on something less than Is. per head. The relief committee had just raised their pittance to 16s foi the 11. Before the bad times the family earnings had been about MS 155., and they had had to part with 'nearly all their furniture. In a cellar, living with another family, I came upon a man and his wife and three children, who for weeks had been living on 6s. 6d. for the five. They had formerly lived in a house of their own, neatly furnished, but the landlord had turned them out when they did not pay their rent, and their furniture had absolutely all disappeared but a bod, a pan, and a kettle. Close by were a man and his wife with three girls and two boys, all over ten years of age, living on ten shillings a week. Ihis family too, Had only one bod among them, and the children slept on the bare boards. But perhaps the strongest illustrations of the distress actually chargeable on the present crisis are the cases of respectable men who have hitherto kept themselves iv comfort, . and endeavoured to provide for old age and infirmity. There was no difficulty in finding plenty of these. At one house, I visited a young couple, not long married, who between them earned over £2 a week. They had both been out of work for some time, and when their savings were exhausted they had at last applied to the parish. Their present income was exactly 5s 6d a week, out of which their rent was 2s. 6., leaving them 3s. a-week for sub. sistence. Another young couple had 2s. a-week from the Relief Committee ; but living with their parents, they had no rent to pay. In the next house there were four grown-up people Hiving, whose united incomes amounted to 95., out of which they had to pay 2s. rent. A little further on I came on an overseer with a family of five children. His salary had been 30s. a- week, and though he had been at work for more than a twelvemonth, he had managed to struggle on till about a fortnight ago, when,, all his resources being exhausted, fie had been compelled to apply for relief, and was now receiving, from one source or another, about 9s. a-week. An old woman and two daughters, both of them over twenty-five years of age — one employed half-time, the other receiving relicf — had among them 4s. 6d. a week. A highly respectable reed hook maker— whose wife cried bitterly as she told me her story— *ia earning, with the aid of one of his boys, 7s. a week, which has to keep four of them, by dredging stones from the bed of the river. They had pawned all their clothes and much of their furniture before applying to the Relief Committee. I might go on for another column with cases of A similar character, but I have selected sufficient, I think, t© show the common destitution in which all classes of operatives here whatever, may have been their previous position, are now plunged. So far as it is possible to get an average of the measure of relief— poor relief and Relief Committee combined — I should say that it could not be more than Is. 6d. to la. Bd. per head; and in very many cases which came under my own observation it did not amount to that ; that is to say, the unemployed operatives and a large portion of those, on half time — on the most favourable representation of the state of things — are sustaining themselves and their families for about Is. 6d. per head per week, and many of them, as we have seen, far less. A very small, proportion of this is actual money ; for the relief committee relieve wholly in kind— bread, soup, and — and the guardians half in kind and half in money. But, whatever be the slender sum of ready money which fi,nds Its way into their pockets, they have to pay their rent out of it, varying according to tho locality, from la, 6d. to 35.. 6d., a week, or at least, they ought to pay.it, but the owners of cottage property, especially those who are softhearted, are amongst the severest sufferers by the crisis. I have heard of one owner who has already lost £400 in this way, and who is nowr losing regularly £20 a week by the inability of his tenants to pay their rents. As a general rule, I am glad . to say there has been unusual forbearance shown by landlords, though I have heard of several cases where the poor creatures have been ruthlessly thrust into the street as soon as they began to run into arrear. To. avoid this fate they will often pay the rent when they have not a morsel of food in the house, or will pawn their bedding, clothes, or furniture. With too many of them the season for these expedients is past. Most of their property is gone, the pawnbroker's shops are full, and one of the largest pawnbrokers in the town told me to-day that it is a fortnight at least since he had any pledge of this sort offered at his shop. The articles which are now finding their way to him are the stock in trade of the small shopkeepers who begin to feel the pressure of the times, and especially of the 3s*. rate which is now being levied with some threatenings of rigour. This is a class of the population very much to be pitied. Mo3t of those who depend on the factory operatives have suffered severelysome are not doing a quarter of their accustomed business, and a few are already, ruined altogether, I nay c been in two or three shops, which were really nothing but an array -of. empty cases— the mere ghosts of shops — no goods . for sale of any sort— and shopkeepers living like their customers, from the parish or the relief committee. In one shop I cleared out the last remnants of the stoak by purchasing, a , rijbdest parcel of local sweatmeats for the swarms of children in. the next court, and the .woman who served me said it was" the first sale she had made for three-weeks.'-- The children, by the. way, so far as I have seen, for the most part continue to look healthy ,-. though ia many cases the poorness of their 'food;- oj the long : continuance of me,al diet, have shown themselves in scorbutic diseases. ; They, are woraeofjf.in.th9 matter of clothing, "and many^l saw ßoving about with nothing more than a thin cotton dressy and; perhaps a petticoat, to coyer them.