The Mill & Mr Lowry.

The following story on the Launceston woollen mill  was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

On January 8 2024 I watched the movie Mrs Lowry and Son. The images of the industrial landscapes and the mill  workers  portrayed by artist L. S. Lowry prompted me to revisit the article.  Now here is something extraordinary.  I actually posted the revamped  article to a history group while I was sitting in a cafe at Blackheath, here in the NSW Blue Mountains. From there I walked over to our village’s big antiques centre. Just inside the door was a new item. I could hardly believe what I was seeing; a bobbin from the Launceston mill in my story. I am the most pragmatic person imaginable, but how very odd! The note with the bobbin explained that Launceston was chosen as the location for the mill because it had a good supply of soft water.

Anyway, here is the story. 😊

In a radio survey that set out to find Australia’s worst job, removing chicken innards on a production line won hands down….or rather hands in. Factory work in general featured high on the list; deservedly so in my opinion. 😨

In the early 1970s I spent several months working at  Coats Patons  (Patons & Baldwins)  Woollen Mill, in Launceston (Tasmania). I was planning a working holiday in England, and had a romantic notion that I might find employment in the mills of Lancashire, like the singer Gracie Fields.  To be honest, I was lucky to be taken on.  I had  only ever worked in an office, and the personnel manager looked at my resume with disdain.  Only when I told him I’d grown up on a farm and  had been a champion bean picker did he agree to give me a go.

I was allocated to the warehouse (a special favour, he told me).  I naively imagined this to be a vast, quiet area where I would register dye lots and batch numbers; singing all the while. In reality it was a factory floor, filled with dust and banks of shuddering  spinning machines. The noise was incredible.

My job at the mill was to whip eight skeins of wool off metal spindles every thirty seconds or so.  I had  to check for knots, band the good ones,  then thrust them  across the table to be packed in cellophane  bags and boxed ready for the nation’s knitters. By this time another lot of skeins would be ready.  Oh my hat!  It was definitely nothing like office work…..or even bean picking. The whole process can be seen in the photograph below, though it conveys little sense of  our  frenzied activity.  This image dates from the nineteen sixties, but  it was exactly the same a decade later. In fact I think that’s ‘my’ table. 

After a brief training stint I joined a team; three ‘old hands’ who looked at me with even more horror than the personnel chap.  Greenhorns were considered a  complete pain in the ars…..neck!

A piecework system operated, so naturally  a slow worker reduced the  pay of everyone on the table. Someone told me that impatient  team leaders were known to restart the machines  before all fingers were clear of the spindles. Descriptions of mutilations were graphic…. OMG!!  Could it be true?

That first day we were loaded up with bright orange 8-ply. The colour is burned into my brain.   In my frantic haste to snatch off  the skeins, I committed the cardinal sin of leaving a ball on. It took the mechanic  an hour to repair the damage and two weeks for my table mates to forgive me.  I tried hard to make amends, but it was almost beyond me. Balls of glue-spattered, unbanded wool often formed towers in front of my gazed eyes.  Once I actually dipped a ball of wool into my glue pot and tried  to wrap it around a paper band . I got into trouble for putting the wretched  bands on crooked, or inside out. The supervisor told me that my glue pot was a disgrace. I’m afraid she was right.

But do you know what?  One day I sort of got the hang of things.  My little gang  began to fill  our daily  quota and we  even earned decent bonuses.  I soon made friends with everyone  over cigarettes and  fish’n’chip lunches in the subsidized cafeteria. If there was any other dish  on the menu I don’t remember it. I was boarding nearby in a tiny room with only a toaster and a kettle, so my diet must have been awful.

Away from the intolerable noise  there was nonstop chatter.  We joked about  the person who  arrived early on her first day and was shown how to ‘bundy on’.  Assuming this was to be her  job she proceeded to bundy-on  another fifty employees.  Then there was the newly arrived migrant  who called ‘FIRE!’  when the morning tea siren sounded. Everyone ended up outside, including the tea lady, who had abandoned her trolley.

Most of my workmates (all women) were saving up to get married or supplementing their family income.   No-one was  the slightest bit envious of my plans to travel overseas. They  thought I was mad,  sure to miss my chance in life and  end up a unfulfilled spinster.

Sometimes I was released from glue pot duty and allowed to bag the skeins and fill the  cardboard boxes. This was dangerously easy, and I tended to daydream about my big trip.  I split a good many cellophane packets, which I  had to hide  in my pockets. I was reminded of  the famous Lucille Ball  chocolate factory skit.

There was one great ‘perk’ at the mill.  Workers could buy high quality Totem brand  wool  for 10 cents a ball. My only problem was that I was a very low grade  knitter. My dear sisters-in-law took pity on me and did all the hard bits. I think being left-handed caused me an extra problem because the most basic pattern came out looking  slightly odd under my needles.

Early the following year I  sailed off to the UK with my new, unique  jumpers. I never did work in a Lancashire  mill, but it was comforting to know that I could probably manage alright  if I  had to. 😎

In later years my partner Rob  and I had a holiday home in the UK. We spent some time in Lancashire, and one night we watched a textile mill burn to the ground. It’s odd how just four months working at Patons & Baldwins all those years earlier had remained in my consciousness.   Watching the fire was a profound experience.

The mill ablaze!

Rob and I both fell in love with the work of the gentle genius L S. Lowry (1887 – 1976). What a connection I felt with his most famous work; Coming  From the Mill.

Of course, this is why;

Patons  & Baldwins – Coming  from the mill.

One day on our travels  I spotted a skipping rope with handles  made from wooden spindles.  I bought as a tribute to Gracie Field’s friends and  neighbours; those who were unable to escape their fate by singing.   Here is little skipping rhyme, once recited by 12  or 13 year old workers during their dinner breaks. It’s heartbreaking to think they were still children,  delighting in  play;

1,2,3, mother caught a flea,

She put it in teapot and made a cup of tea.

The flea jumped out, mother gave a shout,

In came a Bobby with his shirt hanging out.

I sometimes think  every Australian should be conscripted into a factory for a six month stint on a production line.  It would be a wonderful exercise in character building. Of course it would have to be done on a ballot system, with the unluckiest souls drawing marbles marked….CHICKEN INNARDS.

So much worse than wool!

FOOTNOTE…… Having opened in 1922,  Patons & Baldwins, by now known as Coats Patons,  closed its doors in 1997 when the company moved operations to New Zealand. The premises are now used as a vast storage facility.

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