Mixed Media: The Mill (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Channel Four drama The Mill set at the time of the 1833 Factory Act in the Quarry Bank cotton mill owned by the Greg family near Manchester is reminiscent of chapter ten The Working Day in Marx’s Capital: ‘there followed on the birth of machinism and modern industry a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night, were broken down’.

In The Mill  the employers are called ‘masters’, and the workers in The Mill are child apprentices who are indentured ‘property of Greg and Sons until 21, food, lodgings, work provided’ and the employers explain that ‘children toil in a mill rather than starve by the roadside’ or live in the Workhouse, ‘bastilles of the proletariat’ (Marx).  The children wake at 6am, finishing work at 8pm, completing a 12 hour working day, and are locked in their dormitories at night leading one visitor to question ‘is this a factory or a prison?’ to which the Gregs reply ‘for apprentices it is home’. The Greg family oppose improvements to workers’ conditions by citing William Senior, the bourgeois economist who argued that the last hour of work produced the profits for the capitalist ‘the whole net profit is derived from the last hour‘  known as Senior’s last hour.

Marx wrote ‘The House of Terror… realised a few years later in the shape of a gigantic Workhouse for the industrial worker… called the Factory.’  The Mill is set at the time when ‘the working-class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, recovered, in some measure, its senses, its resistance began’. The Mill includes an account of  John Doherty, Irish trade unionist active in the Ten Hours Movement and who with Robert Owen established the Society for Promoting National Regeneration. Doherty published the story of Robert Blincoe, a  former child labourer which is changed to the character of Esther Price in The Mill. A mass meeting of 100,000 workers at Wibsey Moor in Yorkshire as part of the Ten Hour Bill movement is also dramatised. The 1833 Factory Act was a Whig compromise which did not achieve the 10 hours working day and children aged 13 to 18 could still work a maximum of 12 hours.

The Mill is a breath of TV fresh air with its portrayal of working class struggles in capitalism in contrast to the bourgeois class drama of Downton Abbey.

Steve Clayton