Piecing together the poem (part 3)

by Becky Cherriman

Becky Moore and I felt it was important that our artwork, which was created for the Leeds 2023 Any Work That Wanted Doing exhibition in response to the stories of disabled mill workers, should evoke a sense of place. We wanted to conjure up the working mill, its atmosphere and conditions. Reading transcripts of oral stories of 20th Century mill workers[i] and looking at signs and machinery at Sunny Bank and Leeds Industrial Museum helped me to imagine the mill environment. In the poem I created as part of the piece, I attempted to convey the repetitiveness of the tasks and industrial machinery through a rhythm that is counterpoint to and, at times, interrupted by the workers’ distinctive voices. I wanted a sense of the roles to come across. June Pearce[ii] mentions the Percher who chalked up cloth in blue to show big mistakes on fabric for menders to deal with. This created such a vivid image that Becky and I decided to refer to it visually in the poem (pictured right).

Poets are always looking for the right form for their pieces. When we met with Rachel Moaby, she mentioned Bryony Pritchard’s brilliant sound and movement project, which drew inspiration from cloth designs and peg boards[iii]. I wondered if peg patterns could suggest a form for a concrete poem. A concrete poem is defined by the Poetry Foundation as verse that emphasizes non-linguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic[iv]. I explored various ways of responding to a peg pattern that we discovered in the Sunny Bank Mills archives. This translation from pattern to poem represented the biggest intellectual challenge of the project for me.

The pattern I chose was signified on point paper by marks that look like backslashes. It reminded me that contemporary poets often use forward slashes as a form of punctuation e.g., to mark line breaks. I thought backslashes could perform the same function while representing a slash back to the past, a shortcut as in web coding that simultaneously brings us back to the digital present.

The final poem then is a concrete poem inspired by a peg pattern but it is also a patchwork of mill workers’ voices (disabled and non-disabled) stitched together with my own. It simultaneously sits beside Becky Moore’s stitched patchwork of fabrics, ephemera, and quotes, while being part of the whole piece. 

Beside and part of the whole conjure up the nature of our collaborative process. Becky and I met at Union, The Northern School for Creativity & Activism having, for two decades, unknowingly lived parallel lives, beside one another, in arts and community in Leeds. Our shared experiences and values, interest in bringing together the voices of a community and desire to make something together meant that we soon had a proposal we were excited about. 

Alongside our research, we met and talked about current and historical social conditions for disabled workers, of our own experiences of chronic illness in and out of the workplace, of the need for social justice. As mentioned above, Becky also spoke about her family and friends’ experiences of textile work. The rich colours of these conversations would later seep into the poem. 

We sat side-by-side in Sunny Bank Mill, looking over archival materials, sharing some that we both found interesting like accident books and, separately, losing ourselves in other elements – Becky in dye recipes, me in the oral archives. 

I went away to work on the poem and Becky began gathering materials and stitching. She sent me photos of work in progress. I was struck by the colours of the patches, the roughness of the material, which would have been used in men’s suits and military uniforms, the photographs she had found. I wrote a draft of something, which I abandoned because it was too dismal, before beginning the final piece. At this stage we met and talked through our progress weekly. 

Once I had decided on the poem’s form, Becky needed to figure out how to incorporate this into the overall visuals of the piece and immediately identified that putting point paper in the background could help to achieve this (the original pattern was laid out on point paper). Achieving the exact layout was a bit trickier! 

In July, when I finally saw the work laid out on Becky’s bed, it reminded me that piece work done by mill workers sitting side-by-side can be stitched together to become one garment. 

There are numerous ways in which we could have approached creating this work, countless stories that could have been told from many different angles. We were aware that in attempting to encapsulate the history of disabled textile workers, there was a danger that the piece could feel disconnected from the present. Yet we feel that the stories of those we looked at tie strongly with those of workers today. 

Thanks to changes in labour laws over time, there are fewer industrial accidents in this country than there were in the 19th Century. However, 30% of the workforce are disabled and disabled people face even more challenges and inequalities within the workplace than non-disabled people[v]. 300,000 people a year in the UK are injured during manual handling incidents at work[vi]. The crookedness many British workers experience is now often associated with too much time spent at a desk typing on a keyboard or mental health problems related to work stress[vii]. Working classes across the world including people who make the clothes we wear in the Global North, are still shaped by unsafe and cruel working conditions[viii] and subject to the forces of  capitalism[ix].

The ephemera in Becky M’s patchwork includes contemporary testimony alongside historical accounts. I believe that the words of the workers included in the poem, in some cases hundreds of years old, resonate with situations working class people find themselves in today. For centuries, disabled people have been responsible for consciousness raising of these inequalities and resultant changes in the workplace. These change-makers include the so-called crowd of cripples[x], deputations of disabled factory children who brought petitions to parliament, and documents they informed like the Factory Commission. A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd a Factory Cripple was also influential[xi]. Written by disabled mill worker William Dodds about his own experiences, it stressed the financial implications of disablement and argued for compensation for workers. Blackie and Turner[xii] found that in discussing their experiences, these disabled workers helped to ensure shorter working hours and helped to formulate a different socio-cultural understanding of disability. 

My wildest hope is that this multi-art piece, and the other Any work that wanted doing commissions will continue this tradition of consciousness raising and that visitors to the exhibition will find solidarity within it.

With thanks to my artistic partner Becky Moore; curator Gill Crawshaw; Leeds 2023; writer support from Matthew Hedley Stoppard, Jessica Wright and Lynne Cade; Leeds Industrial Museum; Rachel Moaby; Sunny Bank Mills; and oral histories from June Pearce, Ronald Philip Teale, and David Pugh.

References

[i] Pearce, J., Teale, R. and Pugh, D. (2020). 360 Archive Film.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Art Fever (2015). Sunny Bank Mills Residency. [Online]. [Accessed 8.8.23]. Available from: http://artfever.org.uk/performance%20-%20sunny%20bank.html

[iv] Poetry Foundation. (2020). Concrete poetry. [online] Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/concrete-poetry

[v] Unison (2022). Manual handling | Health and safety. [online] UNISON National. Available at: https://www.unison.org.uk/get-help/knowledge/health-and-safety/manual-handling/#:~:text=Every%20year%2C%20300%2C000%20people%20in [Accessed 25 Jul. 2023].

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Health and Safety Executive (n.d.). Statistics - Work-related ill health and occupational disease. [online] www.hse.gov.uk. Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/#:~:text=type%2C%202021%2F22-   [Accessed 25 Jul. 2023].

[viii] Nguyen, L. (2022). The Danger of Sweatshops. [online] Earth.org. Available at: https://earth.org/sweatshops/#:~:text=Workers%20in%20the%20garment%20industry 

[ix] Jess, R. (2022). They Look Down on Us. [online] They Look Down On Us. Available at: http://classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/they-look-down-on-us 

[x] Engels, F. (1971). The condition of the working class in England : Transl. and ed. by W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner. Oxford: Blackwell.

[xi] Simkin, J. (2020). William Dodd. [online] Spartacus Educational. Available at: https://spartacus-educational.com/IRdodd.htm 

[xii] Turner, D.M. and Blackie, D. (2022). Disability and political activism in industrialising Britain, c. 1830–1850. Social History, 47(2), pp.117–140. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2044202.