THE BURNING OF THE ALBION MILLS
The Albion Mills, the first great factory in London, formerly stood on the
east side of Blackfriars Road, on the approach to Blackfriars Bridge. They
were steam-powered mills, established in 1786 by Matthew Boulton & James
Watt, featuring one of the first uses of Watt’s steam engines to drive
machinery, and were designed by pioneering engineer John Rennie (who later
built nearby London Bridge). Grinding 10 bushels of wheat per hour, by 20
pairs of 150 horsepower millstones, the Mills were the ‘Industrial wonder’
of the time, quickly becoming a fashionable sight of the London scene…
Erasmus Darwin called them “the most powerful machines in the world.”
But if the trendy middle and upper classes liked to drive to Blackfriars in
their coaches and gawp at the new industrial age being born, other, harder
eyes saw Albion Mills in different light. They were widely resented, especially
by local millers and millworkers...
At one time the Thames bank at Lambeth was littered with windmills –
eventually they were all put out of business by steam power. When the Albion
opened London millers feared ruin.
Steam was one of the major driving forces of industrialization and the growth
of capitalism. The spectre of mechanization, of labour being herded together
in larger and larger factories, was beginning to bite. Already artisan and
skilled trades were starting to decline, agricultural workers were being forced
into cities to find work, dispossessed from the countryside by enclosure and
farm machinery… Many of those who had not yet felt the hand of factory
production driving down wages, deskilling, alienating and shortening the lifespan,
could read the writing on the wall.
Mills & millers were often the focus of popular anger. Not only were they
widely believed to practice forms of adulteration, adding all sorts of rubbish
to flour to increase profits (Significantly in many folk and fairy tales the
miller is often a greedy cheating baddie), but at times of high wheat prices
and thus, (since bread was the main diet of the poor) widespread hunger, bakers
and millers would be the target of rioters, often accused along with farmers
and landowners of hoarding to jack up prices. Bread riots could involve the
whole community, though they were often led by women. Rioters would often
seize bread and force bakers to it at a price they thought fair, or a long-established
price; this was the strongest example of the so-called ‘moral economy’
(discussed by EP Thompson and other radical
historians) a set of economic and social practices based in a popular view
of how certain basic needs ought to be fairly and cheaply available.
The idea of a moral economy was one that crossed class boundaries, a reflection
of the paternalist society, where all knew their place, but all classes had
responsibilities and there were certain given rights to survival. But this
moral economy, such as it was, was bound up with pre-capitalist society -
which were being superseded by the growth of
capitalism, of social relations based solely on profit and wage labour...
“DARK
SATANIC MILLS”
Cockney
revolutionary visionary William Blake, an artisan himself, felt and expressed
the powerful mistrust of the
growing changes. He lived in nearby Lambeth, and it’s thought that Albion
could have inspired his references to “dark Satanic mills”.
The name Albion may have set Blake off, as Albion as a symbolic name for an
idealised England, played an important part in his radical spiritual mythology.
Blake was in the 1790s a political radical, like many artisans, inspired by
the French Revolution; he also strongly opposed the rational mechanical Industrial
Revolution and set up a mystical creative spirituality against it.
Blake took the traditional mistrust of the symbolic figure of the Miller several
steps further: in ‘Milton’ he described Satan as the “Miller
of Eternity”, whose mills represent the cold inhuman power of intellect,
grinding down and destroying the imagination.
“all sorts of base mixtures”
Dark
rumors were spread locally about the Albion Works: “The millers,
themselves best aware of what roguery might be practiced in their own trade,
spread abroad reports that the flour was adulterated with all sorts of base
mixtures.” (Robert Southey)
Powerful watermill owners had attempted to prevent Albion being opened: they
had managed to deter venture capitalists in the City from investing in the
building, but Watt and Boulton had found the money themselves. In 1791, after
a shaky start, the Mills looked like they were hitting profitability...
“Success to the mills of ALBION but NO Albion Mills.”
On 2 March 1791 Albion Mills burned down. The cause was never officially discovered,
but it was widely believed to be arson by local millers or millworkers, feeling
their livelihood was under threat. It was reported that “the main
cock of the water cistern was fastened, the hour of low tide was chosen”
when the fire started...
(Although the fire could have been accidental: there had been some concerns
about safety, and mills were prone to fire, with sparks and friction caused
by grinding, and all that dust, chaff and flour about…)
“The fire broke out during the night, a strong breeze was blowing
from the east, and the parched corn fell in a black shower above a league
distant: even fragments of wood still burning fell above Westminster Bridge.”
The interior of the mills was totally destroyed in half an hour, the roof
crashing in quickly. The fire could be seen for miles: burning grains and
sparks blew all over the City and Westminster.
A huge crowd gathered and made no effort to save the Mills, but stood around
watching in grim satisfaction! “The mob, who on all such occasions
bestir themselves to extinguish a fire with that ready and disinterested activity
which characterizes the English, stood by now as willing spectators of the
conflagration...” (Southey)
Later in the day locals & mill workers danced around the flames &
“and before the engines had ceased to play upon the smoking ruins, ballads
of rejoicing were printed and sung on the spot” (Southey). Millers waved
placards which read “Success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion
Mills.”
After a soldier and a constable got into a row, a fight broke out, leading
to a mini-riot; but firemen turned their hoses on crowd (early water cannon!)
“…it was supposedly maliciously burnt, and it is certain the
mob stood and enjoyed the conflagration… Palace Yard and part of St
James Park were covered in half burnt grains..” (Horace Walpole)
A flood of speedily printed ballads, lampoons, prints and broadsheets celebrated
the burning:
“And now the folks begin to shout,
Hear the rumours they did this and that.
But very few did sorrow show
That the Albion Mills were burnt so low.
Says one they had it in their power,
For to reduce the price of flour,
Instead of letting the bread raise,
But now the Mills are all in a blaze,
In lighters there was saved wheat,
But scorched and scarcely fit to eat.
Some Hundred Hogs served different ways
While Albion Mills were in a blaze.
Now God bless us one and all,
And send the price of bread may fall.
That the poor with plenty may abound,
Tho’ the Albion Mills burnt to the ground.”
(Extract from a popular song, published March 10th 1791)
“...maliciously burnt...?”
Was it arson? The Mills stood in Blackfriars, an area together with neighbouring
Southwark long notorious for its rebellious poor and for artisan and early
working class political organization. Just as the Luddites, stockingers of
the North & Midlands were soon to smash machinery that threatened their
livelihoods, did workers displaced orfearing displacement by the Mills take
matters into their own hands? 18th Century London workers undercut by the
new industrial processes did destroy the machines taking their jobs…
In Limehouse in 1768, Dingley’s Steam-powered Sawmill was burnt down
by 500 sawyers put out of work. Sawyers had many privileges and scams they
could pull, to use wood (especially for shipbuilding) which allowed them to
gather valuable offcuts, & good wages; the steam mill threatened to do
away with all these perks, which often made the difference between bare subsistence
and a living wage. The arson was effective: a generation passed before another
such attempt to replace sawyers’ labour was made in London. (Interestingly,
Sawmill owner Dingley had been populist demagogue John Wilkes’ unpopular
opponent in the notorious Middlesex by-election: he couldn’t even get
near the hustings some days for huge ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ crowds,
and was beaten up by Wilkes’ lawyer. He is said to have died of shame
at being so vilified. Aaaah.) Around the same time Spitalfields silkweavers
were also fighting a heavy fight against mechanisation and wage cuts, smashing
machinery and intimidating masters and workers undercutting the agreed rate.
It’s also possible that disgruntled small millowners were behind the
burning. Although Albion had not entirely replaced local water-powered mills,
it had caused disruptions in the price of wheat, which may have hit small
mills’ profits.
Albion Mills remained a derelict burned out shell until 1809, when it was
pulled down. Most of the Steam-powered flour mills subsequently built in London
were much smaller. Whether or not it was arson, whether it was the millers
or millworkers who burned it, the fire was long remembered and celebrated
locally. Rightly or wrongly, in popular tradition, and maybe in the rhymes
of Blake, the Mill stands as a symbol of the disruption and disaffection caused
by industrialisation, but also of the powerful if ultimately defeated (thus
far) resistance to the march of capitalism.
GB, October 2006
SOME SOURCES/useful reading
• William Blake, Milton, A Poem in Two Books (1804)
• Broadsheet with a popular song celebrating the Burning of the Mills,
Published March 1791, by C. Sheppard
• Robert Southey, Excursion To Greenwich, in his Letters
from England, 1802-3.
• E.P. Thompson: Customs in Common, especially Chapter 4, The
Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century.
• George Rude, Wilkes and Liberty. (Useful on Dingley’s Sawmill.)
www.icons.org.uk/theicons/collection/jerusalem
www.lostindustry.org.uk/walkblackfriars.htm#Albion
www.history.rochester.edu/steam/lord
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