BooksBarbecue
Back Sisters of Gold Save as PDF
Chapters (64)
  1. Cover
  2. Title page
  3. Dedication page
  4. A Week’s Work in Birmingham
  5. I
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. II
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. Thirty-Nine
  46. III
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Forty-Three
  51. Forty-Four
  52. Forty-Five
  53. Forty-Six
  54. Forty-Seven
  55. Forty-Eight
  56. Forty-Nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-One
  59. Fifty-Two
  60. Fifty-Three
  61. Acknowledgements
  62. Further Reading
  63. About the Author
  64. By the Same Author

As she lay in bed that night she tried to train her thoughts away from him, from the excitement that had risen in her body when he came close to her. He gave off a feeling of pent-up desire that became more and more unmistakeable . . .

Blushing with shame, she forced her mind to pray . . . If she did not, she knew where her thoughts would go, their steps taking her across the yard behind the church that evening, into the darkness which followed.

Fifteen

Fifteen

Each morning, Annie made sure that she clocked in at the works bang on time and was seated at her press ready for the bell to ring.

She was getting used to the hours of work, which in the beginning had felt like an eternity. For the first days she had gone home with pains in her back and neck, her fingers cut to ribbons. And her wages were always less than she expected. She was not as fast as the others yet and there were so many stoppages – for her overall; for the Sick Club; a penny for once not getting back inside on time when work began again at two o’clock; another penny, the first week, for wastage, which evidently went into the ‘Waste Fund’ to be divided up at Christmas.

There was a lot to learn. Firstly, to add to the exhaustion, she discovered that all the obligatory cleaning of their presses and workplaces was to be done on Saturday mornings. She was beginning to feel as if she lived her whole life at Masters and Hogg.

Gradually she came to understand how the factory worked. The room where they pressed out blanks for pen nibs was one of many. Whenever the bell rang and they knocked off work, women came streaming out of a host of similar rooms where they worked at presses designed for the many processes it took to produce a finished pen nib.

There were presses for stamping a pattern on to each nib, for piercing a tiny hole in each to let the air through, for raising them into a curved shape, for splitting each nib at the tip. In another room, she saw long straps with wheels high up by the ceiling, the straps turning hour after hour, working machines which ground the nibs smooth. She learned, with increasing amazement, that on the lower floors, as well as the rollers for making the steel strips for her blanks, were ovens for annealing – or heat treatment – of the metal in ‘muffles’ before drenching them first in oil, followed by a bath of vitriol. Later the nibs were ‘barrelled’ – turned in large barrels with a grinding powder to smooth them. In yet another room some of them were coated with lacquer, bright silver or gold – and all to produce box upon box full of thousands of the fragile nibs in varying colours, which were then sold all over the world.