Accessibility and Archives: “A genuine full length picture of humble mechanic life”
In this first post for the 2024 Disability History Month, Philip Milnes-Smith introduces the life of the weaver William Thom (1788-1848).
A recent paper by the historian David Turner has encouraged us to reject the idea of a binary between striving workers and disabled people as merely the recipients of others’ care. Regular readers of this blog should be familiar with the idea that stereotypes of disabled people simply being ‘unproductive mouths’ are wide of the mark, even if the work could often be at best underemployment, and perhaps demeaning or even exploitative. We have repeatedly seen a determination that disabled people be equipped with a trade to allow them to escape dependence – but also that disabled people were already working seemingly un-noticed.
William Thom acquired his disability (“a lameness of one leg”) at the age of seven having been “crushed under the wheel of a carriage.” This did not prevent him being apprenticed to the cotton weaving trade in Aberdeen and then earning a living that enabled him to support dependents, first his mother and then a wife and children. In his own words, the disablement “unfits me for work requiring extra personal strength”. He alludes to his employment of “little mechanical appliances of my own contriving” which empowered him to “subject the more laborious parts of my calling to the limits of my very stinted bodily power.”
However, in “the spring of 1837,… ‘certain American failures silenced in one week six thousand looms in Forfarshire’”). Thom’s subsequent unemployment – and roving the country to look for a new opportunity with his wife and small children – was a rolling tragedy of misery, starvation and despair that culminated in the death of one young daughter. After picking up factory work back in Aberdeen, he moved to Inverurie which was his residence when he wrote Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-loom Weaver. Ultimately, literary success brought him and his family to London where it was predicted he might enjoy “years of settled comfort and security”. Initial celebrity, however, did not convert into further opportunities to support the family with writing, and he attempted to set up in business as a linen merchant, which failed. A charitable donation from the Literary Fund Society enabled him to return home to Scotland and the loom but he was now “reduced in mind and body”. A correspondent to the Aberdeen Press and Journal noted, “For some time past he had been in delicate and declining health; and his diseased state of his body was doubtless aggravated by the uncertainty of his circumstances.” The noticeable difficulty he now had in speaking (“brief, broken, but thrilling accents”) may plausibly be related to the “consumption” which was noted in connection with his death.
His radical views, arising in part from his own life experience, can sometimes be glimpsed in his writings:
“[T]he world does not at all times know how unsafely it sits — when Despair has loosed Honour's last hold upon the heart — when transcendent Wretchedness lays weeping Reason in the dust — when every unsympathizing onlooker is deemed an enemy — who THEN can limit the consequences? For my own part, I confess that… I can never hear of an extraordinary criminal, without the wish to pierce through the mere judicial view of his career”.
A reviewer aligned this with Chartism (“the political code of starving men”), noting “He will not have written in vain, should he teach use to feel, when we hear of failing trade and silent manufactories and workshops, that there is much more in such misfortunes than the mere abstract depression of some national interest.”
In an 1845 speech in London at premises owned by the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People Thom recalled (to cheers) an activist past which had resulted in a 90-day custodial sentence “for the cause of reform” in connection with plans to break open the “well stored granary” of a “wealthy monopolist” who had hoped for future higher profits in a time of scarcity. A correspondent to The Examiner submitting a personal tribute to Thom, and a donation (from women and children) to the support of his widow and children, averred “the hard-working poor need more and other than charity… The suffering, imploring, almost despairing workers of our land want justice… let us not dare tell them their sufferings are inevitable.”
The title of this blog comes from a newspaper report about Thom. His life-story is imagined as representative not of disabled people but working-class people (many of whom also “struggled manfully with want and famine and sickness and death”). Thom’s life is an important reminder that disability history can be labour history.
Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.
By James Forbes - ArtUK, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78910209