Trouble At Mill!
the radical world of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth
On Saturday 8th November we held an immersive spoken-word and song spectacular at Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Burnley, celebrating Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and our new graphic novel adaptation of her radical story This Slavery.
The enormous and graceful engine, Peace, was in full steam and the sold-out audience had plenty of opportunity to have a close look at her. We designed and constructed a brand new exhibition about the life and work of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, made in collaboration with PhD candidate Jenny Harper and Dr Nicola Wilson from Reading University. It included a life-size recreation of the Martin’s family kitchen from This Slavery, so people could sit inside the book and feel what it was like to live and work in a 1910s mill town. The exhibition will be staying up at Queen Street Mill for the winter so you can still go and enjoy it.
There were two promenade theatre performances in the afternoon, each begun with a flash-mob style song from the East Lancashire Clarion Choir and a welcome from Jules Gibb of the Pendle Radicals. Visitors were encouraged to delve into the dressing up box and don a cap or a shawl, and grab a protest banner, before they began their journey through the incredible rooms of the world’s only remaining steam-powered cotton mill.
The audience were stunned and awed by Jennifer Reid‘s powerful and moving Wayvin Mewsic, sung a-cappella from their midst into the eerie heights of the tape size room. Then, from the top of the stairs, an angry and impassioned young woman appeared — Kitty Levi of Burnley Youth Theatre — who delivered a thunderous and challenging monologue inspired by Rachel’s speeches from This Slavery. “I get sick of your sort,” she told them, “You’ll work till you drop, you’ll rot without even smashing a window. You’ll starve and then shake a clean tablecloth to con your neighbour you’ve ate.” Having been challenged to demand more from life, the audience walked through the mill to the distant sound of weaving looms, arriving in the warehouse to be greeted by the East Lancashire Clarion Choir singing The Weaving Shed, and then Life – a song co-written by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth herself.
Jennifer Reid then struck up the poignant Our Poor Little Factory Girls as she led the audience into the dispatch room, where they found Áine Salha of Burnley Youth Theatre, who demanded of the audience “Do you mean to destroy capitalism at all?” Her monologue, accompanied by animated art from the book, included a complex and masterful calculation of the compound ways in which each weaver laboured to feed not themselves but the monsters of capitalism and empire. The imagery laid the ground for the finalé in the next room – the enormous weaving shed, containing a forest of 300 Lancashire looms and (for that day only) shrouded in the eerie mists of time.
From the very back of the massive shed came a low murmur – the beginnings of a specially commissioned song by Boff Whalley and Commoners Choir, entitled This Slavery. There was barely a dry eye as the 60-strong choir processed slowly towards the audience, with the song building alongside the sound of the clattering looms. Lighting effects highlighted the fiery mood of the singers, as they sang
Tired and broken, bruised and scarred
Clothed this Empire yard by yard
Live like animals, work like slaves
End our days in a pauper’s grave
Is that a fire on the horizon –
Or a new dawn breaking on the world?
And with a rousing round of the song Unity from both choirs, the audience were delivered back into the mill café for traditional ‘Lancashire canapés’ (cheeses, chutneys, pies and parkin) and a selection of Mr Fitzpatrick’s temperance drinks.
Thank you to everyone who took part, our amazing hosts Queen Street Mill Textile Museum, and to our funders: Arts Council England, Mid Pennine Arts and the University of Reading Centre for Books and Publishing Cultures. These photographs are by Caroline Eccles of Huckleberrry Films. 
