Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/115

18, 1863.] town generally, for our time is short, we will, if you please, press forward to our manufactory.

Passing through the entrance and down a flight of steps, we find ourselves in a courtyard, surrounded by some thirty or forty smithies, roaring and ringing in chorus, and peopled with workmen, stripped and grimy. We enter one. Its occupants are a “maker” and a “striker,” the former being the skilled artisan who fashions the work, the latter being the labourer who submits brute strength to the better guidance of his companion. A long strip of steel passed over a chisel, stuck end up in the anvil, is smitten at a given signal by the striker, who wields a huge hammer, and at every blow, a piece of steel the length of a pocket-knife blade falls into a bowl placed for its reception. And then the bellows are blown, and the sparks and the dust hiss up, and the pieces of steel are thrust into the fire; and, while the striker blows, the maker with his pincers turns the pieces over and over, thrusts them further in, draws them nearer out, and dredges them with sand to intensify the heat, until at length they are ready for forging. That point reached, the striker leaves the bellows, and the maker brings one of the pieces to the anvil; and while the latter turns it over and over, and deals it skilful little blows with a small hammer, the former, armed again with his great “sledge,” comes down upon it with heavy blows, that smash out sparks in all directions. In an incredibly short time the piece of steel assumes a shape somewhat resembling a knife-blade, and being now too cold to yield longer to the hammer, it is again thrust into the fire. One by one the remaining pieces are similarly treated, and that done, they are all drawn out again, to be jammed by a blow from the striker into a mould which completely shapes the whole blade. And so the work goes on—a continual round of heating and re-heating, and turning over and over, and tapping and striking, until the back of the blade is thick, the edge thin, the nick for the thumbnail cut, and the trade-mark stamped. That done, the blade, which has now become soft as iron, is hardened by being thrust red hot into water as often as necessary, and is then ready for the grinder.

Passing on through the ranges of smithies to the grinding shop, and peeping through the open windows on our way, we find one pair of smiths forging scissors, another razors, another files, another forks, and others other articles of cutlery; but as the processes are similar to the one we have witnessed, we need not linger to inspect them. So on we go, over the great boilers, through the engine house, up this pair of stairs and down that, until we come to an aristocratic looking smithy, where there is quite a little colony of comparatively clean workmen. Stopping for a few moments here, we find it is the file-cutting shop. What a marvellous educator practice is! There stand these men, each with an embryo file before him, and each with a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other; and from morning till night they keep up a ceaseless bewildering “tap, tap, tap,” cutting the “teeth” of their files with a rapidity and precision that know neither pause nor error. There are the lines, every one parallel to the rest, and all of the same width and depth, and yet they were cut at the rate of a hundred and sixty a minute, the workman’s hand and eye being his only guides to accuracy. Look at the file in my knife, cut on both sides and on both edges. There is a man cutting one like it. He began a minute since; he will finish a minute hence.

But we must pass on, for there is a great deal to see yet and time runs short. Hurrying through shop after shop—one filled with workmen, another with workwomen, all resounding with the busy hum of labour, we at length descend into another courtyard surrounded by ranges of shopping whose windows and walls are bespattered with yellow mud flung off the grinding stones that are whirling madly round inside, amidst a steam-driven labyrinth of bands and a grating, grinding, hissing whiz that fairly sets one’s teeth on edge. Entering, we find grindstones and polishing wheels of all sorts and sizes, and behind each a workman bending closely over his work. Some are engaged in “wet-grinding,” and some in “dry-grinding.” The grindstones of the former dip as they revolve, in shallow troughs of water, and bespatter the grinder with yellow mud ; the grindstones of the latter, dipping in no water, fling off a cloud of mingled steel and stone dust, which being drawn off into a large tube, passes away into the courtyard without. It was not always thus. Not many years ago the dry-grinder, whose services are mostly required in the grinding of forks, received that dust into his lungs, and there it settled and grew in bulk until it surely brought about his early death. Even now, I am sorry to say, the evil has not wholly been overcome, but what with air tubes and respirators, the dry-grinder’s life has been much prolonged. Let us hope that in course of time a perfect remedy may be devised, for human life is a heavy price to pay for forks. But the “Grinder’s Asthma” is not the only danger to which these men subject themselves in the earning of their daily bread. It not unfrequently happens that one of the great stones is whirled asunder, and its huge fragments flung in all directions. In the roof of the very building in which we now stand, there is a great hole, rent, as we are told, by the passage of a grinding stone so broken; and while three persons lie at the Infirmary with broken limbs in consequence, the body of a fourth lies in the adjoining shed awaiting the coroner’s inquest. But with that strange disregard of evil contigenciescontingencies [sic] characterising all engaged in dangerous occupations, the survivors work on as calmly as if nothing had happened. One here is grinding his knives, another there his forks; a third is busy upon his razors, and a fourth upon his scissors. But what is going on amidst all that cloud of white dust at the far end of the room yonder ? Passing into the midst of it, we find a saw-mill in miniature, and half-a-dozen miller-like workmen reducing, by its agency, great horns, and bones, and pearl-shells to knife-handles in the rough, which, being passed on to the grinders, are ground into shape, and afterwards polished on the leather-bound wooden polishing wheels. It is astonishing to see what is effected by this gradation of wheels. The article to be ground and polished is passed over wheel