"I'm only a poor hard-working factory girl..."
The
Factory Girl is a traditional song which is known all over Britain. There are
English, Scottish and Irish versions which are all very, very similar. Some
people claim that it is an Irish song – but then there are some people who
claim that any good song must be Irish!
I once had a conversation with a very well
educated Romanian woman in London; I had been singing my songs and she asked me
“Are they Irish?” “No,” I said “they are English.” “But there aren't any
English folk songs” she said. When I assured her that there are she wondered how
come she had lived in London for 10 years and never heard of English folk songs
before, although she was aware of Irish ones!
If
you click here you will find my version of THE FACTORY GIRLand then you’ll
know what I’m talking about!
The idea of the Gentleman, or Nobleman,
wandering through the countryside and meeting a beautiful young country girl is
widespread in song and literature from the Georgian period onwards.
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| Belper North and East Mills |
In early
songs she’s usually a milkmaid but with industrialisation she became ’the
factory girl’. Sometimes he falls in
love and marries her, sometimes he just seduces her and goes on
his way. In this song I believe he has really fallen for her but she is an
independent, modern woman and will have none of it - “My friends and my
comrades they would all frown upon it...” so he is left to wander, broken
hearted, through “high hills and valleys where no man will know me...”
I've
known the song The Factory Girl for a long time. I recorded it on an LP –
Punk's Delight – back in 1984 but I don't particularly like that version. It
has a big, lush backing – fiddle, viola, whistles etc – there is some smashing
playing and it's a good arrangement but it's all too pretty. I much prefer it
unadorned like this where the message can come through.
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| The Chevin from my bedroom window |
I live in Belper, in Derbyshire and one of my
favourite walks – in fact one of my favourite places in the world – is North
Lane on The Chevin. North Lane is claimed by some historians to be a Roman
road. I don't doubt that the Romans used it to take lead from Wirksworth to
Chester Green but I think it's an older route, one of those which has been used
for ever. In more recent times it was used as a drove road and also a coach
road to avoid the swampy River Derwent valley. Now it is a very well used footpath.
It can get quite busy on a summer Sunday afternoon and you are likely to meet
everyone you know! It’s even better though, in the winter when you can walk the
whole way without meeting a soul. Then it is very atmospheric and you can feel
the history.
(Chevin
is the Belper version of the old Brittonic word Cefyn, which still exists in
Welsh, meaning a wooded ridge, so the name has been around since pre-Roman
times.)
The walk up to, or down from, the Chevin to
Belper and its famous mill is illustrated in the video of this song—click the
link above if you haven’t already!
Whenever I go there I find myself singing the Factory Girl. It's very
apt because generations of factory girls probably walked that path from Farnah
Green and other villages west of Belper to go to work in the mills.
Belper
is the central point of the Derwent Valley World Heritage Site which stretches
from the Silk Mill in Derby to Masson Mill in Matlock Bath. It can claim to be
the place where the Industrial Revolution started. (Other places such as
Ironbridge make the same claim, of course!) Cromford Mill is where
the factory system was perfected. Richard Arkwright's mill there was the first
one to use water powered machinery and to employ a large workforce for which he
built a village – to turn a manu (hand) - factury into a machine factory. World Heritage Site
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| Long Row. Built in the 1790s |
The
Belper mills, about 10 miles south down the Derwent, were founded by Jedediah
Strutt, a friend and business associate of Arkwright, and he refined the system
by introducing all kinds of inventions such as fireproof mills and metal framing
which later made skyscrapers possible. The Strutt dynasty went on to completely
reshape Belper which had previously been a tiny, unimportant hamlet best known
for nail making. At one time the Strutt’s factory site of 4 mills was the
largest industrial site owned by one company in Europe! As well as the mills
they built schools, churches, a chapel, a swimming baths... gave land for parks
and were generally benefactors for the whole town. The housing they built for
their workers was well built and is still much sought after. I live in one of
their last houses built in 1912, the same as the East Mill. The Strutts were
not entirely without vices however, they had their foibles. For instance
there's a nice little footpath which cuts off a corner on the main Ashbourne
Road but it was solely for Strutt use. If anyone else used it there were
serious punishments such as losing your job! And you could be fined for
whistling or spitting. It was best to keep in with them.
So
although the song is a nationally found one I often include it in sets of local
material because it fits so well.
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