The children rested one night at Nottingham in the warehouses of their new masters—the next day they were led out to see the castle, Mortimer-hole and other local curiosities, in the forest of Sherwood, which are so celebrated by bards of ancient times. Many shoes, bonnets, and many other articles of clothing having been lost upon the journey, others were supplied—but withal Blincoe found himself treated as a parish orphan, and he calculated on being received and treated as if he had been a gentleman’s son sent on a visit to the house of a friend or relative. By the concurring testimony of other persons who had been entrapped by similar artifices, it appears certain, that the _purveyors_ of infant labourers to supply the masters of cotton and silk factories with cheap labourers, adopted this vile, unmanly expedient, in most of their transactions. It will be seen, by the evidence of Sir Robert Peel, Baronet, David Owen, Esq. and other witnesses examined in 1816, that, when children were first wanted to attend machinery in cotton-factories, such was the aversion of parents and guardians to this noxious employment, that scarcely any would submit to consign their offspring to those mills, the owners of which, under the specious pretext of diminishing the burdens occasioned by poor-rates, prevailed on churchwardens and overseers, to put their infant paupers into their hands. Since then, by a gradual progress of poverty and depravity, in the county of Lancashire alone, there are some thousand fathers, mothers, and relatives, who live upon the produce of infant labour, though alloyed by the dreadful certainty, that their gain is acquired by the sacrifice of their children’s health and morals, and too frequently of their lives, whereby the fable of Saturn devouring his children, seems realised in modern times.
Lowdham Cotton-Mill, situated near a village of that name, stood ten miles distant from Nottingham, on the Surhill road; thither Robert Blincoe and his associates were conveyed the next day in carts, and it was rather late when they arrived. The mill, a large and lofty edifice, being surmounted by a cupola, Blincoe, at first, mistook for a church, which raised a laugh at his expense, and some jeering remarks, that he would soon know what sort of service was performed there. Another said, he did not doubt but the young cocknies would be very _regular_ in their _attendance_. When he came in view of the apprentice-house, which was half a mile distant from the mill, and was told that was _to be his home for fourteen years to come_, he was not greatly delighted, so closely did it resemble a workhouse. There was one source of consolation, however, remaining—it was not surrounded by lofty walls, nor secured by strong gates, as was the case at Pancras. When the first cart, in which was young Blincoe, drove up to the door, a number of villagers flocked round, some of whom exclaimed, “God help the poor wretches.”—“Eh!” said another, “what a fine collection of children, little do they know to what a life of slavery they are doomed.”—“The Lord have mercy upon them,” said a third.—“They’ll find little mercy here,” said a fourth. The speakers were mostly of the female sex, who, shaking their heads, said,—“Ah! what fine clear complexions!”—“The roses will soon be out of bloom in the mill.” Such were a part of the remarks which saluted the ears of these children, as they entered the Lowdham Mill. In common with his comrades, Blincoe was greatly dismayed, by the gloomy prognostications, which their guardians did all they could to check, or prevent the children from hearing, hurrying them, as rapidly as they could, inside the house.