Vernon Mills, Stockport: 1902 Serious Fire

Note: This is a sub-section of Vernon Mills, Stockport

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1902 Serious Fire

David Hulme is a retired journalist who while building his family tree decided to investigate the death of his great grandfather in a mill fire in 1902. What he found was a careless attitude to safety and a willingness to place blame anywhere but at the door of the mill company itself. Ten men died – and were even blamed for staying behind to fight the fire. This is David’s story:

My great grandfather, Isaac Peet, was a mill hand in one of Stockport's newest cotton mills, the Vernon mills, a complex of three buildings near to the River Goyt in the Portwood area of the town.

Just before 4pm on November 5, 1902, a fire broke out in a mule – a cotton spinning machine up to 150 feet long and moving forwards and backwards up to four times a minute.

The machine was on the third floor of the central mill building, the oldest of the three. Friction in the moving mechanism had caused sparks which quickly caused a fire to spread throughout the room.

Women and girls began to escape, screaming in fear as they ran, while the men stayed behind to fight the fire. Whether they’d been trained to fight fires was shrouded in doubt. But their equipment was rudimentary by today's standards - portable fire extinguishers known as fire kings or queens, plus buckets. It was the practice, apparently, to fight a fire and to only give the alarm when the flames had become uncontrollable.

As the flames spread from the No. 1 spinning room, the men were forced into the upper storeys of the five-storey building, unable to descend the staircases because of heat and smoke. The exterior fire escape had been removed when internal staircases had been built at both ends of the building during extension work. The architect who designed the mill complex, Edward Potts, was later to tell a coroner's inquest that the internal staircases were an improvement on the exterior staircase, where escaping men could have been engulfed in flames blown towards them by the wind. But a mill worker also told the inquest that all the men would have escaped if the outside stair escape had still been in place.

As crowds gathered in the street below, the fire brigade arrived with a newly-acquired sixty foot horse-drawn ladder which was raised towards the upper windows where the trapped mill workers could be seen. It took two attempts to get the ladder to the right height. A police fireman, John Balfour Graham, climbed to the top of the ladder to help around 26 men escape from the fifth storey windows, some of them climbing down his body as he clung to the top of the ladder with his legs. He was later to be awarded a silver medal for bravery from the Society for the Protection of Life from Fire.

Up to thirty workers were taken to Stockport Infirmary with burns, cuts and other injuries. A nearby doctor’s surgery where some of the injured had been taken first was described as being “like a slaughterhouse.” One injured boy simply asked to be left to die because he was in so much agony.

Nine men, including Isaac Peet, died in the fire or its immediate aftermath, with a tenth man dying several years later from his injuries. Isaac had been spotted breaking a window and then climbing onto the window ledge. He was helped down the ladder but died from his burns in hospital. His wife, Eliza, stayed with him during the three days it took him to die, and she was then taken home seriously ill with stress. She had eight children to care for, the youngest of whom was my grandfather, James, who lost his father a month before his fourth birthday.

Two men died in falls – one had tried jumping to safety and hit a wall below while another, Thomas Hipwell, was killed when the rope he was sliding down snapped.

Other mill workers had successfully slid down ropes tied to machinery on floors above the fire, suffering friction burns to their hands. It was the only way they could reach the rescue ladder. Sheets were held by men and women below in case the men fell from the ropes.

The mill complex was only 20 years old and was claimed to be fire proof. The story of the fire travelled around the world, being reported as far away as New Zealand. Newspapers reported that King Edward VII had enquired "as to the condition of the sufferers from this disastrous fire."

Inquest hearings were held at the local courthouse and the infirmary – and it would appear that blame was laid everywhere but at the door of the mill company and its directors.

This was the era of super mills owned not by an individual or a family but by shareholders, and run by a board of directors. The Vernon Cotton Spinning Company was the first in Stockport to be shareholder-owned. There were 500 employees with hundreds of thousands of spindles in operation.

In his summing up, the coroner said if the men had left immediately they could have gone down the internal staircases and escaped. Therefore, there had been no gross or wilful neglect on the part of the mill company.

This despite a factories inspector, David Walmsley, undermining that assumption when he gave evidence to the inquest showing that in the wake of the 1895 Factories Act he visited the Vernon mills and sent notice to the sanitary authority that there was insufficient means of exit in case of fire. Months later he found that an outside fire escape had been installed. But the day after the fire, he was surprised to find the outside escape had been removed.

In a telling exchange, Walmsley told the coroner that the sanitary authority had not enforced his notice to install an outside fire escape because “there were so many people in the council interested in mills that if they took action it might cause friction and jealousy.”

That was the unspoken problem – that the new shareholding regime meant too many people had an interest in the local cotton mills and preferred not to rock the boat. Even two of the inquest jurors had to be stood down at the swearing in because they were shareholders in the Vernon mills company.

Walmsley had certainly been successful in making sure that 38 outside fire escapes were installed at other mills in the town since 1896, and would have pressured the Vernon mills company to keep an outside fire escape if he had known about plans to remove it. He also didn’t believe the Vernon mills were fireproof, as the owners claimed.

The architect Potts had told the inquest that sprinklers were included in the original planning but had not been installed prior to the fire.

In all, there was a feeling of complacency on behalf of the mill company and its representatives. The fireproof staircases were an adequate means of escape, they claimed. But the fire proved them wrong.

Despite the evidence, the jury returned verdicts of accidental death and said the company could not be blamed. But everyone else was – to the workers who, in the words of a mill charge hand, had “dallied” too long in fighting the fire; to the clerk who had failed to get a message directly to the fire service – which apparently had no firemen immediately available and not enough horses; to the sanitary authority who preferred not to act on the issue of outside fire escapes; and the local water authority for failing to properly paint the fire hydrant signs at the Vernon mills.

Even the crucial issue of oil for the mules was swept aside. One witness said although the supply of oil was increased a few months before the fire from two to three gills (a gill being equal to a quarter of a pint) at the request of the trade union, machine minders had frequently been short of oil. Others said that wasn’t the case – if they ran short, they would borrow oil from each other. It was friction that led to the tragic fire.

It was also said that fire drills were virtually non-existent.

In clearing the mill company of any blame, the jurors said that outside fire escapes should be built – this was just a recommendation, not an order – and that periodic fire drills should be arranged and sprinklers installed. The local fire brigade should also be consulted for advice when new buildings were being planned.

Only months later, a similar fire broke out in a mule in another building at the Vernon mills. But this time it was put out with hoses and buckets of water and no one was injured. The fire brigade arrived within six minutes of the alarm being raised - and an external fire escape had now been installed.

As for the families of the dead and injured, there was no social safety net in the way we would expect today. The Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897 had established for the first time that anyone injured at work could claim compensation without having to prove their employer was at fault. But compensation was only limited, and judges took a restrictive attitude to any claims.

This was a period of Conservative government, where reform was slow, and where it was estimated that up to 30 per cent of the UK population lived on the edge of starvation. A typical worker might earn 18 shillings a week compared to an income of £10 a week for a middle class family. It was only in 1906 that a Liberal government was swept into power and introduced a raft of social improvements. It included a basic social welfare system.

For those families who had lost their loved ones in the Vernon mill fire, fundraising events were organised, with musical performances and a charity football match among them, while the town’s mayor set up his own fundraising scheme. Collections took place throughout England.

Though hundreds of workers were left jobless and forced to find employment elsewhere or face poverty, there was money to rebuild the burnt out mill building. Newspapers of the time highlighted the cost of the fire to the mill company - £200,000 - but this was covered by insurance. The insurers had been so pleased at the installation of “fireproof” staircases that they reduced the premium by 10 per cent.

After the tragedy, Eliza Peet struggled on with her life, raising eight children alone in the Portwood area, not far from the Vernon mills. Nine years later, records show she was the head of the household but now working as a cotton weaver and caring for her three youngest children, including James, my grandfather. She hadn’t remarried. It would be a remarkable man who would take in a widow and her children.

As well as Isaac Peet, the other victims were Thomas Hipwell, Joseph Beard, George Rowarth, Thomas Ashton, John Cotton, William Wright, Richard Jones and Robert Hunt. Joseph Beard was one of the first to die, and was the only means of support for his widowed mother. There was a tenth victim: Joseph Adshead, who escaped by fireman’s ladder. He was badly burned but died three years later as a result of his injuries aged just 23. He left a wife and three children, who were all aged under five.

I believe they were victims of a fire that was caused by a deadly mix of complacency and a careless approach to safety. There was still a lingering servility towards employers. This was hinted at in the way the lawyer representing the dead men’s families felt moved to praise the company directors for showing sympathy. And at least they recognised the courage of the men who gave their lives trying to save the mill.

Today lawyers would be bringing a class action in similar circumstances; there would have been demands for an official inquiry into mill safety. But the company directors were not only fire-proof – they were blame-proof, too.

It was a tragedy that echoed down the generations. It had a dreadful impact on my great grandmother, it blighted my grandfather’s life - he never had a father figure to guide him, and grew up in poor circumstances – and the effects, I believe, were felt by his own wife and children in later life. And by me.

David Hulme, 2016.

Sources: British Newspaper Library for extensive inquest reports on the fire (Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer; Yorkshire Evening Post; Western Daily Press; Sheffield Daily Telegraph; St. James’s Gazette; Manchester Courier; Lancashire Evening Post; Dundee Evening Telegraph; the Dundee Evening Post; Leeds Mercury; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette; and the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette); the History Services website for a compilation of newspaper reports on the fire and Joseph Adshead (Wyatt family tradition; Evening Telegraph; and the Manchester Evening News); Marjorie Bloy, A Web of English History, for references to the political and social welfare environment of the time; Wikipedia for the reference to the Workmen’s Compensation Act; the Ancestry genealogical service for census records on Eliza and Isaac Peet; and Stockport: A History by P. Arrowsmith.

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