Main Page Before 1796 1796 -1799 1800 - 1819 1820s Late 19th Century Litton Mill Land Ownership Slack & Mill Connections Living Conditions Robert Blincoe Censuses 1841 - 1891

MILL CONNECTIONS There are many connections with Litton Mill and it is likely that the cottages were built for mill workers. The censuses show the majority of people at Littonslack in the 1800s are mill workers. The 1841 census shows 16 Irish women living at Littonslack all with recorded ages as 20 and all mill workers. Note that in the 1841 census ages were rounded down to the nearest multiple of 5 - so these girls could be aged 20 to 24 years and 11 months.  See further notes at the bottom of this page. One cottage had husband, wife, 3 children and 5 of these women. Looking at the census for the wider area of Litton and Cressbrook, the total number of Irish women recorded as 20 is over 80. The 1841 census shows them as born in "foreign parts", yet the 1851 census shows the same women as born in the Workhouse of St Giles, Bloomsbury, Middlesex. St Giles contained a large community of Irish and was a very poor area of London. The movement of these girls may have been through schemes set up with the Workhouses and the Poor Law Commision.  Many apprentices at the mill had come from Workhouses, but burial records show that Litton Mill had not taken apprentices since 1818 with Needham's (second) apprentice house, built in 1794, being seized by Needham's creditors in 1817 and pulled down shortly after that.  Cressbrook Mill however, had apprentices until 1837. The children were mainly from the workhouses, but when attempts were made to stop this by an Act of Parliament of 1816, Cressbrook mill began taking apprentices, mainly girls, from the Duke of York's Royal Military School (once known as The Royal Military Asylum.) A transcript of the Littonslack censuses for 1841, 18 51, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1891 is shown here with a full list of all the 20 year old Irish women in the immediate area (there were barely any males). * Census takers were instructed to write the age of every person under "...15 years of age as it is stated to you. For persons aged 15 years and upwards, write the lowest of the term of 5 years within which the age is." See this link for all 1841 Census Instructions