Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

14
During the early years of the 19th century, when Rochdale was thriving as
a textile manufacturing centre, all was not peace and harmony. At this time
the inhabitants of the town and surrounding area could be divided into three
groups or classes. There were the members of the upper-class, the wealthy
land owners, the Tory gentry, who were members of the Anglican Church.
These people had the ability to wield real power through their connections
in the church, the magistrature, and by casting a vote in elections. The
middle-class, the nouveau-riche entrepreneurs who were ambitious, selfmade
men, saw themselves as the engines of this economic boom but
completely disenfranchised since they were unable to vote in elections. Many
of the members of this group belonged to one or other of the diverse nonconformist
churches that had sprung up in the area, Politically, they were
Whigs and later Liberals and they were determined to wrestle power away
from the traditional ruling class. At the bottom of the heap economically and
politically were the working-class who made up 96% or the population of
Rochdale.
The industrialization of the textile industry led first to the concentration of
formerly rural people into Rochdale. The population exploded and by 1841
there were 68,000 people in a town that just 20 years earlier had 23,000.
Living conditions in the overcrowded, squalid and increasingly polluted town
were dreadful. As mechanization increased and prices for cloth fluctuated,
the wages paid to factory workers and the prices paid to independent
handweaves spiraled ever downwards. As local medical practitioners at the
time commented ‘the labouring classes in the Borough of Rochdale ... are
now suffering great and increasing privations. That they are unable in great
numbers to obtain wholesome food in sufficient quantities to keep them in
health; and that they are predisposed to disease and rendered unable to
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 16