Fourteen Years at the Loom

“It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.”

— Lamentations 3:27, ASV

The Half-Timer

Dundee in the 1860s was a city of chimneys. Its mills and weaving-sheds spun and wove flax and jute into sailcloth, sacking, and canvas for half the world, and they ran on the labour of women and children. Men’s wages were low and men’s work was uncertain, and in many families it was the mother and daughters who kept the house going. The Slessors were one of those families.

At the age of eleven, Mary went to work at Baxter Brothers, one of the largest textile firms in the city. She became what was called a half-timer. The law then allowed children to work in the factories only if they spent part of each day at school, so she worked half the day and went to the school attached to the works for the other half. When she was put on full time she went to school at night instead. For a while she moved to the Rashiewell factory to learn weaving under her mother, who was also working there, and she tried two other works. By the age of about fourteen she was back at Baxter’s, where she became a skilled and well-paid weaver.

Livingstone was careful about the word. In Dundee a “mill-girl” was a spinner, and Mary Slessor was not a spinner. She was a weaver, a “factory girl,” and she would have wanted the distinction kept. She worked at the loom, eventually in charge of two wide looms at once, for about fourteen years.

When she brought home her first wages, her mother wept over them and put them away, saying they were too sacred to spend. But they could not stay unspent for long. The family needed every shilling, and before many years had passed Mary’s wages were the main support of the home.

Six Till Six

The working day ran from six in the morning to six at night, with an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. Mary rose at five to do her share of the housework before she left, and there was more of it waiting when she came home. In the weaving-shed the belts whirred overhead, the shuttles flew, and the noise was so constant and so loud that talking was almost impossible. It was, as Livingstone says, hard and monotonous work, and she was one small figure among thousands.

It would be easy to make this sound picturesque, and it was not. It was the life of the Scottish industrial poor, with its long hours and its tiredness, its crowded rooms and its early deaths. Of Mary’s own brothers, the younger Robert died of croup in December 1860, when he was about eight. William, who had become an apprentice blacksmith, died of tuberculosis in April 1870, not yet twenty. Five months later their father died. Mary was twenty-one, and she was now, in all but name, the head of the household.

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the book of Lamentations, written in the ruins of Jerusalem. It is not a cheerful book, and the verse is not a cheerful sentiment. “It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.” The poet does not pretend the yoke is light. He says that it is good, because of what it teaches: to sit alone and keep silence, to wait quietly, to hope in God when there is nothing else to hope in. Mary Slessor did not choose her yoke. It was put on her by her father’s drinking and her family’s poverty. But when she later found herself alone in an African forest, with fever in her bones and no one to help her, she had already learned to work while exhausted, to make do, and to keep going. The loom had made her hard and patient.

A Book on the Loom

She came out of the factory schools with little more than reading and simple arithmetic, and almost no knowledge of the world. The only books she had read were from the Sunday school library. But her mind was waking up, and she was hungry to learn. She began to take time from her sleep to read. She carried a book to the factory and laid it open on the loom, glancing at it when the work allowed. She read on her way to work and on her way home, walking through the grey streets with her head down over a page. Livingstone compares her to David Livingstone, the explorer, who as a boy in the cotton mill at Blantyre had propped a book on his spinning-jenny. The comparison is his, but it would not have displeased her.

She read above all the Bible. Once a girl asked her for something to read, and Mary handed her own Bible, saying, “Take that; it has made me a changed lassie.” She read it, Livingstone says, not as a duty but as a letter addressed to herself, full of news about the God who had loved her. The psalmist’s words were true for her in a literal way: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, And light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105, ASV). She walked a dark road every morning, and she walked it reading.

Her Mother’s Sayings

Her real school was the Church. From the Sunday school she went on to the Bible class, and she brought home the questions that puzzled her and put them to her mother. Mrs. Slessor did not always find them easy to answer. “Is baptism necessary for salvation, mother?” Mary asked once. Her mother thought, and said that the Bible says he that repents and is baptised shall be saved, but it does not say that he that repents and is not baptised shall be damned.

Some of her mother’s sayings stayed with Mary all her life. “When one duty jostles another, one is not a duty,” she was told. It is a piece of hard-won wisdom from a woman who had more duties than strength, and her daughter would one day need it badly, when the claims of her family at home and her work in Africa pulled against each other. Another saying was a kind of prayer: “Thank God for what you receive: thank God for what you do not receive: thank God for the sins you are delivered from; and thank God for the sins that you know nothing at all about, and are never tempted to commit.” It is not hard to hear in the last phrase the voice of a wife who knew exactly what temptation had done to her husband.

Mary’s friends noticed something in her even then. A younger girl in the Bible class, the daughter of an elder, remembered going early to meet her so as to walk with her to the class, drawn by her goodness and her kind ways.

Work as unto the Lord

Paul wrote to the slaves at Colossae, men and women whose work belonged to someone else, “whatsoever ye do, work heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23, ASV). He was not telling them that their condition was good. He was telling them that even labour they had not chosen could be offered to God. The weavers of Dundee were not slaves. But many of them had as little choice about their work as Mary had, and the Church that taught them this verse was teaching them that their lives were not wasted.

She was not wasted. The fourteen years at the loom gave her a body that could endure, a will that did not give up, and a working woman’s understanding of the poor that never left her. It gave her, too, the habit of supporting her family, which would shape her decisions for the next twenty years. She would send most of her missionary salary home to her mother and sisters, and would live on African food because she could not afford anything else. And it gave her a way of looking at people. When she stood years later in an African village, surrounded by women carrying loads on their heads and babies on their backs, she did not look down on them as a lady looks at labourers. She had been a labourer herself.