Her name, let us say, is Mary Ann McCready. She is eleven-years-old when she first walks through the gate at six in the morning. The hooter has already gone. Her mother walked her to the mill from a kitchen-house off the Grosvenor Road: a two-up, two-down with six children in one room and an outside privy shared with the next terrace. Mary Ann is a half-timer. She does school until noon, the mill until six. She is paid two shillings a week. 

Keir Starmer has one card left to play

Jess Phillips’s resignation will be particularly painful for Starmer

By 13 she is full-time. By 15 she is a spinner at the wet frames, which means she stands ten hours a day in a room kept at ninety degrees Fahrenheit, with the windows shut – barefoot on flooded boards, her apron soaked through, the air thick with a fine vegetable dust that settles on her tongue and in her lungs – and never leaves. The women call it pouce. The doctors, later, will call it ‘byssinosis’. The frames are so loud that the spinners learn to lip-read across the aisles, and so the women of her street will be famously deaf into old age, shouting at each other on the doorsteps on Sunday afternoons. 

She marries at the age of 19. Like her mum, she has six children, two buried before they walk. She is back at the frames a fortnight after each birth. She coughs blood for the first time at 34-years-old. Her chest sounds, her sister says, like ‘wet paper tearing’. She dies at 41. She is buried in Milltown Cemetery in a........

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