My son John and his girlfriend Yoana visited me last weekend. Though it was raining most of the time (in true, southwest Scotland style) John suggested we could go to New Lanark for a visit, so that’s what we did.
New Lanark holds a special place in my heart. For those who don’t know, it is a former 18th century cotton spinning mill village located on the banks of the Falls of Clyde, where social reform became very important. The lives of those who worked in the mill and their families were improved through schools, education, reasonably priced food and medical support. It’s a living village too – there are still tennants living there, and apparently very long waiting lists to get an apartment.
I think I might have visited with my parents, a very long time ago, but my fondest memories are from when John and Anna were young and we went there every year at Christmas time. There’s a ride you go through, where you sit on moving chairs and are taken on a trip back through the darkness of time. At Christmas, it gets set up like a kind of magical grotto and the filmed clips of a child that grew up in New Lanark, are replaced with an elf-like girl called Holly. At least that’s how it was back then, though that is twenty years ago now.
The site has been undergoing improvement for a long time and it was lovely to visit again. Some things struck me, now that hadn’t really done so before. One was that the classroom, where the millworkers children were taught was a very large, airy room, with a high ceiling and lots of natural light. The contrast between that and the small, low ceilinged apartments, where large families occupied one or two rooms, must have seemed incredible to the children when they began to attend school.
The other was a comment in the film, where the mill workers’ working day was described. They “only” worked ten hours per day, potentially from ten years old, but there were evening classes so that they could be educated if they wanted. I only work eight hour days and am struggling to motivate myself to write in the evenings. It’s incredible to imagine a world where working ten hour days, six days a week, was considered humane, but there it is.
Robert Owen, the social reformer, who brought in the improvements for workers in New Lanark, eventually left to set up a new project in America called New Harmony. This project fell apart within a few years. Reading between the lines, a lot of the people they attracted had lofty ideals, but weren’t necessarily hard working.
It’s easy to see with hindsight, but it’s obviously much easier to improve the lives of those who started out with very little and were used to hard labour than it is to form a new community of truly equal people. If Owen had really wanted a socialist paradise, he could have considered whether it was possible to make all those in New Lanark equal. I think then, he might have realised he couldn’t achieve that without reducing his own circumstances to close to those of his workers, and I imagine that was why he set off on an unrealistic vanity project, rather than really setting out to achieve equality.
Back to work and I am unexpectedly working this weekend as the duty vet for Southern Scotland. This means that if there are any reports of suspected notifiable diseases, such as foot and mouth or bird flu reported, I’m the vet who will be sent out. Equally, if there’s an urgent welfare issue that’s so bad it can’t wait, that will be my job to tackle as well. My car is currently loaded up with boxes full of all the kit that I might need, which is quite eye opening as there’s so much of it. I know that in an outbreak situation, I would have to arrange clean and dirty areas in my car and, as I didn’t have much warning, everything has just been thrown in. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for now. Complicated routines take time to organize and I had less than a day to find everything, without anyone local to help me out. Roll on Monday!
A Vet’s Life 