1927 - Saunders, A. Tales of a Pioneer - III. EARLY BUSINESS TRAINING, p18-20

       
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  1927 - Saunders, A. Tales of a Pioneer - III. EARLY BUSINESS TRAINING, p18-20
 
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CHAPTER III. EARLY BUSINESS TRAINING

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CHAPTER III

EARLY BUSINESS TRAINING

Accept your lot as a man does a piece of rugged ground, and begin to get out the rock and roots, to deepen and mellow the soil, to enrich and plant it.

--From "A Cheerful Courage," by J. E.

WHEN my school days in Bristol were ended at the age of fourteen, I returned to Lavington, and my mother told me that I must at once qualify myself to take Edward's place in and out of the mill, as he would soon be called on to manage a much larger mill at Bath.

Six months after I began learning to take his place at Russell Mill, Edward left it and took possession of Bathwyk Mill, on the river Avon, in Bath, which he at once kept going day and night. He soon found that the large city business required his constant attention to buying, selling, collecting money, etc, so that he could spare but little time to attend to the manufacturing part of the business, although this was the part to which he had so long and so successfully devoted himself, and for which my father's brand had become so reliable. So father and Edward decided, without consulting me, that I must go to Bath to attend to the manufacture of flour there.

Edward soon gave me to understand that he looked to me to keep everybody in the mill doing their best; and to see that everything sent out of it was honestly and certainly as good as he had promised it to be; and that it was most important that all the hands in the mill should see in me an example of careful industry.

Edward was more than satisfied with my mill work, but he sometimes pretended that I bossed him instead of allowing him to boss me, and was fond of joking about my pride in the mill, and the importance that I attached to apparently little things. I remember, on one occasion, when father's clever mill-wright came with Edward to look through the Bathwyk Mill, he expressed his admiration of the grinding, and said to Edward, "You surely don't get time now to dress these stones yourself,

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Mr Saunders?" To which Edward replied, as he looked towards me, "Dress a stone myself! Bless your heart, I could not tie a sack well enough to please Alfred!" On another occasion, when my sister Sarah said to him, "What a pity it is that Alfred has to get up at twelve o'clock every Sunday night to start the mill," he replied, "Of course it is, but he would not trust anyone else to put all the stones in their right places after they have been stopped for twenty-four hours."

During Edward's second year in Bath, the profits of the milling business reached to £3000, two-thirds of which went to father, besides the interest on his capital, and one-third to Edward. Edward had worked for years at Lavington for £20 a year, and I worked harder and longer than any other man in the mill at Bath for three years at £12 a year. I never asked for more, and I do not remember ever wishing for or expecting it, although my salary was less than half of what was paid to the lowest paid man in the mills. I had entire confidence, which the sequel will show to have been well founded, in the justice and generosity of father and Edward.

Our regular hours were from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with never less than one whole night per week. During an epidemic of influenza, in my second year, I worked three whole nights a week for six successive weeks. During the first two years in Bath, I never had my best clothes on except on Sundays and at Christmas when we were all required to be together at the old home. During my last year in Bath, on one occasion I worked all night, taking in, weighing and stacking a large load of wheat which arrived by the canal on the eve of Queen Victoria's Coronation for which we had been promised a holiday. I remember being almost asleep on the following night as I walked through the streets with my sister Sarah to see the illuminations.

This excessive and ill-paid but not unhappy work came to a sudden end after three years by an altogether unexpected demand from father that I should go to Lavington to dress the Russell Mill stones. I hurried off at once, expecting to be back as soon as I had dressed the three pairs of stones; but I was detained day after day, and then told that I must stay altogether and that Samuel would take my place at Bath.

The time that now followed was unhappy for both father and me. I had not Edward's docile, patient

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temper, and, though father and I tried to be forbearing towards each other, there was constant daily friction between us. I knew that this was a source of deep grief to my mother, and I came at last to the conclusion that she would be happier if I were out of the way. So I asked father if I might seek for employment elsewhere, and he replied that he had not the slightest objection to my doing so.

In looking back on this part of my life, I feel deeply ashamed that I did not more patiently bear with my father's hasty temper, and that I did not more completely discern and appreciate his many great and good qualities, especially his unflinching courage and truthfulness and his very unusual generosity and magnanimity.


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