Batting

When the bales of cotton arrived at the mill, the first job to be done was ‘batting’. Women and girls would have to break open the bales and bat them into ?? ready for feeding into the spinning machines.

This happened on the ‘batting floor’ of the factory, right at the top of the building, where the work would have been hot and tiring. The dust, dirt and heat would have made this an unenviable task.