Hair or clothing could be caught between belt and shaft, pulling a worker in and twirling her around the shaft until she was beaten to death; shuttles could fly off the loom, spiking a worker in the face. Workers could be caught in machinery, like the young ‘scavenger’ Patrick Noon of Stalybridge, whose job was to clean the floor underneath a spinning mule; in March 1846 his head became trapped in a space only four inches wide, and the whirling machinery flayed the skin from his head, revealing the bone.
