A visit to Darwen, Lancashire

A visit to Darwen, Lancashire

Pictured to the right of Gandhi here, Mirabehn and Desai helped organise his trip to Darwen in Lancashire. He had come to witness the devastation of the Depression (and of the Indian boycott of British cloth) on industrial textile workers there, and to appeal directly to them. Mirabehn recounts in her memoir Gandhi’s hard-hitting message to the workers that their deprivation made him sad, but that in India workers were starving to death. Gandhi’s punishing schedule left her exhausted and she was glad of the contact with the people, which kept her awake, unlike lectures in Oxford or Cambridge, at which she found it impossible not to fall asleep.

Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, Cotton Town digitisation project: www.cottontown.org