The Return of Apprentices for 1816 listed John Hackett and Sons of Tansley Mill as being an employer of apprentices. This is the earliest record of the ownership of Tansley Mill by the Hackett family.

The entry provides evidence that the Tansley Mill was dependent, like many others, on the apprentice system at that time. Because it needed water power, the mill was established in an area of sparse population at some distance from any large town. This created problems in recruiting the workforce.

Population in the large towns was increasing,. The poorest were placed on parish relief and were the legal responsibility of the parish overseers. The mill owners and the parish overseers found a mutually convenient way of alleviating their difficulties by signing over boys and girls to provide labour for the cotton industry. From the age of seven and upwards they were separated from their parents and were sent to the mills where they were accommodated, fed and educated under the control of a superintendent and his wife.

Conditions for these pauper children were often very harsh and employment at the end of the apprenticeship depended on the availability of jobs for free workers at the time. There is no evidence as to how the Hackett mills treated their apprentices but the few pieces of evidence that have survived indicate that some of the Derbyshire mill owners had a poor reputation as employers.

Robert Blincoe, in his memoirs, wrote of his experiences as an apprentice at the Litton Mill as follows: 'Not a spark of pity was shown to the sick of either sex:: they worked to the very last moment it was possible for them to work and when it was no longer possible, if they dropped down, they were put into a wheelbarrow and wheeled to the Prentice house.. .where they were left to live or die."

The Litton Mill was about 15 miles north cast of Tansley. However not all mill owners were as cruel and many of them provided an education for the children and realised that a well fed, healthy and adequately clad workforce is bound to be more productive than a miserable, starving, downtrodden one.

It is to be hoped that the successive Hackett mill owners were in the latter category, but as they owned several factories at any given time, would they have the time to create a benevolent, paternalistic climate where the running of a mill was delegated to a manager? In the case of the Tansley Mill where John Hackett lived only a short distance away it is probable, I think, that he was able to look after the welfare of his apprentices. Accommodation for them was probably provided in the three story annexe at the Tansley Mill which, in the 1881 advertisement was described as "adjoining cottages".

He was a devout Methodist and it is not likely that he, would deliberately mistreat the children in his care. The fact that a special burial plot was set aside for the family at the village chapel does not indicate that he was unpopular with his employees. It is clear that he adopted a paternal approach to the management of the mills in a same way to many of the Lancashire and Cheshire mill owners.