The Story of Britain

by Patrick Dillon

  Before the railways came, travelling was so difficult that most people never left the area where they were born. Boys grew up to become farmers, while girls married farmers from the next village. The most exciting thing to do was walk to the nearest town, where you could see coaches stopping on their journey to London. It took days to reach London by horse-drawn carriage, so most people never bothered to go there.

  Railways changed everything.

  Often, the first sign of the railway arriving was the roar of an explosion as engineers blasted the hillside to make a tunnel. Next, shining rails were laid in place; and a few months later, the villagers would see a column of black smoke above the trees, the ground would shake, and a gleaming train would rush by, with passengers waving from the carriage windows. The villagers would stare after it open-mouthed, wondering where the rails led. By train they could get from Birmingham to London in just five hours. They could reach towns and cities their parents had never visited. They could see London – or even the sea!

  After the railways came, no one wanted to travel by horse any more. Coaching inns fell into ruins, and weeds grew up through the roads. People didn’t want to stay in their villages – they wanted to go further and travel faster. So the slow, calm way of life in the country came to an end as, one by one, villagers packed their bags and went to the new industrial towns to find work in factories.

  Life in the Factories

  PEOPLE soon discovered that life in the new factories was far harder than they expected. For a start, it was very dangerous. Dust entered workers’ lungs and made them cough blood. Machinery crushed their fingers. No one worried about health and safety, so a lot of people were killed in accidents.

  Most factory owners didn’t care about the men and women who worked for them; they didn’t think it their responsibility. Their business was to pay them as little as possible and make them work as hard as they could.

  “If they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else,” they said.

  When factory owners realized it was cheaper to employ children than grown-ups, they put children to work as well. Boys of four were sent down mines, while young girls spent hours working at cotton looms until their arms ached and their heads spun with the clatter of machinery.

  They weren’t given any holiday, but worked every day, starting early and finishing late. Factory owners grew rich and built great houses, but the people who worked for them lived in damp basements or draughty attics, shared beds with their families and lived in single rooms where windows were boarded over and the air was choked with coal fumes. Factory workers never had enough to eat, couldn’t afford new clothes, and had no toys or books. Children’s only pleasure, after a day of hard toil, was to fall asleep and dream – until the factory bells rang again, and their mothers woke them to go back to work.

  No one looked after workers when they grew old or sick, and no one tried to make factories safer. Some MPs suggested a law to stop people working so hard, but the factory owners soon persuaded them against it.

  “If they worked less hard, we’d have to close our factories!” they said.

  Some MPs wanted a law to stop children working, but the factory owners complained about that as well.

  “We need children to clean our factory chimneys!”

  The only thing worse than work was having no work, for then the factory owners closed their gates and sent everyone home. To start with, it was a relief to have some time off, but at the end of the day there was no money, so the workers had no food to eat, and their families starved.

  Some workers thought factories shouldn’t be allowed. They called themselves Luddites and went round destroying machines and smashing factory windows. But others saw that factories were here to stay. And as their lives grew harder, they realized that no one else would help them – so they decided to stand up for themselves.

  Unions

  “WE need to stick together,” the factory workers agreed. “If the owners do something unfair, then we’ll all stop work, and they’ll have to close their factories. That’ll make them listen!”

  So the workers formed societies they called unions. If a boss sacked someone unfairly, the union called a strike, everyone stopped work and the boss had nothing to sell.

  The factory owners were furious. “Damned rogues,” they growled. “We need to show them who’s in charge!”

  When some workers at Tolpuddle, in Dorset, started a union, their boss had them arrested. In those days murderers and burglars weren’t jailed, but loaded onto ships and sent to Australia. And the six men from Tolpuddle were sentenced to be transported as well. When one of them, George Loveless, was told he was to be punished like a common criminal, he wrote a poem in protest:

  We raise the watchword liberty,

  We will, we will, we will be free!

  So many people thought it unfair to treat the six men like criminals that at last the government gave in and allowed the Tolpuddle Martyrs to come home.

  After that, more and more workers joined unions. They campaigned to have the working day made shorter, to stop children being put to work, and to make food cheaper. The factory owners hated unions, sacked anyone who joined one, and had union leaders arrested, but the workers were determined not to give in. They knew they deserved something better than the misery of life in the factory towns.

  And they discovered that more and more people agreed with them.

  Better Lives

  WELL-TO-DO people were shocked when they visited the new towns and discovered how factory workers lived. Walking along the streets, they saw little children begging and women shivering in doorways.

  “Surely it’s wrong,” they said, “that people live like that in Britain, the richest country in the world!”

  London was the most shocking city of all. It had grown so much in the industrial revolution that it was less like a town than a smoking, foggy monster which ate up the fields and villages around it, and belched a plume of soot across the whole of southern England. People miles away in the countryside sniffed the reek of London and called it the Big Smoke.

  Under its smoke, London was a jungle of roads and alleyways where children roamed in gangs, living on the streets by day and hiding in basements at night. The writer Charles Dickens knew just what it was like to be a poor child in London because he had been poor himself. When he was only a boy, his father lost the family’s money and went to jail, and Charles Dickens was sent to work in a factory.

  Dickens wanted more people to know what poverty felt like, so he wrote stories about the children who lived on the streets and slept in basements. One of the most famous was Oliver Twist, about a boy who was forced to work as a pickpocket. People were scared of the rough-looking children they saw on the streets of London, but Dickens showed them street children had feelings just like theirs. He described London so well that his readers felt as if they were walking through it, and visiting the kind of places where the poor lived: “a villainous street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water … and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses”.

  Other writers also taught people about the lives of the poor. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote about families in factory towns in the north of England, and Charles Kingsley explained what it felt like to be a poor boy put to work cleaning chimneys. People started to collect money for those who had no work, and set up charities to look after the sick who couldn’t afford doctors. Some factory owners built better houses for their workers.

  “But shouldn’t the government do more?” everyone asked.

  In the old days MPs didn’t think it was their business to care for ordinary people, but now so many were suffering that they changed their minds. They passed laws to stop employees working too many hours each day, and to stop young children being put to work. A politician called Robert Peel started a police force to make London safer.

  Cities were still very unhealthy, though, and became mor
e so when cholera, a terrible new disease, appeared. During cholera epidemics it felt as if the Great Plague had returned. Then a doctor called John Snow discovered it was caused by drinking bad water. Poor people had nothing else to drink, because their houses had no proper toilets or water pipes. Thousands died and everyone agreed that something had to be done. So Parliament set up a committee to find out just how bad life was for the poor.

  As the head of the committee, Edwin Chadwick, visited people’s homes, he became more and more worried. Because there were no proper sewers, sewage flowed into the rivers until they were thick, black and stinking – but people went on drinking from them because there was no other water. The air was dense with smoke, and yellow fog filled the streets for days on end. Babies were born small and died young. Thousands of people died because they couldn’t breathe properly. Chadwick described it all in his report:

  “The annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss from death or wounds in any wars in which the country has been engaged.”

  It was time to make life better, not just for the rich, but for everyone. So Joseph Bazalgette designed London a proper sewage system, and Parliament passed laws to bring water to town in clean pipes. Later, MPs voted to build schools, so that children could learn how to read and write instead of being forced to work.

  Thanks to its factories, Britain had become the richest country in the world. But the British couldn’t feel proud until the men and women who worked in them had food to eat and clean water to drink – and lived the way the people of a great country deserved.

  The Great Exhibition

  KING William IV didn’t have any legitimate children, and his brothers and sisters were all dead, so when he died, the crown passed to his niece, Victoria. She was queen for longer than any other monarch, and because of her the people of the nineteenth century are often called Victorians.

  Victoria was only eighteen when she inherited the throne. She described how it happened in her diary:

  I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma, who told me the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here, and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing-gown), and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, had expired at 12 minutes past 2 this morning, and consequently that I am Queen.

  Victoria was shy and knew nothing about politics, but soon after becoming queen she married her German cousin Albert, who helped advise her as Britain changed from a country of fields and farmers to one of factories and towns.

  Albert loved factories and inventions. “Machines don’t have to make life worse for people,” he told Victoria. He thought the British should be proud of the new world they were making, and of their great empire. So he decided to stage an exhibition of everything new and spectacular in Britain and Ireland, and everything exotic in the empire.

  A competition was held to design a hall for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London. The winner was a gardener called Joseph Paxton.

  “The hall should be novel, like everything in the exhibition,” said Paxton. “I will build a palace made entirely of iron and glass!”

  No one had ever done that before, but he wanted to show that machines could even change what buildings looked like. So he made columns of iron and sent them to Hyde Park to be put together, then had thousands of sheets of glass lifted into position. When Londoners saw Paxton’s glass hall glinting in the sunlight, they called it the Crystal Palace.

  The Crystal Palace was so big that the trees of Hyde Park went on growing inside. Its stalls displayed carpets and cutlery, statues and pottery, fabrics, lights and machines. Locked cabinets contained caskets of diamonds and pearls. Water spilled from marble fountains, and visitors climbed galleries to look down on the wonders below.

  Princes came to the Great Exhibition from as far away as India, and ambassadors arrived from every country in the world. When Queen Victoria declared it open, bands played, flags waved, and millions of visitors queued in Hyde Park to see what was in the Crystal Palace.

  One of them was the writer Charlotte Brontë, who could hardly find words to describe what she saw. “It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth!” she wrote.

  When they visited the Great Exhibition, the British saw how their country had changed, and how rich it had become. And just as Prince Albert had hoped, they realized how much they had to be proud of.

  The Charge of the Light Brigade

  BUT people soon had something more serious than the Great Exhibition to talk about, for not long afterwards, Britain went to war again. The war was against Russia, and the British were allied with the French. Some of the old generals who remembered fighting France when they were young got muddled and shouted, “Attack the French!” as they went into battle. That showed how long it was since the British had fought a war. The army wasn’t ready – the soldiers didn’t have enough bullets, and the generals didn’t have proper maps – and things went wrong from the very start.

  The British and French decided to invade a peninsula called the Crimea in the south of Russia. They thought it was so far south it would always be hot, so they didn’t take thick coats or boots. In fact, winter in the Crimea was freezing cold and it rained so hard that carts full of supplies got stuck in the mud. The soldiers shivered in their tents without any blankets, and soon fell sick.

  Things went wrong in battle as well. Today officers in the army are carefully trained, but in those days officers were chosen simply because they were aristocrats. They thought they could beat the Russians easily, but kept making mistakes. In fact, the most famous attack in the Crimean War was a mistake. It was called the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  The Light Brigade was a regiment of six hundred lightly-armed soldiers who fought on horseback. During the Battle of Balaclava the British general, Lord Raglan, saw a small group of Russian artillerymen and ordered the Light Brigade to attack them. But his message got muddled, and by mistake the Light Brigade charged straight at the main Russian guns.

  The Russian gunners couldn’t believe horsemen would dare charge guns. They started to fire, but the horsemen didn’t retreat – instead they broke into a gallop. Cannonballs tore gaps in their ranks and soldier after soldier fell from his horse, but the others simply drew together and charged on, while smoke blocked everything from view. It only cleared when the horsemen reached the guns and saw the gunners running away up the hillside. By sheer bravery the Light Brigade had captured their target. Unfortunately it was the wrong target – and there were only a few of the Light Brigade left alive.

  Afterwards the poet Alfred Tennyson wrote a poem about their courage:

  Half a league, half a league,

  Half a league onward,

  All in the valley of death

  Rode the six hundred.

  Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole

  THE British learned all about the mistakes in the Crimean War because, for the first time, journalists travelled with the soldiers and wrote reports for people to read in newspapers at home. They could learn from pictures as well, for photography had been invented not long before. A photographer who went to the Crimea sent back images of the men who survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  When they read about soldiers falling sick and running out of bullets, people in Britain were furious. And when a woman called Florence Nightingale read about wounded men dying in hospital because no one looked after them properly, she decided to go out to the Crimea to help.

  At first the army tried to discourage her. “A war is no place for a girl!” the generals protested.

  Fortunately Florence Nightingale’s father was very influential, and Florence herself very determined. She argued with the generals until they let her visit one of the army hospitals.

  She was horrified by what she saw. Sick and wounded soldiers lay together, so the wounded caught the diseases of the sick. There were no proper toil
ets, bloodstained bandages covered the floor, and the stink was appalling. Everything was filthy. Doctors didn’t have enough medicine, and there were no nurses. Florence soon discovered that more soldiers died in hospital than were killed in battle.

  On the very day she visited the hospital Florence Nightingale took charge. The doctors protested, but she ignored them. She made them keep the hospital clean, and provide fresh air and clothing for the soldiers. She made them change dirty bandages and separate the sick from the wounded. At night soldiers saw her moving from bed to bed with her lantern, and called her the Lady with the Lamp.

  With Florence Nightingale in charge, far fewer soldiers died, and people realized how important cleanliness is to staying healthy. Later, when she returned to England, Florence started a school of nursing that changed British hospitals for ever.

  But Florence Nightingale wasn’t the only woman who went to the war to help sick soldiers. A Jamaican nurse called Mary Seacole also set off for the Crimea. Mary Seacole wasn’t rich or well-connected like Florence Nightingale, and instead of working in the hospital, she decided to help soldiers in their camps and on the battlefield. She built a shed out of scrap wood where men could recover after they had been ill. Whenever she heard there was going to be a battle, Mary Seacole packed her bag of medicines and followed the soldiers. She often risked her life to help the wounded, for it made no difference to her whether they were British, French or Russian. Many soldiers lying in pain after a battle knew help had come when they saw “Mother” Seacole walking slowly across the hill, stooping to bandage wounds and bring them comfort.