Most poor children needed to start earning money as early as possible, because their meagre wages were essential to their family’s survival. In 1816 Frederick Augustus Earle, a clerk in London’s parish of St Giles, reckoned that countless young girls were prostitutes. The previous week about thirty had been arrested, and ‘several of them were very young, two or three of them not above thirteen or fourteen years of age’.68 Even younger children were put to work in various manufacturing trades and as labourers, while others were apprenticed, bound by indenture, usually for seven years, which meant that the parents, the parish or a charity had to pay for them to learn a trade.
Rules governing apprentices were strict. When fourteen-year-old Richard Cureton of Bow Lane off Cheapside in London became apprenticed on 5 August 1783, he was bound for seven years to William Wakelin, a girdler (who made ceremonial girdles). The official indenture, written on parchment, gave a list of rules to which the apprentice had to agree, including:
He shall do no damage to his said Master nor see to be done of others, but that to his power shall let, or forthwith give warning to his said Master of the same. He shall not wast the goods of his said Master nor lend them unlawfully to any. He shall not commit Fornication, nor contract Matrimony within the said Term. He shall not play at Cards, Dice, Tables, or any other unlawful Games whereby his said Master may have any loss with his own goods or others during the said Term, Without License of his said Master; he shall neither buy nor sell. He shall not haunt Taverns or Playhouses nor absent himself from his said Master’s service day nor night unlawfully: But in all things, as a faithful apprentice he shall behave himself towards his said Master and all his during the said Term.69
Richard’s fee of £10 was paid to Wakelin by a charity administered by the Merchant Taylors’ Company that gave money for apprenticing poor children.70 In return, Wakelin was expected to ensure that the apprentice was ‘taught and instructed the best way and manner that he can, finding & allowing unto the said Apprentice sufficiant Meat Drink Apparel Lodging and all other Necessaries according to the Custom of the City of London, during the said Term’.71 Five years after finishing his apprenticeship, Richard was married to Frances Carter, but died in 1804 at the early age of thirty-five, a year after his only child Joseph was born. In 1817 Joseph was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a fishing-rod and tackle maker. He himself had nine children, and direct descendants today live in Canada and the USA.
Innumerable apprentices, bound to a skilled master, learned a valuable trade, but others suffered seven years of virtual servitude. Children of destitute families were compulsorily apprenticed by the parish as allowed by the Poor Law, usually in lower-status positions like servants or agricultural labourers. If they could be apprenticed outside the parish, so much the better, because responsibility for them was then transferred to their new parish. Any child living in the workhouse or whose parents received poor relief could be apprenticed in this way. Mines regularly took children from local workhouses, while countless children from London’s workhouses ended up in northern textile mills. Until 1814, when compulsory apprenticeships were abolished, it was an offence to run away, and notices in the newspapers warned about such culprits. Two apprentices in a cotton spinning mill fled in May 1793:
TWO RUNAWAY APPRENTICES
ABSCONDED from LITTON MILL, near Tideswell, in the County of Derby, on Tuesday morning the 14th of May Instant.
DAVID POWELL, about 13 Years of Age, fair Complexion, and light Hair; had on a light Cloth Coat and Breeches, or else a Fustian Coat and Breeches.
Also, MARY BEDINGFIELD, about 14 Years of Age, dark Complexion, and dark Hair, and has remarkably thick Lips; had on a blue Gown, green stuff Petticoat and black Hat.
Whoever will apprehend the said Apprentices and give information thereof to Messrs. Needham, Frith, and Co at Litton Mill aforesaid, shall receive ONE GUINEA Reward, and be paid all reasonable Expences.72
A few years later, around August 1799, an orphan called Robert Blincoe was sent to Litton Mill from London’s St Pancras workhouse. Believed to have reached the age of seven, he was bound as an apprentice for fourteen years. He survived the ordeal, though he lost a finger and was left with crooked legs. As he explained, ‘I got deformed there; my knees began to bend in when I was fifteen…a very little makes me sweat in walking; I have not the strength of those who are straight.’73 In 1833 he gave evidence to the Select Committee on the employment of children in factories. When asked if he would send his own children to such a mill, he replied:
No; I would rather have them transported. In the first place, they are standing upon one leg, lifting up one knee, a great part of the day, keeping the ends up from the spindle; I consider that that employment makes many cripples; then there is the heat and the dust; then there are so many different forms of cruelty used upon them; then they are so liable to have their fingers catched and to suffer other accidents from the machinery; then the hours is so long, that I have seen them tumble down asleep among the straps and machinery, and so get cruelly hurt.74
Questioned about this cruelty, he said:
I have seen the time when two hand-vices of a pound weight each, more or less, have been screwed to my ears, at Lytton mill in Derbyshire. Here are the scars still remaining behind my ears. Then three or four of us have been hung at once on a cross beam above the machinery, hanging by our hands, without shirts or stockings. Mind, we were apprentices, without father or mother to take care of us…we used to stand up, in a skip, without our shirts, and be beat with straps or sticks; the skip was to prevent us from running away from the strap.75
Litton Mill was far from exceptional. Throughout England the textile industry relied on unskilled child workers. Four different threads were manufactured that could be made into fabrics – these were silk, wool, linen (from flax) and cotton threads. Silk, the finest of threads and used for sewing and weaving, depended on the labour of children because their small and dexterous fingers could handle the threads more efficiently. In 1800 the antiquary Richard Warner, who was a curate at Bath, visited a silk-spinning factory in a nearby Somerset village:
A little silk manufactory enlivens Maiden-Bradley, established by Mr. Ward of Bruton, about nine miles from this village. Fifty-three children great and small, are employed in spinning two of the fine filaments, as produced by the worm, together; this work is carried to Bruton, when, with the assistance of ingenious machinery, the silk thread for use is made…The children employed (who begin working before they are six years of age) earn wages proportioned to their expedition and ability; the youngest make about three half-pence or two-pence per day, and the most experienced half-a-crown or three shilling per week; but for this they are expected to work from five o’clock in the morning till six at night!76
Warner was obviously concerned about the long working hours, and in 1816 during a parliamentary debate on children working in cotton factories, Sir Robert Peel stated that ‘little children of very tender age were employed with grown persons at the machinery, and those poor little creatures, torn from their beds, were compelled to work even at the age of six years, from early morn till late at night–a space of perhaps 15 to 16 hours!’77
Children in agriculture also worked excessively long hours. Some were hired as farm servants, usually on a yearly basis, for indoor and outdoor labour, while others were apprentices, bound to the farm for several years as unpaid hired hands, receiving board and lodging in return. Mrs Mary Rendalls described being apprenticed at the age of eight or nine, in about 1811, to Thomas Nicholls, a small farmer at Lower Woodrow near Brampford Speke in Devon:
When I was an apprentice, I got up as early as half-past two, three, four, or five, to get cows in, feed them, milk them, and look after the pigs. I then had breakfast, and afterwards went into the fields. In the fields I used to drive the plough, pick stones, weed, pull turnips, when snow was lying about, sow corn, dig potatoes, hoe turnips, and reap. I did everything that boys did. Master made me do everything�
��My mistress was a very bad temper; when bad tempered she treated me very ill; she beats me very much; she would throw me on the ground, hold me by the ears, kneel upon me, and use me very ill; I used to scream. This has happened several times a week…My master beat me, and I went to my father’s house. My father was afraid to let me stop, as he might be summoned, as I was an apprentice.78
Some of the most physically exhausting work of all was in the mines, both underground and on the surface. In 1841 shocking evidence was collected for a parliamentary commission on the conditions then being suffered by children, though older miners reckoned it had actually been far worse several decades earlier. When they were children, many had started work at six or seven years of age, some even younger. Their first job would be to open and close the heavy wooden tunnel doors. In Cumberland in 1813, the traveller and writer Richard Ayton went down the William Pit near Whitehaven, a coal mine that extended under the sea. He was horrified at what he saw:
a number of children…attend at the doors to open them when the horses pass through, and…in this duty are compelled to linger their lives, in silence, solitude, and darkness, for sixpence a day. When I first came to one of these doors, I saw it open without perceiving by what means, till, looking behind it, I beheld a miserable little wretch standing without a light, silent and motionless…On speaking to it I was touched with the patience and uncomplaining meekness with which it submitted to its horrible imprisonment, and the little sense it had of the barbarity of its unnatural parents. Few of the children thus inhumanly sacrificed were more than eight years old, and several were considerably less, and had barely strength sufficient to perform the office that was required from them. On their first introduction into the mine the poor little victims struggle and scream with terror at the darkness, but there are found people brutal enough to force them to compliance, and after a few trials they become tame and spiritless, and yield themselves up at last without noise and resistance to any cruel slavery that it pleases their masters to impose upon them. In the winter-time they never see day-light except on a Sunday, for it has been discovered that they can serve for thirteen hours a day without perishing…As soon as they rise from their beds they descend down the pit, and they are not relieved from their prison till, exhausted with watching and fatigue, they return to their beds again.79
Ayton described what else he and his companion witnessed:
We traced our way through passage after passage in the blackest darkness…Occasionally a light appeared in the distance before us, which did not dispel the darkness…but advanced like a meteor through the gloom, accompanied by a loud rumbling noise, the cause of which was not explained to the eye till we were called upon to make way for a horse, which passed by with its long line of baskets, and driven by a young girl, covered with filth, debased and profligate [indecent], and uttering some low obscenity as she hurried by us. We were frequently interrupted in our march by the horses proceeding in this manner with their cargoes to the shaft, and always driven by girls, all of the same description, ragged and beastly in their appearance, and with a shameless indecency in their behaviour.80
At least there was standing room in this Whitehaven pit, because in many mines the coal was dragged or pushed along low passageways by ‘hurriers’, or ‘drawers’, crawling along on their hands and knees. This barbaric work was done by girls, boys and women (even when they were pregnant), wearing round their waist a belt from which a chain passed between their legs and was attached to the huge baskets or tubs. Years later Joseph Gledhill related his first experiences down a coal mine in Yorkshire, in about 1798:
I began life as a hurrier when I was between five and six years of age; I was a hurrier till I was 16…there was no such thing as rails upon the roads; we used to hurry then upon ‘sleds’, with a belt and chain, and with a pair of short crutches we held in our hands to enable us to hurry on our hands and feet; I remember at that time such things as crooked legs, but whether that resulted from the employment I cannot tell; they [the boys] worked then about 12 hours.81
Even before the steam engines and furnaces of the accelerating industrial revolution began to devour vast quantities of coal, a constant supply was required for open fires for cooking, as well as for heating water and keeping rooms warm. With so many domestic fires kept constantly alight or relit each day, smoke hung in the air summer and winter. All houses and many other buildings needed chimneys to allow the smoke from fireplaces and cooking ranges to be channelled outside, and an accumulation of soot caused chimney fires that could spread rapidly through buildings. To remove this danger, chimneys were cleaned about four times a year, but adults were too big for this job. It had to be done by boys and girls who would climb up the narrow flues, sweeping with a handbrush and using a scraper to dislodge compacted soot. The youngest climbing boys were made to seek work by ‘calling of the streets’, and the soot itself was a valuable commodity, sold to farmers as fertiliser.
Sweeping chimneys was hard, dangerous and claustrophobic. The choking black dust harmed the children’s eyes and lungs, and like those employed down mines, climbing boys rarely washed, though some masters ensured they washed on Sundays. The chimney sweep David Porter, it was reported to Parliament in 1788, ‘knows many instances of boys who have served four or five years without being at all washed’.82 Because soot is a carcinogen, chimney sweeps were particularly prone to ‘Sooty Warts’,83 which was cancer of the scrotum.
In 1802 the writer Samuel Pratt commented on the awful plight of these children: ‘Where a chimney sweeper’s boy is not regularly cleansed once a week, and is kept in filth and nastiness, he is often afflicted by violent itchings, which break out in small pimples, and soon become an ulcer, and ultimately end in an incurable cancer, the consequence of obstructed perspiration.’84 He was saddened by three pitiful boys he encountered in London’s St Martin’s Lane:
The three poor creatures immediately under my eyes, were melancholy both to see and to hear…They were in their boyhood; the youngest six, the next seven, and the third told me he was ‘past nine a little bit, and going on for ten.’ They were all brothers, and apprenticed to a huge grim being, who soon after came up with them, damned the elder apprentice for leaving one of his brushes, with which he struck him on the shoulders.85
An Act of Parliament in 1788 had made it illegal to employ children under eight years of age, but this law was constantly ignored, particularly by sweeps using their own children. The three boys observed by Pratt were barely clothed, and the youngest was limping so badly that he begged his master to let him rest on the church steps:
Rest, said the black man, that’s a fine story indeed; I have two chimneys to sweep now before half past eight, in Covent Garden, and don’t you hear St. Martin’s is now striking seven, and there is one of the chimneys as crooked as a cork screw, that none but such a shrimp as you can crawl up. While he was growling out these words, he took up the child and slung him over his shoulder, just as he would have slung one of his sacks.86
A tradesman suddenly called out for a sweep, so he went inside to examine the chimneys, and Pratt seized the opportunity to question the boys:
the elder apprentice who appeared to be in extreme ill health, told me in a fearful whisper, on my asking concerning his mode of living and labour, that…if he lived would rather be a shoe black or a galley slave than a chimney sweeper, especially to the brute who is gone into that house, for he not only almost starves but beats me and my brothers to death, though I have gone all weathers through my morning work for many years. I have nothing to sleep on but some of these sacks in a soot cellar, and what’s worse, my master won’t allow us to wash and tight ourselves up [free from rags] not once a month: so that I am quite sore with the clogged stuff that has almost eat into my flesh – only look, Sir, at these sore places and these great lumps.87
Effective alternative methods of sweeping chimneys, using long rods and brushes, without the need to climb chimneys, were being developed, but a reluctance to use the
m prevailed. Children were preferred, not just for sweeping but for ascending flues to extinguish fires. Some chimneys were so narrow that even a small child could become stuck. Before a parliamentary committee in 1788, James Dunn described what happened to him during one chimney fire:
he himself had been very ill-treated by his Master, having been bound Apprentice at 5 Years of Age, for 7 Years…when he was about 10 Years old, he was sent up a Chimney which had been on Fire for 48 Hours…during the Time he was up the Chimney, his Master came, and found Fault with him, in so angry a Manner, as to occasion a Fright, by which Means he fell down into the Fire [having reached the fire by ascending an interconnecting flue], and was much burnt, and crippled by it for Life.88
In early 1806, in what was then the western edge of London, one chimney of a well-to-do house leased by Richard Creed of Marsh and Creed navy agents was in need of cleaning:
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