The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Before she went home for dinner this girl had to clean the machine which sometimes took her so long she had no time for food. Once the machines started again they continued clanking and whirring until seven o’clock at night. ‘She then comes home, and throws herself into a chair exhausted. This is repeated six days in the week (save that on Saturdays she may get back a little earlier, say an hour or two)… She looks very pale and delicate and has every appearance of an approaching decline.’

  Factory girls like this were paid between 5s and 10s a week, their younger sisters and brothers from 2s 6d to 5s. Mill workers got 12s to 24s a week depending upon the degree of skill and experience required in their particular job. Men of exceptional skill could command as much as 30s. These highly practised engineers and craftsmen considered themselves, and were considered to be, a cut above the ordinary labouring class, artisans almost on a par with stone-masons, carpenters, compositors, shoemakers and tailors, the best paid of whom might have as much as £2 a week to spend. These were the men who belonged to trade unions from which they were anxious to ensure that common, unskilled labourers continued to be excluded. They were as far above the common labourer as the clerks of the city, though more poorly paid, were above them in the subtly graduated social scale. In Bradford, as Professor Harrison has noted, ‘the skilled woolcombers did not drink in the same pubs with more lowly members of the textile fraternity’.14

  In Bradford, as in many another large industrial town, towering above the poor houses of the people were public edifices of increasing size, impressiveness and dignity. More building was carried out in England in the nineteenth century, in fact, than in all the centuries that preceded it. Town hall and law courts, hospitals and schools, museums and galleries, government offices and warehouses, university colleges and libraries, clubs, hotels and theatres, large blocks of healthy if intimidating model dwellings for artisans, all appeared in a variety of styles from Greek to Byzantine, from Gothic to Elizabethan. There were prisons designed to look like medieval castles, railway stations like Renaissance French châteaux, banks like Roman temples.

  The size and style of public buildings were frequently influenced by considerations neither practical nor aesthetic. When George Gilbert Scott entered the competition organized in 1856 for new government offices in Whitehall, all his Gothic designs were at first accepted. But Whig advocates of the classical style – warmly supported by Lord Palmerston and angrily attacked by their political opponents in both Houses of Parliament – condemned the Gothic taste as too much associated with conservatism and with the High Church movement; and so orders were given for an Italian design to be submitted instead.

  Rivalries of a different kind led to the building of a town hall at Leeds at far greater expense than had originally been proposed. For, when the mayor of Bradford announced that his city’s recently constructed St George’s Hall was ‘the best known specimen’ of such a building in all England, eleven feet wider than Birmingham town hall, even loftier than Exeter Hall in London and capable of contaihing concert audiences of over 3000 people, the merchants of Leeds were much irritated by the claims. They commissioned a young Yorkshire architect, Cuthbert Brodrick, to build a fine town hall of which they could be just as proud. When the queen came to Leeds for the official opening in 1858, Brodrick’s massive classical structure was certainly an impressive sight, longer than London’s Guildhall, higher than Birmingham’s town hall, wider than Westminster Hall. That it was larger than Bradford’s St George’s Hall went without saying. So imposing was it, in fact, that, as Asa Briggs has noted, it provided inspiration for at least three other town halls, that of nearby Morley (usually profoundly suspicious of Leeds), Portsmouth and Bolton.15 By the end of the century there was scarcely a town in the country that did not possess an imposing town hall, a monument to civic pride only occasionally overshadowed by the knowledge that in almost every city, out of sight of the hall’s proud towers and serried windows, were – as it was said of Birmingham in 1875 – other quarters in which little else was to be seen but ‘bowing roofs, tottering chimneys, tumbledown and often disused shopping, heaps of bricks, broken windows and coarse, rough pavements, damp and sloppy’.16 In these areas the ill-health of the people was a cause of deep concern.

  In 1842 the Report of an Enquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain was issued by the Poor Law Commission. It was based largely on the findings of the Secretary of the Commission, Edwin Chadwick, an industrious, opinionated and domineering man who had been trained as a barrister and had been an intimate friend of Jeremy Bentham. The report was a horrifying indictment and was to have far-reaching effects. For years the conditions which it revealed had been unknown or ignored; and attempts to deal with the problems of sanitary reform and public health had been half-hearted and sporadic. Threats of dangerous outbreaks of disease had occasionally prompted the government into action: fear of yellow fever being introduced into the country from abroad in the early nineteenth century had led to the establishment of a Board of Health; but this had been dissolved when the fever did not arrive. Later, following a serious outbreak of cholera on the Continent, another Central Board of Health was established, but this too was disbanded when the danger was past. And it was not until the painstaking inquiries of Chadwick and his colleagues were made known that the Public Health Act of 1848 established a General Board of Health which was more than a temporary expedient. Thereafter Medical Officers of Health were appointed; and serious attempts began to be made to deal with polluted water supply, grossly inadequate sewage disposal and the other evils which encouraged and spread disease and death.

  The prisons [Chadwick had written] were formerly distinguished for their filth and bad ventilation; but the descriptions given by Howard of the worst prisons visited in England (which he states were the worst he had seen in Europe) were exceeded in every Wynd in Edinburgh and Glasgow inspected by Dr Arnott and myself. More filth, worse physical suffering and moral disorder than Howard describes are to be found amongst the cellar populations of the working people of Liverpool, Manchester or Leeds and in large portions of the metropolis.17

  The mortality rate among people forced to live in such places could readily be appreciated by studying the figures for life expectancy. These were closely related to class: in eight districts which Chadwick examined, life expectancy among the upper classes was forty-three years, among tradesmen thirty, and for labourers only twenty-two.18 And it was erroneous to suppose, Chadwick insisted, that ‘greater sickness and mortality’ could be ascribed to children employed in factories than among those

  who remain in such homes as these towns afford to the labouring classes. However defective the ventilation of many of the factories may yet be, they are all of them drier and more equally warm than the residences of the parents … It is an appalling fact that, of all who are born of the labouring classes in Manchester, more than 57% die before they attain five years of age; that is before they can be engaged in factory labour, or in any other labour whatsoever.19

  Even in a country town such as Windsor which, ‘from the contiguity of the [castle], the wealth of the inhabitants and the situation’, might have been expected to be superior to other towns, sanitary conditions were quite as bad as anywhere else and health as much endangered. ‘From the gas-works at the end of George Street a double line of open, deep, black and stagnant ditches extends to Clewer-lane. From these ditches an intolerable stench is perpetually rising, and produces fever of a severe character.’20

  The 1848 Public Health Act which followed upon this report was limited in scope and effectiveness. It granted local authorities permission to set up Local Boards of Health rather than obliged them to do so, while the General Board of Health, which it established and which was reconstructed in 1856, lasted only until 1858. And by then Chadwick whose autocratic manner had offended medical men and local authorities alike, had been dismissed, much to the pleasure both of The Times which preferred to take its ‘chance
of cholera and the rest than to be bullied into health’ and of those who agreed with the laissez-faire opinions of a writer in The Economist who averred: ‘Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learnt their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good.’21

  Yet the Public Health Act did mark ‘the first clear acceptance by the state of responsibility for the health of the people’; while the General Board of Health, in the words of John Simon – who became the first medical officer of the Privy Council after the board’s demise – awoke in the whole country ‘a conscience against filth’.22

  Simon, who remained medical officer until 1876, was a man whose character was in striking contrast to Chadwick’s. Diplomatic, patient, persuasive, he was to a considerable extent responsible for a whole series of enactments which helped to transform the nation’s health, among them the Sanitary Act of 1866, the Factory Act of 1867, the Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act of 1868, the Vaccination Act of 1871 and the Public Health Act of 1872 which divided the country, apart from London, into districts each responsible for appointing a Sanitary Inspector as well as a Medical Officer of Health and for supervising the administration of the sanitary laws. Finally in 1875 came the ‘Great Public Health Act’ which provided a complete statement of the powers and duties of local sanitary authorities and covered all manner of subjects from the prevention of epidemics to the foundation of infirmaries, from offensive trades to adulterated foods, from housing and the purchase of land for public amenities to the cleaning of streets and the inspection of markets and slaughterhouses.23

  Between the passing of this Act and 1900 the mean annual death rate fell from over twenty-three to well under nineteen per thousand of the population for men, and from over twenty to less than seventeen for women.24

  52 Mines, Brickfields and Sweat-shops

  In March 1862 the readers of The Cornhill Magazine were offered an account of ‘Life and Labour in the Coal-fields’. The writer described his being lowered in an iron cage to the dark passages leading to the coalfaces, their roofs supported by pillars of coal which were themselves to be knocked down when the mine was exhausted. Along these passages boys dragged or pushed laden baskets to the crane which hauled them up to be carried away by the pit ponies; and beyond the boys, struggling with their loads, could be seen the ‘real getters of the coal, the so-called hewers’:

  Their work is the most peculiar we have witnessed. In a small, corner-like recess, full of floating coal-dust, foul and noisome with bad air and miscellaneous refuse and garbage, glimmer three or four candles, stuck in clay or there may be only a couple of Davy lamps. Close and deliberate scrutiny will discover one hewer nearly naked, lying upon his back, elevating his short sharp pickaxe a little above his nose, and picking into the coal-seam with might and main; another is squatting down and using his pick like a common labourer; a third is cutting a small channel in the seam, and preparing to drive in wedges. By one or other kind of application the coal is broken down, but if too hardly embedded, gunpowder is employed, and the mineral blasted; the dull, muffled, roof-shaking boom that follows each blast startling the ear … At the busiest hours of the day here are in all some four hundred living human beings in the different parts of the vast mine [but] there is only one time in the twenty-four hours when we can see all these people together and that is the hour of loosening or stopping work. At that hour let us take our stand at the bottom of the shaft.

  The long-wished-for minute arrives, and is signalled, not by clock or bell, but by one long, shrill, resonant cry, coming from the top of the shaft and the banksman’s lips. ‘Loose; 1-o-o-s-e; 1-o-o-s-e-’ is the one word thrice repeated, but drawled and drawn out into vocal lengths of some seconds’ duration. The cry is taken up by men below, and rings from mouth to mouth and gallery to gallery, until the remotest corners of the pit are echoing with the welcome sound. Down fall picks from the hands of hewers, and implements of all kinds are left by human beings of all ages. Every five or ten minutes shows us gang after gang winding their dim and perilous way to the base of the shaft; to that little circle of light which, like a fairy ring, lies brightly upon the black coal floor. On it stands the empty cage; into that get the men and boys as they arrive, and up they go, black and weary.1

  Writing some years earlier, before the passing of the Hours of Labour in Factories Act of 1844 and its subsequent amendments, another observer, Friedrich Engels, described the utter exhaustion of the miners, particularly the children, as they wandered home from the pit. Basing his accounts on official reports as well as upon his own observations, Engels described the long and toilsome days of the miners who worked for twelve or more hours at a stretch, frequently undertaking double shifts so that they spent twenty-six hours without coming to the surface, having no set times for meals but eating when they could. Their children – mostly over eight, though some were no more than four – were employed underground, as children had been for generations, in opening and shutting ventilation doors as well as in carting lumps of coal in heavy, wheel-less baskets and tubs.

  The tubs have to be hauled over the bumpy ground of the underground passages, often through wet clay or even water [Engels wrote]. Sometimes they have to be hauled up steep inclines and are brought through passages which are so narrow that the workers have to crawl on their hands and knees … All the children and young people employed in hauling coal and ironstone complain of being very tired. Not even in a factory where the most intensive methods of securing output are employed do we find the worker driven to the same limits of physical endurance as they are in the mines. Every page [of the official reports] gives chapter and verse for this assertion. It is a very common occurrence for children to come home from the mine so exhausted that they throw themselves on to the stone floor in front of the fire. They cannot keep awake even to eat a morsel of food. Their parents have to wash them and put them to bed while they are still asleep. Sometimes the children actually fall asleep on their way home and are eventually discovered by their parents late at night. The women and older girls are also habitually exhausted owing to the brutal way in which they are overworked. The most obvious consequence of their unnatural physical exertions is that all the strength in their bodies is concentrated into muscular development.2

  Some parts of their bodies were overdeveloped by the strain of their exertions, while others were ‘crippled owing to lack of nourishment’. Nearly all miners were physically stunted, ‘except those in Warwickshire and Leicestershire [who worked] under particularly favourable conditions’; and most were bandy-legged or knock-kneed or had some spinal or other deformity. Among both boys and girls puberty was delayed, sometimes until the eighteenth year. J. C. Symons encountered one boy of nineteen who, except for his teeth, had the physique of a boy aged between eleven and twelve. The crippling of women was particularly noticeable, and many women were forced to undergo exceptionally painful and sometimes fatal confinements due to distortion of the pelvis. Diseases of the lungs and heart, internal pains, indigestion and the distressing complaint known as ‘black spittle’ were all widespread; and life expectancy was very low.

  Coalminers in all districts, without exception become prematurely aged and unfit for work after they are forty years old [Engels continued, basing his comments on the First Report (1842) of the Children’s Employment Commission]. It is generally agreed that a miner is practically an old man [at that age]. That is true of the coalhewers. The loaders, who lift heavy lumps of coal into the tubs, become old when they are 28 or so, so that there is a saying in the coal districts: Loaders are old men before they are young ones. It is very rare indeed to come across a miner who is 60 years of age. Even in South Staffordshire, where the coal mines are relatively healthy, comparatively few miners reach the age of 51.3

  At the beginning of the 1840s there were 118,000 coalminers in Britain, 2350 of them wom
en. The men earned between 15s and 25s a week, the women a good deal less. As the Shaftesbury Commission discovered in 1842 ‘a girl of twenty [would] work for 2s a day or less, while a man of that age would want 3s 6d’.

  The men work in a state of perfect nakedness [the commission reported], and are in this state assisted in their labours by females of all ages, from girls of six years old to women of twenty-one, these females being themselves quite naked down to the waist … ‘One of the most disgusting sights I have ever seen,’ says the Sub-Commissioner, ‘was that of young females, dressed like boys in trousers, crawling on all fours, with belts round their waists and chains passing between their legs … In one pit, the chain, passing high up between the legs of two of these girls, had worn large holes in their trousers; and any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined – no brothel can beat it. On descending Messrs. Hopwood’s pit at Barnsley, I found assembled round the fire, boys and girls … stark naked down to the waist, their hair bound up with a tight cap, and trousers supported by their hips. Their sex was recognisable only by their breasts, and some little difficulty occasionally arose in pointing out to me which were girls and which were boys, and which caused a good deal of laughing and joking … In [other] pits the system is even more indecent; for … at least three-fourths of the men for whom the girls ‘hurry’ work stark naked, or with a flannel waistcoat only. [A miner was quoted as saying], ‘I have worked a great deal where girls were employed in pits. I have had children by them myself, and have frequently had connexion with them in the pits. I am sure that this is the case especially in pits about Lancashire.’ ‘I am certain the girls are worse than the men in point of morals [another miner said] and use far more indecent language … I have known myself of a case where a married man and a girl who hurried for him had sexual intercourse often in the bank where he worked.’ ‘I have worked in a pit since I was six years old [reported one Betty Wardle]. I have had four children, two of them were born while I worked in the pits. I worked in the pits whilst I was in the family way. I had a child born in the pits, and I brought it up in the pit shaft in my skirt.’