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

by Christopher Hibbert

  A female miner, Betty Harris, aged thirty-seven, described her work in the mines:

  I have a belt round my waist, and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet. The road is very steep, and we have to hold by a rope, and, when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of. There are six women and six girls and boys in the pit I work in: it is very hard work for a woman. The pit is very wet where I work, and the water comes over our clog-tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs; it rains in at the roof terribly; my clothes are wet through almost all day long … My cousin looks after my children in the daytime. I am very tired when I get home at night; I fall asleep sometimes before I get washed. I am not so strong as I was, and cannot stand my work as well as I used to. I have drawn till I have had the skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way. My feller has beaten me many a time for not being ready. I were not used to it at first, and he had little patience: I have known many a man beat his drawer.

  Seventy years later there was still very little mechanization in the mines, and a day’s work remained very hard. One Welsh miner, who started working underground at Mountain Ash, Glamorgan, on his fourteenth birthday in 1915, told George Ewart Evans:

  I was fourteen in the morning and I went to work that night … Well, the men – they told me, ‘You put that coal into that tub by there; and after you’ve done, you have a little spell till I’m ready for you again.’

  That was my first night underground; and when I came home in the morning, I was very tired. Every penny counted in those days. I was having twelve shillings a week. That was my wages: six days a week, Monday to Saturday …

  I was frightened, I’ll say that, first of all when I went into the face because seeing everything in front of you in darkness and only this little oil-lamp I had going in, and naturally it was a bit frightening. I had a little box of food, a tommy-box it was called, and a little tin jack of water. That was the standard equipment for a collier at that time, with the Davy lamp. No electrical lamps, no cap-lamp.

  At that time it was done with no machinery. The mandril, the shovel and the curling-box – these were your tools. I was working in a seam that was roughly two feet six inches high. Your mate would send you to the top end of where you were working; you’d have to drag this curling-box of coal down; and take the curling-box of muck back up to keep filling in behind you. The coal went into the tub or dram; and the rubbish into the place to pack behind you for safety – to help keep the roof up.4

  Men, women and children in the chain- and nail-making trades were required to work quite as hard as miners, in conditions almost as bad and for less money. The men earned at most 5s a hundredweight and they were able to produce no more than three hundredweight a week, while the women often earned less than 5s a week. ‘We do not live very well,’ one of them admitted. Our most living is bacon.’ Another, a girl of fifteen, ‘stated that she did not get enough to eat, even of bread and potatoes’. A doctor confirmed that the workers were nearly always hungry.

  One of the worst abuses was the masters’ habit of forcing the workers either to accept part of their wages in food or to buy their food and other necessities at shops owned by them or by their relations or friends, where prices were inflated. ‘They tell their men, or at least it is understood, “If you do not buy my groceries, we will not buy your nails.”’

  This elaboration of the truck or tommy system, which the navvies also found so irksome, was common in many other industries and was widely resented, as Benjamin Disraeli, who had studied the official reports, well knew. In his novel Sybil, published in 1845, he records a conversation between a group of black-faced miners in the Rising Sun who complain bitterly of the butties, or middlemen who contract to supply a certain amount of coal for an agreed sum and who pay the wages of the colliers under contract to them in goods.

  ‘The question is,’ said Nixon, looking round with a magisterial air, ‘what is wages? I say ’tayn’t sugar, ’tayn’t tea, ’tayn’t bacon. I don’t think ’tis candles; but of this I be sure, ’tayn’t waistcoats … Comrades you know what has happened; you know as how Juggins applied for his balance after his tommy-book was paid up, and that incarnate nigger Diggs [a butty and owner of a tommy shop] has made him take two waistcoats. Now the question arises, what is a collier to do with waistcoats? Pawn ’em I s’pose to Diggs’ son-in-law, next door to his father’s shop, and sell the tickets for sixpence … The fact is we are tommied to death …’

  ‘And I have been obliged to pay the doctor for my poor wife in tommy,’ said another. ‘“Doctor,” I said, says I, “I blush to do it, but all I have got is tommy, and what shall it be, bacon or cheese?” “Cheese at tenpence a pound,” says he, “which I buy for my servants at sixpence! Never mind,” says he, for he is a thorough Christian, “I’ll take the tommy as I find it.”’…

  ‘Juggins has got his rent to pay, and is afeard of the bums,’ said Nixon; ‘and he has got two waistcoats!’

  ‘Besides,’ said another, ‘Diggs’ tommy is only open once a-week, and if you’re not there in time, you go over for another seven days. And it’s such a distance, and he keeps a body there such a time; it’s always a day’s work for my poor woman; she can’t do nothing after it, what with the waiting, and the standing, and the cussing of Master Joseph Diggs; for he do swear at the women.’

  ‘This Diggs seems to be an oppressor of the people,’ said a voice from a distant corner of the room.

  Master Nixon looked around, smoked, puffed, and then said, ‘I should think he wor; as bloody-a-hearted butty as ever jingled.’

  ‘But what business has a butty to keep a shop?’ inquired the stranger. ‘The law touches him.’

  ‘I should like to know who would touch the law,’ said Nixon; ‘not I for one. Them tommy-shops is very delicate things; they won’t stand no handling, I can tell you that.’

  ‘But he cannot force you to take goods,’ said the stranger; ‘he must pay you in current coin of the realm, if you demand it.’

  ‘They only pay us once in five weeks,’ said a collier; ‘and how is a man to live meanwhile?’

  ‘Ay, ay,’ said another collier; ‘ask for the young Queen’s picture, and you would soon have to put your shirt on, and go up the shaft.’

  ‘It’s them long reckonings that force us to the tommy-shops,’ said another collier; ‘and if a butty turns you away because you won’t take no tommy, you’re a marked man in every field about.’5

  The factory inspectors had an impossible task in endeavouring to ensure that the provisions of the Factory Acts were observed, since the employers paid runners to warn of their approach and made it clear that workers who complained of their treatment might well find themselves out of work. Extracts from the Acts were to be found pinned on the workshop wall at the time of the inspectors’ visits, only to be stowed back in a drawer as soon as they had gone. ‘It is quite a common thing,’ said a minister from Dudley, a centre of the chain-making industry, ‘for these people to work even thirteen or fourteen hours a day … In fact, you may go through the district when it is pitch dark, and there are no lamps in some parts, you will hear these little forges going and people working in them, and you wonder when they are going to stop.’

  A nailer’s usual day is from 5 or 6 a.m. till 9 or 10 p.m. [recorded one worker in the industry from Halesowen near Birmingham]. That is many hours to be stiving up in a hot shop, but some work till 11 or 12 or later if the master wants the work quickly … Some children begin at eight years old…1 should not like my boy now 5, to begin before 8, and he shan’t if I can help it, but if I am anyways obligated he must. He is but a little mossel, and if I were to get that little creature to work I should have to get a scaffold for him to stand on, to reach, and with that it would be like murder-work, as you may say.6

  Children did, however, work in nailers’ workshops before they were eight, as they – and women of all ages – did in the brickfields where the conditions of labour were as
degrading as they were in the mines and in agricultural labour gangs.

  I consider that in brickyards [a factory inspector reported in 1865] that the degradation of the female character is most complete … I have seen females of all ages, nineteen or twenty together (some of them mothers of families), undistinguishable from men, excepting by the occasional peeping out of an earring, sparsely clad, up to the bare knees in clay splashes, and evidently without a vestige of womanly delicacy, thus employed, until it makes one feel for the honour of a country that there should be such a condition of human labour existing in it.

  I questioned one such group in a brickyard in South Staffordshire as to how many of them could read, and found that only one out of twenty was so qualified … Lest my evidence should seem partial, or as seen only through the medium of inspectorship, permit a master brick-maker to give his own version of the story.

  ‘I am a brick and tile manufacturer and sanitary pipe maker, in the neighbourhood of Tipton, midway from Birmingham and Wolverhampton. I employ about fifty work-people, about half of whom are” women and children. A flippancy and familiarity of manners with boys and men grows daily in the young girls. Then, the want of respect and delicacy towards females exhibits itself in every act, word, and look; for the lads are so precocious and the girls so coarse in their language and they sing unblushingly before all, whilst at work, the lewdest and most disgusting songs.

  ‘The overtime work is still more objectionable, because boys and girls, men and women, are not then so much under the watchful eye of the master, nor looked upon by the eye of day.

  ‘All these things, the immorality, levity and coarse pleasures, awful oaths, lewd gestures, and conduct of the adults and youths, exercise a terrible influence for evil on the young children.

  ‘It is quite common for girls employed in brickyards to have illegitimate children. Of the thousands whom I have met with I should say that one in every four, who had arrived at the age of twenty, had an illegitimate child.’7

  ‘They become rough and foul-mouthed,’ another observer reported of the women workers of the brickfields of Staffordshire. ‘Clad in a few dirty rags, their bare legs exposed far above the knees, their hair and faces covered with mud, they learn to treat with contempt all feelings of modesty and decency. During the dinner hour they may be seen lying about the yards asleep, or watching the boys bathing in some adjoining canal.’8

  Dickens, who knew only too well what the brickmakers’ communities were like, described one near Chesney Wold which was visited by the self-righteous philanthropist Mrs Pardiggle. He has Esther Summerson describe the scene:

  The brickmaker’s house was one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brickfield, with pigsties close to the broken windows, and miserable little gardens before the doors, growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there, an old tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the doors and windows, some men and women lounged or prowled about …

  Mrs Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral determination, and talking with much volubility about the untidy habits of the people, conducted us into a cottage at the farthest corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled. Besides ourselves, there were in this damp offensive room – a woman with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a man, all stained with clay and mud, and looking very dissipated, lying at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful young man, fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl, doing some kind of washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in, and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire, as if to hide her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome… ‘I want an end to these liberties took with my place,’ (growled the man upon the floor). ‘You haven’t no occasion to be up to it. I’ll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a washin? Yes, she is a washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That’s wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin, instead! An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty – it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it … How have I been conducting of myself? Why, I’ve been drunk for three days; and I’d a been drunk four, if I’d a had the money. Don’t I never mean for to go to church? No, I don’t never mean for to go to church … And how did my wife get her black eye? Why, I giv’ it her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a Lie.’9

  Dreadful as workers’ conditions were in mines and brickfields, however, it was generally agreed by contemporary observers that those who worked in sweat-shops had to endure lives even more pitiable. As late as 1890 a Parliamentary committee, appointed to report on the sweating system, heard of

  a double room, perhaps nine by fifteen feet, in which a man, his wife and six children slept and in which same room ten men were usually employed, so that at night eighteen persons would be in this one room … with … three or four gas jets flaring, a coke fire burning in the wretched fireplace, sinks untrapped, closets without water and altogether the sanitary condition abominable. [In another tailoring workshop] the water closet is in the shop itself, the females sit within three feet of it … There is great want of decency, and it is easy to imagine what follows on such contamination … There is a sky-light which, when broken, exposes the workers to the rain. On complaints being made the sweater says, ‘If you can’t work go home.’ … In nine cases out of ten the windows are broken and filled up with canvas; ventilation is impossible and light insufficient … There is to be found all the trade refuse in the room.

  One witness who appeared before the committee said: ‘You can tell when work is being done on the Sabbath by the blinds being drawn.’ Another confessed: ‘I am almost ashamed to say what my food is … I might get meat once in six months.’

  Most workers in tailoring sweat-shops were paid by the piece. A woman might get 7½d for a coat and by working fifteen hours she could make four coats in the day, earning 2S 6d. But out of this she had to pay 3d for getting the button-holes worked, and 4d for trimmings. Men were paid slightly more than women, but rarely received more than 15s a week, when they were paid at all. For wages were as uncertain as work was irregular. Sometimes, one workman said, ‘we have nothing to do for weeks and weeks’. Then there would be a rush of work and he would be constantly employed from six o’clock in the morning until midnight. Other witnesses worked for twenty-two hours at a stretch; one had worked for forty.

  In almost every occupation workers lived in fear of losing their jobs and, since there were more people looking for work than vacancies to fill, they clung to employment so anxiously that their masters were able to make demands upon them which today would seem utterly intolerable. Men, unskilled as well as skilled, were often required to pay hiring charges for the tools they had to use or to provide their own. Men working in ironworks even had part of their pay stopped for ‘clay to repair the furnaces’; and, as Professor Best has noted, the clerical staff at a Burnley mill in 1852 were recommended to bring their own coal to work to fuel the office stove during cold weather. The management did, however, provide ‘brushes, brooms, scrubbers and soap’ so that the clerks could clean their offices ‘forty minutes before prayers’.

  Complaint was likely to lead to dismissal, and dismissal to reliance upon the inadequate and humiliating outdoor relief provided by the Poor Law.

  We read of dock labourers fighting to get to the front of the crowd outside the dock gates, of skilled workmen, clerks and shop-assistants dyeing their hair black so as to look younger and brisker than they actually felt. After sixty, wrote the coolest statistician of the period, ‘a man becomes unfit for hard work, and if he loses his old master, cannot find a new one. In some trades, a man is disabled at fifty-five or fifty. A coal backe
r is considered past work at forty.’10

  It is usually reckoned that the strongest man cannot last more than twenty years at the business [Henry Mayhew confirmed]. Many of the heartiest of [coalbackers] are knocked up through the bursting of blood-vessels and other casualties, and even the strongest cannot continue at the labour three days together. After the second day’s work, they are obliged to hire some unemployed mate to do the work for them.

  The coalbackers are generally at work at five o’clock in the morning, winter and summer. In the winter time, they have to work by the light of large fires in hanging caldrons, which they call bells.

  Many of the backers are paid at the public-house; the wharfinger gives them a note to receive their daily earnings of the publican, who has the money from the merchant. Often the backers are kept waiting an hour at the public-house for their money, and they have credit through the day for any drink they may choose to call for. While waiting, they mostly have two or three pots of beer before they are paid; and the drinking once commenced, many of them return home drunk, with only half their earnings in their pockets. There is scarcely a man among the whole class of backers, but heartily wishes the system of payment at the public-house may be entirely abolished. The coalbackers are mostly an intemperate class of men. This arises from the extreme labour and the over-exertion of the men, the violent perspiration and the intense thirst produced thereby. Immediately a pause occurs in their work, they fly to the public-house for beer. One coalbacker made a regular habit of drinking sixteen half-pints of beer, with a pennyworth of gin in each, before breakfast every morning.11