While changes in employment disadvantaged married women, the horrific treatment of children is the darkest chapter in the early industrialisation of Britain. First-hand evidence to parliamentary commissioners, the testimony of inspectors and campaigners, and the portrayals of child paupers in the pages of Dickens, Kingsley and others have left us with a body of deeply disturbing evidence. While we need to set these stories within their historical context, we should never lose sight of the wilful cruelty and neglect that was visited on the helpless and the ease with which it was justified.
The background to child labour in factories was the huge increase in the numbers of British children – taking England alone, the juvenile population increased from roughly 2 million in 1750 to 4.5 million in 1821.17 This rapid increase meant that there were many more families with a large number of children and more mouths to feed. In the early industrial period the poorest families were the most likely to send children out to work, but this pattern was complicated by individual family choices: the presence of younger children, for example, meant the older children would have to go out to work; and even well-paid families in certain trades were eager to get their children into work. Miners’ children could earn good wages working underground – in 1752 John Brabbon earned £19 a week as a coal-hewer while his ten-year-old son brought in almost £10 a week as a pony-driver, both at Whickam colliery in Northumberland; and in 1841 a Durham colliery manager said his miners were ‘very anxious, and very dissatisfied if we do not take the children’.18 Parents often lied about their children’s ages, while older children falsely obtained working certificates for their younger siblings.19
While some families chose, or were forced by circumstance, to send their children to work, the worst exploitation came through use of so-called pauper or parish apprentices. A mill-owner could make a one-off payment of £5 to a workhouse overseer, provide a set of clothes and essentially take ownership of a child pauper. Thousands of children were brought from workhouses in cities and towns to mills often hundreds of miles away, where they were given bed and food in return for work. A 1757 law allowed apprentices the right of settlement in any parish after forty days’ residence, which had the effect of dramatically increasing the number of poor children taken out of London to work in Lancashire mills and as domestic help in the booming cities of the north. In 1795 Dr John Aikin expressed his concerns: ‘In these [factories] children of a very tender age are employed; many of them collected from the workhouses in London and Westminster, and transported in crowds, as apprentices to masters resident many hundreds of miles distant, where they serve unknown, unprotected, and forgotten by those to whose care nature or the laws had consigned them.’20
This process was not confined to Lancashire; Robert Owen took over the works at New Lanark from his father-in-law David Dale in 1799:
. . . at that period I found there were 500 children, who had been taken from poor-houses, chiefly in Edinburgh, and these children were generally from the age of 5 and 6, to 7 and 8. The hours of work at that time were 13, inclusive of meal times, and an hour and a half was allowed for meals . . . their limbs were very generally deformed, their growth was stunted, and, although one of the best schoolmasters upon the old plan was engaged to instruct those children regularly every night, in general they made very slow progress.’21
Robert Blincoe, a one-time pauper apprentice, later gave some details of life at the Litton mill in Derbyshire: ‘Palfry, the Smith, had the task of riveting irons upon any of the apprentices, whom the masters ordered, and those were much like the irons usually put upon felons. Even young women, if suspected of intending to run away, had irons riveted on their ancles, and reaching by long links and rings up to the hips, and in these they were compelled to walk to and from the mill to work and to sleep.’22
In 1832 Elizabeth Bentley, a doffer at a wool mill in Leeds from the age of six, described one method of discipline: ‘I have seen the overlooker go to the top end of the room, where the little girls hug the can to the backminders; he has taken a strap, and a whistle in his mouth, and sometimes he has got a chain and chained them, and strapped them all down the room.’23
In 1810 two Manchester JPs inspected the Merryweather Weaving Factory in Ancoats, Manchester:
. . . we found the Rooms in general tolerable, but crowded with too many Looms; that there were no Rules put up in this Factory . . . The Potatoes for Dinner were boiling with the Skins on, in a State of Great Dirtiness, and Eight Cow Heads boiling in another Pot for Dinner; a great Portion of the Food we were told was of a liquid Nature; the Privies were too offensive to be approached by us; some of the Apprentices complained of being overworked.’24
When mills closed down or were short of work, mill-owners often advertised groups of apprentices ‘To be disposed of’ to anyone who would take them. In 1816 the transportation of parish apprentices was limited to forty miles and their use in factories generally declined.25 This mirrored the general decrease in the use of children, which came partly through technology – the piecers who tied up broken thread, for example, became redundant once this could be done automatically – and partly through changes in social attitudes. There were regular factory Acts through the nineteenth century but legislation tended to echo the changing realities rather than lead the way, while small workshops and manufactories, potteries and match-making factories were unregulated before 1870, and child chimney sweeps were not prohibited until 1875.
Aside from factories the most disturbing workplaces for children were coal mines. Children had worked in mines for centuries but the huge demand for coal made their situation worse. Five-year-old children worked as trappers, sitting in the dark all day to open ventilation doors, before graduating to pony-drivers and eventually coal-face workers. In the pits of West Yorkshire and Lancashire the seams were too narrow to use ponies, so the coal was hauled from the face to the shaft by children. A horrific incident at the Silkstone colliery in Bradford in 1838, in which rainwater flooded a shaft, saw twenty-six children drowned. The resulting Royal Commission into child labour in mines heard from Patience Kershaw: ‘I hurry in the clothes I have now got on, trousers and ragged jacket. The bald place on my head is made by thrusting the corves. I hurry the corves a mile or more underground and back; they weigh 3 cwt. I hurry eleven hours a day. I wear a belt and chain at the workings to get the corves out. The getter that I work for sometimes beat me if I am not quick enough.’ One commissioner reported: ‘When a child has to drag a carriage loaded with coals through a passage not more than eighteen inches in height some ingenuity is required to get his body and the carriage through the narrow space. In some pits I have had to creep on my hands and knees, the height being barely twenty inches, and then have gone still lower on my breast, and crawled like a turtle.’26 The children often worked in a knee-deep sludge of water and coal dust and sometimes had to crawl on inclines of one in three. The Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 outlawed the use of all girls and boys under ten in underground working; for once legislation was ahead of practice.
Various factory Acts prescribed education for children but without saying how this was to be gained. Nevertheless industrialisation began the creation of the modern idea of childhood, and the transition from dependency to adulthood, as a time of learning rather than working. While the earliest factories depended on child labour, this era was short-lived. Textile mills relocated to towns and cities, technology improved, skills levels increased and the demand for child labour shrank. As adult wages improved people did not need to send their children out to work.
While children were gradually eased out of the industrial workplace, conditions for all workers remained difficult and dangerous. The finest cotton threads stuck together if the temperature fell below 24ºC so the spinners kept the heat levels high. Lack of ventilation allowed infectious diseases to spread and this, combined with the noise from the machinery and the open moving parts, made work uncomfortable and potentially dangerous.
The structure of the factor
y, with its shop-floors, overseers, managers and owners, gave birth to and reflected the class structure of society. The early factory owners emerged under the old dispensation and became, either by default or intention, the lords of their industrial manors. Building a mill in a small town or village, employing local and immigrant workers, and accumulating wealth and social standing made these industrial pioneers into patriarchs who ruled their empires from on high. Factories needed their workers to attend regularly and work continuously. Owners like the Strutts were typical in holding back one-sixth of wages, which would then be paid quarterly in reward for good behaviour. They drew up a book of punishable offences including: ‘Being absent without leave; Going to Derby Fair; Absent due to drink; stealing thread; Stealing candles or oil; Wasting yarn; neglecting cleaning and oiling; tying bad knots.’ From the offences committed it is clear that there were occasional high spirits among the apprentices: ‘Riding on each other’s backs; Striking T Ride on the nose; Throwing tea at Josh Bridworth; Using ill language; Throwing water on Ann Gregory very frequently.’27 These employees had not, in general, broken any law but their employers assumed the right to punish them.
The most successful early industrialists like Arkwright, Boulton, Strutt and Wedgwood treated their apprentices and other workers with firmness and decency. Young people were made to work hard but many were trained in their trade, with Boulton, for example, also providing instruction in the arts of drawing and design. He even started an insurance scheme for workers, one of the first in the world, to cover sickness, injury or death. Wedgwood imposed severe rules against lateness, drunkenness and misbehaviour, usually the loss of hours and pay; he was the first to introduce time cards and a clock.
However well or badly workers were treated, the factory saw the beginnings of an industrial class system with the owners and workers on either side of an unbridgeable social divide. While in previous times an apprentice would aspire to become a master, such a path was to become increasingly difficult. Instead a middle class emerged that was quite separate from shop-floor workers, and as the century progressed members of each social class had, at best, nothing to do with each other, and at worst a mutual contempt.
A new type of society emerged as the factories offered stability and wages in return for workers keeping regular hours, obeying sets of rules, and working at new levels of intensity. In effect people traded the insecurity, continual near-poverty, and relative freedom of low-level working for secure, better-paid, more highly controlled employment. Society itself became much more controlling, regulated and disapproving of those, such as the poor and dissolute, who did not conform to its standards and requirements. In return Victorian society offered a degree of widespread material well-being that, fragile though it may look to us, was beyond the experience of any previous human society. The Victorian age also saw the separation of the domestic sphere from the public sphere, the home from the workplace. This was the culmination of the change from the self-sufficient household of earlier times; now the ideal household comprised a man out at work, a woman as home-maker and children in education.
The huge upheaval brought on by industrialisation inevitably led to social unrest. The most serious threat to the cotton industry came in 1779, when Arkwright’s new mill at Chorley was destroyed, along with nine other local mills (see here). There were fears of a general insurrection and the army had to intervene, but disruption did not lead to full-blown revolution. In fact the rioters of 1779 argued that they were on the side of the law since, by throwing people out of work, the machines would ruin the country. In 1780 the Lancashire Court of Quarter Sessions gave a historic judgement in favour of the new machines, declaring:
that the invention and introduction of the machines for carding, roving, spinning and twisting cotton has been of the greatest utility to this country by the extension and improvement of the cotton manufacturers and the affording labour and subsistence to the industrious poor . . . that it is impossible to restrain the force of ingenuity where employed in the improvement of manufactures . . . that if the legislature was to prevent the exercise of them in this kingdom, it would tend to establish them in foreign country’s, which would be highly detrimental to the trade of this country.
While violent protests against machines continued, the 1780 ruling marked the point where new machinery, and innovation in general, was supported by law. This seems a logical or even inevitable part of industrialisation, but we should remember that patent laws and guild regulations had, for centuries, made illegal devices that threatened livelihoods. The world had turned.
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Atrocious Murder
‘On Tuesday evening last, about half past six o’clock, as Mr WILLIAM HORSFALL, a very extensive Woollen Manufacturer, at Marsden, about seven miles from Huddersfield, was returning from the market at that place, he was assassinated on the public road, on Crossland Moor:
‘The circumstances, as stated to us by an eyewitness of this most barbarous Murder are these:– Mr Horsfall and a Manufacturer, of the name of Eastwood, had left Huddersfield together, and at a short distance before they came to the fatal spot, Mr Eastwood stopped to water his horse, while Mr Horsfall rode leisurely along the road; soon after he had passed the Warren Inn, a distance of about a mile and a half from Huddersfield, and on the Manchester road, four men, each armed with a horse pistol, appeared in a small plantation, and placed the barrels of their pistols in appertures in the wall, apparently prepared for that purpose; the muzzle of two of these pieces Mr Horsfall distinctly saw, but before he had time to extricate himself from his perilous situation, they all four fired, and inflicted four wounds in the left side of their victim, who instantly fell from his horse, and the blood flowed from the wounds in torrents. A number of passengers both horse and foot rushed almost instantly to the spot, and, after disentangling his foot from the stirrup, he was with some difficulty got to the inn.’28
William Horsfall, who died of his wounds, was a virulent anti-Luddite who became a noted target of activists. On 8 January three men were hanged for his murder. The Horsfall case became notorious as people were appalled by the murder, and the authorities became more assiduous in their quashing of Luddite dissent.
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The most notable organised rebellion came from the Luddites who operated in Nottingham, West Yorkshire and Lancashire in 1811 and 1812. A letter to a Huddersfield mill-owner in March 1812 was typical:
Information has just been given that you are a holder of those detestable Shearing Frames and I . . . give you fair Warning to pull them down . . . If they are not taken down by the end of next week, I will detach one of my Lieutenants with at least 300 men to destroy them [and burn] your Buildings down to Ashes and if you have the Impudence to fire upon any of my Men, they have orders to murder you, & burn all your housing.29
William Felkin recorded his experience as a special constable aged seventeen chasing a Luddite across Nottingham rooftops in 1811:
. . . who entered a house alone in Rutland Street, Nottingham, one evening; proceeded up the stairs and smashed the material parts of a frame in a minute or two . . . threw himself on the roof; passing along others he saw in the dim light that the earth had been lately turned up in a garden below, and leaped from the eaves of a three-storey house upon it. The frame-breaker quietly passed through a kitchen where a family were at table, and escaped. In a few minutes the shouts of a sympathising crowd were heard at New Radford, half a mile from the scene of the adventure.30
William Cobbett, who had been sympathetic to the protest of the Luddites but who believed destruction of machinery was no answer, wrote ‘A Letter to the Luddites’: ‘By machines mankind are able to do that which their own bodily powers would never effect to the same extent. Machines are the product of the mind of man; and their existence distinguishes the civilised man from the savage.’31 The murder of William Horsfall by four Luddites in 1812 (see here) was a shock to the nation; seventeen Luddites were hanged at York in 1813 and many more transporte
d and, while protests continued, the movement dwindled.
Workers did not simply get together to wreck machinery; mills and large-scale mines employed large numbers of workers, and gave the possibility of collective action in support of better pay. In 1792 local dignitary Henry Blundell became concerned about miners in Wigan who had gathered ‘to demand an extravagant advance in wages. They have given only til tomorrow at 3 o’clock to consider of it and if their demand is not complied with, they threaten to destroy the Works by pulling up the engines, throwing down the wheels and filling up the pits.’32 The authorities soon realised that large numbers of workers coming together gave potential for political subversion, and industrial workers began to be seen as a potentially dangerous class of people. The 1799 and 1800 Combination Acts made it illegal for workers to combine to press for improvements in pay or conditions. The Acts were repealed in 1824 but a new Act in 1825 restricted trades unions to bargaining over pay and conditions.
It is clear that the shock of industrialisation caused enormous hardship for many and it took decades to put right the abuses while holding on to the gains. But over time, and in an echo of the old guild system, workers created their own forms of mutual support including Friendly Societies, unions, federations and cooperatives. The change to an industrial economy powered by coal was far from smooth; it plunged working people into an era of rapid change that made many worse off, while also losing control of their own destinies. In the long run it freed the nation from fear of want, but the long run was a long time coming for those at the bottom. Protests to halt innovation were doomed to fail, but workers were able to organise successfully to bring about improvements in conditions. By the late nineteenth century the trade unions went so far as to form their own political party, eventually winning the power to govern the country. This was only possible because industrialisation brought workers together where they could fight for their common concerns.
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