Child labour was a key aspect of nineteenth century British capitalism, as was slavery of the blacks in the southern states of America, and remains so today in India, Pakistan and many other Third World countries. In 1797 the wages of a Bolton handloom weaver were 30 shillings and sixpence a week; by 1830 they had dropped to five shillings and sixpence. According to the Chartist Richard Oastler, as the wages of handloom weavers declined, families were reduced to living on the labour of their children. It was not uncommon for those seeking Poor Law relief to be forced, as a precondition for help, to send their children to work in the textile mills. Paupers’ children from London and other cities were apprenticed in the workhouses and later transported in thousands to the cotton mills of Lancashire, Derby, and Nottinghamshire. They were valued for their nimble fingers, capable of keeping up with the fast operations of the power looms.
Prior to the Act of 1833, young persons and children were worked all night, all day, or both, until they dropped. However, even when restrictions were introduced on child labour, they were ineffective due to the lack of government enforcement. The 1833 Act only allowed for the appointment of a mere four Factory Inspectors to inspect the nation’s factories and mills! Also the legal work restrictions only applied to children in textile mills – and even then, it excluded children in the silk and lace-making factories. With impunity to employers, children continued to have their fingers severed and their limbs crushed in unguarded machinery.
Nonconformist mill-owners, with their Methodist over-lookers, would drive their child-labourers till five minutes before midnight on Saturday and then enforce their attendance at Sunday school on the Sabbath. This was part of the Protestant work ethic, which epitomised the penny-pinching Scrooge-like class morality of the British bourgeois.
Young children were not only employed deep underground, but also in the pitch-black suffocating chimneys of industrial Britain. Some chimney flues in which children were forced to work were only seven inches (18 centimetres) square. Their terror of the dark and narrow confines was overcome by the threat of greater terror from below. Chimney sweeps were beaten, stabbed by needles, or deliberately burned as a means of “encouraging” them to carry out their duties. It was reported that in 1848 a child of ten had been sold to different employers five times over. He was a clever worker, and although crippled by his injuries, had cleaned no less than twelve chimneys in a day. At Nottingham in 1850, another boy of ten, Samuel Whitt, was jammed in a chimney, below which a fire was still smouldering. He was eventually torn down by two people standing one upon another, and died in agony. In 1851, near Leeds, George Wilson, aged ten, after cleaning nine chimneys, died in the tenth.
When there were attempts to end this barbarism, the propertied classes howled in protest at the thought.
“Some boys’ flesh”, said one employer, “is far worse than others, and it takes more time to harden them.” He estimated it would take six months for parts of the body to grow sufficiently “cartilaginous”.[13] “I had myself formerly boys of as young as five-and-a-half years, but I did not like them; they were too weak”, stated a master.
Six years’ old was described as “a nice training age.” Many were later afflicted by stunted growth, deformities and even cancer. Quite a number were burned or asphyxiated to death. These were children nobody wanted or could ill afford to keep. Some were simply sold to employers and according to the laws of supply and demand, the smaller the children, the higher the price. It was not until 1875 that a Bill introduced by Lord Shaftesbury brought this scandal finally to a close.
In the silk industry, little children would stand for ten hours upon stools to perform their work. Crowded into suffocating spaces, with no ventilation, these work dens became the prison house of infants. The same was equally true of the textile mills where children as young as four and five, and incredibly even toddlers of three, were put to work. In abominable conditions, hundreds of thousands of children, half-ragged and half-washed, were literally worked to death in the shadow of the overseer.
“The punishments for arriving late in the morning had to be made cruel enough to overcome the temptation to tired children to take more than three or four hours in bed”, the Hammonds explained. “One witness before Sadler’s Committee had known a child, who had reached home at eleven o’clock one night, got up at two o’clock the next morning in panic and limped to the mill gate. In some mills scarcely an hour passed in the long day without the sound of beating and cries of pain. Fathers beat their own children to save them from a worse beating by the overseers. In the afternoon the strain grew so severe that the heavy iron stick known as the billy-roller was in constant use, and, even then, it happened not infrequently that a small child, as he dozed, tumbled into the machine beside him to be mangled for life…
“In one mill, indeed, where the owner, a Mr. Gott, had forbidden the use of anything but a ferrule (a metal ring), some of the slubbers (weavers) tried to keep the children awake, when they worked from five in the morning to nine at night, by encouraging them to sing hymns. As the evening wore on, the pain and fatigue and tension on the mind became insupportable. Children would implore anyone who came near to tell them how many hours there were still before them. A witness told Sadler’s Committee that his child, a boy of six, would say to him, ‘Father, what o’clock is it?’ I said perhaps it is seven o’clock. ‘Oh, it is two hours to nine o’clock? I cannot bear it.’”[14]
The report of the Commission on the Employment of Children and Young Persons, set up by Lord Shaftesbury in 1840, described the horrendous nightmare conditions in the coalmines.
“A girdle is put round the naked waist to which a chain from the carriage is hooked and passed through the legs and the boys crawl on their hands and knees drawing the carriage after them”, stated the report. Describing girls working in the mines, it continued: “Chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, saturated with wet and more than half naked, crawling upon their hands and feet dragging their heavy loads behind them, they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural.”[15]
This was to lead to the introduction of the Mines Act of 1842 and the reduction of hours for women and children in 1844. At the time, the good seventh Earl of Shaftesbury spoke in the House about the appalling slave-like conditions of children in the collieries:
Labour very hard, nine hours a day regularly, sometimes twelve, sometimes above thirteen hours; stop two or three minutes to eat; some days nothing at all to eat, sometimes work and eat together; have worked a whole day together without stopping to eat; a good many children in the mines, some under six years of age; sometimes can’t eat, owing to the dust, and damp, and badness of the air; sometimes it is as hot as an oven, sometimes so hot as to melt a candle. A vast many girls in the pits go down just the same as the boys, by ladders or baskets; the girls wear breeches; beaten the same as the boys; many bastards produced in the pits; a good deal of fighting amongst them; much crookedness caused by the labour; work by candlelight; exposed to terrible accidents; work in very contracted spaces; children are plagued with sore feet and gatherings. ‘I cannot but think, (says one witness), that many nights they do not sleep with a whole skin, for their backs get cut and bruised with knocking against the mine, it is so low. It is wet under foot; the water oftentimes runs down from the roof; many lives lost in various ways; and many severely injured by burning; workers knocked up after fifty.’ I cannot much err, (says Mr. Commissioner Tuffnell), in coming to the conclusion, both from what I say, and the evidence of witnesses given on oath above, that it must appear to every impartial judge of the two occupations, that the hardest labour, in the worst room, in the worst conducted factory, is less hard, less cruel, and less demoralising, than the labour of the best of coal mines.[16]
As today with the recent arguments over the introduction of the minimum wage, attempts at that time to limit the use of child labour were met with howls of protest from the employing class. When Sir Robert Peel introduced a Bill as early as 1802 to reduce children’s working hours and prohibit night work for smaller children, strong protests were sent by mill-owners from Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds, Preston, Keighley and elsewhere. Such actions, they said, would be “prejudicial to the cotton trade” and “would amount to a surrender of all the profits of the establishment.” This refrain was to be heard from the ruling class in response to every measure to regulate working conditions within their factories – right up to the present day with their screams against modern “regulations” and red tape.
The long hours in work endured by children prevented any real formal education. This suited the employing class who regarded education as deeply subversive. Education would only be “prejudicial to their morals and happiness”, and teach them to despise their lot in life. For Mr. D. Giddy, President of the Royal Society, “instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity”, and lastly, “it would render them insolent to their superiors.”[17]
Following the 1833 Act, the government decided to spend £20,000 a year on schooling. However, in the same year it spent £50,000 on the rebuilding of stables at Windsor Castle. It was evident that working class children were valued much less than horses.
These were the social conditions that gave rise to “go-slows” and “turn-outs” (the word “strike” was not used until the early nineteenth century) against the starvation wages, excessive hours and insufferable conditions. By the end of the eighteenth century, under the impact of a developing class war, trade unionism began to take root in the form of trade clubs, established primarily by skilled handicraftsmen: joiners, carpenters, shipwrights, coopers, printers, and others. By the 1790s new layers of factory workers became organised, especially among cotton spinners.
Without being aware of it, the trade unions became the focal points for the organisation of the working class as a class. Their illegal character had its origins in shadowy societies such as the United Irishmen. Even prior to 1799, more than forty pieces of anti-union legislation were placed on the statute books. As early as 1718 a Royal Proclamation was issued against the weavers’ unlawful clubs and combinations, which were alleged to have evolved into elaborate organisations strong enough to dictate terms to the employers. The men of property could not tolerate such rebellious behaviour, as the following tract revealed:
But lo!
CONSPIRACY and TREASON are abroad!
Those imps of darkness, gender’d in the wombs
Of spinning-jennies, winding-wheels, and looms,
In Lunashire –O Lord!
My L-ds and G-tl-n, we’ve much to fear!
Reform, Reform, the swinish rabble cry –
Meaning of course rebellion, blood, and riot –
Audacious rascals! you, my Lords, and I,
Know ‘tis their duty to be starved in quiet…[18]
The new Combination Acts were savagely administered in the new industrial districts, rendering trade unions criminal organisations. Under such tyranny, the working class had no alternative but to fight for survival. In self-defence, trade unions were forced to operate in underground secrecy, camouflaging their activities, fighting fire with fire wherever they could. Yet, in this cruel environment of persecution and oath taking was formed the initial cadres from which modern trade unionism emerged. “The working class made itself as much as it was made”, noted the historian EP Thompson.[19] The British working class, our forefathers, not only constituted in Marx’s words, the “first-born sons of modern history”[20], but an oppressed class that could never reconcile its gravedigger.
-
Quoted in The Town Labourer, p. 179
-
Ibid, pp. 159-60
-
Quoted in Magnificent Journey by Francis Williams, p.24, London 1954
-
Quoted in The English Reform Tradition, edited by Sidney Jackman, p.87, New Jersey, 1965
-
Quoted in The Town Labourer, p. 57
-
Quoted in Thompson, op. cit.
-
Ibid, p.213
-
Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 359-60