A lot of tut-tutting goes on today when the horrors of child labour are exposed in the developing world, however it’s not so long ago that the factories of the Industrial Revolution brought in young people, barely more than toddlers, to work in foul environments that often sickened and killed them.
Exploiting Vulnerable Kids
Greg Wright reports in the Yorkshire Post (February 12, 2009) that, “In the early 1800s, many children worked 16-hour days in atrocious conditions alongside their parents. Child labour was not confined to mills but also rife in the coal mines (where children began work at the age of five and usually died before they were 25), gas works and shipyards…”
At bygonederbyshire.con Anton Rippon continues the narrative by explaining that children were “Regarded as public nuisances to be disposed of as quickly as possible, they were sent out to work as soon as possible by families trying to exist on wages that were below starvation level.”
Small Children Worked as Chimney Sweeps
Being tiny, it was relatively easy for children to scramble up the chimneys of upper-class Victorian houses. Their job was to brush off accumulated soot in the chimney. Of course, they wore no protection against the rough brickwork, so their knees and elbows would be sliced and bruised until they developed calluses.
The boys who did this were often taken out of workhouses and “apprenticed” to chimney sweeps, who frequently beat them to terrorize them into doing the dangerous work.
Charles Dickens, who often drew his material from real living conditions in Victorian England, gave an unflattering picture of one such gentleman named Gamfield, to whom Oliver Twist was to be apprenticed. But the boy was saved from this fate by a magistrate who remarked that, “Mr. Gamfield did happen to labour under the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death already.”
Young People in Coal Mines
Other children were sent down into the coal mines at the age when today’s kids are starting kindergarten.
Hurriers and fillers were small children who loaded trucks with coal by hand as it was pried from the coal face by older men. Other children would then drag the trucks of coal along passageways often no more than three feet high.
Trappers were employed to open and close ventilation doors in the passages as the truckloads of coal were hauled to the mine shaft. The trappers worked in total darkness in shifts of between 12 and 18 hours a day.
Payment was a few pennies a week to add to meagre earnings of families that lived in absolute squalor.
Campaign to End Child Exploitation
During the second decade of the 18th century campaigns to end the worst abuses began to gather support, as noted by victorianweb.com: “After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when ‘Short Time Committees’ organized largely by evangelicals began to demand a ten-hour day.” A Royal Commission was set up to hear testimony.
In 1832, one of the reformers, Richard Oastler, gave testimony to the commission in which he described the awful conditions of child labour and mentioned an occasion on which he was in the company of a slave master from the West Indies. Oastler said the man compared the system of slavery with that of mill workers in Yorkshire.
He quoted the slave master as saying: “well, I have always thought myself disgraced by being the owner of black slaves, but we never, in the West Indies thought it was possible for any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine years old to work 12½ hours a day; and that, you acknowledge, is your regular practice.”
New Laws Improve Working Conditions
Eventually, the campaign got results. BBC – Primary History listed some of the meagre gains:
- “1841 Mines Act - No child under the age of 10 to work underground in a coal mine.
- “1847 Ten Hour Act - No child to work more than 10 hours in a day.
- “1874 Factory Act - No child under the age of 10 to be employed in a factory.”
Conditions in factories, mills, and mines were still atrocious by today’s standards, but they were something of an improvement.
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