They blamed high wages.
With one in ten men away fighting
able adult workers came at a premium
and cut into profits.
Pit's advice was short and simple
He was supposed to have told them,
Yoke up the children.
Luckily for Pit and for Great Britain
and PLC for the first time in it's history
the country was awash with children.
In the mid 1700s the population of Britain
was small and stationary around 5.7 million.
But by the end of the century it had shot up
by more than 50 percent.
to 8.7 million.
So what changed?
The answer's in here.
This is Sir Michael's in Shropshire
built by that great man of
the industrial age,
Thomas Telford in 1796.
There's been a church on this site
since Norman times.
The marriage registers are long.
And very well maintained.
Ah now these are beautiful records.
You can see here somebody's
not been able to sign their name,
so they put their mark.
And elsewhere they struggle to
write their signatures.
Now study of these and other records
have shown that as the 18th century
progressed more people
were marrying younger.
Now why was that?
Previously men and women were
employed to work the land
and lived in with their employer,
usually a farmer,
or a big local land owner.
These men liked to keep their
young employees single,
because married employees
had children
and were more of a burden.
But advances in farming practice
meant less people were needed
to grow food.
So fewer people lived in
and more were kicked out.
Of course that meant that
there was no master to
ask for permission to wed.
These liberated workers began traveling
earning their wages in new industries.
The pay wasn't great,
but it wasn't based on the sliding
scales of farmwork.
They reached their peak
potential earnings at younger ages
and so attempted to marry
and start families sooner.
Women with jobs found their earnings
could shore up new families,
adding again to the temptation.
to marry younger.
As for those women who
couldn't find work,
well they were eager to marry young
and gain financial protection.
The result in the early 1700s
the average age of British brides
had been nearly 27.
By 1800 it had fallen to 23 and a half.
Those 3 additional years of married life
were crucial.
Girls were at their most fertile
and could produce 2 additional babies.
[babies crying]
So at the very moment that Britain
was prepared to take the giant
technological leap into the machine age,
it had it's largest, youngest population.
And it was a mobile population.
able to adapt to change.
Every thing was tailored towards
delivering the industrial future.
But that industrial future
needed feeding.
Children played a role in that too.
We tend to think of children
from this time as working
in mines and factories.
But in fact,
child labor was ubiquitous.
Almost every work place
would have had children in it.
And the biggest employer
was actually agriculture.
Agriculture accounted for about
a third of children's jobs.
Often on small setups like this one.
This farm was attached to the
local rectory
and worked by a small team
including boys and girls.
[cows moo]
Of course agriculture is one
area where we still see
children working today.
Ushered into the life of the farm
under the watchful eye of their parents.
The children of the industrial revolution
rarely enjoyed such a
gentle introduction.
Unlike the factory apprentices,
child farm workers were often
the only children employed
on an establishment.
And they were also housed with
their master or another
adult worker.
And there was no one looking
over the shoulders of these
men to see how they were
treating their child employees.
As a result these children
were often more vulnerable
than the children who worked
in factories.
For example,
men's reminisces tiptoe around
the topic of child's sexual abuse
but in the testimonies I've read,
there are 2 cases where boys were
probably molested.
And both involved lonely little farm
workers consigned to the care
of other adults,
far from the protection
of friends and family.
Just like the heavy industries
agriculture had a job for
every age group.
And the entry level into farm
work began at 6 years old,
when children could be employed
as human scarecrows.
When I was 6 and 2 months old,
I was sent off to work
I do not think I shall ever forget
those long hungry days
in the fields scaring crows.
You can imagine the feeling
of loneliness.
Hours and hours passed without
a living creature coming near.
I cried most of the time.
And in desperation I would shout
as loud as I could.
Mother, mother, mother!
But mother could not hear.
She was working in the hay fields
who knows where.
By my 7th birthday
I was driving the plow,
Any repairs to plow or harness
had to be taken to tradesmen.
Once after working all day long
I had to carry a plow horse collar
that required whittling
And the plow coulter
that needed repairs at the blacksmith.
These 2 heavy things made a burden
far too much for me.
But I had to trudge with them
as best I could,
the mile and a half
across the fields to Evidon.
William Arnold was just 6 years old
when he went to work
on that farm in North Hamptonshire
And this is a horse collar
like the one he carried.
Let me show you just
how heavy this is...
[grunting]
Now we need the coulter
cuz he also carried that.
This is part of the plow.
40 pounds!
That probably weighs
more than he did.
In many ways,
the crow scarers and the children
fetching and carrying for farm
laborers were on the lowest rung
of the employment ladder.
But many testimonies tell us
that even at that level
and at a young age
the children saw these punishing
labors as an opportunity.
They were proper workers,
and they wanted to get on.
I our village there was...
and justice of the peace.
I began to draw up a pair of horses
that plow for him.
And after a bit,
thinking I suppose
I was a small likely lad
he made me a sort of stable boy
and gave me 8 shillings a week
to start with.
Here was a... lad
who was set on rising
as fast and as much as he could.
There were no slack off hours for me.
No taking it easy with
the other lads,
To make more money,
to do more,
to know more,
to be a somebody in
my little world,
was my ambition.
They might not have had much choice
about their employment
but many children were determined
to seize what opportunities came along
with a level of determination
and enthusiasm that's astonishing.
If sometimes hard to imagine.
For some jobs really did require
huge amounts of courage.
With a view of immediately
testing my capablitiies,
my new master persuaded me
to climb a chimney on my
very first morning.
With the feet standing up on
the grate,
the body would nearly
fill up the width of a chimney.
I climbed with my right arm
lifted above the head,
the left arm by my side.
The elbows were pressed
hard against the brick work
to hold the body suspended,
until the knees were drawn up.
Then the knees on one side
and the bare heels on the other,
held me secure.
While the right hand held the scraper
to bring down the soot
the knees and elbows
through the constant pressing
and the friction with the brick work
became peeled, thus allowing soot to penetrate.
It caused open, festering sores.
which took several weeks to heal.
Breathing was always more or less
a difficulty.
A hood, called a climbing cap
was drawn over the head
and tucked in at the neck.
But even with that protection,
I was subject to the taste
and inhalation of every kind of soot,
into my throat and lungs,
where fires had only just been put out,
the sulfurous fumes were sufficient
to stifle them.
Once the fumes were so strong
that I fell from top to bottom,
[boy screams]
lying sensible.
[Mary Poppins song: Chim Chim Chiree.]
Yes they really did put
kids up chimneys
And this is a kind of normal chimney
that George Elson would have
been dealing with.
But that one's so wide
that you would have no
challenge from that.
You'd have been up and down
there like grease lightning.
What really tested boy's metals
were chimneys that measured
9 inches by 9 inches,
which is this size.
And so ...
and wriggle through
and clean something like this.
Seems practically impossible.
Martin is president of the
National Association of British Chimney Sweeps.
So Martin, here's a very old chimney
right here.
And this is the kind of thing
those boys would have to clean.
So tell us,
how did they go about doing it?
Well the little boys were known
as climbing boys.
Apprentice to the trade
at 7 years old in some cases
and they used to use their
elbows and knees to scamper
up inside the chimney.
And uh, in many cases they
stripped naked
although they had some sort of early uniform
the soot used to fill the pockets
and because the chimney design
was so small they became wedged,
so they stripped naked so they could
escape back down the chimney
after cleaning it.
So what equipment did they have?
The little climbing boys
and in some cases girls,
they used to use a small scraper
such as this,
a little metal scraper
with a wooden handle
and the traditional sweep's hand brush.
which would literally,
they would scrape the soot away
and brush with the hand brush.
The exploitation of climbing boys
and girls was rightly seen
at the time as a national scandal.
However even when new
technology was introduced
in the form of jointed
chimney brushes,
and sweeps no longer needed children,
it didn't mean boys and girls
were spared.
There was still a great reluctance
for the master sweeps of the day
to do away with boys,
and it was far cheaper to
purchase a small boy from a family
for a guinea or 2
a few shillings for the poorer families,
and in some cases,
little girls as well.
So boys and girls were cheaper
than brushes.
Absolutely at the time.
In one horrible incident in Dover
where a master had sent a boy
up the chimney with a wet towel
to extinguish a chimney fire.
And apparently he climbed
into the flue
very reluctantly, the master threatened
to beat him.
He attempted to climb
further into the chimney
then got stuck in the chimney wedged
And apparently they heard
his screams for over 2 miles.
Not exactly Chim Chimney Cheree
in Mary Poppins is it now?
It shows how hard life was
and how few opportunities there were.
The many climbing boys
quit the trade and went off
to serve in the armed forces.
The scandal of boy soldiers
is something today that we associate
with the most
callous regimes in the developing world.
But putting boys into war zones
was actually an old British tradition.
For example, there were 13 of them
who fought in the Battle of Trafalgar
on this ship, HMS Victory.
One of them was a 16 year old
midshipmen Lieutenant William Rivers.
His father was also on board
and William first went to sea
with him on Victory age 6 and a half.
And he immediately saw action
and was wounded off....
I had the honor of serving
in 3 general actions.
In the first,
I received 2 wounds in my right arm.
And in the latter while I was
receiving orders from his late lordship
Admiral Nelson,
I received a wound on my face.
which was shortly followed
by a gun shot wound
which carried away my left leg.
Both William the father
and William the son...