The Children Who Built Victorian Britain Part 1

The catalyst to Britain's Industrial Revolution was the slave labour of orphans and destitute children. In this shocking and moving account of their exploitation and eventual emancipation, Professor Jane Humphries uses the actual words of these child workers (recorded in diaries, interviews and letters) to let them tell their own story. She also uses groundbreaking animation to bring to life a world where 12-year-olds went to war at Trafalgar and six-year-olds worked the fields as human scarecrows.

Jane Humphries:

Jane Humphries is a fellow of All Soul Souls College and a Professor of Economic History at Oxford University and the author of "Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution".

In "The Children Who Built Victorian England" she uses the biographies, letters, diaries and documents of hundreds of working children to tell the story of the Industrial Revolution from their perspective. By accessing their testimonies she allows them to speak up for themselves and what they have to say may surprise you. These children weren't mindless drones or soul-less victims; they were feisty, clever, gutsy and determined people who collectively made sure that future generations did not suffer the same fate they did.

The programme also sees Jane visiting Jane visits the places where the children worked as she tries to get a picture of how widespread the practice of child labour was. She also looks at the kind of jobs that, 200 years ago, were seen as appropriate for children.

More tellingly she also reveals the social conditions which created a population boom amongst the poor - one which was exploited by the early industrialists. For example most of the new factories were built in sparsely populated areas and so their workforce was provided through the trafficking of orphans from the cities. These destitute children aged eight and sometimes younger, who were handed over by the Parish authorities and signed up to work for free until they reached adulthood. Without this available slave labour many businesses would never have got off the ground.

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_zJeDKE9vI

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/sochistov.html

http://www.nettlesworth.durham.sch.uk/time/victorian/vindust.html

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. All copyrighted materials contained herein belong to their respective copyright holders, I do not claim ownership over any of these materials. I realize no profit, monetary or otherwise, from the exhibition of these videos.

I lived partly with my father and grandmother and partly in the workhouse.

When I was nine, I was then bound apprentice to a man who turned me over to the colliers.

My father said to him, "I had rather you'd tied a stone around his neck

"and drowned him."

# But you won't fool the children of the revolution

# No, no, wow! #

Three great golden men,

surveying their plans for the future.

Mathew Bolton, William Murdoch, and James Watt.

All key figures in Britain's Industrial Revolution.

This statue cast them as minor deities lording it over their domain

and stands here in the centre of Birmingham,

a city that benefited greatly from their combined genius.

There are monuments like this all over the country

because when it comes to the Industrial Revolution,

we all know who should get the credit.

It's the money men, the manufacturers, the inventors,

the engineers, the great and the good.

Men like these.

But these 18th and 19th century entrepreneurs and inventors

were only able to capitalise on their brilliance

thanks to an all-important resource,

raw material found in plentiful supply.

It was children.

Of course there's no memorial to their contribution

but the children of the revolution fortunately have left us something

much more important than stone and gold paint.

They've left us their own stories in their own voices

and they can still speak up for themselves

down across the centuries.

Standing by my father with a knot of whip cord in my button hole,

which showed that I had a desire to work with horses.

I stood there, waiting for the highest bidder for my services.

Before I'd left home, I'd read Uncle Tom's Cabin

and when I saw us all lined up, I remember thinking

it was much the same in England as it was in America.

Bar the whip.

They called them the white slaves of England.

What we just heard were the words of Charles Bacon, hired off in the 1870s.

I'm professor of economic history at Oxford University

and a fellow of All Souls College,

and for the last five years I've been searching for and studying

lost testimonies by the child workers of the Industrial Revolution.

The children of the Industrial Revolution were the first generation

of ordinary working-class British kids

to have their thoughts and experiences thoroughly documented.

Their stories are preserved in diaries, letters

and in published and unpublished autobiographies.

We also have government reports, parish records and early newspaper interviews.

But outside of academia, few people know these documents exist,

or appreciate how vast this treasure trove of hidden voices really is.

I began to read and research these eye-witness accounts of life in the age of manufactures

as a way of looking at child labour today in the developing world.

It's a sobering thought that the nearest equivalent to the Mumbai slumdogs

are the mud-larks and gutter-snipes of 18th and 19th century London.

But the more I read these childrens' stories,

the more it taught me about the lives of those people

who are our great, great, great,\ngreat grandparents.

We always see them as victims, drudgers and drones,

but it's not the whole story.

The children's relationship to the world of work was complex.

Their employment helped build up Britain's industrial power

but it also contributed to our modern notions of childhood.

Mind you, there were many amongst that first generation who signed up

for work without really knowing what they were letting themselves in for.

A rumour circulated that there was going to be an agreement between

the overseers of the workhouse and the owner of a great cotton mill.

The children were told that when they arrived at the cotton mill,

they would be transformed into ladies and gentlemen.

That they would be fed on roast beef and plum pudding,

and have plenty of cash in their pockets.

In August 1799, 80 boys and girls who were seven years old

became parish apprentices till they had acquired the age of 21.

The young strangers were conducted into a spacious room

with long, narrow tables and wooden benches.

The supper set before them consisted of milk-porridge of a very blue complexion.

Where was our roast beef and plum pudding?

That was the con played on eight-year-old Robert Blincoe,

as told to a journalist several years later.

He was bound apprentice to a spinning mill like this one.

This is Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, founded in 1780.

It was built out in the sticks because it needed the river

that runs through the valley to power the machines inside.

The downside of that decision was that remote places like this were low on available man power.

So who would staff these mills?

Who would do the work?

The solution was to recruit the most vulnerable elements in society.

Orphans.

The first wave of factory labour in this country was made up of orphans.

They were the real life Oliver Twists, left to the mercy of the parishers.

And their employment was nothing less than state-sponsored slavery.

They were called parish apprentices

and, aged as young as seven or eight,

were taken by cart from their homes in the parishes of London

and other towns and cities,

and transported hundreds of miles away to places like this.

On arrival, they would be piled into dormitories like this one,

billeted near their workplaces

and indentured to the mills and factories as apprentices.

Once signed over, they had to stay here until they were 21, sometimes 24 years old.

This is the girls' dormitory.

It's bigger than the boys' dormitory next door.

It looks a little bit primitive, doesn't it?

However, inside the factories, things were far from basic.

State of the art machinery shook and pounded the walls of these mills

from dawn till dusk,

and all the while, children kept time with the relentless beat.

So how many people would be working this machine?

Typically, two men and a young child to a pair.

The machine that we have here represents only half of that pair.

- Was it dangerous? -Oh, yeah.

Injuries generally occurred in the last two hours of the day.

- So, injuries happened when people lost concentration? -Yeah.

I see over here in this picture, the boy's not wearing any shoes.

You weren't allowed to wear your clogs,

the footwear of that period,

simply because, with these machines running all the time,

you get a level of cotton dust

building up on the floor, like snow,

and if your clog iron was to catch the railing on the floor,

the possibility of a spark and you would set fire to the floor

and burn the mill down, so mill room work was always barefooted.

I heard that there was a fatality

associated with this machine in the past.

Yes, a 13-year-old boy.

One of the most important tasks that he was involved in was wiping down.

The men in charge of these machines would draw the carriages out

onto the end of the railings and then apply a brake to prevent the carriage retracting.

The children then had to go round the back of the mule and crawl underneath.

On this occasion, the guy in charge of this mule took his brake off

and commanded the child to get out, and the child either didn't hear him or he didn't get out in time

- and consequently, he was crushed in a roller beam and killed instantly.Terrible.

Parish apprentices were often called pauper apprentices

because the new factories provided the powers that be with a cheap way of dealing with poor children.

Work became a substitute for social welfare.

Katrina Honeyman is a history professor at Leeds University and an expert on parish apprentices.

Our image of child labour is almost entirely negative.

Does that really cover the experience of the pauper apprentices in this time period?

Many children went off to their apprenticeship -

whether it was factory or elsewhere quite excited at the possibility

of becoming an independent worker, learning a skill.

They had regular meals, even if they weren't great.

- Yes. -They got education.

They had a roof over their heads.

But right from the start, they would be working 14 or 15 hours a day,

sometimes more, with the possibility of overtime,

for which they might get a little money.

Otherwise they weren't paid.

This free labour was integral to the rise of the new industries.

Managers didn't want adults who were used to less regimented ways of working.

Children could be made to adapt.

Not only that, but many machines were designed

to be operated by small children, with their nimble fingers.

Can we see these children as pivotal to the emergence of this new form of enterprise?

It's difficult to see how the industry could have expanded

in the way that it did without the quantity and the nature

of the child labour that was available.

The master carder's name was Thomas Birks.

Tom the Devil, we called him.

He was a very bad man.

Everybody was frightened of him.

He once fell poorly and very glad we were.

We wished he might die.

We were always locked up out of mill hours,

for fear any of us should run away.

One day, the door was left open.

Charlotte Smith said she would be ringleader if the rest of us would follow.

She went out but no-one followed her.

The master found out.

There was a carving knife which he took and, grasping her hair, he cut if off close to the head.

This head-shaving was a dreadful punishment.

We were more afraid of it than any other,

for girls are proud of their hair.

Rural and picturesque, this place seems a world away

from scary urban factories, but Quarry Bank had its runaways too.

In 1856, a girl called Esther Price was caught escaping.

She was sent up here to the punishment room in the attic of the house.

Here it is. This is the punishment room.

The windows would be blacked out.

Her bed is a blanket on the floorboards.

She got supper and breakfast

but was locked away here for a whole week on her own.

Poor little mite.

As an added and coincidental cruelty, as she was taken up here,

she had to pass by the corpse of an adult who had died earlier that day

and was laid out in the attic for collection.

Alone in the dark, stomach empty, a corpse for company.

No wonder she wanted to run away.

This siphoning off of poor and orphaned children from state care

was not going to sustain the huge industrial expansion that Britain was experiencing.

The country needed lots and lots of cheap labour,

so the order came from the very top - use the children.

During the war with revolutionary France,

Prime Minister William Pitt was warned that British manufacturers were unable to pay their taxes.

They blamed high wages.

With one in ten men away fighting,

able adult workers came at a premium and cut into profits.

Pitt's advice was short and simple.

He is supposed to have told them, "Yoke up the children."

Luckily for Pitt and for Great Britain PLC,

for the first time in its 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%,

to 8.7 million.

So, what changed?

The answer's in here.

This is St Michael's in Madeley, 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, these are beautiful records.

You can see here somebody's not been able to sign their name

so they've put their mark,

and elsewhere, they've struggled\nto write their signatures.

A study of these and other\nrecords have shown

that as the 18th century progressed,\nmore people were marrying younger.

Now, why was that?

Previously, men and women were\nemployed to work the land

and "lived in" with their employer,

usually a farmer\nor big local landowner.

These men liked to keep\ntheir young employees single

because married employees had\nchildren and were more of a burden.

But advances in farming practice

meant less people were\nneeded to grow food.

So fewer people "lived in"

and more were kicked out.

That meant that there was no\nmaster to ask for permission to wed.

These liberated workers began\ntravelling, earning their\nwages in new industries.

The pay wasn't great\nbut it wasn't based on the\nsliding scales of farm work.

They reached their peak potential\nearnings at younger ages

and so were tempted to marry\nand start a family sooner.

Women with jobs found their earnings\ncould shore up new families,

adding again to the temptation\nto marry younger.

As for those women\nwho couldn't find work,

well, they were eager to marry young\nand 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 ½.

Those three additional years\nof married life were crucial.

Girls were at their most fertile and\ncould produce two additional babies.

# Get it on

# Bang a gong, get it on! #

So at the very moment\nthat Britain was prepared

to take the giant technological leap\ninto the machine age,

it had its largest,\nyoungest population.

And it was a mobile population,\nable to adapt to change.

Everything was tailored towards\ndelivering the industrial future.

But that industrial future\nneeded feeding

and children played\na role in that too.

We tend to think of\nchildren from this time

as working in mines and factories,

but, in fact,\nchild labour was ubiquitous.

Almost every workplace\nwould have had children in it.

The biggest employer\nwas actually agriculture.

Agriculture accounted for about\na third of children's jobs,

often on small set ups\nlike this one.

This farm was attached\nto the local rectory

and worked by a small team\nincluding boys and girls.

Of course, agriculture is one area

where we still see\nchildren working today,

ushered into the life of the farm

under the watchful eye\nof their parents.

The children of the industrial\nrevolution rarely enjoyed\nsuch a gentle introduction.

Unlike the factory apprentices,\nchild farm workers were often the

only children employed\non an establishment.

They were also housed with their\nmaster or another adult worker,

and there was no one looking over\nthe shoulders of these men

to see how they were treating\ntheir child employees.

As a result, these children were\noften more vulnerable than the\nchildren who worked in factories.

For example,\nmen's reminiscences tiptoe around\nthe topic of child sexual abuse.

But in the testimonies I've read,\nthere are two cases where\nboys were probably molested.

And both involved lonely little\nfarm workers consigned to the care

of other adults, far from the\nprotection of friends and family.

Just like the heavy industries,\nagriculture had a job\nfor every age group.

The entry level into farm\nwork began at six years old,

when children could be employed\nas human scarecrows.

When I was six and two months old,\nI was sent off to work.

I do not think I shall\never forget those long, hungry days\nin the fields scaring crows.

You can imagine the\nfeeling of loneliness.

Hours and hours passed without\na living creature coming near.

I cried most of the time.

In desperation I would shout as loud\nas I could, "Mother! Mother! Mother!"

But Mother could not hear.

She was working in the hay field\ntwo miles away.

By my seventh birthday\nI was driving the plough.

Any repairs to plough or harness\nhad to be taken to tradesmen.

Once, after working all day long,\nI had to carry a plough horse\ncollar that required whittling,

and the plough coulter,\nthat needed repairs at the\nblacksmith.

These two heavy things made\na burden far too much for me,

but I had to trudge with them as\nbest I could the mile and a half\nacross the fields to Everdon.

William Arnold was just six years\nold when he went to work on\nthat farm in Northamptonshire.

This is a horse collar\nlike the one he carried.

Let me show you just\nhow heavy this is.

Now we need the coulter,\nbecause he also carried that.

This is part of the plough.

40 pounds. That probably\nweighs more than he did.

In many ways, the crow scarers and\nthe children fetching and carrying\nfor farm labourers

were on the lowest rung of\nthe employment ladder.

But many testimonies tell us\nthat even at that level and\nat a young age,

the children saw these\npunishing labours as an opportunity.

They were proper workers\nand they wanted to get on.

In our village there was a wealthy\nbanker and justice of the peace.

I began to drive a pair of\nhorses at plough for him.

After a bit, thinking, I suppose,\nthat I was a smart, likely lad,\nhe made me a sort of stable boy

and gave me eight shillings\na week to start with.

Here was a rise for a lad\nwho was set on rising as fast\nand as much as he could.

There were no slack half\nhours for me, no taking it\neasy with the other lads.

To make more money, to do more,\nto know more, to be a somebody in\nmy little world was my ambition.

They might not have had much choice about their employment,

but many children were determined to seize what opportunities come along

with a level of determination and enthusiasm that is astonishing, if sometimes hard to imagine.

Some jobs really did require huge amounts of courage.

With a view of immediately testing my capabilities,

my new master persuaded me to climb a chimney on my very first morning. With feet standing 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 down by my side.

The elbows were pressed hard against the brickwork

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 applied the scraper to bring down the soot, the knees and elbows, through the

constant pressing and the friction with the brickwork, became peeled, thus allowing soot to penetrate.

It caused ugly, 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 sulphurous fumes were sufficient to stifle one.

Once the fumes were so strong that I fell from top to bottom, nigh insensible.

Yes, they really did put kids up chimneys.

This is the kind of normal chimney that George Elson would have been dealing with.

That one is so wide that you would have had no challenge.

He'd have been up and down like greased lightning.

What really tested boys' mettles were chimneys that measured nine inches by nine inches,

which is this size.

To get into and wriggle through and clean something like this

seems practically impossible.

Martin Glynn is president of the National Association of British Chimney Sweeps.

So, Martin, here's a very old chimney, right here.

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,

apprenticed to the trade at seven years old in some cases.

They used to use their elbows and knees to scamper up inside the chimney.

In many cases they stripped naked.

Although they have some sort of nearly uniform, the soot use to fill the pockets,

and because the chimney design was so small, they became wedged.

So they used to strip naked so they could escape back down the chimney after cleaning.

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 handbrush,

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 the boys and girls were spared.

There was still a great reluctance for the master sweeps of the day to do away with boys.

It was far cheaper to purchase a small boy from a family for a guinea or two,

a few shillings from the poorer families, and in some cases little girls as well.

- Boys and girls were cheaper than brushes? - Absolutely, at the time.

In one horrible incident in Dover in Kent, where a master had sent a boy

up the chimney with a wet tarpaulin to extinguish a chimney fire,

and apparently he climbed into the flume, very reluctantly, the master threatened to beat him,

he attempte nto climb further into the chimney, became stuck in the chimney, wedged,

and apparently they heard his screams for over two miles.

Not exactly chim-chimmeny-choo-ree, Mary Poppins, is it now?

It shows how hard life was and how few opportunities there were

that many climbing boys quit the trade and went off to serve in the armed forces.

The scandal of boy soldiers is\nsomething today that we associate

with the most callous regimes\nin the developing world.

But putting boys into war zones was\nactually an old British tradition.

For example, there were 13 of\nthem who fought at the Battle of\nTrafalgar on this ship, HMS Victory.

One of them was a\n16-year-old midshipman,\nLieutenant William Rivers.

His father was also on board,\nand William first went to sea with\nhim on Victory aged six and a half,

and he immediately saw action\nand was wounded off Toulon.

I had the honour of serving\nin three general actions.

In the first, I received\ntwo wounds in my right arm.

In the latter,\nwhile receiving orders from his late\nLordship, Admiral Nelson,

I received a wound on my face,

which was shortly followed\nby a gunshot wound\nwhich carried away my left leg.

Both William the father\nand William the son appear\nin that famous painting,

Death of Nelson by Benjamin West,

with William Jr being dragged off\nthe deck on the bottom corner.

Altogether, 720 boys\nfought in that battle,

and they served at every\nsingle level of the ship society.

Matthew Sheldon is head archivist\nat Portsmouth's Royal Naval Museum.

Matthew, you've actually\ngot William Rivers' diary.

Yeah, it's quite unusual to actually\nhave a kind of personal account from\nthis date for someone who was young.

He went to sea actually at the age\nof I think six and a half,

and he then actually stays on the\nship, on Victory,

for the next 10 years,\nright up to the Battle of Trafalgar.

He was exceptional,\nbut probably not unique.

I'm sure he wasn't unique, no.\nWe've got another case

on the people who were on board\nTrafalgar with a father and a son\non board, so that did happen.

So certainly not an exception, but I\nthink six and a half is quite young.

What are the other materials here?

This is a prize money register.\nWhen ships were in action,\nif they captured a ship

the value of the ship\nwas divided among the ship's crew.

We see it shared out after the Battle\nof Trafalgar, and I particularly like\nthis one for Samuel Robbins here,

who is getting his one pound\nseventeen and sixpence,

and so there you have a kind of\n15 year old Marine Society boy.

- Did he get educated?\N{\1c&H00FFFF&}- Well, he can certainly sign.{\r}

Absolutely. Did he get educated\nby the Society or did he get\nsome learning on board?

Marine Society boys were\nthe naval equivalent of\nthe parish apprentices.

They were boys who were dependant on\nthe state for their welfare and

who instead of being sent to cotton\nmills found themselves in naval\nbarracks and trained for the sea.

Not all of these\nraw recruits were orphans, however.

Many were just kids who found\nthemselves in a spot of bother.

The Marine Society were concerned\nabout the growing number of teenagers

they saw hanging around on the\nstreets, seemingly unsupervised,

a bit like the sort of\nASBO kids we have today.

They're like, something must be done.\nThe solution was, why not send them\nto the sea? They seem quite lively.

That would be the kind of boys\ninitially, but also generally just

people struggling to\ncare for their children.

So sometimes parents would bring\ntheir children to the Society?

Sometimes parents, friends...\nSometimes masters who would be

dissatisfied with their apprentices\nwould come up and say, "Look, he is\nincapable of learning the trade.

"He wants to go to sea.\nCan you take him?"

What was it like for these\nboys when they found\nthemselves on board ship?

It was obviously a tough change.\nThey lost their home.

They lost any attachment\nfigure they would have had before

and were thrown into this\ncommunity of sailors -\nnot exactly choirboys -

being 13 or 14-years-old only,\nso it was surely\nvery intimidating at first.

But we heard horrible cases in\nbattle of boys being injured and\npeople being killed around them.

They all remember their\nfirst encounter with death.

It seems something that\nsticks with them for ever.

The first time that\nthey see someone's head blown away

by a cannon shot, that sticks.

But then what is\nremarkable from then on,

they all say that they're\nnumbed to the horrors of war.

We had not fired two\nbroadsides before an unlucky shot\ncut a poor man's head right off!

The horrid sight, I must confess,\ndid not help raise my spirits.

The ship that struck us\nwas so much disabled that she\ncould not live upon the water.

It gave a dreadful reel.

We were afraid to send any\nboats to help because they\nwould have been sunk

by too many souls getting\nin her at once.

You could plainly perceive the poor\nwretches climbing over to winward\nand crying most dreadfully.

Even our own men were in tears,\ngroaning, "God bless them."

But were they really numb to it?

We've got testimonies that sailors\nare apparently having seven times\nmore likelihood

of ending up in a\nlunatic asylum, so really, the signs\nare that they very much struggled

afterwards, that while they were on\nboard it was all fine and covered up,

but when back on land and alone,\nthen the truth maybe came out and\nit really showed like if that ever

digested or if that locked it up in\nlike a sea chest deep down in their\nsoul and hope never to open it again.

Obviously these hellish\nexperiences left their mark.

But the testimonies demonstrate that\nthe harshness shown to the children\nof the revolution

did not stop them from acting\nselflessly towards others.

Take the older brother of the\nyoung Alexander Somerville,\nthe wonderful William.

William was a stripling when I was\nborn, and worked for such wages

as a youth could obtain in\nthat part of the country.

When he came home at night he would\nstrip off his coat, take off his hat,

put on his nightcap and get down\nthe box and sort through the old\nhemp and scraps of leather.

He'd examine all the children's feet\nto see which of them had shoes\nmost in need of mending.

And then he would sit down and cobble\nthe shoes by the light of the fire\nuntil near midnight.

COCKEREL CROWS

He would rise at four o'clock in\nthe mornings and do the heaviest\npart of James' work

amongst the farmers' cows\nand other cattle

before going to do his own day's\nwork two or three miles distant.

James was too young for the heavy\ntask of cleaning, so William got up

every morning to do that part of his\nwork and so keep James in employment.

The one overriding motivation\nfor these children

was helping the warm heart that\nwas at the centre of their lives.

Their mothers.

My brother and I had the\ndeep satisfaction of knowing

it was not through any\nfault of our mothers

that we were forced to go\nthrough so much privation.

She was a good angel in the home, and\nthe one on whom we all had to lean.

"Mother, Mother, I have earned half\na sovereign and all of it myself!

"And it is yours, all yours!

"Every bit is yours!"

In time my wages went up\nto nine shillings a week

and I was able to be a real\nhelp to our little household

and lighten somewhat\nthe burden of care

resting on my mother's shoulders.

Boys and their mothers, eh?

But Mums became the centres of\ntheir world because more often\nthan not Dads were away or missing.

Their absence was prompted by\npoverty, death, travelling for work,

and in the case of 10%\nof the male population,

because of being called away to\nfight abroad in the Napoleonic wars.

Feckless fathers were often blamed\nfor exploiting their children by the\npoliticians and the upper classes,

but in many ways men were the\nfirst victims of industrialisation.

Machines took away their\nskills and livelihoods

and called upon their children,\nwho were cheaper and more docile.

Those fathers were left behind.

It was when I was about eight\nyears old that our family\nmisfortune fell to our lowest ebb.

The saddling trade in London\nhad been going worse and\nmen were short of work.

The large army contracts\nfor cavalry saddles\nhad now gone to the factories.

It was the beginning of 1876 when my\nfather was turned off from his work\nand became unemployed.

The effect of these undeserved\nfortunes on my father was however\nnoticeable to me then and later.

After 1876, he became more and\nmore silent, and even morose.

There is no greater trial to a\nself-suspecting and good work man

than that of finding his\nservices are not needed,

leaving him to spend his days\ntrying to secured a job,

only to be met by the sign,\n"No hands wanted."

Add to this the misery and poverty\nwhen he returns home,

and it is not surprising that even a\nstrong-minded man should break down.

Given the frequency of broken\nfamilies, the grinding poverty,\nand the need to work,

these children could never\nhave enjoyed a childhood\nas we might know it.

But there again,\nthis was an era where the concept\nof childhood remained fluid.

People were at odds about\nwhat childhood meant, when it\nstarted and when it finished.

Even the children\nwere sometimes confused.

In 1850, the journalist Henry Mayhew\ninterviewed a nameless

eight-year-old watercress seller\nin London's East End.

On and off, I've been very\nnear 12 month in the street.

Before that, I had to take care\nof a baby for my aunt.

No, it wasn't heavy,\nonly two months old.

But I minded it for ever such a time\nuntil it could walk.

Before I had the baby, I used to help\nmy mother who was in the fur trade,

and if there were slits in the fur,\nI'd sew them up.

All my money I earned,\nI puts in a club,\nand draws it out to buy clothes with.

It's better than\nspending it on sweet stuff,\nfor them that's got a living to earn.

I ain't a child,\nand I shan't be a woman until I'm 20.

But I'm past eight, I am.

A lot of children, when they started\nwork full-time, and the watercress\ngirl had been in full-time work

since about the age of five, ceased\nto think of themselves as children.

Sometimes, they felt\nmuch better about themselves

when they did start working.

So, what motivated them?

I think that just\ncomes automatically.

You're not earning for yourself,\nyou're learning to tip up the\nearnings to your mother

who might give you a little bit back\nbut it's basically for the family.

If you can think, my money went\ntowards the joint on Sunday,

the only meat we get in the week,\nthen you're going to feel\na sense of self-esteem and pride.

MUSIC: "Everything in Its Right\nPlace" by Radiohead

By the middle of the 19th century,\nthere seems to have been\na groundswell of concern

that as a society, we were not\nallowing kids to be just children.

As early as the 1830s, people\nare talking about these children\nbeing children without childhood.

I think the origin of this,\nthe most immediate origin\nis the romantic poets,

and it's difficult to exaggerate\nthe impact which Wordsworth had.

Wordsworth got away entirely\nfrom the idea of original sin.

He thought children\ncame from heaven, trailing\nclouds of glory, famously.

So, they can actually rescue\nadults who have gone astray.

If you begin to internalise this\nkind of view of childhood,

then the lives of these\nchildren at work are anathema.

People are beginning to say,\nwhen a child starts work,\nhe or she ceases to be a child.

Certainly that innocence\nwould be lost.

Certainly, the innocence\nwould be lost,

because they'd be\nmixing with adults,

but they'd be having their\nchildhoods taken away from them.

The only way they would have their\nchildhoods handed back to them

would be if Parliament intervened.

And that was something that\ninitially seemed highly unlikely.

It is not surprising that the first\nofficial reports into child labour

were supportive, and written in\na stomach-churning, rose-tinted way.

I have visited many factories\nand I never saw a single

instance of corporal\nchastisement inflicted on a child,

nor indeed did I ever see\nchildren in ill humour.

They seemed to be\nalways cheerful and alert,

and the work of these lively little\nelves seemed to resemble a sport.

As to exhaustion of their day's work\nthey evinced no trace of it emerging\nfrom the mill in the evening,

to commence their little\namusements with the same alacrity

as boys issuing from school.

So why did things change?

Why did this place,\nthe Houses of Parliament start\nto legislate against child labour?

When did Britain begin to think\nthat working kids to death\nwas a bad idea?

Parliament had been largely happy\nto keep its nose out of the issue\nof child employment.

Crucially, though,\nthe times were a-changing -

the children who had survived\nthe mines and factories

were growing up, and getting\norganised into early trade unions.

Popular culture also began\nto report on the worst abuses.

Dickens started his serialisations

of Oliver Twist\nand Nicholas Nickleby.

And he knew a bit about\nchild labour -

at 12, he'd worked 12-hour shifts\nin a blacking factory

with boy called Fagin.

Slowly reform began to manoeuvre\nitself onto the political agenda.

In 1831, radical MP John Hobhouse\ntried to introduce a bill\nrestricting child labour.

He proposed that no child under\nnine should work in a factory

and that 9-to-18-year-olds'\nhours of work should be limited\nto 12 a day or 66 a week.

Radical(!)

In response to his efforts,\nworkers around the country

formed short time committees\nto promote the cause

and argue\nfor more legislation.

Is it not a shame and disgrace\nthat, in a land called

"the land of the Bibles",\nchildren of a tender age

should be torn from their beds by\nsix in the morning, and confined,

in pestiferous factories,\nuntil eight in the evening?

Ten hours a day, with eight\non Saturdays, is our motto...

may it be yours.

In 1832, MP Michael Sadler\nbecame the main spokesman

for the Short Time Committees.

Mass meetings in the factory\ndistricts drew crowds of\n100,000 and more in support.

And while Parliament continued to\nresist reform, it did give Sadler\nthe authority to launch an enquiry.

That commission interviewed\n48 child workers and when his\nfindings were published in 1833,

they shocked genteel\nBritish society.

While I am earnestly pleading the\ncause of these oppressed children,

what numbers of them are\nstill tethered to their toil,

confined in heated rooms, stunned\nwith the roar of revolving wheels,

poisoned by the noxious effluvia\nof grease and gas,

till weary and exhausted, they\nturn shivering to beds from which

a relay of their young work\nfellows have just risen.

The same year, 1833, the first\nFactory Act was passed,

unfortunately, it only applied\nto the textile industry.

However, it did ban children under\nnine from working, and limited the

hours of work of children\naged nine to 13 to nine a day.

But its real significance\nwas that it laid down a marker\nfor future reform.

Reports from the front line\nof child labour began to filter\nback to the middle classes.

Most shocking of all were\naccounts of underground work\nin Britain's coal mines.

But what caused the uproar was\nnot the hazardous work of children

in these pits,\nit was topless ladies.

In some pits, it was practice for\nwomen and young boys to be chained

to the carts that\nthe miners filled with coal.

They then dragged them\nto the surface through black,\nhot, filthy tunnels

where the heat was so fierce

they usually stripped\nto the waist to cope.

When these artists' recreations\nof their working conditions

were published,\nthey caused a furore.

This is the Big Pit in Blaenavon,

one of the places industrial Britain\nwas born, in iron, coal and steel.

The pit was started in 1840\nand it's a museum now,

but you can still get underground,\nand see some of the old seams.

When you get down there,\nyou get a real sense of what\nwas asked of the child miners.

There we go. OK, this way everyone,\nplease. Thank you.

Come on in.

This is gloomy, down here.

This is how it was.

So, a little boy or girl would be...

- A little boy or girl would stand...{\r}\N{\1c&H00FFFF&}- Sitting right there?{\r}

Sitting by the side of the door\nand they would listen for horses.

When the horses come along,\nthey would open the door,

they would let the horses go through\nand they would close the door.\n10 hours a day.

Back in those days,\nthey had company in the timberwork.

- They would have insects,\ncockroaches.\N{\1c&H00FFFF&}- Ugh.{\r}

Running around their feet, rats.

I thought you are\ngoing to get to the rats.

- Mostly the children, they worked\nin the dark, they had no lights.{\r}\N{\1c&H00FFFF&}- Didn't they have a candle?{\r}

If the families could afford\ncandles. But as you can imagine,

candles were a naked flame,\ncandles were dangerous with gas.

So we'll turn our lights out

and I'll ask you to take one of your\nhands, put it against your nose

and tell me if you can see\nyour fingers.

Shall we try that now? Take one\nof your hands against your nose.

- Can you see your fingers?{\r}\N{\1c&H00FFFF&}- I cannot see anything.{\r}

So, imagine these children in this,\nfor 10 hours a day.

I'm a trapper in the Gawber Pit.

It does not tire me, but I have to\ntrap without a light and I'm scared.

I go in at four and sometimes\nhalf-past three in the morning\nand come out at half-past five.

I never go to sleep.

Sometimes I sing when I've light,\nbut not in the dark.

I don't like being in the pit.

After the scandal\nof the climbing boys,

the sacrifice of the child soldiers,\nand the shame of the pit\nand factory girls,

parliament finally began\nto face up to the situation.

Even then, though,\nit was a struggle.

The story of that struggle\nis locked away in here,

the Victoria Tower\nin the Houses of Parliament.

It's not so hard to understand\nwhy there were so many twists

and turns in Parliament's\nrelationship with child labour.

It was a Parliament that was not\njust sympathetic to the interests\nof manufacturers and mine owners,

it was largely made up\nof manufacturers and mine owners.

But is still staggering\nthat reform took so long.

Inside this sealed vault\nis every piece of legislation

passed by Parliament since 1460.

Each of these rolled-up scrolls\nis a bill,

and even the organisation\nof these scrolls

shows what an infuriating time the\nreformers had in effecting change.

Now we can see how frustrating and\nprolonged this struggle really was.

This document, down here,\nis the first protective

labour legislation for children,\nthe Parish Apprentices Act of 1802.

Limited to parish apprentices\nand largely toothless.

These documents are\narranged chronologically.

It's like walking through\nlegislative history.

We have to go all the way down there\nand all the way back here,

still in the 1800s\nbut there's a long way to go

before we get to any more\nprotective labour legislation.

OK. 1810. 1815...

1819, The Cotton Factories Act.

I'm not going to get it down\nfor obvious reasons,

but that Act tried to limit the age\nof starting work to nine years old.

1820s, more 1820s.

Into the 1830s.

To here. 1833. The first piece\nof protective labour legislation

that's really effective, limiting\nthe length of the working day.

But we actually have to go next door\nfor the material that really bites.

As you see, they've changed\nthe system by this time.

But here we have it,\nthis is the Factory Act of 1884.

It limited the length of\nthe working day for children\nunder 13 to six and a half hours.

41 years of argument,\ndebate, struggle and investigation

for three and half hours\nof children's working time.

Meanwhile, out in the real world,

there's huge sectors of employment\nthat were totally unregulated

and crying out for reform.

For example, construction.

I worked at a brick and tile works\nthat was three miles from our home.

Each day, a six-mile walk was added\nto the day's work of 12 hours.

The work was heavy\nfor a lad of my age.

Each brick weighed\nabout nine pounds,

and in the course of a day I carried\nseveral tons of clay bricks.

We usually started work\nat six in the morning,

when I would pick up the bricks\nfrom the floor of the shed.

For this I received\nseven shillings a week.

My mother said that the work was\ntoo hard and the distance too long

for me to walk\nevery morning and night.

She told me the money\nwould be missed,\nsomeone would have to go short.

But it was no use being slowly\nkilled by such work as I was doing,

and it was making me hump-backed.

It was not until I had been away\nfrom the work for several weeks

that I was able to straighten\nmyself out again.

In those reminiscences,\nWill Thorne recalled being\na nine-year-old worker in the 1860s.

This brick-making kiln\nis similar to the one\nthat would have employed Will.

This barrow is like the one\nthat he'd have to move,\nloaded with bricks.

There's 25 bricks here, which would\nhave been a child's load.

Adults moved 50.

I think I'm supposed\nto try and move this.

Whoa. This isn't easy.

It's not easy at all!

The bricks I've just smashed\nwere made here,

at Bliss Hill Victoria Museum, by\nTony Mugridge, the last independent\ntravelling brickmaker in Britain.

I'm standing back out of the spatter\npath because this is kind of messy.

But, Tony, we are interested\nin how they managed to get round

the child labour legislation\nin the brick fields and maintain\nchildren's employment.

There's a very clever thing.

What would happen is that the people\nwould be employed, the workers,

men and women, in the brick fields.

There were employed\nby the brickmaker.

If the brickmaker employed children,\nhe'd be breaking the law.

So what he did, he'd employ the\npeople to employ their own children.

By doing it that way,\nthey got round it all.

What kind of jobs did the kids do?

The children would be preparing\nthe clay down in the soap pit\nover there.

They would pick the clay up\nand carry it to the work benches.

The clay is very heavy.

A lump like this...

I believe you. I believe you.

We are probably talking around\n12 to 14 lb weight of clay.

By the time they are eight,\nnine and 10, they are able\nto move the brick barrows easily

and by the time they\nare 11 or 12, they're making bricks.

Will is a great example of how the\nchild workers were far bolshier\nthan we give them credit for.

He first went on strike\nat the ripe old age of six.

Not surprisingly,\nhe grew up to be a union leader

and then later\na member of parliament.

He enjoyed a distinguished career\nuntil he retired in 1946, aged 84.

The industrial generation powered\nBritain's journey towards

wealth and influence, and then set\nabout improving the lot of those\nyoungsters who followed on behind.

As that generation grew up, they\nbegan to organise into trade unions

and to campaign for changes\nin employment law.

As a result, kids started\nto disappear from the workplace

and slowly parliament began\nto back a new solution

to the problem\nof what to do with children.

School.

Labour is replaced by learning\nand childhood becomes defined\nby new rite of passage. Education.

By the end of the 19th century,

school leaving age provides a clear\nboundary, and one enshrined in law.

CHILDREN SQUEAL

Instead of being seen\nas fuel FOR the future,

children BECAME the future.

In effect, that old romantic notion\nfinally came of age.

Childhood is important.

It needs protecting.

Children are special.

And the children who survived\nthe first industrial revolution

were even more so.

We've always given\nthese children our pity

but it's our respect they deserve.

They were heroes, whether\nthere's a statue to them or not.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [e-mail]