Children of the Victorian Britain Part 2

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...