I live 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, Three great golden men!
Surveying their plans for the future, Matthew Bolton, William Murdoch and James Watt. All key figures in Britain's industrial revolution. This statue casts them as minor deities, roding 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 one 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 buttonhole, 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 it was 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 Their stories are preserved in diaries, letters and in published and unpublished autobiographies.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 eyewitness accounts of life in the age of manufacturers 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 slam dogs are the mudlarks and gutter snipes of 18th and 19th century London. But the more I read these children's stories, the more it taught me about the lives of those people who are great, great, great, great grandparents.
We always see them as victims, drudges 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 a workhouse and the owner of a great cotton mill. The children were taught that when they arrived at the cotton mill, that 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 7 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 Blinko, was 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 manpower. 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 parishes. 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. Upon 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. 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 Chris, 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. Yes. Was it dangerous?
Oh yeah. Injuries generally always occurred in the last two hours of the of the day. So injuries happen when people lost concentration?
Yeah. I see over here in this picture the boy's not wearing any shoes. No, you weren't allowed to wear your clogs which were that foot period, footwear of that period, you weren't allowed to wear them simply because with these machines running all the time you get a level of cotton dust that builds up on the floor almost as if it's been snowing.
Yeah. And obviously with your clogs, if your clog iron was to catch the railing on the floor, possibility of a spark and you would set fire to the... factory floor, you'd burn the mill down so mule room work was always barefooted. I heard that there was a fatality associated with this machine in the past.
Yes, there was. A 13-year-old boy who was at one of the most important tasks that he was involved in was that of wiping down. The men who were in charge of these machines would draw the carry ...carriages out onto the end of the railings and then applying a brake to prevent the carriage retracting.
The children then had to go right in the back of the mule and then they would crawl underneath on their hands and knees and on this occasion the guy who was in charge of this particular 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 at a roller beam and killed instantly. Oh, 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 extensively. They were excited at the possibility of becoming an independent worker, learning a skill. They had regular meals, even if they weren't great. They got education, you know, and 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 labor that was available the master carter's name was thomas burks 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 it 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, it's 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 endorphin 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.