The Role of Child Labor in History

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 I'd rather you tied a stone around his neck and drowned him. Yeah! I can't afford to lose the children of the river. 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, warding 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 caught 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 Their stories are preserved in diaries, letters and in published and unpublished autobiography. 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 slum 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 our great, great, great, great grandparents. We always see them as victims, drudgers and drones. But it's not the... 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 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 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. 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 till 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 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, to the fire. You had to burn the mill down, so mule room work was always bare-footed. I heard that there was a fatality associated with this machine in the past. Yes, there was. A 13-year-old boy, 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 carrier Carriage is out onto the end of the railings and then applying a brake to prevent the carriage retracting. The children then had to go round 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. 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, 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. The 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 will 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 the 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. 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 Maidley, 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, and 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've put their mark. And elsewhere, they've struggled 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 landowner. 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 were able to grow food. 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 travelling, earning their wages in new industries. The pay wasn't great, but it wasn't based on the sliding scales of farm work. 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 three additional years of married life were crucial. Girls were at their most fertile and could produce two additional babies. So at the very moment that Britain was prepared to take the giant technological leap into the machine age, it had its largest, youngest population. And it was a mobile population, able to adapt to change. Everything was tailored towards delivering the industrial future. That industrial future needed feeding, and 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 labour was ubiquitous. Almost every workplace 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 set-ups like this one. This farm was attached to the local rectory and worked by a small team, including boys and girls. 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 reminiscences tiptoe around the topic of child sexual abuse. But in the testimonies I've read, there are two 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 six years old, when children could be employed as human scarecrows. When I was six and two months old, I was sent off to work. I do not think I shall ever forget those long hungry days in the field scaring crows. You can imagine the feeling of loneliness. Hours and hours pass 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 hayfield two miles away. By my seventh birthday, I was driving a plough. Any repairs to plough or harness had to be taken to tradesmen. Once, after working all day long, I had to carry a plough horse collar that required whistling and the plough coulter that needed repairs at the blacksmith. These two 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 Everton. William Arnold was just six years old. when you went to work on that farm in Northamptonshire. And this is a horse collar like the one he carried. Let me show you just how heavy this is. And now we need the coulter, because he also carried that. This is part of the plough. £40. That probably weighs more than he did. In many ways, the crow scarers and the children fetching and carrying for farm labourers 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 labourers as an opportunity. They were proper workers, and they wanted to get on. In our village there was a war for Ganga and justice of the peace. I began to drive a pair of horses at Plough for him, and after a bit, thinking I suppose that I was a smart, likely lad, he made me a sort of... stable boy and gave me eight shillings a week to start with. Here was a rise for a lad who was set on rising as fast and as much as he could. There were no slack half-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 capabilities, my new master persuaded me to climb a chimney on my very first morning. With the feet standing upon 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 hand 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 ...searched 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 sulfurous fumes were sufficient to stifle one. Once, the fumes were so strong that I fell from top to bottom. My insensible... 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 had no challenge from that. He'd have been up and down there like grease lightning. What really tested boys' metals were chimneys that measured 9 inches by 9 inches, which is this size. And 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, 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, apprenticed to the trade at seven years old in some cases, and they used to use their elbows and knees to scamper up inside the chimney, and 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 used to strip naked so they could escape back down the chimney after cleaning. 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 sweeps and 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 that 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 two a few shillings from 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 in kent where a master had sent the boy up the chimney with a wet tar pooling to extinguish a chimney fire and apparently he climbed into the flu very reluctantly the master threatened to beat He attempted to climb further into the chimney, became stuck in the chimney, wedged, and apparently they heard his screams for over two miles. Not exactly Chim Chiminey Chereen Mary Poppins, is it now? And 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 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 at the Battle of Trafalgar on this ship, HMS Victory. One of them was a 16-year-old midshipman, Lieutenant William Rivers. His father was also on board and William first went to sea with him on victory, aged six and a half. And he immediately saw action and was wounded off too long. I had the honour of serving in three general actions. In the first, I received two wounds in my right arm. and in the latter whilst receiving orders from his late lordship admiral nelson i received a wound on my face which was shortly followed by a gunshot wound which carried away my left leg both william the father and william the son This painting, Death of Nelson, by Benjamin West, with William Jr. being dragged off the deck on the bottom corner. Altogether, 720 boys fought in that battle, and they served at every single level of the ship's society. Matthew Sheldon is head archivist at Portsmouth's Royal Naval Museum. Matthew, you've actually got William Rivers. diary. Yeah, it's quite unusual to actually have a kind of personal account from this date from someone who was young. He went to sea actually at the age of, I think, six and a half, and he then actually stays on the ship on Victory for the next ten years. is right up to the Battle of Trafalgar. He was exceptional, but probably not unique. I'm sure he wasn't unique, no. We've got another case on the people who were on board at Trafalgar with a father and a son on board, so that did happen. So certainly not an exception, but I think is quite young. Yes. Well, what are the other materials here? This is a prize money register. When ships were in action, if they captured a ship, the value of the ship was divided among... amongst the ship's crew. Here we see it being shared out after the Battle of Trafalgar, and I particularly like this one for Samuel Robbins here, who is getting his £1.176. And so there you have a kind of 15-year-old Marine Society boy. Did he get educated? Well, he can certainly sign. Absolutely. Did he get educated by the Society, or actually did he get some learning on board? Marine Society boys were the naval equivalent of the parish apprentices. They were boys who were dependent on the state for their welfare and who instead of being sent to cotton mills, found themselves in naval barracks and trained for the sea. Not all of these raw recruits were orphans, however. Many were just kids who found themselves in a spot of bother. The Marine Society were concerned about the growing number of teenagers they saw hanging around on the streets, seemingly unsupervised, and a bit like the... That's sort of the us bookets we have today, that I saw like something must be done. And then the solution was like, why not send them to the sea? They seem to be quite lively. That would be the kind of boys initially, but also generally just people struggling to care for their children. So sometimes parents would bring their children to the sea? Sometimes parents, friends, sometimes masters who would be dissatisfied with their apprentices would come up and say, look, he's incapable of learning the trade. He wants to go to sea. Can you take him? Well, Roland, what was it like for these boys when they found themselves on board ship? It was obviously a tough change. They lost their home, they lost any attachment figure they would have had before, and were thrown into this community of sailors, not exactly choir boys, being 13 or 14 years old only, so it was surely very intimidating at first. But we heard horrible cases in battle of boys being injured and people being killed around them. They all remember their first encounter with death. It seems something that sticks with them forever. The first time they see someone's head blown away by a cannon shot, that sticks. But then what is remarkable, from then on, they all say that they're numbed to the horrors of war. We had not fired two broadsides before an unlucky shot cut a poor man's head right off. The horrid sight, I must confess, did not help raise more spirits. The ship that struck us was so much disabled that she could not live upon the water, but gave a dreadful reel. We were afraid to send any boats to help, because they would have been sunk by too many souls getting in at once. You could plainly perceive the poor wretches climbing over to Wynwood and crying most dreadfully. Even our own men were in tears, groaning. God bless them. But were they really not to it? We've got testimonies that sailors are apparently having seven times more likelihood of ending up in a lunatic asylum. So really the signs are that they very much struggled afterwards. While they were on board, it was all fine and covered up. But when back on land and alone, then the truth maybe came out and it really showed like if that ever digested it or if that locked it up in like a sea chest deep down in their soul and hoped never to open it again. Obviously, these hellish experiences left their mark. But the testimonies demonstrate that the harshness shown to the children of the revolution did not stop them from acting selflessly towards others. Take the older brother. The young Alexander Somerville, the wonderful William. William was a stripling when I was born, and worked for such wages as a youth could obtain in that part of the country. When he came home at night, he would strip off his coat, take off his hat, put on his nightcap and get down the Elshin box and sort through the awls, hemp and scraps of leather. He'd examine all the children's feet to see which of them had shoes most in need of mending. And then he would sit down and cobble the shoes by the light of the fire until near midnight. He would rise at four o'clock in the mornings and do the heaviest part of James's work amongst the farmers, cows and other cattle, before going to do his own day's work two or three miles distant. James was too young for the heavy task of cleaning, so William got up every morning to do that part of his work and so keep James in employment. The one overriding motivation for these children was helping the warm heart that was at the centre of their lives, their mothers. My brother and I had the deep satisfaction of knowing it was not through any fault of our mothers that we were forced to go through so much privation. For she was our good angel in the home and the one on whom we all had to lean. Mother, mother, I won't have a sovereign, and all of it myself, and it's yours, all yours, every bit is yours. In time, my wages went up to nine shillings a week, and I was able to be a real help to our little household, and lighten somewhat the burden of care resting on my mother's shoulders. Boys and their mothers, eh? But mums became the centres of their world because more often than not, dads were away or missing. Their absence was prompted by poverty, death, travelling for work and, in the case of 10% of the male population, because of being called away to fight abroad in the Napoleonic Wars. Factless fathers were often blamed for exploiting their children by the politicians and the upper classes. But in many ways, men were the first victims of industrialization. Machines took away their skills and livelihoods and called upon their children who were cheaper and more docile. Those fathers were left behind. It was when I was about eight years old that our family misfortune fell to our lowest ebb. The saddling trade in London had been going worse and men were short of work. The large army contracts for cavalry saddles had now all gone to the factories. It was the beginning of 1876 when my father was turned off from his work and became unemployed. The effect of these undeserved fortunes on my father was however noticeable to me then and later. After 1876 he became more and more silent. and even morose. There is no greater trial to a self-respecting and good workman than that of finding his services are not needed, leaving him to spend his days trying to secure a job only to be met by the sign, no hands wanted. Add to this the misery and poverty when he returns home, and it is not surprising that even a strong-minded man should break down. Given the frequency of broken families, the grinding poverty and the need to work, these children could never have enjoyed a childhood as we might know it. But there again, this was an era where the concept of childhood remained fluid. People were at odds about what childhood meant, when it started and when it finished. Even the children were sometimes confused. In 1850, the journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed a nameless eight-year-old watercress seller in London's East End. On and off, I've been very near a 12 month in the streets. Before that, I had to take care of a baby for my aunt. No, it wasn't heavy, only two months old. But I minded it for ever such a time, until it could walk. Before I had the baby, I used to help my mother who was in the fur trays. And if there were slips in the fur, I'd sew them up. All my money I earned, I put in the club. and draws it out to my clothes with. It's better than spending it on sweet stuff, for then that's got a living to earn. I ain't a child, and I shan't be a woman till I'm 20, but I'm past eight I am. A lot of children, when they started work full-time, and of course the Watercress girl had been full-time work since about the age of five. Cease to think of themselves as children and sometimes they felt much better about themselves when they did start working. So what motivated them? I think that this comes automatically. And you're not earning, of course, for yourself. You're earning to tip up the earnings to your mother, who might give you a little bit back. But it's basically for the family. And if you can think, as I think some people do, you know, my money went towards the joint on Sunday, the only meat we get in the week, then you're going to feel a sense of self-esteem and pride. By the middle of the 19th century, there seems to have been a groundswell of concern that as a society we were not allowing kids to be just children. As early as the 1830s, people are talking about these children being children without childhood. Now, I think the origin of this, the most immediate origin, is the Romantic poets, and it's difficult actually to exaggerate the impact which Wordsworth had. Wordsworth got away entirely from the idea of original sin. He thought children came from heaven, trailing clouds of glory, famously, so they can actually rescue adults who've gone astray. Now, if you begin to internalize this kind of view of childhood, then the lives of these children at work are anathema. People begin to say, when a child starts work, he or she ceases to be a child. And that is completely different. And certainly that innocence would be lost. Certainly the innocence would be lost, because they'd be mixing with adults who... But they would be having their childhoods taken away from them. The only way they would have their childhoods handed back to them would be if Parliament intervened. And that was something that initially seemed highly unlikely. It's not surprising that the first official reports into child labour were supportive and written in a stomach-churning, rose-tinted way. I've visited many factories, and I never saw a single instance of corporal chastisement inflicted on a child. Nor indeed, did I ever see children in ill-humour. They seemed to be always cheerful and alert, and the way they were treated was very different. The work of these lively little elves seemed to resemble sport. As to exhaustion of their day's work, they evinced no trace of it, emerging from the mill in the evening to commence their little amusements with the same alacrity as boys issuing from school. So why did things change? Why did this place, the Houses of Parliament, start to legislate against child labour? When did Britain begin to think that working kids to death was a bad idea? Parliament had largely been happy to keep its nose out of the issue of child employment. Crucially though, the times were changing. The children who'd survived the mines and factories were growing up and getting organised into early trade unions. Popular culture also began to report on the worst abuses. Dickens started his serialisations of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and he knew a bit about child labour. At 12, he'd work 12-hour shifts in a blacking factory, with a boy called Fagin. Slowly reform began to manoeuvre itself onto the political agenda. In 1831, radical MP John Hobhouse tried to introduce a bill restricting child labour. He proposed that no child under nine should work in a factory and that nine to 18 year olds' hours of work should be limited to 12 a day or 66 a week. Radical! Through his efforts, workers around the country form short-time committees to promote the cause and argue for more legislation. Is it not a shame and a disgrace that in a land called the Land of the Bibles, children of a tender age should be torn from their beds by six in the morning and confined in pestiferous factories until eight in the evening? Ten hours a day, with eight on Saturdays is our motto. May it be yours! In 1832, MP Michael Sadler became the main spokesman for the short-time committees. Mass meetings in the factory districts drew crowds of 100,000 and more in support. And while Parliament continued to resist reform, it did give Sadler the authority to launch an inquiry. That commission interviewed 48 child workers. And when its findings were published in 1833, they shocked genteel British society. While I'm earnestly pleading the cause of these oppressed children, what numbers of them are still tethered to their toil? Confined in heated rooms, stunned with the roar of revolving wheels, poisoned by the noxious effluvia of grease and gas, till weary and exhausted they turn, shivering to beds from which a relay of their young workfellows have just risen. The same year, 1833, the first Factory Act was passed. Unfortunately, it only applied to the textile industry. However, it did ban children under nine from working and limited the hours of work of children aged nine to thirteen to nine a day. But its real significance was that it laid down a marker for future reform. Reports from the front line of child labour began to filter back to the middle classes. Most shocking of all were accounts of underground work in Britain's coal mines. But what caused the uproar was not the hazardous work of children in these pits. It was topless ladies. In some pits, it was the practice for women and young boys to be chained to the carts that the miners filled with coals. They then dragged them to the surface through black, hot, filthy tunnels. Where the heat was so fierce they usually stripped to the waist to cope. When these artists' recreations of their working conditions were published, they caused a furore. This is the Big Pit in Blenathen. It's one of the places industrial Britain was born in iron, coal and steel. Pitt was started in 1840 and it's a museum now, but you can still get underground and see some of the old seams. And when you get down there, you get a real sense of what was asked of the child miners. Here we go, okay. This way everyone, please. Thank you. Come on in. Well, this is a good way down here. This is how it was. So a little boy or girl would be looking. Yeah, a little boy or girl. would stand by the side of the door. And what they would do, they would listen for horses. And when the horses come along, they would open the door, they would let the horses go through, they would close the door for 10 hours a day. And of course, back in those days, they had company in the timber work. They would have insects, cockroaches. And then running around their feet they would have been rats. But mostly the children they worked in the dark, they had no lights. So didn't they have a candle? If the families could afford candles but as you can imagine, candles were a naked flame and candles were dangerous with gas. So what I'm going to do now we're going to turn our lights out and I'm going to ask you to take one of your hands put it against your nose and tell me Can we see your fingers? Shall we try that now please? Yes. Right, take one of your hands please, against your nose, and can you see your fingers? I cannot see anything. So imagine these children in this for ten hours a day. I'm a chopper in the Garber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to chop without a light, and I'm scared. I go in at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at half past five. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark. I don't like being in the pit. So after the scandal of the climbing boys, the sacrifice of the child soldiers, and the shame of the pit and factory girls... Parliament finally began to face up. to the situation, even then though it was a struggle. And the story of that struggle is locked away in here, the Victoria Tower in the Houses of Parliament. It's not so hard to understand why there were so many twists and turns in Parliament's relationship with child labour. After all, it was a Parliament that was not only sympathetic to the interests of manufacturers and mine owners, it was largely made up of manufacturers and mine owners. But it's still staggering that reform took so long. Inside this sealed vault is every piece of legislation passed by Parliament since 1460. Each of these rolled up scrolls is a bill. And even the organisation of these scrolls shows what an infuriating time the reformers had in effecting change. Now we can see how frustrating and prolonged this struggle really was. This document down here is the first protective labour legislation for children, the Parish Apprentices Act of 1802. Limited to parish apprentices and largely toothless. These documents are arranged chronologically. It's like walking through legislative history. We'd have to go all the way down there and come all the way back here, still in the 1800s, but there's a long way to go before we get to any more protective labour legislation. 1810, 1815, 1819, the Cotton Factories Act. Not going to get it down for obvious reasons, but that act tried to limit the age at starting work to nine years old. 1820s, more 1820s, into the 1830s, to here. 1833, the first piece of protective labour legislation that's really effective, limiting the length of the working day. But we actually have to go next door for the material that really bites. Well, as you see, they've changed the system by this time. But here we have it. This is the Factory Act of 1884. It limited the length of the working day for children under 13 to six and a half hours. 41 years of argument, debate, struggle and investigation for three and a half hours of children's working time. Meanwhile, out in the real world, there's huge sectors of employment which are totally unregulated and crying out for reform. For example, construction. I worked at brick and tile works that was three miles from our home. Each day a six mile walk was added to the day's work of 12 hours. The work was heavy for a lad of my age. Each brick weighed about nine pounds. And in the course of a day I carried several tons of clay bricks. We usually started work at six in the morning, when I would pick up the brick from the floor of the shed. For this, I received seven shillings a week. My mother said that the work was too hard and no distance too long for me to walk every morning and night. She told me the money would be missed. Someone would have to go short. But it was no use being slowly killed by such work as I was doing, and it was making me humpbacks. It was not until I had been away from the work for several weeks that I was able to straighten myself out again. In those reminiscences, Will Thorne recalled being a nine-year-old worker in the 1860s. This brick-making kiln is similar to the one that would have employed Will. And this barrow is like the one that he would have had to move loaded with bricks. There's 25 bricks here, which would have been a child's load. Adults move 50. I think I'm supposed to try and move... Move this. Whoa! This isn't easy! Oh! It's not easy at all! The bricks I've just smashed were made here at Bliss Hill Victoria Museum by Tony Mugridge, the last independent travelling brick maker in Britain. Well I'm standing back here out of the splatter path because this is kind of messy here, but Tony, we're interested in how they managed to get round the child labour legislation in the brick fields then and maintain children's employment. a very clever thing. What would happen is that the people would be employed, that is the workers, men and women in the brick fields, they would be employed by the brickmaker. But if the brickmaker employed children, he'd be breaking the law. So what he did was... He employed the people to employ their own children. And by doing it that way, they got around it all. And what kind of jobs did the kids do then? What they would do is the children would be preparing the clay down in the soap pit over there, and then they would pick the clay up and carry it to the workbenches. The clay is very heavy, you know, a lump like this. I believe you, I believe you. But we are probably talking, you know, somewhere in the region of 12 to 14 pounds weight there in clay. By the time they're 8, 9 and 10, they're... able to move the brick barrows easily and then by the time they're sort of 11 and 12 they're making bricks will is a great example of how the child workers were far bolshier than we give them credit for he first went on strike at the ripe old age of six not surprisingly he grew up to be a union leader and then later a member of parliament he enjoyed a distinguished career until he retired in 1946 aged 84. The industrial generation powered Britain's journey towards wealth and influence and then set about improving the lot of those youngsters who followed on behind. As that generation grew up, they began to organise into trade unions and to campaign for changes in employment law. As a result, kids started to disappear from the workplace and slowly Parliament began to back a new solution to the problem of what to do with the children. School. Labour is replaced by learning and childhood becomes defined by new rite of passage, education. By the end of the 19th century school leaving age provides a clear boundary and one enshrined in law. Instead of being seen as fuel for the future, children became the future. In effect, that old romantic notion finally came of age. Childhood is important. It needs protecting. Children are special. And the children who survived the first industrial revolution... were even more so. We've always given these children our pity, but it's our respect they deserve. They were heroes, whether there's a statue to them or not. Ian Hislop shows how the Victorians dragged themselves out of the ethical wilderness to become guardians of the nation's morals next night in Age of the Do-Gooders. And then at 11, we take a look at how we shook the world with the power of explosions.

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, warding 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 caught 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 autobiography. 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 slum 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 our great, great, great, great grandparents. We always see them as victims, drudgers and drones. But it's not the... 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 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 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.

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 till 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 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, to the fire.

You had to burn the mill down, so mule room work was always bare-footed. I heard that there was a fatality associated with this machine in the past. Yes, there was. A 13-year-old boy, 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 carrier Carriage is out onto the end of the railings and then applying a brake to prevent the carriage retracting. The children then had to go round 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.

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, 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. The 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 will 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 the 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. 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 Maidley, 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, and 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've put their mark. And elsewhere, they've struggled 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 landowner.

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 were able to grow food. 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 travelling, earning their wages in new industries. The pay wasn't great, but it wasn't based on the sliding scales of farm work. 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 three additional years of married life were crucial. Girls were at their most fertile and could produce two additional babies. So at the very moment that Britain was prepared to take the giant technological leap into the machine age, it had its largest, youngest population. And it was a mobile population, able to adapt to change. Everything was tailored towards delivering the industrial future.

That industrial future needed feeding, and 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 labour was ubiquitous. Almost every workplace 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 set-ups like this one. This farm was attached to the local rectory and worked by a small team, including boys and girls. 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 reminiscences tiptoe around the topic of child sexual abuse. But in the testimonies I've read, there are two 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 six years old, when children could be employed as human scarecrows. When I was six and two months old, I was sent off to work.

I do not think I shall ever forget those long hungry days in the field scaring crows. You can imagine the feeling of loneliness. Hours and hours pass 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 hayfield two miles away.

By my seventh birthday, I was driving a plough. Any repairs to plough or harness had to be taken to tradesmen. Once, after working all day long, I had to carry a plough horse collar that required whistling and the plough coulter that needed repairs at the blacksmith. These two 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 Everton. William Arnold was just six years old.

when you went to work on that farm in Northamptonshire. And this is a horse collar like the one he carried. Let me show you just how heavy this is.

And now we need the coulter, because he also carried that. This is part of the plough. £40.

That probably weighs more than he did. In many ways, the crow scarers and the children fetching and carrying for farm labourers 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 labourers as an opportunity. They were proper workers, and they wanted to get on.

In our village there was a war for Ganga and justice of the peace. I began to drive a pair of horses at Plough for him, and after a bit, thinking I suppose that I was a smart, likely lad, he made me a sort of... stable boy and gave me eight shillings a week to start with. Here was a rise for a lad who was set on rising as fast and as much as he could. There were no slack half-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 capabilities, my new master persuaded me to climb a chimney on my very first morning.

With the feet standing upon 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 hand 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 ...searched 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 sulfurous fumes were sufficient to stifle one.

Once, the fumes were so strong that I fell from top to bottom. My insensible... 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 had no challenge from that. He'd have been up and down there like grease lightning.

What really tested boys' metals were chimneys that measured 9 inches by 9 inches, which is this size. And 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, 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, apprenticed to the trade at seven years old in some cases, and they used to use their elbows and knees to scamper up inside the chimney, and 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 used to strip naked so they could escape back down the chimney after cleaning. 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 sweeps and 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 that 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 two a few shillings from 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 in kent where a master had sent the boy up the chimney with a wet tar pooling to extinguish a chimney fire and apparently he climbed into the flu very reluctantly the master threatened to beat He attempted to climb further into the chimney, became stuck in the chimney, wedged, and apparently they heard his screams for over two miles.

Not exactly Chim Chiminey Chereen Mary Poppins, is it now? And 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 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 at the Battle of Trafalgar on this ship, HMS Victory.

One of them was a 16-year-old midshipman, Lieutenant William Rivers. His father was also on board and William first went to sea with him on victory, aged six and a half. And he immediately saw action and was wounded off too long. I had the honour of serving in three general actions. In the first, I received two wounds in my right arm.

and in the latter whilst receiving orders from his late lordship admiral nelson i received a wound on my face which was shortly followed by a gunshot wound which carried away my left leg both william the father and william the son This painting, Death of Nelson, by Benjamin West, with William Jr. being dragged off the deck on the bottom corner. Altogether, 720 boys fought in that battle, and they served at every single level of the ship's society. Matthew Sheldon is head archivist at Portsmouth's Royal Naval Museum.

Matthew, you've actually got William Rivers. diary. Yeah, it's quite unusual to actually have a kind of personal account from this date from someone who was young. He went to sea actually at the age of, I think, six and a half, and he then actually stays on the ship on Victory for the next ten years.

is right up to the Battle of Trafalgar. He was exceptional, but probably not unique. I'm sure he wasn't unique, no.

We've got another case on the people who were on board at Trafalgar with a father and a son on board, so that did happen. So certainly not an exception, but I think is quite young. Yes. Well, what are the other materials here? This is a prize money register.

When ships were in action, if they captured a ship, the value of the ship was divided among... amongst the ship's crew. Here we see it being shared out after the Battle of Trafalgar, and I particularly like this one for Samuel Robbins here, who is getting his £1.176.

And so there you have a kind of 15-year-old Marine Society boy. Did he get educated? Well, he can certainly sign.

Absolutely. Did he get educated by the Society, or actually did he get some learning on board? Marine Society boys were the naval equivalent of the parish apprentices. They were boys who were dependent on the state for their welfare and who instead of being sent to cotton mills, found themselves in naval barracks and trained for the sea.

Not all of these raw recruits were orphans, however. Many were just kids who found themselves in a spot of bother. The Marine Society were concerned about the growing number of teenagers they saw hanging around on the streets, seemingly unsupervised, and a bit like the...

That's sort of the us bookets we have today, that I saw like something must be done. And then the solution was like, why not send them to the sea? They seem to be quite lively. That would be the kind of boys initially, but also generally just people struggling to care for their children.

So sometimes parents would bring their children to the sea? Sometimes parents, friends, sometimes masters who would be dissatisfied with their apprentices would come up and say, look, he's incapable of learning the trade. He wants to go to sea.

Can you take him? Well, Roland, what was it like for these boys when they found themselves on board ship? It was obviously a tough change. They lost their home, they lost any attachment figure they would have had before, and were thrown into this community of sailors, not exactly choir boys, being 13 or 14 years old only, so it was surely very intimidating at first.

But we heard horrible cases in battle of boys being injured and people being killed around them. They all remember their first encounter with death. It seems something that sticks with them forever.

The first time they see someone's head blown away by a cannon shot, that sticks. But then what is remarkable, from then on, they all say that they're numbed to the horrors of war. We had not fired two broadsides before an unlucky shot cut a poor man's head right off. The horrid sight, I must confess, did not help raise more spirits.

The ship that struck us was so much disabled that she could not live upon the water, but gave a dreadful reel. We were afraid to send any boats to help, because they would have been sunk by too many souls getting in at once. You could plainly perceive the poor wretches climbing over to Wynwood and crying most dreadfully. Even our own men were in tears, groaning. God bless them.

But were they really not to it? We've got testimonies that sailors are apparently having seven times more likelihood of ending up in a lunatic asylum. So really the signs are that they very much struggled afterwards.

While they were on board, it was all fine and covered up. But when back on land and alone, then the truth maybe came out and it really showed like if that ever digested it or if that locked it up in like a sea chest deep down in their soul and hoped never to open it again. Obviously, these hellish experiences left their mark. But the testimonies demonstrate that the harshness shown to the children of the revolution did not stop them from acting selflessly towards others.

Take the older brother. The young Alexander Somerville, the wonderful William. William was a stripling when I was born, and worked for such wages as a youth could obtain in that part of the country.

When he came home at night, he would strip off his coat, take off his hat, put on his nightcap and get down the Elshin box and sort through the awls, hemp and scraps of leather. He'd examine all the children's feet to see which of them had shoes most in need of mending. And then he would sit down and cobble the shoes by the light of the fire until near midnight. He would rise at four o'clock in the mornings and do the heaviest part of James's work amongst the farmers, cows and other cattle, before going to do his own day's work two or three miles distant. James was too young for the heavy task of cleaning, so William got up every morning to do that part of his work and so keep James in employment.

The one overriding motivation for these children was helping the warm heart that was at the centre of their lives, their mothers. My brother and I had the deep satisfaction of knowing it was not through any fault of our mothers that we were forced to go through so much privation. For she was our good angel in the home and the one on whom we all had to lean.

Mother, mother, I won't have a sovereign, and all of it myself, and it's yours, all yours, every bit is yours. In time, my wages went up to nine shillings a week, and I was able to be a real help to our little household, and lighten somewhat the burden of care resting on my mother's shoulders. Boys and their mothers, eh?

But mums became the centres of their world because more often than not, dads were away or missing. Their absence was prompted by poverty, death, travelling for work and, in the case of 10% of the male population, because of being called away to fight abroad in the Napoleonic Wars. Factless fathers were often blamed for exploiting their children by the politicians and the upper classes. But in many ways, men were the first victims of industrialization. Machines took away their skills and livelihoods and called upon their children who were cheaper and more docile.

Those fathers were left behind. It was when I was about eight years old that our family misfortune fell to our lowest ebb. The saddling trade in London had been going worse and men were short of work.

The large army contracts for cavalry saddles had now all gone to the factories. It was the beginning of 1876 when my father was turned off from his work and became unemployed. The effect of these undeserved fortunes on my father was however noticeable to me then and later.

After 1876 he became more and more silent. and even morose. There is no greater trial to a self-respecting and good workman than that of finding his services are not needed, leaving him to spend his days trying to secure a job only to be met by the sign, no hands wanted.

Add to this the misery and poverty when he returns home, and it is not surprising that even a strong-minded man should break down. Given the frequency of broken families, the grinding poverty and the need to work, these children could never have enjoyed a childhood as we might know it. But there again, this was an era where the concept of childhood remained fluid. People were at odds about what childhood meant, when it started and when it finished. Even the children were sometimes confused.

In 1850, the journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed a nameless eight-year-old watercress seller in London's East End. On and off, I've been very near a 12 month in the streets. Before that, I had to take care of a baby for my aunt. No, it wasn't heavy, only two months old.

But I minded it for ever such a time, until it could walk. Before I had the baby, I used to help my mother who was in the fur trays. And if there were slips in the fur, I'd sew them up. All my money I earned, I put in the club. and draws it out to my clothes with.

It's better than spending it on sweet stuff, for then that's got a living to earn. I ain't a child, and I shan't be a woman till I'm 20, but I'm past eight I am. A lot of children, when they started work full-time, and of course the Watercress girl had been full-time work since about the age of five. Cease to think of themselves as children and sometimes they felt much better about themselves when they did start working. So what motivated them?

I think that this comes automatically. And you're not earning, of course, for yourself. You're earning to tip up the earnings to your mother, who might give you a little bit back.

But it's basically for the family. And if you can think, as I think some people do, you know, my money went towards the joint on Sunday, the only meat we get in the week, then you're going to feel a sense of self-esteem and pride. By the middle of the 19th century, there seems to have been a groundswell of concern that as a society we were not allowing kids to be just children. As early as the 1830s, people are talking about these children being children without childhood. Now, I think the origin of this, the most immediate origin, is the Romantic poets, and it's difficult actually to exaggerate the impact which Wordsworth had.

Wordsworth got away entirely from the idea of original sin. He thought children came from heaven, trailing clouds of glory, famously, so they can actually rescue adults who've gone astray. Now, if you begin to internalize this kind of view of childhood, then the lives of these children at work are anathema. People begin to say, when a child starts work, he or she ceases to be a child.

And that is completely different. And certainly that innocence would be lost. Certainly the innocence would be lost, because they'd be mixing with adults who... But they would be having their childhoods taken away from them.

The only way they would have their childhoods handed back to them would be if Parliament intervened. And that was something that initially seemed highly unlikely. It's not surprising that the first official reports into child labour were supportive and written in a stomach-churning, rose-tinted way.

I've visited many factories, and I never saw a single instance of corporal chastisement inflicted on a child. Nor indeed, did I ever see children in ill-humour. They seemed to be always cheerful and alert, and the way they were treated was very different. The work of these lively little elves seemed to resemble sport.

As to exhaustion of their day's work, they evinced no trace of it, emerging from the mill in the evening to commence their little amusements with the same alacrity as boys issuing from school. So why did things change? Why did this place, the Houses of Parliament, start to legislate against child labour? When did Britain begin to think that working kids to death was a bad idea? Parliament had largely been happy to keep its nose out of the issue of child employment.

Crucially though, the times were changing. The children who'd survived the mines and factories were growing up and getting organised into early trade unions. Popular culture also began to report on the worst abuses.

Dickens started his serialisations of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and he knew a bit about child labour. At 12, he'd work 12-hour shifts in a blacking factory, with a boy called Fagin. Slowly reform began to manoeuvre itself onto the political agenda.

In 1831, radical MP John Hobhouse tried to introduce a bill restricting child labour. He proposed that no child under nine should work in a factory and that nine to 18 year olds' hours of work should be limited to 12 a day or 66 a week. Radical! Through his efforts, workers around the country form short-time committees to promote the cause and argue for more legislation.

Is it not a shame and a disgrace that in a land called the Land of the Bibles, children of a tender age should be torn from their beds by six in the morning and confined in pestiferous factories until eight in the evening? Ten hours a day, with eight on Saturdays is our motto. May it be yours!

In 1832, MP Michael Sadler became the main spokesman for the short-time committees. Mass meetings in the factory districts drew crowds of 100,000 and more in support. And while Parliament continued to resist reform, it did give Sadler the authority to launch an inquiry.

That commission interviewed 48 child workers. And when its findings were published in 1833, they shocked genteel British society. While I'm earnestly pleading the cause of these oppressed children, what numbers of them are still tethered to their toil? Confined in heated rooms, stunned with the roar of revolving wheels, poisoned by the noxious effluvia of grease and gas, till weary and exhausted they turn, shivering to beds from which a relay of their young workfellows have just risen.

The same year, 1833, the first Factory Act was passed. Unfortunately, it only applied to the textile industry. However, it did ban children under nine from working and limited the hours of work of children aged nine to thirteen to nine a day. But its real significance was that it laid down a marker for future reform. Reports from the front line of child labour began to filter back to the middle classes.

Most shocking of all were accounts of underground work in Britain's coal mines. But what caused the uproar was not the hazardous work of children in these pits. It was topless ladies.

In some pits, it was the practice for women and young boys to be chained to the carts that the miners filled with coals. They then dragged them to the surface through black, hot, filthy tunnels. Where the heat was so fierce they usually stripped to the waist to cope.

When these artists' recreations of their working conditions were published, they caused a furore. This is the Big Pit in Blenathen. It's one of the places industrial Britain was born in iron, coal and steel.

Pitt was started in 1840 and it's a museum now, but you can still get underground and see some of the old seams. And when you get down there, you get a real sense of what was asked of the child miners. Here we go, okay.

This way everyone, please. Thank you. Come on in. Well, this is a good way down here.

This is how it was. So a little boy or girl would be looking. Yeah, a little boy or girl.

would stand by the side of the door. And what they would do, they would listen for horses. And when the horses come along, they would open the door, they would let the horses go through, they would close the door for 10 hours a day.

And of course, back in those days, they had company in the timber work. They would have insects, cockroaches. And then running around their feet they would have been rats. But mostly the children they worked in the dark, they had no lights. So didn't they have a candle?

If the families could afford candles but as you can imagine, candles were a naked flame and candles were dangerous with gas. So what I'm going to do now we're going to turn our lights out and I'm going to ask you to take one of your hands put it against your nose and tell me Can we see your fingers? Shall we try that now please?

Yes. Right, take one of your hands please, against your nose, and can you see your fingers? I cannot see anything. So imagine these children in this for ten hours a day.

I'm a chopper in the Garber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to chop without a light, and I'm scared. I go in at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at half past five.

I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark. I don't like being in the pit. So after the scandal of the climbing boys, the sacrifice of the child soldiers, and the shame of the pit and factory girls...

Parliament finally began to face up. to the situation, even then though it was a struggle. And the story of that struggle is locked away in here, the Victoria Tower in the Houses of Parliament.

It's not so hard to understand why there were so many twists and turns in Parliament's relationship with child labour. After all, it was a Parliament that was not only sympathetic to the interests of manufacturers and mine owners, it was largely made up of manufacturers and mine owners. But it's still staggering that reform took so long.

Inside this sealed vault is every piece of legislation passed by Parliament since 1460. Each of these rolled up scrolls is a bill. And even the organisation of these scrolls shows what an infuriating time the reformers had in effecting change. Now we can see how frustrating and prolonged this struggle really was.

This document down here is the first protective labour legislation for children, the Parish Apprentices Act of 1802. Limited to parish apprentices and largely toothless. These documents are arranged chronologically. It's like walking through legislative history.

We'd have to go all the way down there and come all the way back here, still in the 1800s, but there's a long way to go before we get to any more protective labour legislation. 1810, 1815, 1819, the Cotton Factories Act. Not going to get it down for obvious reasons, but that act tried to limit the age at starting work to nine years old.

1820s, more 1820s, into the 1830s, to here. 1833, the first piece of protective labour legislation that's really effective, limiting the length of the working day. But we actually have to go next door for the material that really bites.

Well, as you see, they've changed the system by this time. But here we have it. This is the Factory Act of 1884. It limited the length of the working day for children under 13 to six and a half hours.

41 years of argument, debate, struggle and investigation for three and a half hours of children's working time. Meanwhile, out in the real world, there's huge sectors of employment which are totally unregulated and crying out for reform. For example, construction. I worked at brick and tile works that was three miles from our home.

Each day a six mile walk was added to the day's work of 12 hours. The work was heavy for a lad of my age. Each brick weighed about nine pounds. And in the course of a day I carried several tons of clay bricks. We usually started work at six in the morning, when I would pick up the brick from the floor of the shed.

For this, I received seven shillings a week. My mother said that the work was too hard and no distance too long for me to walk every morning and night. She told me the money would be missed. Someone would have to go short. But it was no use being slowly killed by such work as I was doing, and it was making me humpbacks.

It was not until I had been away from the work for several weeks that I was able to straighten myself out again. In those reminiscences, Will Thorne recalled being a nine-year-old worker in the 1860s. This brick-making kiln is similar to the one that would have employed Will. And this barrow is like the one that he would have had to move loaded with bricks.

There's 25 bricks here, which would have been a child's load. Adults move 50. I think I'm supposed to try and move... Move this.

Whoa! This isn't easy! Oh! It's not easy at all!

The bricks I've just smashed were made here at Bliss Hill Victoria Museum by Tony Mugridge, the last independent travelling brick maker in Britain. Well I'm standing back here out of the splatter path because this is kind of messy here, but Tony, we're interested in how they managed to get round the child labour legislation in the brick fields then and maintain children's employment. a very clever thing.

What would happen is that the people would be employed, that is the workers, men and women in the brick fields, they would be employed by the brickmaker. But if the brickmaker employed children, he'd be breaking the law. So what he did was... He employed the people to employ their own children. And by doing it that way, they got around it all.

And what kind of jobs did the kids do then? What they would do is the children would be preparing the clay down in the soap pit over there, and then they would pick the clay up and carry it to the workbenches. The clay is very heavy, you know, a lump like this.

I believe you, I believe you. But we are probably talking, you know, somewhere in the region of 12 to 14 pounds weight there in clay. By the time they're 8, 9 and 10, they're... able to move the brick barrows easily and then by the time they're sort of 11 and 12 they're making bricks will is a great example of how the child workers were far bolshier than we give them credit for he first went on strike at the ripe old age of six not surprisingly he grew up to be a union leader and then later a member of parliament he enjoyed a distinguished career until he retired in 1946 aged 84. The industrial generation powered Britain's journey towards wealth and influence and then set about improving the lot of those youngsters who followed on behind.

As that generation grew up, they began to organise into trade unions and to campaign for changes in employment law. As a result, kids started to disappear from the workplace and slowly Parliament began to back a new solution to the problem of what to do with the children. School. Labour is replaced by learning and childhood becomes defined by new rite of passage, education.

By the end of the 19th century school leaving age provides a clear boundary and one enshrined in law. Instead of being seen as fuel for the future, children became the future. In effect, that old romantic notion finally came of age. Childhood is important. It needs protecting.

Children are special. And the children who survived the first industrial revolution... were even more so. We've always given these children our pity, but it's our respect they deserve.

They were heroes, whether there's a statue to them or not. Ian Hislop shows how the Victorians dragged themselves out of the ethical wilderness to become guardians of the nation's morals next night in Age of the Do-Gooders. And then at 11, we take a look at how we shook the world with the power of explosions.

Transcript for:The Role of Child Labor in History

Transcript for:
The Role of Child Labor in History