League of Dishonour

The
League
of
Dishonour
Conditions of Work
for Children in
English Textile Factories
During the 19th C
Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard

Thomas Gray
Alan Challoner MA
Front Cover illustration: Auguste Hervieu's depiction of the interior of a cotton factory for
Frances Trollope's 1839 novel Michael Armstrong. It shows dreadfully malnourished child
scavengers, unkempt and overworked female piecers, and several brutal overseers.
There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud

Resounded through the air without a star,
Whence I, at the beginning, wept thereat.
Languages diverse, horrible dialects,

Accents of anger, words of agony,
And voices high and hoarse, with sound of hands,
Made up a tumult that goes whirling on
For ever in that air for ever black,
Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.
And I, who had my head with horror bound,

Said: "O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?"
He answered: "I will tell thee very briefly.
These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.
No fame of them the world permits to be;

Misericord and Justice both disdain them.
Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass."
And I, who looked again, beheld a banner,
Which, whirling round, ran on so rapidly,
That of all pause it seemed to me indignant;
And after it there came so long a train
Of people, that I ne'er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.
When some among them I had recognised,
I looked, and I beheld the shade of him
Who made through cowardice the great refusal.
Dante, Inferno: Canto III
"Whatever you neglected to do unto one of the least of these,

you neglected to do unto Me!"
Matthew 25:40
2
Part One — Setting the Scene
Children of poor and working-class families had worked for centuries before industrialization
— helping around the house or, when they were able, assisting in the family's enterprise.
The practice of putting children to work was first documented in the medieval era when
fathers had their children spin thread for them to weave on the loom. Children performed
a variety of tasks that were auxiliary to their parents but critical to the family economy. The
family's household needs determined the family's supply of labour and, “the
interdependence of work and residence, of household labour needs, subsistence
requirements, and family relationships constituted the family economy”. 1
In the 17th Century many children had a troubled existence. The Puritan, Cromwell, was a
highly religious man who believed that everybody should lead their lives according to what
was written in the Bible. The word Puritan means that followers had a pure soul and lived a
good life. Cromwell believed that everybody else in England should follow his example.
One of the main beliefs of the Puritans was that if you worked hard, you would get to
Heaven. Pointless enjoyment was frowned upon. Cromwell shut many inns and the
theatres were all closed down. Most sports were banned. Boys caught playing football on
a Sunday could be whipped as a punishment. Swearing was punished by a fine, but those
who kept swearing could be sent to prison.
During his time as head of government, he made it his task to ‘tame’ the Irish. He sent an
army there and despite promising to treat well those who surrendered to him, he
slaughtered the people of Wexford and Drogheda who surrendered to his forces. He
ordered that all Irish children should be sent to the West Indies to work as slave labourers in
the sugar plantations. He knew many would die out there — but dead children could not
grow into adults and have more children.
Today we shed tears at their plight and we prosecute to the limits of the law anyone who
abuses children in whatever way. Yet two hundred years ago it was common practice for
young children to be worked to death, to receive punishment when their frail bodies tried
to sleep and who often went a whole day starving for food that their weak constitutions
demanded.
1 Tilly, L. A. & Scott, J. W. Women, Work and Family. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978.
3
For some, this meant working in the mines — and conditions in coalmines were often
terrible. Children as young as five worked underground. Life at or just above subsistence
level required a maximum of familial co-operation which meant that in the early 1800s
women and children worked in the mining industry. The 1842 Children’s Employment
Commission noted that the mines from Dartmoor to Land’s End employed about 19/20ths
of the region’s young people. The total number of persons employed in the mines of
Cornwall in 1842 was approximately 28,000-30,000 and those of Devonshire a further 1,5002.
By contrast the Alston Moor District in the North of England employed in the region of 5,000,
Ireland, approximately 4,500 and Scotland around 400. Clearly the mining regions in the
British Isles employed a great number of young children, and it was not unusual to find them
as young as seven or eight working at the mine’s surface, and occasionally boys of this age
underground.
Surface workers’ tasks were sometimes as arduous as it was for those underground and
many complained of the effects of over-exertion. In 1842 there was a Children’s
Employment Commission and it was noted that young boys employed at ‘jigging’ were
bent double over large sieves which they had to constantly shake; they often brought up
blood after a prolonged period at this task. The Commissioner noted the poor physical
condition of many of the children who did not have sufficient nourishment to undertake
hard, physical labour.
Not only that, but at their stage of physical

development their body was not ready for
such work. The bones in the body are
growing continuously up to the age of
eighteen years, and some beyond that. If
the work that these children were doing, not
only regularly but excessively, put undue
strain on the joints and muscles then
deformity was a common result. This was
particularly evident in the areas of work
where children had to stoop, bend or twist
and sometimes to stand differently on one
leg to the other whilst operating tools or machinery. Often they were too short in stature to
reach parts of the machinery and they were forced to stand on insecure stools or ledges
where one leg might support the body more than the other. Employers often hired children
over adults because children were powerless and could not revolt. 3
In 1838, Jenkin4 estimated that roughly 5,000 children were employed in the metal mines of
Cornwall and by 1842 the returns from The First Report 5 show as many as 5,378 children and
youth worked in the mines. In 1838 Lemon collected data from 124 tin, copper and lead
mines in Cornwall and found that 85% employed children. In the 105 mines that employed
child labour, children comprised from as little as 2% to as much as 50% of the work force
with a mean of 20%. 6 According to Jenkin the employment of children in copper and tin
mines in Cornwall began to decline by 1870. (Jenkin Idem)
2 Barham, C., 1842, Reports to the Commissioners on the Employment of Children, British
Parliamentary Papers.
3 Yancey, D. Life in Charles Dickens’ England. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books Inc., 1999.
4 Jenkin, A. K. H. The Cornish Miner: An Account of His Life Above and Underground From Early
Times. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1927.
5 House of Commons Papers (British Parliamentary Papers):1842[380]XV Children's employment
(mines). R. Com. 1st rep.
6 Lemon, Sir C. The Statistics of the Copper Mines of Cornwall. Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society I (1838): 65-84.
4
In 1842, the proportion of the work
forces that were children and
youth in coal and metal mines
ranged from 19 to 40%. A larger
proportion of the work forces of
coal mines used child labour
underground while more children
were found on the surface of
metal mines ‘dressing the ores’ (a
process of separating the ore from
the dirt and rock). By 1842 one-
third of the underground work
force of coal mines was under the
age of 18 and one-fourth of the
work force of metal mines were
children and youth (House of
Commons Papers 1842[380] XV; Idem).
In 1851 children and youth (under 20) comprised 30% of the total population of coal miners
in Great Britain. Following the passing of the Mining Act of 1842 which prohibited girls and
women from working in mines, fewer children worked in mines.
Another occupation that caught up poor children was that of

chimney-sweeping and there is little in the history of child
labour that provides so much evidence of cruelty, pain and
hardship. These boys were usually working in the cities and
very large towns and they were procured by Master chimney
sweeps as apprentices from the lowliest families in such
places as London's poor East End. In the 19th century boys
were made to climb up chimneys to clean them. This
barbaric practice was ended by law in 1875.
In the early factories candles were used for lighting and as

these were easy to knock over they were a huge fire hazard7.
Poorly heated, dim factories full of unskilled workers put many
innocent children in danger. The lack of knowledge about
machinery caused workers to be crushed, mangled, or torn to
death in belts. Often polluted and unsanitary buildings
caused much death and illness (Yancey idem). During the
Victorian Era children were often mistreated and subjected to
the poorest of working and living conditions. This time period was characterized by the use
of children to help develop the economy. Child labourers received less than the essentials
needed at home, school, and at work. The life of a young worker was in essence a life of a
slave.
The establishment and growth of nascent textile manufacturing enterprises relied to a great
extent in many areas (particularly rural ones) on the practice of bringing in parish
apprentices. These factories, in some cases, would not have continued for as long as they
did without them. Those which were founded almost entirely on the labour of poor children
from local and more distant parishes included some which were very short lived, but others
which were successful into the medium and long term. However, the fact that many did
continue over a long number of years is, in part, due to the conditions under which these
children were employed.
The practice of binding poor children out of the parish was well-established before the
factory age and continued thereafter. It was large in scale, extended over a wide
7 McMurtry, J. Victorian Life and Victorian Fiction. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979
5
geographical area, and liberated the industrial labour market. The movement of parish
apprentices into early textile mills gathered pace from 1780 as the number of pauper
children increased8
The process of factory parish apprenticeship was much more controlled than
conventionally believed. The distribution of children sometimes involved large groups
generating a sense of random disposal. 9 Yet small groups and individuals contributed to
the overall pattern. The surviving record, disappointingly erratic as it is, nevertheless
indicates the careful registering of all movements. The trade in parish factory apprentices
continued well after the first decade of the nineteenth century. Parishes, or other
institutions caring for poor children, may have disguised the extent of this activity, but traces
of its persistence can be identified. From the demand side it is clear that parish apprentice
labour was widely distributed geographically. Some employers were explicitly drawn by
the benefits of large group, long distance apprenticeships, but many were taken from
nearby. (Honeyman, Idem)
For several decades, historians have emphasised the need to identify those parishes which
bound children to textile mills, in order to estimate the extent of factory apprenticeship; to
assess the outcome of the policies which moved children from parish to mill and to
challenge conventional wisdom that the trade in poor children was simply a northward
movement from London.10
No area outside London contained the

level of surplus children that was
characteristic of the poorer parishes of
the capital; but even the smallest
contributor played a part. Evidence
suggests that the majority of firms,
especially in the midlands, drew initially
at least upon parishes in the region for
their supplies of parish apprentices.
Each of the textile factory enterprises

made use of parish apprentices. For
some, such labour was partial and
temporary. For others, poor children
formed the bulk of the labour force for
thirty years or more. The variation in dependence can be attributed to the nature of the
local labour market, specifically the availability of local child labour, and competition for
such labour. This supports conventional wisdom that the more isolated the factory or mill,
the greater the likelihood that parish apprentices would provide at least part of the labour
force.
There were severe hardships experienced by children who worked in the textile mills. It was
common practice for them to work long hours and they became very tired and found it
difficult to maintain the speed required by the overlookers. There are first hand accounts of
the distance children would walk in a day at the mill. John Fielden MP, in a speech in the
House of Commons on 9th May 1836, spoke of these privations and the exhausting work
from which the children had no escape.
8 Parliamentary returns of 1803 suggest that there were 195,000 children of paupers aged
between 5 and 14 who were permanently relieved by the parishes in England and Wales.
9 Honeyman, K. The London parish apprentice and the early industrial labour market. Paper
for Economic History Society conference, Exeter, March 31 2007
10 Geoffrey W Oxley, for example, states that more needs to be known about the general
context of policies, the number of parishes participating in apprenticing to mills, and the
achievement of the strategy. See his Poor relief in England and Wales 1601-1834, 1974, pp77-
8
6
“At a meeting in Manchester a man claimed that a child in one mill walked twenty-four miles
a day. I was surprised by this statement, therefore, when I went home, I went into my own
factory, and with a clock before me, I watched a child at work, and having watched her for
some time, I then calculated the distance she had to go in a day, and to my surprise, I found
it nothing short of twenty miles.”
Many children were hit with a strap to make them work faster. In some factories children
were dipped head first into the water cistern if they became drowsy. Children were also
punished for arriving late for work and for talking to the other children. Parish apprentices
who ran away from the factory were in danger of being sent to prison. Children who were
considered potential runaways were placed in irons.
Lord Ashley carried out a survey of doctors in 1836. In a speech he made in the House of
Commons he argued that over half of the doctors interviewed believed that, “ten hours is
the utmost quantity of labour which can be endured by the children” without damaging
their health. However, Lord Ashley admitted that some doctors that came before his
committee did not believe that long hours caused health problems.
Children who were late for work were severely punished. If children arrived late for work
they would also have money deducted from their wages. Time-keeping was a problem for
those families who could not afford to buy a clock. In some factories workers were not
allowed to carry a watch. The children suspected that this rule was an attempt to trick
them out of some of their wages.
This is not written as a comprehensive record of child poverty, its associated

bad work environments or an overview of employers and factory owners with
bad employment records. It is a selection made from contemporary
published works that, put together, show the despicable and reprehensible
story of how the children of this period were overworked, underpaid, ill-
treated and abused, all for the profit of self-interested and cruel Masters.
Many of these children died before they reached puberty and others were
crippled, physically and mentally, for the rest of their lives.
There follows some stories of the more considerate employers who, although
working the children hard, did understand their needs and contrived to make
their life more tolerable.
vvv
Poor Parish Children
We know more about poverty in the 19th century than in

previous ages because, for the first time, people did accurate
surveys and they made detailed descriptions of the lives of the
poor. We also have photographs and they tell a harrowing
story.
Given the role of child labour in the British Industrial Revolution,

many economic historians have tried to explain why child
labour became so prevalent. A competitive model of the
labour market for children has been used to examine the
factors that influenced the demand for children by employers
and the supply of children from families. The majority of scholars argue that it was the
plentiful supply of children that increased employment in industrial work places turning child
labour into a social problem.
The most common explanation for the increase in supply is poverty — the family sent their
children to work because they desperately needed the income. Another common
explanation is that work was a traditional and customary component of ordinary people's
lives. Parents had worked when they were young and required their children to do the
7
same. The prevailing view of childhood for the working-class was that children were
considered ‘little adults’ and were expected to contribute to the family's income or
enterprise.
Other less commonly argued sources of an increase in the supply of child labour were that
parents either sent their children to work because they were greedy and wanted more
income to spend on themselves or that children wanted out of the house because their
parents were emotionally and physically abusive. Whatever the reason for the increase in
supply, scholars agree that since mandatory schooling laws were not passed until 1876,
even well-intentioned parents had few alternatives.
At the end of the 19th century more than 25% of the population was living at or below
subsistence level. Surveys indicated that around 10% were very poor and could not afford
even basic necessities such as enough nourishing food. Between 15% and 20% had just
enough money to live on (provided they did not lose their job or have to take time off work
through illness).
There were many areas of employment into which children were forced and the poor
parish children were easy prey to this practice. Everyone would have a parish of legal
settlement11 and if relief was required it would be the responsibility of that parish to provide
it. The parish was required to elect each Easter two Overseers of the Poor12 who were
responsible for setting the poor rate, it's collection and the relief of those in need. These
overseers should ideally be, ‘substantial householders’ but in small villages the only practical
qualification was to be a rate payer. In rural England, where 90% of the population then
lived, this was a fair and equitable system run by local people and administered by the
local Justices of the Peace who were likely to be the Rector and local landowners.
However, when the parish was short of money and could not adequately support the
pauper children (and also sometimes if the parents wouldn’t do their duty because they
wanted to use the money for their own enjoyment) then they might be ‘sold’ to factory
owners who were well outside (and often very far away) the children’s home district.
This practice went on for many years and despite the Factory Acts and the Industrial
Revolution there is evidence as late as the 1890s that the numbers living in poverty and
whose children were made to work from a very young age did not diminish.13
The Records from the Powys County Archives offer this picture of the food allowances for
‘Casual Paupers’. The official regulations quoted below, which were to be displayed in all
workhouses, really bring home the alarmingly harsh regimes which were maintained in
these places over many years. The following extracts are taken from Regulations of the
Local Government Board dated December 1882, with later amendments’
11 Legal Settlement was the overlying principle of poor relief and it had several qualifications
that were required in order to benefit.
12 The Overseer of the Poor was appointed by the vestry in Easter week he was the only parish
officer bound by civil law, except the constable after 1842. Created by statute in January
1601 they were appointed after election under the seal of two Justices of the Peace. Working
closely with the Church Wardens they were responsible for setting and collecting the poor
rate and distributing benefits to those requiring relief. They were required by law to keep
detailed account books of income against expenditure and where possible were elected
from substantial householders. The overseers would also endorse settlement certificates and
illegitimacy bonds, present settlement queries to the justices for examination and effect
removal orders. Along with the wardens they would arrange parish apprenticeships for
deserving poor children.
13 Booth, C. Life and Labour of the People of London. Rev. ed. London; Macmillan and Co.
1904.
8
Males above 15 years of age — 8 oz. of Bread or 6 oz of Bread, and 1 pint of Gruel or 1 pint
of Broth.
Females above 15 years of age, Children from 7 to 15 years of age — 6 oz of Bread, and 1
pint of Gruel or 1 pint of Broth.
Breakfast — same as Supper.
Children under seven years of age:
• For each child under the age of seven months — half pint of Milk
and half oz of Sugar.
• For each child between the ages of seven months and two years —
half pint of Milk, half oz of Sugar, and 2 oz of Bread.
• For each child between the ages of two years and seven years -—
half pint of Milk, 4 oz of Bread, and half oz of Cheese.
Parish Apprentices
Children of poor families, orphans and widows’

children were often apprenticed at the parish’s
expense to Masters in other parishes. This was a way of
disposing of possible future problems by altering their
legal settlement status. If they served their full term of
seven years then their legal settlement would be at the
place of their Masters settlement. Girls were usually
apprenticed until they attained 21 or got married and
boys till they were 24. This extra three years gave the
master a bit more cheap labour as an incentive. The
Parish Indentures were important documents and were
sworn before the local Justice by the overseers and the churchwardens; two copies were
made one for the master and one for the parish. The master had a legal obligation to feed
clothe and impart the mysteries of his trade for the duration of the contract. However,
many Masters failed miserably in their duty.
Robert Blincoe was a case in point and his life story has been told elsewhere.14 He was born
about 1792, in the London parish of St Pancras. The circumstances of his birth are unknown
but it seems likely that his birth was not the cause of much joy. Of his first few years Blincoe
retained only vague impressions. However, he was quite clear about one thing and he
perfectly recollected it. At the age of four he was taken in a coach, accompanied by an
unknown woman, and left at St Pancras workhouse. (Brown, Idem)
Blincoe believed, on the basis that he recalled no sorrow at their parting, that the woman in
the coach was not a relative. His patchy memories of his first years suggested to him that
he had, “passed through many hands before he arrived at the workhouse”. Who knows
what series of wet nurses or impoverished relations he had been entrusted to before his
complete abandonment; or what agonies a desperate mother may have suffered
following his birth? There is a hint in Blincoe's description of sustained efforts having been
made to keep him from the misery of the workhouse. It may also be that in these years he
received the balm of a mother's love; his subsequent strength of character certainly
suggests that someone had once made him feel treasured and important. (Brown, Idem)
14 Brown, John. A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy Sent from the Workhouse ... to ... a
Cotton-mill, etc. Manchester: J. Doherty, 1832.
9
It seems that Blincoe was just one among thousands of poor children who found themselves
thrown onto the meagre charity of the parish during the later 1700s because of parental
mortality, immorality or misfortune. His mother might have been a prostitute, the victim of
rapacious lust, the dupe of an amorous neighbour, or a fallen lady of decent birth. We will
never know the truth. What matters is that her son had been stigmatised as illegitimate and
abandoned by whatever family still lived. Thereby, Robert Blincoe was condemned to a
childhood of profound emotional emptiness and economic exploitation. This was the lot of
so many children during that era and it is their story that is told here. Many were the places
to which they eventually found themselves but some of the worst were those who were
‘placed’ in the textile industry of the north of England.
Many parents were unwilling to allow their children to work in these new textile factories. To
overcome this labour shortage factory owners had to find other ways of obtaining workers.
One solution to the problem was to buy children from orphanages and workhouses. The
children became known as pauper apprentices. This involved the children signing
contracts that virtually made them the property of the factory owner.
Pauper apprentices were cheaper to house than adult workers. It cost Samuel Greg who
owned the large Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, a £100 to build a cottage for a family, whereas
his apprentice house, that cost £300, provided living accommodation for over 90 children.
The same approach was taken by the owners of silk mills. George Courtauld, who owned a
silk mill in Braintree, Essex, took children from workhouses in London. Although offered
children of all ages he usually took them from, “within the age of 10 and 13”. Courtauld
insisted that each child arrived “with a complete change of common clothing”. A
contract was signed with the workhouse that stated that Courtauld would be paid £5 for
each child taken. Another £5 was paid after the child's first year.
The children also signed a contract with Courtauld that bound them to the mill until the age
of 21. This helped to reduce Courtauld's labour costs. Whereas adult males at Courtauld's
mills earned 7s. 2d., children under 11 received only 1s. 5d. a week.
Owners of large textile mills purchased large numbers of children from workhouses in all the
large towns and cities. By the late 1790s about a third of the workers in the cotton industry
were pauper apprentices. Child workers were especially predominant in large factories in
rural areas. For example, in 1797, of the 310 workers employed by Birch Robinson & Co in
the village of Backbarrow (See below, also), 210 were parish apprentices. However, in the
major textile towns, such as Manchester and Oldham, parish apprenticeships were fairly
uncommon.
Children from the middle and lower order families usually started their apprenticeship in
their mid-teens. Before then they were deemed to lack the strength and mental agility to
perform their tasks. This did not apply to pauper children. Well before they reached
puberty the parish tried to cut its expenditure by sending (selling) children as young as
seven or eight years old under a contract which bound them to their masters until they
reached the age of twenty-one. In fact, the title of ‘apprenticeship’ was a mockery when
applied to the backbreaking, tedious, mindless, and often dangerous and unhealthy work
they were fated to perform. 15
Unfortunately, parochial authorities were among the most ardent admirers of this
bastardised apprenticeship system. It was said of overseers in 1732 that they were ruining
children by putting them out as apprentices as early as they could to any sorry Masters that
will take them. The practice of indenturing parish orphans went back centuries. In 1618 the
City of London had sent 100 boys and girls to work on Virginian plantations. An Act of 1691
gave an even greater incentive for adopting this strategy. It stipulated that a child gained
legal settlement after just 40 days of apprenticeship in another parish. In a book of 1764,
15 Lane, J. Apprenticeship in England, 1600-1914. London; UCL Press, 1996.
10
Richard Burn described the abuses that this Act accidentally unleashed. He wrote,
“Overseers bind out poor children apprentices, no matter to whom or to what trade, but to
take especial care that the master lived in another parish”. 16, 17
Labouring men were accustomed to working for a few days every week until they had
sufficient cash to meet their immediate wants. Then many adjourned to the parlour of the
local inn to celebrate days taken off in an atmosphere of tipsy conviviality.
Also, whilst trade was good, there was little incentive to give up another job to enter the
mills. The Lancastrian weaver William Thorn later recalled how, “four days was a week as far
as working went — and such a week brought the skilful worker forty shillings.” This was a fine
income, enough to buy plenty of meat, plus watches for the men and fashionable dresses
for their wives and daughters. 18, 19, 20 This attitude gave the mill owners a serious problem.
Parish apprentices were an alternative, if only partial, solution.
After 1691 the overseer's express duty was to get more children bound in other parishes
than rival parishes could bind to their own. And so keen were parishes to shed the burden
of poor children that they happily paid masters to take them away. The typical fee was
around £5, a fine investment when it cost at least £6 to keep a child for a year in a
workhouse. During the 1700s, the Foundling Hospital bound thousands of girls to domestic
service and boys to textile mills or the merchant navy. As Blincoe was soon to learn, in
striving to reduce the poor rates, magistrates and overseers seldom did much reflecting
before affixing their signatures to parish children's indentures. 21, 22, 23
The overseers of St Martin in the Fields, in London, were past masters at invoking the 1691
Act. As many as 91 per cent of their pauper children were bound to masters domiciled in
other parishes. The savings they made were immense. It's unlikely that St Pancras parish
was quite as successful, but its overseers did form useful ties with the agents of northern
manufacturers to send cartloads of children to work in factories, often in declining trades
and under unknown masters.
They had already sent dozens of pauper children north to the Midlands and Lancashire.
The overseers and churchwardens were by now cosily familiar with Messrs Gorton and
Haslam, who acted for northern manufacturers and received a commission for every child
they took off the parish's hands. Children were hustled aboard wagons and sent north in
batches; if they weren't returned within six weeks, their settlement in St Pancras lapsed and
the overseers could rest content that they were no longer responsible for them. Such was
the incentive to dispose of the burden that nearly two-thirds of the children apprenticed by
the parish were sent into the textile industry, many of them hundreds of miles from their
16 Burn, R. The History of the Poor Laws: With Observations (London: printed by H. Woodfall and
W. Strahan, for A. Millar, 1764).
17 Anon. (Burn?) An Account of Several Work-Houses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor,
second edition; J Downing, London, 1732.
18 Ure, A. The Philosophy of Manufactures, or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and
Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, 2nd edn. London: C. Knight,
1835.
19 Fleischman, R.K. Conditions of Life Among the Cotton Workers of Southeastern Lancashire,
1780-1850 New York: Garland, 1985.
20 Chapman, S. D. The Early Factory Masters: The Transition to the Factory System in the
Midlands Textile Industry. Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1967.
21 George, M. D. London Life in the Eighteenth Century. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
and Co., 1925.
22 Rose, M. B. Social Policy and Business: Parish Apprenticeship and the Early Factory System
1750-1834, Business History, Vol. 31, No.4 (1989), 5-33.
23 Wagner, G. Thomas Coram, Gent. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004.
11
place of birth. 24, 25
Even having paid a generous commission to the manufacturers’ agents, parishes were still
in pocket. It cost St Pancras just thirty shillings for each apprentice indentured to cotton
spinners, but over four times as much per year to support a child in the workhouse. Small
wonder that apprenticing children to northern textile mills was standard practice among
London's parishes.
In 1790 the overseers of Hanwell in Middlesex threatened the local poor that if they didn't,
avail themselves of the offer of sending their children to the Nottinghamshire textile mill of
Messrs W. Toplis and Co. Ltd., then they would be struck from the parish pension list.
St Martin in the Fields, St Luke's, Chelsea, St Botolph without Aldersgate, and St George's in
Southwark, St Clement Danes, and St Margaret's in Westminster all sent consignments of
children to mills in Lancashire, Derbyshire or the Midlands. In 1794 St Margaret's sent 50 in a
single batch. Several advertised their workhouse or vagrant children in provincial
newspapers. At least one overseer boasted of working an ‘idiot’ in with every twenty
children, though agents were usually relied on for rejecting the obviously unsuitable. When
the cotton master Samuel Oldknow obtained 70 children from Clerkenwell in 1796, he wisely
took the precaution of having a doctor examine them before signing any paperwork.
26,27,28
Sending workhouse children hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from the parish of
their birth was by no means novel. What was new during the 1790s was the scale of the
forced migrations. St Pancras sent only two or three children per year into the cotton trade
before 1795. Thereafter supply and demand soared in unison. As the parish sank into debt,
the overseers contacted masters as far away as Stockport and Bury in Lancashire. It was a
classic coincidence of needs. Demand kept pace with supply as the northern counties
were undergoing nothing short of a technological revolution. As the Derbyshire surveyor
John Farey wrote, ‘in most newly-erected cotton-spinning mills ... the demand for children's
labour ... exceeds even the inordinately excited increase of population in the place, and
children are not only sought for through adjoining districts, but in many instances have
been imported by scores at a time ... from London, Bristol, and other great towns.’ 29, 30, 31
Mill owners hungered for parish apprentices. They knew that, without them, their enterprises
would rapidly cease to be viable. As employees, children were not always the natural
choice but freeborn adults usually recoiled at the prospect of entering the new textile mills.
24 See minutes of the meeting of Directors of the Poor, 22 June 1805; Liddall, St Pancras Vestry,
pp. 202-5; Brown, St Pancras Poor, pp. 36-7.
26 Carter, P. Poor Relief Strategies: Women, Children and Enclosure in Hanwell, Middlesex, 1780
to 1816, Local Historian, vol. 25, no. 3 (1995).
27 Cruickshank, M. Children and Industry: Child Health and Welfare in North-west Textile Towns
During the Nineteenth Century Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981.
28 Ashmore, O. The Early Textile Industry in the Derwent Valley, Part One of John Brown, A
Memoir of Robert Blincoe, Derbyshire Miscellany series, supplement 10 (Duffield: Derbyshire
Archaeological Society, Local History Section, 1966), p. 16.
30 Farey, F. General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire. London: Sherwood,
Neely and Jones, 1815, vol. 3, pp. 501-2.
12
In 1799 Mary Howard was sent to the Isle of Skye, off the western coast of Scotland, to be
trained in the ‘business of household work’. The system of parish apprenticeships, as
eagerly exploited by these overseers, was no more than legalised child slavery. 32
In all this manoeuvring to save money, the welfare of children came nowhere. Everyone
involved knew that Masters had little to impart in terms of skills, but children were still forced
to sweat for a paltry wage for as many as sixteen years. At the end of this gruelling term
they were left with few, if any, useable talents. This suited their Masters fine. Those who took
on pauper apprentices usually worked in overstocked trades with insufficient work to go
round. They needed the cheapest labour available, and they certainly had no wish for
their apprentices to set up on their own account. Some wanted only the cash fee from the
parish. (Rose, Idem)
There can be no doubt at all many Masters severely ill-treated their apprentices. In 1767, a
law was passed to make it easier for abused children to have their indentures cancelled;
but few apprentices had the spirit or capability to appeal to the authorities. Too often,
those who did so were sent chastened back to their Masters. In 1802, when the St Pancras
overseers received a letter from a young apprentice sent to a mill in Lancashire
complaining of ill-treatment, they refused to allow her to return because of the costs that
would be involved and she was left to manage her troubles without help from them.
(George, Idem)
However, there was at least one trade which seemed so deeply cruel and hard that even
parish overseers of the poor felt reluctant to apprentice their wards to it. Master chimney
sweeps had to procure apprentices from the lowliest families in London's poor East End.
These were the children of parents who were out of work or engaged in low trades such as
hawking fish and the flesh of domestic animals. Those with a taste for hard liquor were
especially good suppliers of young lives. For their part, Master sweeps usually preferred to
keep overseers and churchwardens out of the picture, for there was always the chance
that they would protest when a child returned to the workhouse badly bruised or singed, or
complaining of being loaned out to anyone able to pay.
Workhouse Children
By the end of the 17th century the workhouse system was becoming well established, and
the General Workhouse Act of 1723 gave parishes the authority to build their own
workhouses or join with other parishes to do so.
Expenditure on the poor had been steadily rising in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
along with the rise in the general population, and the combination of the workhouse system
plus outside help, in the form of money or essential provisions, was placing ever greater
demands upon the poor rate.
Is it worth the waiting for?

If we live 'til eighty four,
All we ever get is gruel!
Every day we say our prayer …
Will they change the bill of fare?
Still we get the same old gruel!
Oliver: Lionel Bart
32 St Pancras Parish Register of Apprentices, 1778-1801, vol. no. P90 PANI 361 (London
Metropolitan Archives).
13
If you had no income at all you had to enter the workhouse. The workhouses were feared
and hated by the poor. They were meant to be as unpleasant as possible to deter poor
people from asking the state for help. In workhouses in the mid-19th century you could not
wear your own clothes. You had to wear a uniform. Husbands and wives were separated
and children were separated from their parents. Inmates had to do hard, unpleasant work
such as breaking stones or pulling apart old rope. There were also many strict rules.
Indeed, the conditions inside the workhouse were deliberately harsh, so that only those who
desperately needed help would ask for it. Families were split up and housed in different
parts of the workhouse. The poor were made to wear a uniform and the diet was
monotonous. There were also strict rules and regulations to follow. Inmates, male and
female, young and old were made to work hard, often doing unpleasant jobs such as
picking oakum or breaking stones. Children could also find themselves hired out to work in
factories or mines.
Children in the workhouses were subject to strict discipline. The Masters were responsible for
ensuring that the work was carried out and punished any infractions. In 1776 Marylebone's
work-shy inmate Johanna Parry had a wooden log affixed to one of her legs. When two
female inmates left the workhouse a few years later without permission, they were retaken,
stripped naked to the waist and flogged “until their backs (were) bloody”. They were then
put in solitary confinement and restricted to a bread-and-water diet for a week. 33
The same punishment was meted out to one Henry Wagstaff and to others of the St
Pancras workhouse in January 1798, “as the most likely means of reforming their conduct”.34
Severe physical punishment was customary for children in the 1790s. The parishes often had
to make do with unscrupulous masters who flogged over-zealously even by the standards
of the day. Some were patently unsuitable. 35
Eventually, a new Poor Law was introduced in 1834. This Law was meant to reduce the cost
of looking after the poor, prevent scroungers and impose a system that would be
universally applied throughout the country.
It can be seen that prior to 1834, the cost of looking after the poor was increasing and this
cost was paid for by the middle and upper classes in each town through their local taxes.
These classes felt that they were paying the poor when they were just lazy and didn’t want
to work.
Under this Law, parishes were grouped into unions and each union had to build a
workhouse if they did not already have one. So this meant in practice that generally poor
people could now only get help if they were prepared to leave their homes and go into a
workhouse.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 — This harsh new legislation marked a major
watershed in the treatment of paupers. Up to this time the responsibility for poor relief lay at
parish level in the hands of the Overseers of the Poor and under the supervision of the
county Justices of the Peace.
33 Neate, A. R. The St Marylebone Workhouse and Institution, 1730-1965 London: St Marylebone

Society, 1967.
34 Brown, W. E. The St Pancras Poor: A Brief Record of Their Treatment, etc., from 1718 to 1904.
London, 1905.
35 Harris, G. The Humanity of Hampstead Workhouse; Camden History Review, Vol. 4 (1976), 28-
31.
14
The new Act set up the Poor Law Commission for England and Wales, charged with forcing
unions of parishes to carry out poor relief in a new and less costly way. The new Poor Law
Unions were to be supervised by Boards of Guardians , elected by the ratepayers and
prominent landowners of the parish. As well as appointing officials such as the relieving
officer and the workhouse master to run the new workhouse unions, they also supervised
the removal of the poor under the settlement laws, and agreed payments with other unions
to take on ‘their’ paupers.
The 1834 Act replaced the ‘Old Poor Law’, dating from the time of Elizabeth I. It was a
deliberately ruthless measure, intended to wipe out ‘pauperism’, which was judged to be
caused by the idleness, fecklessness, drunkenness, and over-dependence on poor relief of
‘the lowest class’. This was to be brought about by building large, institutional workhouses
which were intended to be so harsh and hostile that only the truly destitute would seek
refuge in them. They were to be the places of last resort.
Shortly after the new Poor Law was introduced, a number of scandals hit the headlines. The
most famous was Andover Workhouse, where it was reported that half-starved inmates
were found eating the rotting flesh from bones. In response to these scandals the
government introduced stricter rules for those who ran the workhouses and they also set up
a system of regular inspections. However, inmates were still at the mercy of unscrupulous
Masters and Matrons who treated the poor with contempt and abused the rules.
Although most people did not have to go to the workhouse, it was always threatening if a
worker became unemployed, sick or old. Increasingly, workhouses contained only orphans,
the old, the sick and the insane. Not surprisingly the new Poor Law was very unpopular. It
seemed to punish people who were poor through no fault of their own.
The worst thing about poverty in the 19th century was the callous attitude of many
Victorians. They were great believers in ‘self-help’. That is they thought everyone should be
self-reliant and not look to other people for help. They also believed that anyone could
become successful through sheer hard work and thrift. Logically that meant that if you
were poor it was your fault. Many Victorians (but not all) felt that the poor were to blame
for their poverty.
Separating families — Perhaps the cruellest aspect of the strict and Spartan regime in these
places was the practice of separating husbands and wives and parents and children. Not
only were they forced to stay in different parts of the workhouse, but they were not even
permitted to meet in the communal areas such as the chapel.
15
Part Two —
Child Workers in the Textile Industry
This section deals with details of the factories and the

extensive abuse of young children and the extraordinary
miserable circumstances under which they worked.
The industrial revolution created a huge demand for female

and child labour. Children had always done some work but at
least before the 19th century they worked in their own homes
with their parents or on land nearby. Children's work was
largely seasonal so they did have some time to play. When
children worked in textile factories they often worked for more
than 12 hours a day.
What happened to children within these factory walls

became a matter of intense social and political debate that
continues today. Pessimists such as Alfred36, Engels 37, Marx 38,
and Webb and Webb39, argued that children worked under deplorable conditions and
were being exploited by the industrialists.
Frank Forrest recalls from his time whilst working in a textile factory:
“In reality there were no regular hours, masters and managers did with us as they liked. The
clocks in the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night. Though this
was known amongst the hands, we were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to
carry a watch.” 40
A picture was painted of the, ‘dark satanic mill’ where children as young as five or six years
old worked for twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week without recess for meals in
hot, stuffy, poorly lit, overcrowded factories to earn as little as four shillings per week.
Reformers called for child labour laws and after considerable debate, Parliament took
action and set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry into children's employment.
Optimists, on the other hand, argued that the employment of children in these factories
was beneficial to the child, family and country and that the conditions were no worse than
36 Alfred, S. K. The History of the Factory Movement. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1857.
37 Engels, F. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Translated by the Institute of
Marxism-Leninism, Moscow. London: E. J. Hobsbaum, 1969[1926].
38 Marx. K. Capital. vol. I. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909
39 Webb, S. & Webb, B. Problems of Modern Industry. London: Longmanns, Green, 1898.
40 Frank Forrest. Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy (1850)
16
they had been on farms, in cottages or up chimneys. Ure41 and Clapham42 argued that the
work was easy for children and helped them make a necessary contribution to their family's
income.
Some commentators argued that it was demand, not supply, that increased the use of
child labour during the Industrial Revolution. One explanation came from the industrialists
and factory owners — children were a cheap source of labour that allowed them to stay
competitive. Managers and overseers saw other advantages to hiring children and
pointed out that children were ideal factory workers because they were obedient,
submissive, likely to respond to punishment and unlikely to form unions. In addition, since
the machines had reduced many procedures to simple one-step tasks, unskilled workers
could replace skilled workers.
Finally, a few scholars argue that the nimble fingers, small stature and suppleness of children
were especially suited to the new machinery and work situations. They argue that children
had a comparative advantage with the machines that were small and built low to the
ground as well as in the narrow underground tunnels of coal and metal mines. The
Industrial Revolution, in this case, increased the demand for child labour by creating work
situations where they could be very productive.
Despite the laws there were still many children and youth employed in textiles and mining
by mid-century. Booth calculated there were still 58,900 boys and 82,600 girls under 15
employed in textiles and dyeing in 1881. In mining the number did not show a steady
decline during this period, but by 1881 there were 30,400 boys under 15 still employed and
500 girls under 15.
Child Employment, 1851-188143
Industry & Age Cohort 1851 1861 1871 1881

Mining
37,300 45,100 43,100 30,400
Males under 15
Females under 15 1,400 500 900 500
Males 15-20 50,100 65,300 74,900 87,300
Females over 15 5,400 4,900 5,300 5,700
Total under 15 as
13% 12% 10% 6%
% of work force
Textiles and Dyeing
93,800 80,700 78,500 58,900
Males under 15
Females under 15 147,700 115,700 119,800 82,600
Males 15-20 92,600 92,600 90,500 93,200
Females over 15 780,900 739,300 729,700 699,900
Total under 15 as
15% 19% 14% 11%
% of work force
Many factory owners claimed that employing children was necessary for production to run
smoothly and for their products to remain competitive. John Wesley, the founder of
Methodism, recommended child labour as a means of preventing youthful idleness and
41 Ure, A. The Philosophy of Manufactures. London, 1835.

42 Clapham, Sir J. An Economic History of Modern Britain. Vol. I and II. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1926.
43 Booth, C. On the Occupations of the People of the United Kingdom, 1801-81. Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society (J.S.S.) XLIX (1886): 314-436.
17
vice. Ivy Pinchbeck 44 pointed out, moreover, that working hours and conditions had been
as bad in the older domestic industries as they were in the industrial factories.
In the early 19th century parliament passed laws to curtail child labour. However they all
proved to be unenforceable. The first effective law was passed in 1833. It was effective
because for the first time factory inspectors were appointed to make sure the law was
being obeyed. The new law banned children under 9 from working in textile factories. It
said that children aged 9 to 13 must not work for more than 12 hours a day or 48 hours a
week. Children aged 13 to 18 must not work for more than 69 hours a week. Furthermore,
nobody under 18 was allowed to work at night (from 8.30 pm to 5.30 am). Children aged 9
to 13 were to be given 2 hours education a day.
In 1842 a law banned children under 10 and all females from working underground. In 1844
a law banned all children under 8 from working. Then in 1847 a Factory Act said that
women and children could only work 10 hours a day in textile factories. In 1867 the law was
extended to all factories. (A factory was defined as a place where more than 50 people
were employed in a manufacturing process).
Once the first rural textile mills were built, around 1769, and child apprentices were hired as
primary workers, the connotation of ‘child labour’ began to change. Charles Dickens
called these places of work the ‘dark satanic mills’ and E. P. Thompson described them as,
‘places of sexual license, foul language, cruelty, violent accidents, and alien manners’.45
Although long hours had been the custom for agricultural and domestic workers for
generations, the factory system was criticized for strict discipline, harsh punishment,
unhealthy working conditions, low wages, and inflexible work hours. The factory
depersonalized the employer-employee relationship and was attacked for stripping the
worker's freedom, dignity and creativity.
These child apprentices were paupers taken from orphanages and workhouses and were
housed, clothed and fed but received no wages for their long day of work in the mill. A
conservative estimate is that around 1784 one-third of the total workers in country mills were
apprentices and that their numbers reached 80 to 90% in some individual mills. 46
Despite the First Factory Act of 1802 (which attempted to improve the conditions of parish
apprentices), several mill owners were in the same situation as Sir Robert Peel and Samuel
Greg who solved their labour shortage by employing parish apprentices.
From around the 1780s, the more far-sighted investors were abandoning water power in
favour of Boulton and Watt steam engines. As long as he had a big enough stockpile of
coal, the owner of a steam engine was largely immune to the effects of dry weather. In
times of drought, in contrast, a water mill had to stop, and during floods it could be
overwhelmed. Steam engines made production even and predictable and this, in turn,
made buyers more confident of getting their yarn on time; reliability always attracts a
financial premium.
The enormous potential of the steam engine and power-driven machinery could not have
been achieved without the development of machine tools to shape metal. When Watt
began to experiment with the steam engine, he could not find a tool that drilled a perfectly
round hole. As a result, his engines leaked steam. In 1775, John Wilkinson, a Staffordshire
iron-maker, invented a boring machine that drilled a more precise hole. Between 1800 and
1825, English inventors developed a planer, which smoothed the surfaces of the steam
44 Pinchbeck, I. Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1800. London: George
Routledge and Sons, 1930.
45 Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
46 Collier, F. The Family Economy of the Working Classes in the Cotton Industry, 1784-1833.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964.
18
engine's metal parts. By 1830, nearly all the basic machine tools necessary for modern
industry were in general use.
In the mid-1780's, an Anglican clergyman named Edmund Cartwright developed a steam-

powered loom. In 1803, John Horrocks, a Lancashire machine manufacturer, built an all-
metal loom. Other British machine makers made further improvements in the steam-
powered loom during the early 1800's. By 1835, Great Britain had more than 120,000 power
looms. Most of them were used to weave cotton. After the mid-1800's, handlooms were
used only to make fancy-patterned cloth, which still could not be made on power looms.
After the invention and adoption of Watt's steam engine, mills no longer had to locate near
water and rely on apprenticed orphans — hundreds of factory towns and villages
developed in Lancashire, Manchester, Yorkshire and Cheshire. The factory owners began
to hire children from poor and working-class families to work in these factories preparing
and spinning cotton, flax, wool and silk.
To many employers, parish apprentices had many virtues. Easily obtained, legally bound to
their master, and hundreds of miles from home, they had few means of redress if badly
treated or overworked. They could also be very cheaply fed and housed, and paid a mere
pittance. Furthermore, for certain jobs they were physically highly adept.
Children had two main roles in textile mills. They worked as scavengers, retrieving cotton
waste from beneath and upon moving machines, and as piecers, repairing splits as the
yarns were drawn out and spun. The youngest children in the textile factories were usually
employed as scavengers and piecers. Scavengers had to pick up the loose cotton from
under the machinery. This was extremely dangerous as the children were expected to
carry out the task while the machine was still working.
The task first allocated to Robert Blincoe was to pick up the loose cotton that fell upon the
floor. Apparently, nothing could be easier... although he was much terrified by the whirling
motion and noise of the machinery. He also disliked the dust and the flue with which he
was half suffocated. He soon felt sick, and by constantly stooping, his back ached.
Blincoe, therefore, took the liberty to sit down; but this, he soon found, was strictly forbidden
in cotton mills. His overlooker, Mr. Smith, told him he must keep on his legs. 47
Illustration of scavengers and piecers at work that

appeared in Trollope's Michael Armstrong (1840)
A little girl about seven years old, was given the job as scavenger and, “she had to collect
incessantly from the factory floor, the flying fragments of cotton that might impede the
work ... while the hissing machinery passed over her, and when this was skilfully done, and
the head, body, and the outstretched limbs carefully glued to the floor, the steady moving,
but threatening mass, may pass and re-pass over the dizzy head and trembling body
47 John Brown wrote about Robert Blincoe's experiences in a textile mill in an article for The Lion
newspaper (15th January 1828)
19
without touching it. But accidents frequently occur and many are the flaxen locks, rudely
torn from infant heads, in the process.” 48
David Rowland worked as a scavenger at a textile mill in Manchester. He was interviewed

by Michael Sadler's House of Commons Committee on 10th July, 1832. He responded thus:
Question: At what age did you commence working in a cotton mill?
Answer: Just when I had turned six.
Question: What employment had you in a mill in the first instance?
Answer: That of a scavenger.
Question: Will you explain the nature of the work that a scavenger has to do?
Answer: The scavenger has to take the brush and sweep under the wheels,
and to be under the direction of the spinners and the piecers generally. I
frequently had to be under the wheels, and in consequence of the perpetual
motion of the machinery, I was liable to accidents constantly. I was very
frequently obliged to lie flat, to avoid being run over or caught by the
machine.
Question: How long did you continue at that employment?
Answer: From a year and a half to two years.
Question: What did you go to then?
Answer: To be a piecer.
Question: Did the employment require you to be upon your feet perpetually?
Answer: It did.
Question: You continued at that employment for how long?
Answer: I was a piecer till I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age.
Question: What were your hours of labour?
Answer: Fourteen; in some cases, fifteen and sixteen hours a day.
Question: How had you to be kept up to it?
Answer: During the latter part of the day, I was severely beaten very frequently.
Question: Will you state the effect that the degree of labour had upon your health?
Answer: I never had good health after I went to the factory. At six years of age I was
ruddy and strong; I had not been in the mill long before my colour
disappeared, and a state of debility came over me, and a wanness in my
appearance.
The children’s slight bodies and delicate hands made them far superior at these tasks to
their elders. “Their fingers are more supple”, explained the owner of a Cheshire silk mill.
They were also, he added, “more easily led into the habit of performing the duties of their
situation”. In other words, children were more pliant; they could be bullied and cajoled in a
way that only the most broken adults would tolerate. This was the subtext to Andrew Ure's
later remark that, “it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty ...
into useful factory hands.” 49 (and Ure, 1825 Idem)
Charles Aberdeen worked in a Manchester cotton factory and in 1832 he wrote:
48 Trollope, Frances. Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy.
London, Henry Colburn. 1840
49 Evidence of James Pattison, Esq., in Report of the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the
Select Committee on the State of the Children Employed in the Manufactories of the United
Kingdom, 25 April-18 June 1816. London: The House of Commons, 28 May and 19 June 1816.
20
“The smallest child in the factories were scavengers … they go under the machine, while it is
going … it is very dangerous when they first come, but they become used to it.” 50
In 1832 Charles was interviewed on 7th July by Michael Sadler and his House of Commons
Committee. He responded to questions as follows:
Question: Does the business of the scavengers demand constant attention, and to be
in perpetual motion, and to assume a variety of attitudes, so as to
accommodate their business in cleaning the machinery to its motions?
Answer: Yes, to go under the machine, whilst it is going.
Question: Is it dangerous employment.
Answer: Very dangerous when they first come, but they get used to it.
Question: Are the hours shorter or longer at present, than when you were apprentice to
a cotton mill?
Answer: Much the same.
Question: Will you inform the committee, whether the labour itself has increased, or
other wise?
Answer: The labour has increased more than twofold.
Question: Explain in what way.
Answer: I have done twice the quantity of work that I used to do, for less wages.
Machines have been speeded. The exertion of the body is required to follow
up the speed of the machine.
Question: Has this increased labour any visible effect upon the appearance of the
children.
Answer: It has a remarkable effect. It causes a paleness. A factory child may be
known easily from another child that does not work in a factory.
Question: Has it had the effect of shortening their lives?
Answer: Yes.
Question: What grounds have you for thinking so.
Answer: I have seen men and women that have worked in a factory all their lives, like
myself, and that they get married; and I have seen the race become
diminutive and small; I have myself had seven children, not one of which
survived six weeks; my wife is an emaciated person, like myself, a little
woman, and she worked during her childhood, younger than myself, in a
factory.
Question: What is the common age to which those that have been accustomed from
early youth to work in factories survive.
Answer: I have known very few that have exceeded me in age. I think that most of
them die under forty. (Idem)
50 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TEXcourtauld.htm
21
In his interview with Michael Sadler's Parliamentary Committee on 17th April 1832, James
Turner told the committee:
“The work of the children, in many instances, is reaching over to piece the threads that break;
they have so many to attend to that they have to mind and they have only so much time to
piece these threads because they have to reach while the wheel is coming out.”
William Dodd was born into a poor family living in Kendal on 18th June 1804. At the age of
five William was sent to work as a card-maker and the following year was employed in a
local textile factory. William's three sisters also worked at the same factory. During busy
periods William and his sisters worked an 18 hour day.
Dodd's next job, at the age of six, was as a piecer. As he was later to point out, this work
put a great deal of pressure on his right knee, “which is always the first joint to give way”.
Within a few years Dodd was a cripple; “My joints were like so many rusty hinges that had
laid for years. I had to get up an hour earlier, and, with the broom under one arm as a
crutch, and a stick on my hand, walk over the house till I had got my joints in working
order”.
He describes the work of a piecer:

”The duties of the piecer will not be clearly understood by the reader, unless he is
acquainted with the machine for spinning woollen yarn, called a billy. This is a machine
somewhat similar in form to the letter H, one side being stationary, and the other moveable,
and capable of being pushed close in under the stationary part, almost like the drawer of a
side table; the moveable part, or carriage, runs backwards and forwards, by means of six
iron wheels, upon three iron rails, as a carriage on a railroad. In this carriage are the
spindles, from 70 to 100 in number, all turned by one wheel, which is in the care of the
spinner. When the spinner brings the carriage close up under the fixed part of the machine,
he is able, to obtain a certain length of carding for each spindle, say 10 or 12 inches, which
he draws back, and spins into yarn; this done, he winds the yarn round the spindles, brings
the carriage close up as before, and again obtains a fresh supply of cardings.
These cardings are taken up by the piecer in the left hand, about twenty at a time. He
holds them about four inches from one end, the other end hanging down; these he takes,
with the right hand, one at a time, for the purpose of piecing, and laying the ends of the
cardings about 2 inches over each other, he rubs them together on the canvas cloth with
his flat hand. He is obliged to be very expert, in order to keep the spinner well supplied. A
good piecer will supply from 30 to 40 spindles with cardings.
J. R. Clynes tells of how he became a piecer in Oldham in 1879:

“When I achieved the manly age of ten I obtained half-time employment at Dowry Mill,
Oldham, as a ‘little piecer’. My hours were from six in the morning each day to noon; then
a brief time off for dinner; then on to school for the afternoons; and I was to receive half a
crown a week in return.
The noise was what impressed me most. Clatter, rattle, bang, the swish of thrusting levers
and the crowding of hundreds of men, women and children at their work. Long rows of
huge spinning-frames, with thousands of whirling spindles, slid forward several feet, paused
and then slid smoothly back again, continuing the process unceasingly hour after hour
while cotton became yarn and yarn changed to weaving material.
Often the threads on the spindles broke as they were stretched and twisted and spun.
These broken ends had to be instantly repaired; the piecer ran forward and joined them
swiftly, with a deft touch that is an art of its own.
I remember no golden summers, no triumphs at games and sports, no tramps through dark
woods or over shadow-racing hills. Only meals at which there never seemed to be enough
22
food, dreary journeys through smoke-fouled streets, in mornings when I nodded with
tiredness and in evenings when my legs trembled under me from exhaustion.”
The Slubbing-Billy.
A machine for drawing out and twisting a strand of silk or other yarn in preparation for spinning.
The number of cardings a piecer has through his fingers in a day is very great; each piecing
requires three or four rubs, over a space of three or four inches; and the continual friction of
the hand in rubbing the piecing upon the coarse wrapper wears off the skin, and causes
the finger to bleed. The position in which the piecer stands to his work is with the right foot
forward, and his right side facing the frame: the motion he makes in going along in front of
the frame, for the purpose of piecing, is neither forwards or backwards, but in a sliding
direction, constantly keeping his right side towards the frame. In this position he continues
during the day, with his hands, feet, and eyes constantly in motion. It will be easily seen,
that the chief weight of his body rests upon his right knee, which is almost always the first
joint to give way.
“I have frequently worked at the frame till I could scarcely get home, and in this state have
been stopped by people in the streets who noticed me shuffling along, and advised me to
work no more in the factories; but I was not my own master. During the day, I frequently
counted the clock, and calculated how many hours I had still to remain at work; my
evenings were spent in preparing for the following day — in rubbing my knees, ankles,
elbows, and wrists with oil, etc. I went to bed, to cry myself to sleep, and pray that the Lord
would take me to himself before morning.” 51
In 1819 he found work at Isaac and William Wilson's textile mill in Kendal. William Dodd
became an overlooker with responsibility for checking the ages of children working in the
factory. Dodd attended evening classes given by a local schoolmaster. Once Dodd had
been taught to read and write he was asked by his employer to help with clerical work in
the factory.
Dodd, who was now badly crippled, found working at Wilson's textile mill increasingly
difficult and in 1837 left to form his own school. Dodd taught reading, writing and arithmetic
but after a few months he lost the right to rent the rooms he was using as a school. He
made several attempts to find a wife but he claims he was rejected because he was a
51 William Dodd. A Narrative of William Dodd,: A Factory Cripple. L. & G. Seeley; 1841. ASIN:
B0008CLE28
23
cripple. After this rejection Dodd decided that he would, “live and die a bachelor”. He
now moved to London where he looked for work as a clerk. Unable to find permanent
work, he was forced to do a wide variety of temporary jobs.
In 1839 Dodd was employed by John Kirby as a clerk but by In the spring of 1840 the pain in
his joints became intolerable. According to Dodd his right wrist now measured “twelve
inches round”. William was sent to St. Thomas' Hospital and the doctors eventually decided
that he would have to have his right arm amputated. A doctor told him that, “on
dissection, the bones of the forearm presented a very curious appearance — something
similar to an empty honeycomb, the marrow having totally disappeared”.
Dodd decided to write a book about his experiences as a child worker. When the
manuscript was finished he sent it to Lord Ashley who arranged for it to be published as, A
Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd a Factory Cripple.
Ashley now decided to employ Dodd to collect information about the treatment of
children in textile factories. Dodd's research was published as The Factory System: Illustrated
(1842). Dodd's books created a great deal of controversy. He was derided in the House of
Commons as an unreliable source of information. Attempts were made to smear his
character. When one MP, John Bright, accused Dodd of, “gross immorality of conduct”,
Lord Ashley decided to sack him.
Dodd, who had been paid 45s. a week by Ashley, decided to emigrate to the U.S.A. He
continued to write books and in 1847 his book, The Labouring Classes of England was
published in Boston. It is not known when William Dodd died.
Wages for children were very low, often just pence; adults were paid about 10 times more.
Many mill owners only cared about profits and not about the lives of their workers; the Mule
Scavenger probably had the worst job in the mill. They were child apprentices, as young as
eight, often from the local workhouse. They got board, lodgings and pocket money to
crawl around under the mules and collect fluff and cotton. Hence, it made economic
sense to employ as many children and as few adults as possible, and this is exactly what
happened. Youngest children were employed to crawl beneath machinery (while still in
operation) to gather up loose cotton and many of these scavengers died by getting
caught up in machinery. Those that survived to adulthood had permanent stoops or were
crippled from the prolonged crouching that the job entailed.
The mills were hot, humid and very noisy and Mule Scavengers worked 12-14 hours at a time
with no proper meal breaks. Concentration was everything as they had to move with the
rhythm of the mule. One slip and they could lose a finger, a hand or even their life as they
were crushed in the heavy machinery.
Benjamin Gomersal worked as a piecer in Mr. Cousen's worsted mill in Bradford, from the
time he was nine years old through to the time of the account below, when he was roughly
25. He and the other labourers were allotted a mere half an hour at noon for lunch which
was their only break and meal throughout the entire day. No time was allowed for
breakfast or even for a drink of water. All day Benjamin and the other piecers stooped and
bent their legs and bodies for negligible pay. This laborious work took an extreme toll on
Benjamin, crippling him for life. After a year in the mill, his legs and knees began to suffer an
intolerable pain, which left him dependant on crutches as well as severely fatigued from
small tasks.
Benjamin was beaten for not producing work that pleased the overseer. He was beaten
until he was black and blue and even had part of his ear torn. He stated that the beatings
were the worst toward the end of the day when the boys were tired. He like many others
were forced to work in the dirty, hazardous mills to support their families who could not keep
up with the changing times.
Benjamin, who lived in Bowling Lane, Bradford, was interviewed by William Dodd in 1842.
24
“I am about twenty-five years old. I have been a piecer at Mr. Cousen's worsted mill, I have
worked nowhere else. I commenced working in a worsted mill at nine years of age. Our hours
of labour were from six in the morning to seven and eight at night, with thirty minutes off at
noon for dinner. We had no time for breakfast or drinking. The children conceive it to be a
very great mischief; to be kept so long in labour; and I believe their parents would be very
glad if it was not so. I found it very hard and laborious employment. I had 2s. per week at first.
We had to stoop, to bend our bodies and our legs.
I was a healthy and strong boy, when I first went to the mill. When I was about eight years old,
I could walk from Leeds to Bradford (ten miles) without any pain or difficulty, and with a little
fatigue; now I cannot stand without crutches! I cannot walk at all! Perhaps I might creep up
stairs. I go up stairs backwards every night! I found my limbs begin to fail, after I had been
working about a year. It came on with great pain in my legs and knees. I am very much
fatigued towards the end of the day. I cannot work in the mill now.
The overlooker beat me up to my work! I have been beaten till I was black and blue and I
have had my ears torn! Once I was very ill with it. He beat me then, because I mixed a few
empty bobins, not having any place to put them in separate. We were beaten most at the
latter end of the day, when we grew tired and fatigued. The highest wages I ever had in the
factory, were 5s. 6d. per week.
My mother is dead; my father was obliged to send me to the mill, in order to keep me. I had
to attend at the mill after my limbs began to fail. I could not then do as well as I could before.
I had one shilling a week taken off my wages. I had lost several inches in height. I had
frequently to stand thirteen and fourteen hours a day, and to be continually engaged. I was
perfectly straight before I entered on this labour.
Other boys were deformed in the same way. A good many boys suffered in their health, in
consequence of the severity of their work. I am sure this pain, and grievous deformity, came
from my long hours of labour. My father, and my friends, believe so to. It is the opinion of all
the medical men who have seen me.”
25
Historical Detail of Textile Factories
and Reports on Child Welfare
It needs to be understood that the reports that are referred to here and that create the
story of these unfortunate children are taken from the written records and statements by
those involved. There were many mills and even more children whose events have gone
unchronicled (as far as we know). It is to be hoped that many were more fortunate than
those whose stories are written here. That said, it seems unlikely that there was a great
variety of experiences because eventually legislation brought some compromise and
empathy before children gained the right to have their childhood returned to them.
Tales abounded of the maltreatment of parish orphans in northern textile mills. So many
young apprentices ran away from the mills of Nottingham that local owners had clubbed
together and set up offices at the Bear Inn to reclaim them. They ruthlessly prosecuted
anyone who harboured an apprentice on the run. In 1784 the Lancashire magistrates had
drafted in a panel of physicians, led by Dr Thomas Percival, to inquire into an outbreak of
putrid fever at a mill owned by the Peel family. They condemned the building as stuffy,
malodorous and filthy. But they reserved most of their ire for the excessively long hours the
children were made to work. The physicians concluded that the length of the working day
was excessive and that more breaks were, “essential to the present health and future
capacity of those who are under the age of fourteen”. Horrified at the inhumanity of the
mills, though no doubt disdainful of nouveau riche capitalists as well, the Lancashire
magistracy promptly took steps to prevent local children being made to do night work in
the county's spinning mills. 52
William Charles Lambert & Francis Lambert —
Lowdham Mill, Nottingham
52 Chambers, J. D. Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century: a Study of Life and Labour under
the Squirearchy. London: P.S. King and Son, 1932.
26
In the summer of 1799 a rumour circulated that there was going to be an agreement
between the church wardens and the overseers of St. Pancras Workhouse and the owner
of a large cotton mill, near Nottingham. The children were told that when they arrived at
the cotton mill, they would be transformed into ladies and gentlemen; that they would be
fed on roast beef and plum pudding, to be allowed to ride their masters’ horses, and have
silver watches, and plenty of cash in their pockets.
In August of that year, eighty boys and girls, who were seven years old, or were considered
to be that age, became parish apprentices at William Charles and Francis Lambert’s
cotton and hosiery mill on the banks of the Dover Beck in Lowdham village, a few miles
outside Nottingham. They were indentured until they had acquired the age of twenty-one.
53, 54
An 18th-century stage wagon similar to the one in which pauper children

from St Pancras were sent to Lowdham Mill
The road to London from Nottingham was described as being, “as firm and good as any
turnpike road in England”, but by modern standards that meant little. The constant jolting
as the heavy wheels passed over ruts and rubble, induced nausea among the workhouse
children and caused severe bruising as they were flung repeatedly from bench to floor.
Then, in the limited light that penetrated the wooden hood, they had to struggle to regain
their place. 55
In his Memoir of Robert Blincoe, John Brown wrote:
“The motion of the heavy clumsy vehicle, and so many children cooped up in so
small a space, produced nausea and other results, such as sometimes occur in
Margate hoys.” (Brown, J. Idem)
Few of the children had travelled in a coach before, but the sense of novelty would not
have long survived the hours they spent crammed inside. In large towns, at least, they were
turned out to walk. They had no difficulty in keeping up with the lumbering pace of the
wagon. The journey took them through St Albans and then Leicester, which means that
they started off along Watling Street, the old Roman road.
Although sleep was taken on the move, it still took three long and excruciating days to
54 Worrall, S. M. Water Power on the Dover Beck; (unpublished thesis, Nottingham University,
1994).
55 Beckett, J. (ed.), A Centenary History of Nottingham. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997), p. 200;
27
reach the town of Nottingham. This must have been an exhausting odyssey for children
unused to anything but a sedentary workhouse life. But their spirits rose during the last few
miles of the journey. The mile or so of road stretching between the Trent Bridge and
Nottingham town centre was widely regarded as among the most scenic in the entire
country.
For centuries, Nottingham had been a prosperous market centre. Only now was the
economic balance starting to shift in favour of the textile industry, and especially the
manufacture of stockings and lace. Reflecting their new status, wealthy hosiers ranked
high in the local corporation that governed the town. Among their number were William
and Francis Lambert, the men to whom Blincoe and the other St Pancras children were
indentured until the age of twenty-one. 56, 57, 58
The Lamberts were brothers, their father was Richard Lambert and he had built up a hosiery
business in Nottingham around a large warehouse in St Mary's churchyard. As the brother’s
father’s career showed, hosiery could be a profitable business. stockings had been staples
of both male and female dress for more than three centuries and so the business seemed
secure. 59, 60
As the wagons drew up outside the Lamberts' warehouse the children began to have
doubts about what they had been told to expect. John Brown noted that some of
townspeople soon gathered around the knot of confused-looking children, openly pitying
them as ‘live stock'’ imported from London, and ‘lambs, led by butchers to slaughter’.
These local residents appeared to have a grudge against the Lamberts, and its cause isn't
hard to identify. For much of the 1700s, Nottingham's hundreds of adult stockingers had
thrived. In fact, Blackner calculated that nearly a third of all the stocking frames in the
country were in the town, more than in the entirety of France. But adult stockingers were
now beginning to feel the pinch as their efforts came under pressure from cheap labour in
the form of hundreds of young parish apprentices.61 (and John Brown, Memoir, Idem)
In 1779, skilled stockingers had petitioned Parliament to impose fixed wages and frame
rents, and to curtail the practice of hosiers taking on cheap apprentices to do adults' work.
Parliament refused. MPs were now guided not by Tudor protectionism but by political
economists of the Adam Smith school. 62
56 Beckett, J. (ed.), A Centenary History of Nottingham. Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1997.
57 Mason, S.A. Nottingham Lace, 1760s-1950s: the Machine-made Lace Industry in
Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire. Ilkeston, Derbyshire; Sheila A. Mason, 1994.
58 Chapman, S.D. The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands Cotton-spinning Industry,
Economic History Review, vol. 18, no. 3 (1956), 526-43.
59 Land Tax Records, Nottinghamshire Record Office. See also Chapman, Early Factory Masters,
pp. 82-3,177-8.
60 Chapman, S.D. Early Factory Masters, chapter 9; Sydney Pollard, 'The Factory Village in the
Industrial Revolution', English Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 312 (July 1964), 513-31.
61 Blackner J. , The History of Nottingham: Embracing its Antiquities, Trade, and Manufactures,
from the earliest authentic records, to the present period..(Nottingham: printed by Sutton and
Son, 1815.
62 Mandeville,B. The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (originally published in
1714, here, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
28
When the brothers Lambert arrived to inspect the children they were already lined up in
rows. As local worthies and High Church Anglicans with plenty of clout, the Lamberts didn't
typically condescend to address mere apprentices. Accordingly, rather than welcome the
children, the Lamberts gave them a harsh, improving lecture on the sin of idleness and the
duty of hard work. John Brown recreated the scene, entirely realistically, with the Lamberts
browbeating the children:
“To behave with proper humility and decorum ... [and] pay the most prompt and submissive
respects to the orders of those who would be appointed to instruct and superintend them.”
(Brown, Memoirs.)
The children were then briefed on the sorts of work that they would be doing, and how
much was expected of them. By the time that they settled down to a fitful night's sleep on
the warehouse floor, they had been partially undeceived. (Chapman, Early Factory
Masters)
The juvenile uncertainties led to wondering fears and it was not long before such fears were
replaced by more real and fiercer ones. As the children tried to sleep on that first night they
must have known that they had been told lies and that the future they faced was going to
take a turn for the worst. (Chapman, Idem)
The following day started early as at five o’clock a bell rang out and the menacing
apprentice governor appeared at the dormitory door. Within minutes, encouraged by the
velocity with which the older boys leaped from their beds and by the governor's dark looks,
they were back in the dining room trying to eat bread and porridge. Here they had to
manage without even having plates for their food.
Lowdham Mill (after closure)

showing mill race
By half past five they were entering Lowdham Mill for the first time. Before they had
reached it, they were greeted by the stupefying roar of water driving the wheel and
innumerable machines carrying forward the Lamberts' ambitions. From far off they could
hear the constant clamour of hundreds of heavy rollers, shafts and flywheels, and dozens of
overseers' voices rose over the din of the machinery, barking orders, warnings and rebukes.
It made for a deafening cacophony, a vast mechanical orchestra with human overtones.
Brutal and discordant, the sound filled the air of an otherwise still morning. As they entered
the mill, the odious stench of the hot oil next assaulted their senses. Quickly brought close to
vomiting, the children found it abhorrent. (Brown, Memoirs)
the children were worked until eight o’clock in the evening with only a brief mid-day meal
in the ‘prentice house. Such a long first working day caused great discomfort for the
children; back and ankles ached atrociously and they went to bed again suffering a great
weariness. Later they were to find themselves being made to work even longer hours and
for an extra halfpenny they were often made to work during the mid-day meal break. Their
29
rations, such as they were, brought to them cold and covered in the dust of the factory.
Once a fortnight they were kept at the mill for fifteen or sixteen hours so that they could
dismantle the machinery for it to be cleaned; a job that they also had to do. Sundays were
their only day out of the factory and they were then expected to attend the church
services in Lowden; as Brown tells us, “to give thanks to a benevolent God”.
An artist’s impression of Lowdham Mill (Date unknown)

Courtesy of Tony Slater’s World of Watercolour63
One of the overseers at Lowdham was a Mr Smith, a cotton-spinner. He was an unfriendly

sort of man and he worked the children without mercy. Constantly having to stoop and
squat in order to avoid the machinery’s fast-moving parts, backs began to ache and the
children soon began to feel uncomfortable, tired and even sick. Smith did not allow them
to sit down for a rest and they were kept hard at it until the long-awaited meal break came
along.
Only the most unruly and work-shy at the workhouse had been subjected to corporal
punishment. Here, beatings were commonplace. “The strap or the stick, the cuff or the
kick, were freely meted out to the Lowdham children. Mr Smith cured any tendency to
slack off with his boot or fist. Many children after only weeks at the mill, found themselves
covered with bruises”. (Brown, Memoirs)
On many occasions, to make up for lost time or to fulfil rush orders, Smith drove them on
late into the night and denied them permission to eat their dinner, which stood by the
spinning machine in a tin can, cold, congealing and covered in flue. Eventually, having
scraped off its thick coating of dust and flue, weak with hunger, they would bolt down the
food in the dark on their weary walk back to the ‘prentice house. This unchild-like life was
one of abject exhaustion. Scrabbling about for so many hours under machines, they were
always fearful in case hair, clothes or limbs might become caught in the moving parts.
(Brown, Memoirs)
John Brown in relating the woes of Robert Blincoe tells us that at Lowdham Mill, “Blincoe
who was not yet eight years old, was too short to operate the machinery properly. The
overlookers had him stand on a box, his body arching perilously over rotating spindles and
flywheels. This solved only part of the problem. So positioned, he couldn't move fast
enough to keep pace with the machine. Blincoe complained to his overseer, asking to be
moved to a different task. The reply took the form of a tirade of verbal abuse, pulled hair
and a flurry of body blows.” Brown’s Memoir tells of Blincoe's hard treatment as a roving
winder:
“In vain, the poor child declared it was not in his power to move quicker. He was beaten by
63 http://www.tonyslater.co.uk/paintings/Landscape/LowdhamMill.html
30
the overlooker, with great severity, and cursed and reviled from morning till night, till his life
became a burthen to him.”
Blincoe’s fate wasn’t an isolated one; all his companions in this wilderness of toil were
treated with disdain. They were all wholly dependent upon the mercy of the overlookers,
whom they found, generally speaking, a set of brutal, ferocious, illiterate ruffians, all void of
understanding, as well as of humanity.
Brown’s Memoir tells us that before long, the complexions of all the St Pancras children,
once comparatively healthy, were sallow and their spirits depressed by the routine of hard
labour and physical abuse. Left hungry by the dismal diet, some took to raiding fields at
night. It is undoubtedly the case that their gravest danger came from the machines
themselves. Their moving parts fully exposed, flywheels often rotating at lethal speeds.
Machinery was a constant peril, especially to underfed children prone to collapsing with
tiredness where they stood. Many of the mill apprentices had the skin scraped off the
knuckles, clean to the bone. Others had their fingers crushed, or the last two joints of their
fingers torn off when they became caught in the wheels or rollers of spinning frames.
On another occasion, Robert Blincoe had his forefinger on his left hand trapped between
the rollers of a roving frame. In extreme agony, he screamed for help, but his lamentations
excited no manner of emotion in the spectators, except a coarse joke. So he “clapped the
mangled joint together, as blood streamed to the floor”.
He had the spirit and courage to run to the next village of Burton Joyce where a surgeon
lived. This doctor was well practised in stitching machine-inflicted wounds and he sutured
the raw and bleeding skin and sent Blincoe back to the mill. Once returned he found no
period of gentle convalescence. Almost immediately he was returned to his frame, on pain
of being thrashed again by his “brutal, ferocious” overlookers. (Brown, Memoirs.)
A girl named Mary Richards, who was thought remarkably pretty when she left the
workhouse and who was not quite ten years of age, attended a drawing frame, below
which, and about a foot from the floor, was a horizontal shaft, by which the frames above
were turned. It happened one evening, when her apron was caught by the shaft. In an
instant the poor girl was drawn by an irresistible force and dashed on the floor. She uttered
the most heart-rending shrieks! Blincoe ran towards her, an agonized and helpless beholder
of a scene of horror.
“He saw her whirled round and round with the shaft - he heard the bones of her arms, legs,
thighs, etc. successively snap asunder, crushed, seemingly, to atoms, as the machinery
whirled her round, and drew tighter and tighter her body within the works, her blood was
scattered over the frame and streamed upon the floor, her head appeared dashed to
pieces — at last, her mangled body was jammed in so fast, between the shafts and the floor,
that the water being low and the wheels off the gear, it stopped the main shaft. When she
was extricated, every bone was found broken — her head dreadfully crushed. She was
carried off quite lifeless.” 64
Not many of those who were mangled by machinery, as seriously as Mary Richards,
survived. Remarkably, she did. Her spine and skull were bruised but intact, and the surgeon
was called in to stitch what he could. But it wasn't much of a life that she was left with. A
permanent cripple, with little chance of a pay-out from the Lamberts and no possibility of
returning to St Pancras now that she had been apprenticed in Lowdham for more than 40
days; she would have to fall back on the forced kindness of strangers in a parish that
resented her presence.
64 Baines, E. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain: With a Notice of its Early History in
the East, and in All the Quarters of the Globe, a Description of the Great Mechanical
Inventions, which Have Caused Its Unexampled Extension in Britain, and a View of the Present
State of the Manufacture, and the Condition of the Classes Engaged in Its Several
Departments. London: Fisher, Fisher and Jackson, 1835.
31
Following the events that led to the crippling of Mary Richards, there was movement in
London to bring in regulations that offered more protection to the parish apprentices.
Following complaints, the parishes of St Clement Danes and St Anne in Westminster resolved
that no more of their children should be sent to the cotton mills. Further afield, magistrates
in the West Riding of Yorkshire refused to sign indentures of parish children except those
who would be working within their own parish. More importantly perhaps was the step
taken by Birmingham Guardians when they determined that cotton mills were not suitable
places of work for children. 65
It seems that around 1802 the Lamberts did try to redeem themselves. In the weeks
following an inspection by the local beadles and overseers, Lowdham Mill underwent a
remarkable transformation. This brought it into approximate line with Peel’s Act, even if the
mill still fell far short of the kindlier regimes of many other capitalists. A brand new ‘prentice
house was erected near to the mill, far more spacious and better ventilated than its squalid
predecessor. Stern instructions were given to the mill cooks to provide better cuts of meat
and to serve porridge and soup in tin cans, one for each child. The apprentices’ hours of
work were lessened and, to the children's palpable relief, the brutal governor was
discharged. Even if the Lamberts did then hire a new ‘prentice governor, Robert
Woodward, who eventually turned out to be a man of unsurpassed viciousness, in 1802 life
had dramatically improved for the St Pancras apprentices. 66
The implementation of the Act was left to magistrates who were supposed to visit the mills.
Many of these knew little of the Act’s stipulations and so they usually went unheeded and
things carried on much as before. That said there was an unusual situation developed that
did bring about some effects on Lowdham Mill. Two of the girls who worked there
managed to get word to their mother and she took it upon herself to get to Lowdham Mill
to see for herself just what her daughters had to suffer. She was on the parish pension list at
St Pancras and it is likely that due to lack of money she would have to do the whole journey
on foot. Her actions brought about a visit from the magistrates but less than a year after
their visit and after the owners of Lowdham Mill had made improvements to the welfare of
its parish apprentices, Lowdham Mill closed down. The improvements had proved too
costly and when the mill closed, Robert Blincoe and others were then sent to Litton Mill. 67
By the early 1800s, the mills that used water drive had lost their edge to Manchester, where
hundreds of belching chimneys soon testified to its unrivalled status as the epicentre of the
cotton-spinning industry. Small rural concerns, until recently in the vanguard of the industrial
revolution, were left struggling to compete. Many survived, but only those with energetic
and resourceful management. Now, being in close proximity to good supplies of coal and
large pools of free labour mattered most, not having access to a fast-flowing stream. This
was the Lamberts' death knell. They lacked the capital to switch to steam, and by the time
they had corrected the earlier abuses, creditors were at their heels.
To make matters worse, during the first years of the new century the unthinkable happened.
Stockings fell gradually out of vogue. In part due to the earnest moralising of the
evangelical movement, with the advent of the new century, clothing in general became
far more restrained. In this sterner cultural milieu, silk stockings were associated with
hedonism and effeminacy. So, in preference to knee-breeches worn with stockings, men
increasingly wore ankle-length pantaloons. Hence William and Francis Lambert were
producing yarn for a slowly vanishing market. (Waller, Idem)
As the Lamberts perhaps came to reflect, they had branched into cotton spinning at a
singularly ill-favoured time. Throughout Blincoe's period of employment there, England was
65 Rose, M.B. Social Policy and Business, p. 22. Evidence of Theodore Price, Esquire, Select
Committee on the State of the Children ... 1816, p. 123.
66 Chapman, S. D. The Early Factory Masters: The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands
Textile Industry (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1967). , p.203.
67 Described in Brown, Memoir, p.27; and Waller, The Real Oliver Twist, pp. 127-8.
32
at war with France. A conflict fought across Europe, the West Indies, India and North Africa,
on the high seas, and, less brutally, in the royal courts of Europe, inevitably led to steep rises
in taxes. The actions of enemy privateers also reduced imports of raw cotton, and English
manufacturers had great difficulty in exporting finished goods with so many of Europe's
ports closed to the British merchant fleet. These hardships were felt with especial keenness
by the Lamberts because within a few years they saw their Arkwright water-driven
machinery rendered obsolete. (Chapman, Idem; Chapter11.)
While the mill was being dismantled and sold off, the Lamberts set about cancelling the
indentures between themselves and their poor apprentices. By all accounts, they wrote to
the overseers and churchwardens in St Pancras offering to return them. If the latter replied,
it was only to say that they wouldn't accept them back. After all, the children now had
settlements in the parish of Lowdham. No sane overseer would needlessly take back thirty
embittered young people, especially in a situation in which the parish debts had continued
to mount every year since the children's departure. By 1802 the shortfall had risen by
another fifty guineas a year and the population of the workhouse, swollen from the disasters
of the 1799 and 1800 harvest failures, now approached 600. The grime, stench and
overcrowding had reached levels known only in the dwellings of the lowest of social castes.
(Brown, Memoir; pp 39-40)
The Lamberts could have simply loaded the children back on to carts and sent them to St
Pancras, but hardly a magistrate in the land would have decided in their favour. They
would have been shipped back within the week as Lowdham's responsibility. This left them
with few options. The children could just be abandoned, like Mary Richards, to the
begrudging care of the Lowdham parishioners. But this would incur the odium of many
respectable people, and might hurt the Lamberts' other business interests. So, with more
hope than confidence, they instructed any children with relations in St Pancras parish to
write to them. Blincoe recalled that a few, presumably those whose parents were now
better off, “found redeemers”. Most however, were left to their fate. (Brown, Memoir; pp 40)
For those who had nothing to fall back on, the Lamberts had another idea. In the winter of
1803, a visit was made by one Ellis Needham. He was the proprietor of Litton Mill near
Tideswell, in Derbyshire's Peak District. The event had presumably been arranged by Robert
Woodward, the new ‘prentice governor, for his brother acted as manager at Litton Mill.
Needham carefully scrutinised the children, won their confidence by dispensing a few small
coins, and then contracted with the Lamberts for their
indentures to be signed over to him. Within days they were
en route to Litton. (Brown, Memoir; pp 41)
Things could have been worse, but only just. When

Lancashire's Backbarrow Mill (See also below) briefly
closed down in about 1811, the parish apprentices were
herded onto a cart, taken to the sands on the Lancaster
road and dumped there.
The full story came out before a parliamentary inquiry of

1816, at which the retired overlooker, John Moss,
described the horrendous conditions of the children in the
mill.
33
Then William Travers, an overlooker sent down by the managers explicitly to refute Moss's
evidence, swore an oath. Under gentle pressure from the questioners, Travers admitted that
the children had been turned away, that they had been left to beg for food, and that they
had been taken back only when 'the gentlemen of Lancaster' had reproached the
managers for inhumanity and, one presumes, for having burdened them with the cost of
feeding so many hungry mouths. 68
Ellis Needham and Litton Mill, Tideswell, Derbyshire
Litton Mill had been set up in 1782 by Ellis Needham and Thomas Frith, both farmers with
small estates in the area. It is said that the location for Litton Mill was chosen not only
because of the source of water to power it, but also the isolation. Situated miles from a
large town meant that unfavourable working conditions within the mill would hopefully go
unnoticed and the workers were away from the urban workforce where industrial riots were
frequent.69
The mill was powered by the water of a small stream, using Richard Arkwright's water frame.
It could be said that the company was doomed from the start. Needham, in particular, had
sunk most of his assets into the venture. The valley was particularly isolated and transport for
the raw material and finished goods were poor. Moreover they had difficulty in attracting a
workforce.
The early spinners, such Arkwright and Strutt had been able to attract the families of
weavers and framework knitters, so-called free labour, meaning the employees were not
indentured. Meanwhile Evans at Darley Abbey could draw on a pool of labour from the
town of Derby. In contrast, the area around Litton was sparsely populated by farming
people who were scornful of the new cotton industry. By 1786 the, barely profitable, mill
was put up for sale. There were no buyers and Needham and Frith struggled on.
Needham's money had gone and he was farming on rented land, while Frith left the
partnership in 1799.
The Poor Law Act of 1601 had, among its provisions, “the putting out of children to be
apprentices”. An agreement was made between the churchwarden and an employer, by
means of an indenture sworn before a Justice of the Peace that the latter would provide
for and give employment and training for a pauper child. Often this worked for the benefit
68 Evidence ofJohn Moss and William Travers, Select Committee on the State of the Children ...
1816, pp. 179-85 and pp. 288-93, p. 291.
69 http://www.letsgo-tideswell.co.uk/tideswell-dale-litton-mill-cressbrook-mill-ravensdale-
cottages-cressbrook-dale-tansley-dale-tideswell-dale-c45.html
34
of the child but often it was seen by employers as a choice of cheap labour and a way for
a parish to relieve itself of responsibility. In the absence of any local labour, this was the
course taken by Needham and Frith.
The mill was notorious in its early days for cruelty, torture and a high rate in apprentice
mortality. It is reputed that burials were made at several locations in an attempt to cover up
the number of deaths. Ellis Needham, together with his partner Thomas Firth, attempted to
sell the premises in 1786. Their advertisement stated, “well supplied by hands from the
neighbouring villages at low wages”. When the mill failed to sell, Needham took to
apprenticing Parish orphans and paupers, some of whom were brought from London or
other large cities. They worked long hours with poor food in bad conditions and were
beaten and abused. In 1815 Needham was declared bankrupt so ironically his cost-cutting
measures did not pay off. The mill was then taken over by a succession of owners, one of
whom was Henry Newton (son of William Newton). 70
By 1857 there were 400 employees at Litton Mill. As with many of the mills, fire struck at Litton
and new buildings had to be constructed. In 1934 the mill was bought by Anglo-French Silk
Mills Limited and produced artificial silk and man-made fibres. In 1963 it changed hands
and then manufactured textured yards before its eventual closure towards the end of the
20th century.
The apprentices were tightly squeezed into their new surroundings in the large stone
‘prentice house. The beds were arranged in tiers as at Lowdham but here at Litton they
were made to sleep, three to a bed. Obviously, once again privacy was at a premium.
The accommodation was on the opposite side of the river to the mill and at 5 a.m. when
the bell sounded their wake-up call they had to quickly make their way across the bridge
that connected the Taddington side of the River Wye with the Tideswell side so that they
could get to their work. They did not get fed before starting work and had to work from
three to five hours before any food was offered to them and so they took up their assigned
positions, bellies empty and aching.
Eventually, when the bell announced breakfast, they were presented with iron cans,
seldom washed, that were deposited beside their machines. They contained a watery
oaten porridge which was occasionally augmented with a few boiled onions. One or two
oatcakes completed the meal. Whenever the machinery permitted, the hungry
apprentices scraped off the fluff and took hasty mouthfuls. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
Afterwards, they worked on until half past twelve or one o'clock. Forty minutes were set
aside for lunch, though most of this was spent cleaning machines. Another apprentice,
‘Orphan John’, later wrote a five-page account of his time at the mill. In this he told of
how, this task completed, the children would rush to a pantry door in the mill, across which
a bar was firmly fixed. Behind it stood ‘an old man with a stick’ who guarded and
dispensed the provisions. Oatcakes were amassed in two piles, one buttered, the other
treacled. There were also cans of either buttermilk or skim-milk. Each child was asked:
“Which 'll'ta have, butter or treacle, sweet or sour?” Having made their selection, they
gulped down their milk and raced back to their machines, eating oatcakes as they went.
Brown’s Memoir (Blincoe’s recollections) differs from Orphan John's in that he claims that
buttermilk was provided only “very scantily”. Perhaps, in their attempts to blacken Ellis
Needham's reputation, either Brown or Blincoe was guilty of exaggeration. But this seems
unlikely, for a magistrate visiting the mill in 1811 said absolutely nothing of buttermilk or skim-
milk, and given that the Needhams tried to show the mill in its best possible light when
70 http://www.letsgo-tideswell.co.uk/tideswell-dale-litton-mill-cressbrook-mill-ravensdale-
cottages-cressbrook-dale-tansley-dale-tideswell-dale-c45.html
35
paying host to local worthies, the fact that this detail went unmentioned strongly suggests
that milk wasn't routinely supplied until after Orphan John's later arrival.71
At Litton, Blincoe was again assigned to the more important employment of a roving
winder. Being too short of statue, to reach to his work, standing on the floor, he was placed
on a block. He was not able by any possible exertion, to keep pace with the machinery. In
vain, the poor child declared he was not in his power to move quicker. He was beaten by
the overlooker, with great severity. If every child did not perform his allotted task, it was the
overlooker who was held responsible, and if he did not attend to the matters of concern he
would be discharged.
In common, with his fellow apprentices, Blincoe was wholly dependent upon the mercy of
the overlookers, whom he found, generally speaking, a set of brutal, ferocious, illiterate
ruffians. Blincoe complained to Mr. Baker, the manager, and all he said to him was, “do
your work well, and you'll not be beaten”. The overlooker, who was in charge of him, had a
certain quantity of work to perform in a given time.
A blacksmith named William Palfrey, who resided in Litton, worked in a room under that
where Blincoe was employed. He used to be much disturbed by the shrieks and cries of the
boys. According to Blincoe, human blood has often run from an upper to a lower floor.
Unable to bear the shrieks of the children, Palfrey used to knock against the floor, so
violently, as to force the boards up, and call out, “for shame! for shame! are you
murdering the children?” By this sort of conduct, the humane blacksmith was a check on
the cruelty of the brutal overlookers, as long as he continued in his shop; but he went home
at seven o'clock and as soon as the overlookers knew that Palfrey was gone, “they would
beat and knock the apprentices about without moderation”. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
Robert Blincoe and Orphan John do agree on the fact that there was no sitting down to
eat. Only at nine or ten o'clock at night, after more than sixteen hours of work, and with less
than half an hour to rest, did the wheel finally come to a stand. The absence of milk in the
mill diet, combined with near-constant standing during the day and the awkward motions
required to operate the machines, took a heavy toll on Blincoe. At the age of fifteen, as he
entered puberty and needed proper nutrition to build up healthy bones, his legs began to
bow. Reflecting on scores of similar cases in 1836, the physician Peter Gaskell was to write
that at this age the long bones of the legs are “soft, yielding [and] bend under pressure”
and are “easily made to assume curvatures and alterations”. Continuous standing and
monotonous movements ensured that for the remainder of his life Blincoe would walk with
difficulty on buckled legs.72
Hardly a textile mill in the country required children to work such long shifts without giving
them an opportunity to rest. On some days, Blincoe recorded, the overseers forbade the
children from collecting their food, an order often sweetened with the promise, seldom
fulfilled, of their receiving an extra halfpenny in wages. Then they would work for upwards
of seventeen consecutive hours without any respite at all.
By the end of their first day at Litton, the children knew that life would be at least as bad as
it had been at Lowdham before the parish officers had made their unexpected visit; by
Friday of this first week, they had a good idea that it was to be much worse. This was the
one day a week when the apprentices were allowed to wash and they had to use the river
to do it. Instead of soap, they were each given a handful of oatmeal.
Blincoe was appalled to see some of the children so pained with hunger that they ate the
71 ‘Orphan John’, Ashton Chronicle, May 1849. p.9; Memoir of Robert Blincoe, p. 63; for the
magistrates' reports, see following chapter and House of Lords Account of Cotton Mills, pp.
48-9,50.
72 Poor Man's Advocate, Saturday 9 June 1832, p. 1; Peter Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery: the
Moral and Physical Condition of the Manufacturing Population Considered with Reference to
Mechanical Substitutes for Human Labour. London, 1836), pp. 147-8.
36
oatmeal. They then washed themselves as best they could with handfuls of sand and clay
clawed up from the river bed. Older girls took on the unenviable job of combing the hair of
the younger apprentices, waging a vain battle against head lice. According to Blincoe,
particularly stubborn infestations were treated using the barbaric method of applying pitch
caps to the head, which were left to dry and then torn off, bringing away pitch, lice, hair
and layers of skin. What most alarmed the newcomers, however, were the bruises and
weals they saw all over the bodies of the existing apprentices. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
Saturdays were the worst. Then, the children worked until eleven 0’clock or midnight;
eighteen or more hours of physical labour without a break and on the meanest of diets.
During periods of drought, when the wheel turned too sluggishly to drive the shafts, the
apprentices would enjoy a brief rest. But they made up for it once rains fell and the river
was in surge. Then the wheel turned all day and all night. Overworked and malnourished,
the children, Blincoe said, “often dropped down at the frames”, undone by weariness.
Only on Sundays did they rest. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
Yet rather than being allowed to play on the Sabbath, the apprentices were corralled into
a room in which a school-teacher instructed them in the rudiments of grammar. They were
also introduced to carefully selected passages of scripture. Unlikely to have been one of
them was — Matthew 18:6: “Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe
in me, it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were
drowned in the depth of the sea”.
These young boys and girls, their limbs aching and barely able to stay awake, derived little
benefit from their schooling. And once lessons were over, they were herded back to the
mill and ordered to clean the machinery. Making children work on the Lord's day would
have shocked some of the parish's respectable inhabitants. The one real blessing on
Sunday was the taste of meat. Even then, it was barely more than a flavour. Ellis bought in
only the cheapest bacon, which was dumped alongside turnips or potatoes into a vast
cauldron of boiling water. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
As a roving winder, Blincoe had struggled to keep up at Lowdham, but here at Litton Mill
the slivers were passed through the rollers at an even greater speed. Over and over again
he fell behind. The children's chaperone on the journey had been Robert Woodward, their
governor at Lowdham. Now an overlooker at the mill, he noticed Blincoe's difficulties and
struck the boy to the ground with a heavy, open-handed blow. The brutality of Robert and
his brother William was to be one of the constant features of the next decade of Blincoe's
existence; seldom was there a let-up.
Blincoe couldn't say how often he was beaten; he simply remarked that for ten years his
body was, “never free from contusions, and from wounds inflicted by the cruel master
whom he served or by his sons and his brutal and ferocious and merciless overlookers”.
Brown doesn't give us much in the way of a narrative for Blincoe's stay at Litton. Instead he
provides a detailed and horrifying litany of the sadistic cruelties practised
The Memoir describes how Robert Woodward would kick him into the air, floor him with
slaps and punches, or thrash him with sticks and rope-ends. The overlookers, Brown was
told, exulted in these barbaric displays of their arbitrary power. They gathered round,
laughingly tormenting Blincoe and the other victims. Both Blincoe and Orphan John spoke
of many different sadistic practices. If they were too slow, clumsy, or even just happened to
be there, the apprentices were flogged with belts, the metal buckles cutting into flesh; they
had heavy metal rollers hurled at their heads, occasionally cracking against skulls and
causing bleeding, bruising and severe swelling. They were lifted up by the ears and hurled
to the ground, having been shaken violently; they were forced to eat dirty pieces of candle
and tobacco spittle, and to open their mouths for the overlookers to spit into; they had
sharp nails dug into their ear lobes; they were tricked into eating tar, thinking they had
been given treacle; and they even had their teeth filed so that, guffawed Robert Wood-
ward, “they might eat [their] Sunday dinner the better”.
37
Another favourite trick was to hang weights from children's shoulders and then insist that
they work encumbered for the rest of the day. Another involved screwing hand-vices,
weighing a pound apiece, to the children's ears. Such cruelty left permanent scars. In 1833
Blincoe revealed to one of His Majesty's Commissioners the heavy lines of scarring behind
each ear where finger nails and small vices had punctured and gripped. John Brown too
noted these mutilations. 73
Blincoe identified Robert Woodward as the most savage of his tormentors, but two others,
Merrick and Charnock, were willing accomplices. Not unlike medieval torturers, the three
appear to have taken pride in their malicious ingenuity. Litton Mill had spinning machines
rather like the mules invented by Samuel Crompton in 1779, and Woodward devised
several techniques of abuse involving them. Blincoe repeatedly had his arms strapped to
the cross-bar running over the mules, so that his legs dangled down into the path of the
carriage as it was first drawn away from the wall and soon after pushed back by the
spinner. Each time the frame moved outwards and then returned, Blincoe had to raise his
legs. If he didn't, he would receive severe bruises or broken bones from the heavy carriage
and its row of fast-turning spindles. His abusers always ensured that harm was done by
beating him around the shins. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
At other times, Blincoe was sent beneath the mule to clear away waste cotton. To avoid
serious injury from the carriage returning after a draw, this was a job to be done little by
little, the child removing some on each cycle and then rapidly getting out of the way. On
one occasion, Blincoe was told to clear all the cotton waste in a single draw. With the
alternative of a severe drubbing from Woodward and his associates, he swung under as
soon as the carriage moved outwards and frantically pushed the cotton before him,
hoping to exit the other side before the returning carriage trapped him inside. He wasn't
quick enough. His head became jammed between the carriage and the headpiece,
tearing skin and rupturing blood vessels. Unrepentant, Woodward thrashed him and bid him
return to work. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
The mechanism of the mule suggested to Robert Woodward another vicious diversion.
Blincoe was made to stand on a metal cylinder, about three feet high, in front of the
machine. His hands were tied behind his back. As the carriage came out, it knocked the
can over and Blincoe went sprawling across the floor. The pleasure for the overlookers was
to see their victim strive with all his might to avoid falling onto the spindles, since doing so
would probably, “have lamed him for life”.
Another sadistic sport practised in Miller's Dale involved tying the children's hands and one
leg behind their backs and then forcing them to hop in the vicinity of the spinning
machines. If apprentices didn't move with sufficient ‘activity’ the, “overlooker would strike a
blow with his clenched fist, or cut his head open by flinging rollers”. At other times,
Woodward and his acolytes would fetch heavy sticks from the woods around the mill and
then force the boys to carry one another upon their backs while they chased after them,
delivering savage blows to their heads and backs. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
Before long, the Memoir tells us, Blincoe had been so brutalised that there, “was not ... a
free spot on which to inflict a blow! His ears were swollen and excoriated, his head, in the
most deplorable state imaginable”. Even his tormentors recoiled when Blincoe was stripped
naked for another thrashing to find that, “many of the bruises on his body had suppurated”.
So tender were his wounds, Blincoe recollected, that, “he was forced to sleep on his face, if
sleep he could obtain, in so wretched a condition”.
73 Memoir of Robert Blincoe, pp. 56-7. See Second Report of the Central Board of His Majesty's
Commissioners appointed to collect information in the manufacturing districts, as to the
employment of children in factories, and as to the propriety and means of curtailing the hours
of their labour (London: The House of Commons, 15 July 1833), pp. 17-18; Poor Man's
Advocate, Saturday 9 June 1832, p. 1.
38
As Brown took pains to point out in his Memoir and elsewhere, others were treated far worse
than he. A young man called James Nottingham, nicknamed ‘Blackey’ because of his dark
eyes, hair and complexion, was beaten so often and so severely that he declined into a
state of melancholic oblivion. Incontinent, “of stools and urine”, unable to work, and
incapable of defending himself, Nottingham was routinely plundered for his rations. Over
and over again he was hurled into the pool behind the weir, to the delight of Woodward
and his fellows. He was then made to sit in the open as water was pumped over him, and
“some stout fellow was employed to sluice the poor wretch with pails of water, flung with all
possible fury into his face”. Nottingham took to creeping, “into holes and corners so as to
avoid his tormentors”.
By now, Blincoe was fifteen years old. He had been working as a roving winder at Litton Mill
for four long years. All this time there had been no let-up in the cruelties inflicted by the
Woodwards and the Needhams. Brown’s Memoir gives no details about visits by
magistrates — it merely comments that they happened and that they had no effect; but
records of their reports do survive and Blincoe would have been heartened by their
findings.
Another victim of abuse, a local girl called Phebe Rag, is said to have been clamped in
heavy leg irons to restrain her from running away. In a fit of desperation, she flung herself
into the pool from the bridge leading to the ‘prentice house. Close to death, she was
hauled out. Worried that others might emulate her, Ellis sent her back to her parents in
nearby Cromford. (Brown, Memoir, Idem)
The Memoir tells us that several of the Litton overlookers had been parish apprentices
themselves. For John Brown, this fact displayed, “human nature in its worst state”. Having
been cuffed, punched and kicked in their time, they served up the same rough treatment
to others. They perhaps felt that to withhold their own blows would have involved an implicit
recognition on their part that the Litton apprentices were somehow better or more
deserving than they had been in their own day.
To avoid charges of lewdness, Brown’s Memoir said little of John Needham's treatment of
young girls, though it referred darkly to him making, “those unhappy creatures ... at once
the victims of his ferocity and lust”. By the time Orphan John arrived, two other Needham
sons, Charles and Frank, were in their teens. For years, he said, “they too lorded it over the
children at the mill”, thrashing them with hazel sticks and lifting up the petticoats of the girls
“out of bravado” and to flog them as well. Nor was Mrs Needham innocent of what
happened down in Miller's Dale. It didn't seem to perturb her that apprentices aged seven,
eight and nine were apparently struck as she read from the Book of Common Prayer. 74
The death toll at Litton Mill lends further support to Blincoe's tale of woe. The Memoir claims
that at one time, “forty boys were sick at once”, so that for a while the mill had to be
closed. Blincoe also spoke of apprentices dying in their scores and Ellis Needham having to
bury them in the churchyard at Taddington to avoid raising criticism among the more
humane residents of his own parish of Tideswell.
The burial registers of Tideswell, Litton, Wormhill and Taddington do not support the
allegation of waves of child fatalities. Even so, the wretched diet and long hours explain
why in fewer than thirty years, from 1783 to 1810, twenty-seven apprentices died at Litton
Mill, whereas only six perished at nearby Cressbrook cotton mill. There was a severe
smallpox outbreak in the region in 1803, but this leaves unexplained the disparity in mortality
rates between Litton and Cressbrook. At a fairly well-conducted spinning factory like
Thomas Ashton's in Hyde, just across the county border in Lancashire, the annual mortality
rate was roughly one in two hundred.
Needham presided over a yearly death rate well over double this figure and even this is to
understate the death rate as not all those who died were recorded as apprentices in the
74 Brown, J. Memoir Robert Blincoe; Orphan John, Ashton Chronicle, May 1849.
39
parish registers. Blincoe spoke entirely truthfully of Needham's cunning in dividing the burials
among several churchyards. Not even a bastard orphan could be denied a proper
Christian burial, so five were interred in Tideswell, one in Ellis's own hamlet of Wormhill, and
the majority, twenty-one in total, on the other side of the river in Taddington. Ellis was hiding
the evidence as best he could. 75
Most of the children were so deprived of food and nourishment that they would raid the pig
sties and dunghills for additional nutriment. Brown (Memoir) wrote: “The food obtained
from the pig’s trough and perhaps having already been defiled by their mouths, was
exultingly conveyed to the privy or the duck-hole; there to be devoured with a much
keener appetite than it would have been by the pigs”.
After five years working there, Blincoe's body was showing signs of poor nutrition and excess
demands placed on immature bones and muscles. He was of unusually short stature, his
knees turned sharply inwards, and scars like seams ran across his head, face and ears. The
healthy workhouse boy, tall for his age, had grown into a crooked young man. And yet,
despite near-continuous beating and belittling, Blincoe held on to a clear sense that this
treatment was wrong, and that any decent person who lived outside of Miller's Dale would
unhesitatingly agree. (Waller, Idem)
Another parish apprentice who found himself at Litton Mill was

John Birley. (I am not sure if this is the boy referred to by Robert
Blincoe as ‘Orphan John’, but they may well be one and the
same person) He was born in Hare Street, Bethnal Green,
London, in the year 1805. His father had died when he was just
two years old and this left him and his sister Sarah to be looked
after by their mother.
His mother persevered until John was about five years old, and
then she took ill and was taken to the London Hospital. The two
children were then taken to the Bethnal Green Workhouse. Their
mother soon died but they had to stay in the workhouse. John
tells that they had good food, good beds and given liberty two
or three times a week. They were also taught to read and in
every respect were treated kindly.76
In the year in which his mother died, he was between six and seven years of age, and a
man came to the workhouse looking for a number of parish apprentices. About forty boys
were ordered to go into the board room. According to John, they were faced with, “about
twenty gentlemen seated at a table, with pens and paper before them. Our names were
called out one by one. We were all standing before them in a row. My name was called
and I stepped out in the middle of the room. They said, ‘Well John, you are a fine lad,
would you like to go into the country?’ I said yes sir.” (Idem)
75 Memoir of Robert Blincoe, pp. 48-9; burial registers of Tideswell, Wormhill and Taddington
(Lichfield Diocesan Registry); Mackenzie, Cressbrook and Litton Mills, p. 10; Chapman, Early
Factory Masters, p. 206; Kay-Shuttleworth, Condition of the Working Classes, p. 67. In seeking
to discredit Blincoe's Memoir, Chapman counted the number of fatalities from Litton Mill in the
Tideswell parish registers and compared this figure with the fatalities for Cressbrook Mill. In
both mills, he reckoned, there were only six deaths between 1780 and 1810. Chapman
acknowledged Blincoe's statement about others having been laid to rest in Taddington, but
he brushed this off as unimportant. H.M. Mackenzie's research demonstrates the contrary:
more than four times as many Litton Mill apprentices were buried in Taddington as in
Tideswell. Perhaps had Chapman consulted the Taddington burial registers as well he might
have revised his general conclusions. It's also important to remember that since parish
apprentices weren't always recorded as such in these registers, the death rate has almost
certainly been understated.
76 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRbirley.htm — As related to the Ashton Chronicle
and published on 19th May 1849.
40
Again, from John’s account:
“We had often talked over amongst ourselves how we should like to be taken into
the country, Mr. Nicholls the old master, used to tell us what fine sport we should
have amongst the hills, what time we should have for play and pleasure. He said we
should have plenty of roast beef and get plenty of money, and come back
gentlemen to see our friends.
The committee picked out about twenty of us, all boys. In a day or two after this,
two coaches came up to the workhouse door. We were got ready. They gave us
each a shilling piece to get our attention, and we set off. I can remember a crowd
of women standing by the coaches, at the workhouse door, crying, “shame on
them, to send poor little children away from home in that fashion”. Some of them
were weeping. I heard one say, “I would run away if I was them”. They drove us to
the Paddington Canal, where there was a boat provided to take us.
We got to Buxton at four o'clock on Saturday afternoon. A covered cart was waiting
for us there. We all got in, and drove off to the apprentice house at Litton Mill, about
six miles from Buxton. The cart stopped, and we marched up to the house, where
we saw the master, who came to examine us and gave orders as to where we were
put. They brought us some supper. We were very hungry, but could not eat it. It was
Derbyshire oatcake, which we had never seen before. It tasted as sour as vinegar.
Our regular (work) time was from five in the morning till nine or ten at night; and on
Saturday, till eleven, and often twelve o'clock at night, and then we were sent to
clean the machinery on the Sunday. No time was allowed for breakfast and no
sitting for dinner and no time for tea. We went to the mill at five o'clock and worked
till about eight or nine when they brought us our breakfast, which consisted of
water-porridge, with oatcake in it and onions to flavour it. Dinner consisted of
Derbyshire oatcakes cut into four pieces, and ranged into two stacks. One was
buttered and the other treacled. By the side of the oatcake were cans of milk. We
drank the milk and with the oatcake in our hand, we went back to work without
sitting down.
We then worked till nine or ten at night when the water-wheel stopped. We stopped
working, and went to the apprentice house, about three hundred yards from the
mill. It was a large stone house, surrounded by a wall, two to three yards high, with
one door, which was kept locked. It was capable of lodging about one hundred
and fifty apprentices. Supper was the same as breakfast — onion porridge and dry
oatcake. We all ate in the same room and all went up a common staircase to our
bed-chamber; all the boys slept in one chamber, all the girls in another. We slept
three in one bed. The girls’ bedroom was of the same sort as ours. There were no
fastenings to the two rooms; and no one to watch over us in the night, or to see
what we did.
Mr. Needham, the master, had five sons: Frank, Charles, Samuel, Robert and John.
The sons and a man named Swann, the overlooker, used to go up and down the
mill with hazzle (hazel?) sticks. Frank once beat me till he frightened himself. He
thought he had killed me. He had struck me on the temples and knocked me
dateless. He once knocked me down and threatened me with a stick. To save my
head I raised my arm, which he then hit with all his might. My elbow was broken. I
bear the marks, and suffer pain from it to this day, and always shall as long as I live.
I was determined to let the gentleman of the Bethnal Green parish know the
treatment we had, and I wrote a letter with John Oats and put it into the Tydeswell
Post Office. It was broken open and given to old Needham. He beat us with a knob-
stick till we could scarcely crawl. Sometime after this three gentlemen came down
from London. But before we were examined we were washed and cleaned up and
41
ordered to tell them we liked working at the mill and were well treated. Needham
and his sons were in the room at the time. They asked us questions about our
treatment, which we answered as we had been told, not daring to do any other,
knowing what would happen if we told them the truth.” (Idem)
The firm of Ellis Needham, and its abuse of parish apprentices survived, with increasing
difficulty, for almost thirty years. Although Robert Blincoe remained at the mill at the expiry
of his apprenticeship term, the majority of its apprentices did not do so. Because of
ratepayer complaints about the financial burden of former apprentices, Needham was
forced to quit the mill in 1814. His brother Robert took over for a short time, bringing more
poor children from London. (Chapman, Idem)
In March 1860 William Adam

and a friend walked past the
old mill at Litton. This is not the
mill that is still there today. It
was the old building, where
Robert Blincoe was so cruelly
treated. It burned down in
1874.
Blincoe noted: “When planning to make visits to Litton Mill, magistrates gave proprietors
ample warning before arriving”, and there's every reason to believe him. Their visit was
preceded by frenetic but careful preparations. “The worst of the cripples were put out the
way, the rooms swept, and the children left in no doubt as to the likely repercussions if they
spoke out.” This last precaution wasn't usually necessary. Parish apprentices were over-
awed by these fine-clothed gentlemen with their elegant mounts, powdered wigs and
fancy stockings. They were of course in complete ignorance of the 1802 Act; few imagined
that visiting JPs were there to scrutinise their own treatment. Most JPs did nothing to
enlighten them. In fact, Blincoe remarked that visiting inspectors were given a cursory show
round the more salubrious parts of the mill and then escorted up to Hargate Wall to dine at
Ellis's, ‘luxurious table’. The gossips at the mill were full of bitter talk of the sumptuous feasts
and lavish entertainments laid on for local worthies at Worm hill’s Old Hall. (Brown, Memoir,
Idem)
Whether or not the magistrates were easily swayed by fine hospitality, they probably had
no desire to find fault. This would, after all, entail taking the side of parish orphans, poor
bastards among them, against one of their social betters. Bringing legal action in such
circumstances was virtually unthinkable. Masters simply did not expect the law to be used
against them. In their eyes, the chief purpose of parliamentary legislation was to protect
their property. Accordingly, when the colliery-owning aristocrat James Lowther, first Earl of
Lonsdale, lost a legal action taken against him over a case of subsidence in 1791, he was
so outraged that he decided to shut down all of his coal mines, throwing thousands out of
work. It took a petition signed by 2,560 people and a guarantee of complete indemnity in
future cases before he would allow the workers back.
There are a myriad similar examples. One notorious case involved the noble Brandling
family. In 1814 John Hodgson, vicar of Jarrow, lost 92 members of his congregation in a
single mining accident. The standard procedure was for the matter to be instantly hushed
42
up, and it took enormous determination and courage on the part of Hodgson and the
judge Sir John Bayley to make the disaster known to the public; “braving the displeasure of
the affluent Brandlings”, who owned the mine, Hodgson published an account of what
happened.
In dozens of mills in Derbyshire and elsewhere, parish apprentices were maltreated.

However, very few were worse off than those in Litton Mill, and there's ample evidence to
show that the vast majority were considerably better treated. There are stories of cruelty
during William Newton's second stint at Cressbrook, but it's significant that when Blincoe was
at Litton, Cressbrook's masters took a personal interest in the fortunes of a lame child in a
spirit of generosity entirely alien to Ellis Needham. 77, 78
Time is said to heal all ills; for Litton Mill its later history seems to have shown that it become a
better place. In 1893 Mr Matthew Dickie a former Stockport mill owner bought Litton Mill.
Matthew Dickie began his business career as a spinner and manufacturer with his father
Matthew Dickie Senior. When he took over Litton Mill he brought with him several families
from Stockport. He set up a Litton & Cressbrook Mills Company and Cressbrook Mill was
taken over. To bring the two mills into closer touch a road was made along the river by the
Company and a toll in aid of local hospitals was put on for visitors who wished to use the
road. This shortened the distance to Monsal Dale. Litton Mill was sold to a syndicate in 1934.
Matthew Dickie had Ravenstor built in Miller's Dale as his

family residence which was given to the National Trust in
1937 by Alderman J. G. Graves of Sheffield along with
64 acres (260,000 m2) of land, which included a one mile
(1.6 km) stretch of the River Wye and Tideswell Gorge, all
of which are leased to the Youth Hostel Association and
open all year round. I remember staying at this youth
hostel as a lad and it was my favourite one in Derbyshire.
A wonderful house put to a very worthwhile use.
Cressbrook Mill
Cressbrook, as a village, did not exist until after the Enclosure Act of 1762. It later increased
around the textile factory called Cressbrook Mill — a complex built alongside the River
Wye, first by Richard Arkwright and then later by his son Richard, JL Philips and Brother
Cotton Spinners and McConnel and Company.
It was McConnel's period of ownership that brought about the development of the village;
prior to that it was only a collection of buildings in the immediate vicinity of the mill. When
McConnel's workforce objected to the quality of the housing available he took it upon
himself to build the model village that has now become Cressbrook. Building started in the
late 1830s and was later extended by Henry McConnel's daughter, Mary Worthington, in
1902 to include a village club, modelled on a working men's club. Cressbrook Mill became
bankrupt in 1965, after which time it changed from being a private mill estate to the public
village that it now is.
77 Mackenzie, M.H. Cressbrook and Litton Mills, 1779-1835, Part 1, Derbyshire Archaeological
Journal, Vol. 88, 1968, 1-25.
78 Hulbert, M. (ed.), Orphan Child Factory Workers at Litton and Cressbrook Mills (unpublished
pamphlet).
43
The mill is located on the River Wye about 4 miles north of Bakewell and to this day it is still
the major building in the village though now it has been converted into apartments. The
original mill was burnt down in 1785 and was rebuilt by Richard Arkwright Jnr. in 1787. A
large extension (Wye Mill — Grade II* listed) was commissioned in 1814 and erected by
William Newton on behalf on J L Philips and Brother, Cotton Spinners. Newton was a local
character whom Anna Seward dubbed ‘The Minstrel of the Peak’. Behind the mill are
apprentices cottages these were built to house orphans brought as child apprentices from
London to work in the mill.
Sarah Carpenter relates how she came to be at Cressbrook Mill in an interview that was
published in The Ashton Chronicle on 23rd June 1849.
“My father was a glass blower. When I was eight years old my father died and our family had
to go to the Bristol Workhouse. My brother was sent from Bristol workhouse in the same way as
many other children were — cart-loads at a time. My mother did not know where he was for
two years. He was taken off in the dead of night without her knowledge, and the parish
officers would never tell her where he was.
It was the mother of Joseph Russell who first found out where the children were, and told my
mother. We set off together, my mother and I, we walked the whole way from Bristol to
Cressbrook Mill in Derbyshire. We were many days on the road.
Mrs. Newton fondled over my mother when we arrived. My mother had brought her a present
of little glass ornaments. She got these ornaments from some of the workmen, thinking they
would be a very nice present to carry to the mistress at Cressbrook, for her kindness to my
brother. My brother told me that Mrs. Newton's fondling was all a blind; but I was so young
and foolish, and so glad to see him again; that I did not heed what he said, and could not be
persuaded to leave him. They would not let me stay unless I would take the shilling binding
money. I took the shilling and I was very proud of it.
They took me into the counting house and showed me a piece of paper with a red sealed
horse on which they told me to touch, and then to make a cross, which I did. This meant I had
to stay at Cressbrook Mill till I was twenty one.”
In 1820 the tiny cottages in Ravensdale (known locally as

‘The Wick’) were built followed in 1840 by the model
village of pretty cottages at the top of the hill. The
Cressbrook mill owners were generally philanthropic and
as well as fine housing they provided piped water
pumped up the hill from a spring near the river and they
funded the village band, which still survives.
[See: http://www.cressbrookband.org.uk/ ]
The scenery around is magnificent.

Along the River Wye, just upstream of
Cressbrook Mill lies Water-cum-Jolly, a
beautiful river gorge with fine limestone
cliffs which attract many rock-climbers,
bird-watchers, walkers and fishermen.
North of the mill lies Cressbrook Dale, or
Ravensdale, a fine gorge-like limestone
dale with numerous crags and the
remains of several lead mines. Most of
this dale is a National Nature Reserve
renowned for its range of rare flowers.
Above the mill is Cressbrook Hall, the

house of mill-owner Henry McConnel.
44
The McConnel family were owners of Sedgwick Mill, a large cotton spinning mill in Ancoats
in the city of Manchester. The mill was built between 1818 and 1821 by the company of
Messrs. McConnel & Kennedy under the chairmanship of James McConnel, William's father.
The house stands on a bluff overlooking the river and is a fanciful piece of Gothic
architecture. The position is superb, with magnificent views down Monsal Dale. Farther up
the hill is the rest of the village, for the most part consisting of the cottages once occupied
by the millworkers.
The heyday of the mill was the 19th century when it produced high-quality cotton for lace-
making. After World War I all the local mills struggled to make a profit and cotton spinning
ceased here in 1965. The mill finally closed in 1971 after which it was allowed to decay for
several years before being restored.
Ainsworth, Catterall & Co at Backbarrow Mill in Lancashire
Backbarrow Mill also known as: Ainsworth Cotton Mill
At one time this was a dark satanic mill, the Ainsworth Cotton Mill; its workforce of young
children, orphans from Liverpool and London, working 6 days a week from 5am to 8pm.
45
The Preston firm of Watson failed in 1807; and the Backbarrow mill was run by John Birch a
year later. Both had depended heavily on parish apprentice labour. Backbarrow
continued to operate under new ownership for at least another decade.
Natural Ultramarine was made from Lapis Lazuli, a semi-precious gem stone found in parts
of Persia, Afghanistan, China and Tibet. In the time of Abraham it was mined in
Afghanistan, in its natural state it is an opaque blue stone of great depth and intensity, it
was brought by camel train over mountains and across deserts, every mile travelled added
to the cost until it eventually reached the city of Ur, in what is now Iraq, there to be used for
temple decoration or for personal jewellery.
In 1890 it became the Blue Works of the Lancashire Ultramarine Co, taken over by Reckitt
and Colman in 1920, continuing to make industrial blue, a mixture of indigo and lime. This (it
is firmly said) did not include Dolly Blue used in clothes washing. The mill closed 1981.
It has been converted to a hotel, White Water Hotel, with a group of time share houses
known as The Lakeland Village.
The following information is acknowledged to Ronald Mein and his publication: The Long
History of Mills in Backbarrow and how the Blue Mills started.
The location of the Backbarrow mill had been an important industrial site for several
hundred years each industry in turn using water power from the river Leven to drive its
machinery. A corn mill was on the site in Tudor times controlled by the monks of Cartmel
Priory, near to Grange-over-Sands; it was a fulling mill 79 and later a paper mill also
occupied the site at one time, these disappeared when the notorious cotton mill was
constructed.
All of these industries were attracted to the site because of the reliable water power of the
fast flowing river Leven which runs from the southern end of Windermere to its estuary in
Morecambe Bay. The cotton mill and the Blue Mill achieved the most fame or notoriety;
the cotton mill because it was investigated by a parliamentary commission set up in 1816 to
inquire on the conditions under which pauper apprentices lived and worked and the Blue
Mill because of the impact of the vivid colour on passers by and the legends that already
obscure the truth most notably ‘Dolly Blue’ which in fact was nothing to do with the
Backbarrow works.
A disastrous fire gutted the Ainsworth's cotton mill in 1868 the same year that the Furness
Railway branch line from Ulverston to Lakeside was opened. Although the cotton mill was
refitted with new machinery it was never reopened, the company having spare capacity in
its other mills in Lancashire.
In the photo adjacent, you can see the Mill in

full production around 1977, the photo was
taken and supplied by Ron Mein and possibly
gives an indication of what earlier working
mills may have looked like, although they had
by this time been cleaned up by, ‘Clean Air
Act's’ and other environmental and health &
safety legislation.
79 Fulling is a step in woolen cloth-making which involves the cleansing of the cloth to eliminate
oils, dirt, and other impurities, and making it thicker. The worker who does the job is a fuller.
46
In 1880 a woollen mill was in operation in one of the former cotton mill buildings but the
proprietors decided they could make enough material in the mills they owned elsewhere
and closed the Backbarrow woollen mill down. A group of businessmen came up with
what must have seemed a very strange idea at the time by proposing to manufacture
Ultramarine pigment. The businessmen involved came from a local firm of industrial
chemists, a wholesale dealer in chemical products and an Ultramarine expert named
Johannes Eggestorff, a German who had learned the process of manufacturing
Ultramarine in his own country. Eggestorff had first moved to Hull showing James Reckitt &
Son, wholesale grocers, how to make blue pigment whilst living in Hull and now the
Backbarrow team had secured his services.
A prospectus was published inviting investors and the scheme took off. The old cotton mill
premises were acquired and in 1890 attempts were made to produce ultramarine blue.
The first attempts were unsuccessful, some pigment was more black than blue, some was
green but the bulk was a whitish shade of blue. After many unsuccessful attempts and a lot
of wasted money some of the investors began to despair at the failures and tradition has it
that one of them named King from Finsthwaite said, “come on, we'll give it one more go” —
this time they did it.
When Parliament set up a committee in 1816 to inquire into the ‘State of Children Employed
in the Manufactories of The United Kingdom’, it was revealed that few mills worked their
child apprentices for less than eleven-and-a-half hours. Many forced them to labour for
fifteen hours, with minimal breaks for refreshment. John Moss, when the apprentice master
of Backbarrow Mill in Lancashire, would awake its 100 child apprentices well before five in
the morning. By the stroke of the hour they were in the mill, and apart from a brief
breakfast stoppage, they weren't released from their toil until eight 0' clock at night. Lunch
was eaten next to the machines; and the Backbarrow mill children also worked on Sundays.
Moss often found children asleep on the factory floor, bent over the machinery, long after
they were supposed to have retired to the apprentice house.
Joseph Dutton was a gentleman resident of Liverpool, who had much experience of
factory conditions in Preston. He thought that the employment of children was, “a system
of oppression incompatible with the principles of our constitution”. He had spent a great
deal of time, “earnestly enquiring into factory conditions”. There was, “so much dust in
Messrs Ainsworth & Catterall’s ‘scutching room (in which the bales of raw cotton were
broken up) that I could scarcely see the women who worked the engine”. The dust was an
important cause of lung cancer. He has recounted the scandal at John Watson’s mills
(Penwortham Factory and the Roach Bridge watermill). When this firm failed in 1809, the
funds that were earmarked to pay for the children’s food and lodgings were cut off and
accordingly the young ones were turned out to fend for themselves, living under trees etc.80
80 South Ribble Primary Schools Local History Project: The Victorians: A Life in the Factory. South
Ribble Museum & Exhibition Centre, The Old Grammar School, Church Road, Leyland
47
Whilst the above picture does not portray
the actual Ironworks it helps to create an
image of how the village may have
looked in those days, and to some extent
sets an atmosphere.
The painting below (oil on canvas) shows an aspect of the Lake District of which most late
eighteenth-century tourists remained entirely ignorant. The mill situated on the River Leven,
flows from Windermere to Greenod on the coast and provided the motive power for the
industrialisation of the valley. Originally a corn mill, then a paper mill, the complex was
turned into a cotton mill at the end of the eighteenth century. The riverside buildings later
became the Whitewater Hotel, before becoming, in March 2010, the Lakeland Motor
Museum.
BACKBARROW MILL ( From a painting by(Charles Towne — 1763 - 1840)
Robert Peel and Radcliffe Bridge Mill

(near Bury, Lancs.)
The first documented reference to industry in

Radcliffe is after 1680, in the Radcliffe parish registers,
which make increasing mention of occupations such
as woollen webster (weaving), linen webster, and
whitster (bleacher). These were cottage industries
which worked alongside local agriculture. In 1780
Robert Peel built the first factory in the town, several
hundred yards upstream from Radcliffe Bridge (at
the end of Peel Street). With a weir and goit
providing motive power for a water wheel, the
factory was built for throstle spinning and the
weaving of cotton — a relatively new introduction to
Britain.
Detail from Ring Throstle, McCulley's Patent Livespindle, by the Lowell Machine Shop, lithograph by
Tappan and Bradford, ca. 1850.
48
The throstle frame was a spinning machine for cotton, wool, and other fibres, differing from
a mule in having a continuous action, the processes of drawing, twisting, and winding
being carried on simultaneously. It derived its name from the singing or humming noise
which it made when operating — a throstle was a dialect name for the song thrush.
Conditions at the mill were poor and child labour was used, bought from workhouses in
Birmingham and London. Children were boarded on an upper floor of the building, and
bound until they reached the age of twenty-one. They were unpaid, and were kept locked
up each night. Shifts were typically ten to ten and a half hours in length; children returning
from a day shift would sleep in the same bed as children leaving for a night shift. Peel
himself admitted that conditions at the mill were, “very bad” . 81
Peel’s Lancashire factories came in for damning accounts, some from the Birmingham
Guardians. They were concerned about the long hours that the children worked. Other
issues were the bland, starchy diet; the overcrowded sleeping accommodation;
inadequate clothing and the lack of attention paid by the mill owner to the children’s
expressions of misery and of homesickness. They were given no stocking or shoes in case
they should want to run away. Following this report, no more Birmingham children were
placed at Peel’s mills.
The Birmingham Guardians had been struck by one exposé in particular, the Manchester
physicians’ drubbing of Robert Peel over the conditions in his Radcliffe mill. As at Lowdham,
parish apprentices at the Radcliffe mill were viciously treated, underfed and overworked.
Peel later acknowledged that cruel usage had stunted the growth and ruined the
constitutions of many, but he defended himself by saying that business demands in London
and elsewhere had obliged him to leave the children in the hands of unscrupulous
overlookers. Peel also mentioned a more plausible reason for his lack of attention to the
health of apprentices: he feared being undercut by competitors if he insisted on the
introduction of a kinder regime.
In 1784 an outbreak of typhoid at Radcliffe prompted Lord Grey de Wilton to inform the
magistrates of the Salford Hundred.82 They were keen to prevent the spread of the disease
to neighbouring towns and villages so they sent doctors to assess the situation. Their
recommendations included leaving the windows of the mill open at night, fumigation of
rooms with tobacco (as this was thought to discourage disease), regular cleaning of rooms
and toilets, and occasional bathing of children. 83
The report forced the magistrates, led by Thomas Butterworth Bayley, to abandon the
practice of binding parish apprentices to any mill not adhering to these conditions. The
report also prompted Peel to introduce an Act of Parliament to improve factory hygiene,
which later became the Factory Act of 1802.84, 85 Over time, conditions at the mill
improved; in the mid-1790s the physician John Aikin, a critic of the factory system, praised
working conditions at the mill 86, and in 1823 inspections by local magistrates of conditions in
mills across the county revealed that unlike many others, the factory at Radcliffe was
81 Augusta, A. & Ramsay, W. Sir Robert Peel, Ayer Publishing, 1969. ISBN 0-8369-5076-3
82 Landau, N. Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
ISBN 0-521-64261-2
83 Meiklejohn, A. Outbreak of Fever in Cotton Mills at Radcliffe, 1784. British Journal of Industrial
Medicine; 1959; 16 (1): 68,
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1037863
84 Sunderland, F. The Book of Radcliffe, Bury. Library Local Studies: Baron Birch, 1995. ISBN 0-
86023-561-0
85 Russell, B. Freedom and Organisation, 1814–1819, Routledge, 2001 ISBN 0-415-24999-6
86 Landau,( Idem)
49
adhering to all requirements of the Factory Acts. 87
Later, in 1797, Peel became MP for Tamworth. Once he was at Westminster, he reviewed
his situation and after achieving notoriety as an abuser of apprentices he drove forward the
first piece of humanitarian legislation for protecting children. He vowed to redeem his
situation from one of being a callous industrialist, addicted to making money to being a
model of St Paul. However, some of this approach may have been double-dealing for he
tried to stop any attempt to prohibit the use of parish apprentices absolutely — he had over
a thousand still in his employ in his calico mills across the north of England. 88
Despite that potential setback he brought forward a parliamentary Bill that passed both
Houses of Parliament. Peel's, Health and Morals of Apprentices Act passed both Houses of
Parliament in 1802. However, it applied only to parish apprentices in cotton and wool
factories, and so not to free children working in factories or anywhere else.
It specified that mills must be clean and well-ventilated, that boys and girls be housed
separately, that no more than two children share a bed, that two suits of clothing must be
provided for each child, and that they be, “instructed in reading, writing and arithmetic”,
for part of every working day. It also made mandatory the giving of each week, “at least
an hour's teaching of Christianity”. Most importantly, night work was absolutely prohibited
and children limited to a far more humane twelve hours' work per day.89
This Act seems to be not much more than a paternalistic throwback to the old society. Its
framers were concerned as much with ensuring that children grew up loyal, chaste and
obedient as that their health was properly safeguarded. Lawmakers worried about the
illegitimate children who would be chargeable on the parish and who might be the result
of boys and girls working in close proximity, shedding clothes to cope with the heat of the
mills.
Messrs W Toplis & Co Ltd — Nottingham
William Toplis, worsted manufacturer in Cuckney, Nottinghamshire, takes a patent for water-
powered, wool-combing machine on 8th Jun 1793
Among the largest users of parish apprentices, the Toplis’s business, ceased trading in 1805
following several challenging years during which costs, especially those associated with the
children, were cut to a minimum.90
Greenholme Mills — Iron Row,

Burley In Wharfedale, Ilkley,
West Yorkshire
Burley-in-Wharfedale, was originally a small

agricultural community with possible
Roman and Anglo-Saxon roots. It
developed in the late 18th and 19th
centuries into an industrial village with
many residents employed at the cotton
mills known as Greenholme Mills, which
87 Augusta, A. & Ramsay, W.,( Idem)

88 Lord Stanley's copy letter book, 1802-3, DDK box 168 (Lancashire Record Office).
89 Thomas, M. W. The Early Factory Legislation: A Study in Legislative and Administrative Evolution
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970.
90 Following Toplis’s failure his youthful workforce was distributed to other mills in the area. Toplis
apprentice register. ‘List of children put out apprentice to William Toplis’. DD895/1
50
were powered from a goit fed from the River Wharfe.
A cotton spinning mill was built on this site by Merryweather and Wilkinson in 1792 and was
the impetus for the initial and subsequent development of Greenholme and Burley-in-
Wharfedale. The mill was demolished in 1872 and its site became part of the gardens of
Greenholme Villa.
The mill was unusual for the West Riding of Yorkshire as the whole process from raw sheep's
wool to finished fabric was carried out on the premises. The machinery was driven by
waterpower. The old mill had a water wheel 16ft 6ins in diameter, which was replaced by
two water wheels when the new mill was built.
The mill was one of the first in the region to be fireproof in its construction. The original
purpose was cotton spinning, but 108 cotton power looms were added in 1825. New Mills
were expanded in the first half of the 19th century and it appears that the large five storey
northern shed was built c.1850 by Fison and Forster immediately after they purchased the
Greenholme Estate. Fison and Forster converted the mill to worsted and moved their labour
and machinery from various premises in Bradford to Greenholme. The firm was one of the
largest of its type and time. The weaving shed, boiler house and pumping house were
added in the late 19th century. Unusually, the mill relied primarily on water power well into
the 20th century and was reputed to have been the world’s largest water powered textile
mill.
The original goit to the old Greenholme Mill was constructed c.1792. The goits channelled
the fast flowing waters needed to power the mills. The longer quarter of a mile goit which
branches off it was constructed c.1819 to power New Mills (later, Greenholme Mills).
When this area was severed from the rest of the Estate by the construction of the mill goit to
the original Greenholme Mill in 1792 it became accessible by two footbridges at either end
of the goit. The land appears to have been treated as part of the ‘park’ associated with
the mill owners’ houses; as a kennel block is recorded on the 1892 and possibly the 1852
Ordnance Survey maps. It appears that this island was sold along with the angling rights in
1968.
A weir was built in 1792 in order to divert water into the newly constructed mill goit and
ensure a steady flow of water which was used to power the mill. At the foot of the stone
weir is a row of stepping-stones which appear to be contemporaneous with the weir.
Currently, the weir is intact and is a piece of industrial archaeology. The monolithic
stepping-stones appear to be complete, though the middle section was submerged by the
Wharfe at the time of survey.
Dennis Warwick has written a history of the mill where more than 250 children were forced
to move from London to work there. 91 The child labourers, some as young as seven, were
employed at Greenholme Mills at the start of the 19th century as ‘pauper apprentices’.
Medical records show 260 paupers were working as apprentices in 1802.
Complaints about factory life had prompted the Workhouse Board for the parishes of St.
Margaret and St. John the Evangelist in Westminster to order visits to all the firms to which
their children were apprenticed. When they arrived at the five-storied Burley-in-Wharfedale
cotton mill, they were charmed by seeing the children having breakfast to the sound of
music from an apprentice boys’ band and this raised the spirits of the three anxious men
who had arrived in September 1802 with instructions to discover how sixty eight boys and
sixty five girls were being treated by the owners.
91 Warwick, D. & Warwick, M. Greenholme Mills Remembered Again. Burley-in-Wharfedale

Local History Group Publications; October 2010; ISBN 9780952429159.
51
The three members of the Board reported that the children were delighted to see us, and
looked up to us for protection from such a state of slavery and oppression as we had no
expectation of meeting (particularly the Boys in the Old Mill) and they excited our
sympathy to a very high degree. The appearance of the boys was what might be
expected from incessant application in close confinement and want of proper air and
exercise. It is not surprising, for none of these children worked less than 14 and some of them
16 & 17 hours in the day; in a close factory where the smell of the oil necessary to the
working of the machinery, if not unhealthy, is very offensive, that their growth should be
checked and their bodies emaciated. 92
Greenholme Mills lodge, Great Pasture

Lane, Burley in Wharfedale A large
house for a lodge; perhaps it was a
manager's house or the mill offices?
A contemporary photograph (2008) by Humphrey Bolton, Geograph Britain and Ireland
Since “numerous complaints” had been made about Whitaker & Merryweather's treatment
of their apprentices, the visitors approached Burley expecting to find conditions there
similar, if not worse, than at Cuckney, (Toplis — see above), “but in that respect we were
happily disappointed”.
“Here — in one of the finest valleys in England — we saw a field for a play-ground, cricket
bats & balls, swings and skipping ropes, and even musical instruments; all of which afforded
a pleasant presage to our future examination of the children and which proved extremely
satisfactory. The Boys looked healthy and happy and were well grown; the Girls particularly
so, and deported themselves with a modesty and propriety of conduct which can only
proceed from good example and great attention on the part of their immediate Instructors.
The only complaint we heard, and that a general one, was want of bread. In that part of
Yorkshire the children even of the wealthy inhabitants seldom eat bread, and what is used
is mostly oat bread, and the children never having been accustomed to it, but eating
potatoes, and having the flour made into puddings, dumplings and porridge, they have
little relish for what is baked; but the children from town having been originally accustomed
to bread, naturally long to have the food of their infant days.” (Idem) “We therefore, with
a view to gratify so natural a desire, rather than from any idea of improvement in their
health, which appears to be remarkably good, requested that they might have bread
which Mr Whitaker promised should be given to them as soon as the present Harvest was
got in.
92 From Descendants of George Merryweather; A Colony of Infant manufacturers.

http://www.mark23.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/BARRET/WHITAKER,MERRYWEATHER.htm
52
The clothing of the children is good & looks neat, especially that of the girls which is rather
superior to their rank in life. Their sleeping apartments are well aired — beds, blankets &
sheets were clean and good. The apartments of the girls are perfectly distinct from those of
the boys and they are even separated at dinner.”
“With respect to those boys who work all night we found them looking better in general and
better educated than the day boys. They have some advantage over the day workers —
their employment being two hours in the 24 less — and having 4 hours from six to 10 in the
morning; a time that is devoted to their exercise and improvement, a circumstance
particularly noticeable in that no death has yet occurred among the night workers.”
“We were extremely gratified by a martial band of 18 instruments played by the apprentice
boys, who serenaded us whilst at breakfast and performed a variety of marches: Rule
Britannia, God Save the King etc. in a style which surprised us.”
Although several of the night boys said they should prefer working in the day, many of the
day boys, on the other hand, expressed a wish to work at night. This we attributed to that
love of variety so natural at their age. On the whole we were perfectly satisfied with the
disposition of Messrs Whitaker and Merryweather to make the children comfortable &
happy, and were much gratified to see preparations being made for building another Mill;
which will afford room to employ the more adult children in weaving and other branches
and enable them, when out of their time, to obtain a sufficiency for their future support.
There were several boys employed in the various trades required to keep in repair the
complicated machinery of the mill, such as carpenters, mill wrights & turners, both in brass
and wood; all of which we saw the boys performing with much dexterity.
Prize-money is paid to the boys from one shilling to two pence every three weeks in
proportion to their attention to work and their good behaviour. The boys in the spinning
room get prize-money every week.
Divine service is performed by a preacher every Sunday morning at 10 o'clock, consisting of

an extempore prayer, psalms, a sermon, psalms and a prayer. He concludes about half
past 11 o'clock. Mr Whitaker, senior, says prayers every Sunday evening from six to seven
o'clock. There is no room for the children in the parish church.
A Library is kept where the Children may have books to read. All the rest of the Sunday they
may walk about & do as they please. the boys bathe twice or thrice a week when the
weather is favourable. When the boys are beat it is with a leather strap.
The children had been apprenticed at ages ranging from seven to fourteen between 1797
and 1801. The mill worked round the clock, the day shift lasting from 6 am to 7 pm, with half
an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. After an hour's play, the apprentices went to
supper and heard prayers read by one of their number before going to bed by 10 pm. The
forty night boys, said the visitors, “live exactly the same as the day boys, but have the
advantage of 4 hours play viz. from 6 to 10 in the morning, at which hour they went to bed.
They were called up at 6 o'clock”.
Breakfast and supper were always milk porridge; and dinner was similarly monotonous:
Sunday - Meat and potatoes

Monday - Rice and milk
Tuesday - Meat and potatoes
Wednesday - Rice and milk
Thursday - Meat and potatoes
Friday - Rice and milk
Saturday - Potatoes
53
The only drink was water. The visitors reported; “Any boy, if he finds his allowance too little,
may have more, if there is any left, which is mostly the case. Each boy had a leather cap,
a blue jacket, waistcoat and pantaloons, shoes, but no stockings.”
The minute book of the Islington Trustees of the Poor records in June, 1801, that
Merryweather & Co. had applied to take a number of children, but the application was
deferred, “"until enquiry be made respecting the same by Mr Dawson [an overseer] who
occasionally goes to Yorkshire”. Nothing came of the approach.
During the debate in May, 1802, on Peel's Health and Morals of Apprentices Bill, William
Wilberforce, who had visited the factory, praised Merryweather's, “paternal affection” for
the children and said it was impossible to do justice to the, “excellency of the plan laid out
for their care”. Conditions at Burley had excited not only the admiration, but also the
astonishment, of visitors from St Clement Danes, another London parish that apprenticed
children to Merryweather.
A report made in the same year by William Hey, a Leeds surgeon, said the firm employed
260 apprentices, of whom fifty two boys worked without a break from 7pm to 6am. They
were given food at midnight, but the machines did not stop. Some boys said they could not
work well by candlelight and others complained that the coming and going of the day
children, who dined below the dormitory, made sleep difficult. Nevertheless, Hey was
satisfied that night work was not a danger to health, a conclusion that pleased the owners,
who had commissioned the report in the hope of finding a way of attacking Peel's Act,
which they implacably opposed.
A repeal of the late Act, or a considerable modification of its obnoxious clauses [wrote
Merryweather] will appear indispensably necessary to the future success of a great number
of persons embarked in the spinning and manufacturing of cotton; who have not only
contributed largely to the public revenue but after having rescued a great number of
children from vice and misery, have, at a heavy expense, trained them up in the habits of
industry and religion, and rendered them (before, a load on society) some of its most useful
members.
Enter now The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comfort of the Poor, a
body with the King as its patron that had been founded in 1796 by a group of evangelicals
following a meeting called by William Wilberforce. Hey's report and Merryweather's
interpretation of it did not altogether please the society, which appointed a committee to
investigate. Their report, while recognising the importance of the cotton trade, took issue
with Merryweather's belief that apprentices must be employed at night because, “free
labourers cannot be obtained to perform night work, except on very disadvantageous
terms to the manufacturers”. Costly it might be, but it was, “evidently cruel and unjust that
the poor orphan, or the deserted child, should be compelled to do night work which the
free labourer cannot, on any practicable or moderate terms, be induced to undertake”.
The report concluded; “Now if we were to read in the history of some part of Asia or Africa
an account of children who, from seven to twelve years, or from eight to thirteen years of
age, were doomed to unceasing labour every night, without the glad and natural return of
day — without a few minutes respite for their meals — and (in the winter half at least),
without even an half hour for relaxation, which is the comfort of mature age, but the
essential possession of the young — should we not shudder the perusal? Should we give
very willing credit to any detail that was subjoined of the health and happiness of these
children? And if (to pursue the consideration) the government of the country should have
prepared for the progressive emancipation of these children, at the end of two years, what
language should we hold as to those who would unite to prevent their receiving the benefit
of so just and politic a law?
William Wood was one of the first apprentices to reach Burley (and certainly the most
talented). He worked at the factory for almost fifty years until his death at the age of sixty.
54
The Bradford Observer, of May 7, 1840 reported that this, “faithful and upright servant
possessed a mechanical and architectural genius of no ordinary kind and to it may be
attributed in a great measure the superior condition of the works at Greenholme”.
Hannah Brown was born in Bradford in 1809; she was interviewed by Michael Sadler and the
House of Commons Committee on 13th June, 1832. She told the Committee in answer to
questions:
Question: How early did you begin to work in mills?

Answer: At nine years old.
Question: What hours did you work?
Answer: I began at six o'clock, and worked till nine at night.
Question: What time was allowed for your meals?
Answer: No, none at all.
Question: Did this work affect your limbs?
Answer: Yes, I felt a great deal of pain in my legs.
Question: Did it begin to produce deformity in any of your limbs?
Answer: Yes; both my knees are rather turned in.
Question: Was there punishment?
Answer: Yes
Question: Has Mr. Ackroyd ever chastised you in any way?
Answer: Yes; he has taken hold of my hair and my ear, and pulled me, and just given
me a bit of a shock, more than once.
Question: Did you ever see him adopt similar treatment towards any others?
Answer Yes: I have seen him pull a relation of mine about by the hair.
Question: Do you mean he dragged her?
Answer: Yes, about three or four yards.
John Watson and Penwortham Mill
John Watson's second local mill was south of the Ribble at Penwortham. It lay just within the
Walton boundary near Middleforth Green. Whilst John Horrocks’ first mill in Dale Street,
Preston, was known as the Yellow Factory, on account of its faded whitewash, Penwortham
factory was always the White Factory. It was located on a small stream which later fed an
enormous reservoir — Vernon’s Lodge.
Many of the workforce came from Penwortham workhouse, a short distance along factory
Lane. A date stone here states that, ‘This workhouse was erected by permission of William
ffarington Esq. Lord of the Manor, in the year 1796’. Whether this building replaced earlier
accommodation is uncertain, for the factory may have existed before 1791. Watson
obtained children from workhouses and from local parishes, and these are stated to have
been, “housed in a building at Penwortham”. By 1825 the mill was being run by Thomas
German and Co. It became German and Petty by 1828.
The 1790's there had been a period of great economic distress with agrarian decline,
industrial revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Not long after, in 1796, Penwortham
Workhouse opened not far from the factory in what is now Greenbank Road on Leyland
Road. This took the paupers of the parish and served the township of Penwortham and
Middleforth Green. Land to the north was originally the ‘Potato Ground’ on which potatoes
55
were grown to feed the paupers in the workhouse. In 1834 this became a Union's Girls'
School.
The above picture is a contemporary one by Chris Allen
During 1842 to 1847, the, building was adapted as a hostel for aged and infirm male
paupers. During 1847 to 1851, the male paupers were evicted and sent to other
workhouses so that Penwortham Workhouse could be used as a ‘House of Recovery’ during
the Preston typhoid epidemic.
During 1851 to 1860's, a maximum of 86 female pauper children (aged 4-13) were
accommodated there and a school was set up within it to cater for them and other poor
children locally. In the 1860's, the workhouse was closed and was then converted to a row
of whitewashed cottages (presently known as Manor Cottages). The original T-shaped plan
of the workhouse building was kept. Penwortham Mill was purchased by Vernon Carus in
1915 and it then specialised in the manufacture of surgical lint; a product which was in
massive demand during the First World War.
In a well publicised letter from John Betts to Richard Carlile that was written on 24th February
1828, there is an interesting
commentary on Watson’s mill which
is located at what he called Penny
Dam. (Penwortham)
“In 1805 when Samuel Davy was seven

years of age he was sent from the
workhouse in Southwark in London to
Mr. Watson's Mill at Penny Dam93 near
Preston. Later his brother was also sent
to work in a mill. The parents did not
know where Samuel and his brother
were. From the loss of her children, so
preyed on the mind of Samuel's mother
that it brought on insanity, and she died
in a state of madness.
Finally a ‘Watt’s Apprentice’ has the last

word… Eventually the apprentices were
93 ‘Penny Dam’ is a local dialect pronunciation of Penwortham, with phonetic spelling. The
‘real’ name is properly authenticated, in various spellings back to the Doomsday Book.
[Personal communication from Dr Alan Crosby, Penwortham.]
56
able to speak for themselves and the whole horrific story came out.
Samuel Davy had been one of ‘Watt’s Apprentices’ at Penwortham. He escaped a posse of
pursuers with his brother and reached London and told his harrowing tale to the press in 1828
of which the following is a part.
“Samuel Davy, a young man now employed in the Westminster Gas Works, has called on the
Publisher of Blincoe’s Memoir, and has said, that his own experience is a confirmation of the
general statement in the memoir.
Samuel Davy, when a child of seven years of age, with thirteen others, about the year 1805,
was sent from the poor-house of the parish of St. George, in the Borough of Southwark, to a
Mr. Watson’s mill at Penny Dam (Penwortham), near Preston in Lancashire, and successively
turned over to Mr. Birch’s mill at Backborough (Backbarrow), near Cartmill (Cartmel), and to
Messrs David and Thomas Ainsworth’s mill near Preston.
The cruelty towards the children increased at each of these places, and though not so bad
as that described by Blincoe, approached very near to it. He describes Richard Goodall as
one who was entirely beaten to death! Irons were used, as with felons in gaols, and these
were often fastened on young women, in the most indecent manner, from the ankles to the
waist!
It was common to punish the children, by keeping them nearly in a state of nudity, in the
depth of winter, for several days together. Davy says, that he often thought of stealing, from
the desire of getting released from such a wretched condition by imprisonment or
transportation; and, at last, at nineteen years of age, though followed by men on horseback
and on foot, he successfully ran away and got to London.
For ten years, this child and his brother were kept without knowing anything of their parents,
and without their parents knowing where the children were. All applications to the Parish
officers for information were in vain. The supposed loss of her children, so preyed upon the
mind of Davy’s mother, that, with other troubles, it brought on insanity, and she died in a state
of madness! No savageness in human nature that has existed on earth has been paralleled
by that which has been associated with the English cotton spinning mills”.
George & Samuel Courtauld — Mill at Braintree
George Courtauld, the son of Samuel Courtauld (I) (1720-65), was born in 1761. He entered
the silk industry and after a seven-year apprenticeship with Peter Merzeau he set up his own
business as a throwster in Spitalfields. His son, also to be called Samuel after his grandfather,
was born in Albany, New York, in 1793. The family moved to England in 1793 and by 1809
Samuel (II) had his own silk mill in Braintree, Essex.
In 1818 George Courtauld went to live in America and left Samuel to run
the silk mill. Samuel expanded the business, building two more mills in
nearby Halstead and Bocking. In 1825 Courtauld installed a steam-
engine at his mill in Bocking. He also invested heavily in power looms and
by 1835 had 106 of these machines in his mill at Halstead.
Samuel Courtauld (II), like all silk manufacturers, was heavily dependent
on young female workers. In 1838 over 92% of his workforce was female.
The high percentage of women workers helped to keep Courtauld's labour costs down.
Whereas adult males at Courtauld's mills earned 7s. 2d., women were paid less than 5s. a
week. The cheapest of all were girls under eleven who received only 1s. 5d. a week.
George came under the influence of the teachings of Richard Price and became a
Unitarian. He developed radical political beliefs and expressed full sympathy for the
American Revolutionaries in the fight against George III and his Tory government.
57
In 1785 Courtauld sold his business and went to America where he met and married Ruth
Minton. The couple obtained a 300 acre farm in Kentucky and over the next seventeen
years Ruth gave birth to eight children, of whom seven survived.
Courtauld returned to England with his family in 1793 and joined Peter Nouaille, who owned
a silk mill in Sevenoaks, Kent. The two men argued over Courtauld's support for the French
Revolution and in 1797 the partnership came to an end. Courtauld next found work
managing a silk mill in Pebmarch in Essex.
In 1809 George Courtauld opened his own silk mill in Braintree. Courtauld specialized in
crape, a hard, stiff silk, which was used for mourning clothing94. Courtauld developed a silk
spindle for use in his mill and patented his invention in 1814.
George Courtauld, letter to Mr. Mann (11th December, 1813)
“I have eight children coming from Islington on Tuesday next and eight or
ten more on Thursday. I had my choice from upwards of 50 girls of different
ages and accepted all but one that was within the age of ten and thirteen.
They are from a very well-conducted workhouse and I really expect and
earnestly hope that by continued care and attention my establishment of
apprentices will prove a nursery of respectable young women fitted for any
of the humble walks of life.”
Courtauld mainly employed children in his mill. At first he recruited local children but in 1813
he started taking young girls from workhouses in London. Most of these came from St.
Pancras and Islington. Courtauld, who much preferred employing girls than boys and
although offered children of all ages usually took them from “within the age of ten and
thirteen”. Courtauld only wanted children from what he called, “well-run workhouses” and
insisted that each child arrived, “with a complete change of common clothing”. A
contract was signed with the workhouse that stated that Courtauld would be paid £5 for
each child taken. Another £5 was paid after the child's first year.
The children also signed a contract with George Courtauld that bound them to the mill until
94 The word crape is the English form of the French word crepe. Crape, or crepe, is a type of silk
fabric. Crepe de Chine, or Canton crape, is soft and has a wavy look to its surface. The other
kind of crape is associated with Great Britain rather than China and is hard with a crimped, or
crisp, appearance.
58
the age of 21. In return Courtauld paid them between six and eight shillings a week and
promised to provide them with the skills needed in the silk industry. Courtauld believed that
he was also training the girls for adulthood and in a letter written in 1813 claimed that his
mill, “will prove a nursery of respectable young women fitted for any of the humble walks of
life”.
In 1814 several of the apprentices ran away from Courtaulds. The girls claimed they were
being badly beaten by the woman supervisor at the mill. A nasty scene took place when
two men, claiming to be relatives of one of the girls, arrived at Braintree threatening
revenge. Courtauld denied all knowledge of the violence that had been taking place but
agreed to sack the women who was accused of beating the girls.
After this incident, Courtauld employed his daughters, Louisa, Catherine, Eliza and Sophia,
to supervise the apprentices in the mill. The four sisters arranged a system of marks that
reflected the work and behaviour of each girl. These marks were written on slates and
exhibited in the mill close to where the girl was working. The apprentices were not allowed
to talk but could sing hymns which Courtauld found, “a help to industry, attention and
orderly conduct”. 95
In 1818 George's son, Samuel Courtauld, rook over the running of the silk mill, George
Courtauld went to live in America where he died in 1823.
By 1850 Samuel Courtauld (II) employed over 2,000 people in his three silk mills. Courtauld
produced a variety of different silks but his main activity was the production of crape,
which became very fashionable in the second-half of the 19th century and was the main
dress material worn, by upper and middle-class women after the death of a relative.
As this business expanded, he recruited partners including his brother, George Courtauld II
(1802-1861) and Peter Alfred Taylor (1819-1891). Both men were active in social reform.
Taylor, a leading figure in the Anti-Corn Law League, eventually became MP for Leicester.
Between 1830 and 1880 the average level of profits of the company increased by 1,400 per
cent. During the same period, wages only rose by 50 per cent. By the 1870s Samuel
Courtauld (II) was a wealthy man with an annual income of £46,000 and a fortune
approaching £700,000.
59
Attempts were made by the workers to share some of these extra profits. However, when his
power-loom weavers at Halstead went on strike in 1860 he refused to negotiate with them.
Courtauld, who was opposed to trade unions, described the men's actions as a, “vain
attempt at intimidation”. He told his mill manager to, “report to me the names of the 20 to
50 of those who have been foremost in this shameful disorder, for immediate and absolute
discharge”.
When Courtauld recruited Peter Alfred Taylor as a partner in 1849 he decided to take a less
active role in the business. His increasing deafness made work difficult and so he planned to
spend more time on his 3,200 acres Gosfield Hall estate near Halstead. However, Samuel
Courtauld found it impossible to retire and continued to play a dominant role in the
company until just before his death in 1881. (Idem)
Gosfield Hall is near Braintree in Essex and was built

in 1545 by Sir John Wentworth, a member of
Cardinal Wolsey’s household, where he hosted
Royal visits by Queen Elizabeth I and her grand
retinue throughout the middle of the 16th century.
Much restoration work was done by Samuel

Courtauld who owned the house between 1854
and 1881. In the early 20th century the house was
virtually abandoned but did good service as a base for troops stationed in Essex during the
Second World War. 96 It is now being run as a private house with commercial activities.
Richard Arkwright and Cromford Mill (and later with Jedediah Strutt)
Sir Richard Arkwright (1733 – 1792), is often credited for inventing the spinning frame — later
renamed the water frame following the transition to water power. However, his patents
were eventually rejected. It was Lewis Paul who had invented a machine for carding in
1748, but Richard Arkwright made improvements to this machine and in 1775 took out a
patent for a new Carding Engine, which converted raw cotton buds into a continuous
shank of cotton fibres which could then be spun into yarn.
A self-made man, he was a leading entrepreneur of the Industrial Revolution. Arkwright's

achievement was to combine power, machinery, semi-skilled labour, and what then was a
new raw material — cotton — to make mass produced yarn. His skills of organization made
him more than anyone else, the creator of the modern factory system, especially in his mill
at Cromford near Matlock in Derbyshire.
Cromford Mill was the world’s first successful water powered cotton spinning mill and it was
built in 1771. From then until around 1790, he continued to develop the mills, warehouses
and workshops.
However, problems with the water supply around 1840 imposed severe limitations on textile
production at Cromford Mill and the buildings were put to other uses. These included a
brewery, laundries, and cheese warehousing.
Finally, in 1922, the site was used as a colour works, producing colour pigments for paints
and dyes. It is remarkable that so many of the buildings survived this use and, by 1979 when
the Cromford Colour Works abandoned the site, many of them were heavily contaminated
with lead chromate.
Arkwright had been the youngest of thirteen children and was born to his parents in 1732 in
Preston, Lancashire, England. They ( Sarah and Thomas) were very poor and could not
afford to send him to school and instead arranged for him to be taught to read and write
96 http://www.gosfield.org.uk/history.htm
60
by his cousin Ellen. Thomas Arkwright was a tailor in Preston. Richard, however, was
apprenticed to a Mr. Nicholson, a barber at nearby Kirkham. Richard, therefore, began his
working life as a barber and wig-maker, setting up a shop at Churchgate in Bolton in the
early 1750s. It was here that he invented a waterproof dye for use on the in-fashion
periwinkles (wigs) of the time, the income from which later facilitated his financing of
prototype cotton machinery.
Arkwright and John Smalley set up a small horse-driven factory at Nottingham. Needing
more capital to expand, Arkwright partnered with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need,
wealthy hosiery manufacturers, who were
nonconformists.
Jedediah Strutt was born at South

Normanton, Derbyshire in 1726. After
having been apprenticed at the age of
fourteen to Ralph Massey, a wheelwright in
Findern, he eventually became involved in
the hosiery trade in the 1750s.
There had been several attempts to

improve the stocking frame that had been
invented by William Lee, a Nottinghamshire
parson, in the 16th century. One of these
was by a man by the name of Roper. He
approached Strutt and his brother-in-law,
William Woollat., for help with his invention.
By 1757 Strutt and Woollat, had came up
with the idea of an attachment that was
placed in front of the stocking frame. This
set of barbed hooks, operated vertically
among the horizontal needles of the
frame, taking the loops from the latter and
reversing them to make a rib stitch.
Strutt tried to find backing for his invention

but was unable to do so. Later, Strutt and
Woollat formed a partnership with John
Bloodworth and Thomas Stamford, two
substantial hosiers from Derby. The four
men obtain a patent for the invention and
began producing the machine. In 1762
Bloodworth and Stamford, impatient with the slow sales of the stocking frame, left the
partnership. Soon afterwards, Strutt found a new partner, Samuel Need, a hosier from
Nottingham.
Strutt's hosiery business began to grow rapidly. Raw silk was purchased in London and was
prepared at Strutt's Silk Mill in Derby . Some of the thread was then turned into silk cloth in
the mill, but most of it was sold to hosiers living locally or to merchants living in England's
main towns and cities.
In 1769 Richard Arkwright went to Ichabod Wright, a banker from Nottingham, in search of
funds to expand his business. Wright introduced Arkwright to Jedediah Strutt and Samuel
Need. Strutt and Need were impressed with Arkwright's water-frame and agreed to form a
partnership.
Arkwright's Spinning-Frame was too large to be operated by hand and so the men had to
find another method of working the machine. After experimenting with horses, it was
decided to employ the power of the water-wheel. In 1771 the three men set up a large
factory next to the River Derwent in Cromford, Derbyshire. Arkwright's machine now
61
became known as the Water-Frame.
After the death of his wife, Strutt had a new house built by the side of his factory at Milford.
His brother-in-law, William Woollat was left to run the business in Derby. His three sons,
William, George and Joseph, were also at this time senior managers in the company.
Strutt was considered to be a good employer. Several observers passed favourable

comments about the quality of the houses that he built in Belper and Milford. When William
Gaskell visited Strutt's Belper village he wrote that it was a shame that there were not more
factories owned by, “men of enlarged benevolence and active philanthropy”. 97
Like all factory owners at the time, Strutt employed children. In 1774 Strutt told a committee
of the House of Commons that he employed children from the age of seven but preferred
them to be at over ten. Strutt criticised those employers who took children as soon as they
“able to crawl”.
So it was in 1771 that these two men built the world's first water-powered mill at Cromford,
which had water power and skilled labour. Arkwright spent £12,000 perfecting his machine
which contained the ‘crank and comb’ for removing the cotton web off carding engines.
Arkwright had mechanized all the preparatory and spinning processes, and he began to
establish water-powered cotton mills even as far away as Scotland. His success
encouraged many others to copy him, so he had great difficulty in enforcing the patent he
was granted in 1775. His spinning frame was a significant technical advance over the
spinning jenny of James Hargreaves.
Richard Arkwright's employees worked from six in the morning to seven at night. Although
some of the factory owners employed children as young as five, Arkwright's policy was to
wait until they reached the age of six. Two-thirds of Arkwright's 1,900 workers were children.
Whole families were employed, with large numbers of children from the age of seven,
although this was increased to ten by the time Richard handed the business over to his son.
Like most factory owners, Arkwright was unwilling to employ people over the age of forty.
A visitor to Arkwright’s Cromford factory described the building as, “magnificent”. However,
in 1790, conditions inside for a worker were less than magnificent. Arkwright was considered
to be a decent owner who did go some way to looking after his workforce. He built
cottages for his workers, but they were
built so close to the factories that if a
worker had any time off, he or she would
not be in a position to get away from the
environment in which they worked. He also
built a Sunday school for the children who
worked at Cromford mill and his best
workers were rewarded with bonuses of
dairy cows. Arkwright also rented out
allotments at cheap rates.
Cromford mill is now a world heritage site. Restoration of the old mill has been carried out
by the Arkwright society which purchased the site in 1979. Most of the smaller modern day
buildings have been demolished. The whole restoration project is supported by the
Derbyshire County Council and the Derbyshire Dales District Council. The mill is open
everyday and attracts visitors from all over the world.
62
98
The Pauper Boys of Linby
This photograph was taken around

1910. It shows the front of the mill
building.
CASTLE MILL, LINBY
‘SATANIC MILL’: Castle Mill and dam seen at the beginning of the last century.
The course of the River Leen from its source at Hollinwell to its confluence with the Trent is
about ten miles in length, as the crow flies. It was of great importance during the middle
ages, for it formed a part of the western boundary of the forest of Sherwood, and its waters
fed the fish stews and supplied the domestic needs of the two great monasteries of
Newstead and Lenton and of the Royal Castle of Nottingham. Moreover, although the fall
of the Leen Valley is gentle, the flow of the river was sufficient to turn a number of water-
wheels, and at one time a score or so mills were erected on its banks, traces of some of
which may even yet be found.
Castle Mill lies below a great artificial lake, designed to form a head of water for the mills.
And there has been a mill at Linby since Norman times. The mill is again noted in a
perambulation of the Forest boundary in 1232, but the Castle Mill is a new building erected
in the eighteenth century in pseudo-Gothic style.
This is a picture of the north facade of the

building. The ornate front of the building is
its original form, and the ornamentation
reflects stonework still seen today
Linby Castle Mill (originally known as Top Mill) and its reservoir — Papplewick Dam — were
constructed by George Robinson in about 1782. They were built to the west of Papplewick
Village, along the edge of Linby Lane. The mill was built by the Robinson family in about
98 Smart, A. http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/news/Bygones-Pauper-Boys-Linby/article-
1198622-detail/article.html
63
1782. The water wheel at Top Mill was a breastshot wheel attached to the east end of the
building.
The water wheel
at Top Mill
This photograph shows the wheel in the late 1940s just before it was removed
No one knows how many child workers died at the site, or how many of the so-called
London pauper boys are buried in Linby churchyard or in the neighbouring fields. Some
stories suggest as few as 40, others as many as 163 but that could be just the tip of the
iceberg. There are few gravestones, mostly they were buried in unmarked plots, with
nobody to mourn over their brief, lost lives. Two hundred years later, there is still some
debate about the fate of these luckless urchins who were transported to the Leen Valley
from the St Marylebone Workhouse in London to provide cheap labour in the cotton mills
run by a Scottish industrialist named George Robinson.
The popular belief, which has been embellished down the years, is that these children, who
were kept in a specially-built lodging house, were under-nourished and harshly treated; but
there is another side the story, as historian and author
Nan Greatrex revealed many years ago, after an
intensive study of 18th-century records. She wrote,
“The early mill owners have been branded as hard
and greedy men who treated their workers and most
especially their child workers, very harshly”. She
argued that many of the deaths could have been
due to the general conditions of poor health, hygiene
and diet that was a feature of working class life
around 1800. Nan Greatrex discovered that, far from
being sweat shops, the Robinsons' mills were quite
64
properly run and that the Robinsons were so keen on giving their child workers a start in life,
they were prepared to subsidise their education.
Castle Mill, Linby courtesy of Nottinghamshire History
http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/articles/tts/tts1916/summer/leen2.htm
Whether or not the Robinsons were, by the standards of the times, good employers, what
cannot be denied is the harsh reality of working in cotton mills 200 years ago. The working
days were long, up to 16 hours a shift, in hot, noisy and confined spaces, the air filled with
choking cotton dust and fibres thrown up by the spinning machines. Children were often
used to crawl into the tight spaces around and under the machines to keep them clear of
debris, exposing them to constant danger. The River Leen had seen some mill industry over
many centuries but, when George Robinson arrived in 1776, he created a manufacturing
empire, establishing six mills including Castle Mill, Grange Farm, Middle Mill and Forge Mill,
driven by water power, and providing jobs for 800 people.
A wrangle over water rights with landowner Lord Byron, the poet's great uncle, forced
Robinson to find alternative means of power and, in 1785, he installed a steam engine
invented by James Watt at Grange Farm — the first to be used in a cotton mill anywhere in
the world. Had the railways come to the area in time, the Leen Valley could have become
the centre of the cotton industry but, through lack of infrastructure and various legal
disputes, the Robinsons abandoned the trade and turned to banking, the mills left to
decay, or plundered for building materials. Today, Castle Mill survives as a private home.
A new mill was erected on this site near Papplewick Lake which came to be known as
Upper Mill or Castle Mill. It is in a pseudo-gothic style of architecture with embattled towers
built of local stone and ‘pebble-dashed’. The old mill stream and wheel is still in use for
grinding meal for cattle, etc.
The rear (south) of the building

looks much more like a three
storey mill. This view was taken in
2000. The building was restored
between 1954 and 1962, gaining
a Civic Trust Award for the work.
It has been converted into
residential use.
Castle Mill, Linby
After the cotton mills closed in the 1820s,

this mill continued in use as a corn-mill.
65
In 1785, James Watt here set up the first engine built by him for a cotton mill. The cotton
industry was then in a flourishing state in this district, and numbers of poor boys of nine or ten
years of age who were “on the parish” were brought from London workhouses and
apprenticed in these large flax mills. The parish registers of Linby contain repeated entries of
the death of ‘a London boy’. Their bodies, 163 in all, lie buried in the north-east corner of
the churchyard, a pathetic result of the churchwarden and overseer poor-law days which
came to an end in 1834.
Samuel Gregg and Quarry Bank Mill
Samuel Greg was the second son of Thomas Greg and Elizabeth Hyde and was born in
Belfast in 1758. After a private education, he joined his uncle, Robert Hyde, at
his company in Manchester. Later in 1780 he became a junior partner in the
company. Two years later, Robert Hyde died, and Greg took over the firm. It
was now a substantial business with the stock of cloth valued at £26,000.
By 1783 it became clear to Greg that his business needed a larger quantity of
good quality yarn. To enable this increase he determined to build his own
textile mill. There was a deep, woodland valley near Styal in Cheshire and he
used that as the site of his first mill. A major factor in coming to that decision was that the
nearby River Bollin provided Greg with the power to drive his machinery.
Quarry Bank Mill
Greg’s prime experience was as a merchant and he lacked the necessary technical
expertise for this type of work. He therefore employed Matthew Fawkner to run Quarry
Bank Mill when it opened in 1784. The mill had cost £3,000 to build and at first Greg
employed 150 men to spin coarse yarn on water frames. The machines were powered by
a water-mill of about 20 horse power.
In 1789 he married Hannah Lightbody, the daughter of Adam Lightbody, another cotton
merchant. Hannah's dowry of £10,000 was invested in his Quarry Bank Mill. This paid for a
replacement water-wheel and cottages for his growing work force at Styal. Being at a rural
66
location Greg had difficulty finding enough people to work in his mill. Manchester was
eleven miles away and the local villages were very small.
He imported his workers and they needed cottages; these cost about £100 each. The
cottages that Greg built for them were of a high standard. Each family had on average
about eight members and the houses provided them with a parlour, a kitchen, two
bedrooms, a cistern and a backyard. Each cottage had a good-sized garden where they
were encouraged to grow their own vegetables.
By the following year he had revised his employment strategy and he decided that the best
solution to his labour problem was to build an Apprentice House and to purchase children
from workhouses. The building for the apprentices cost £300 and it provided living
accommodation for over 90 children. It was a large detached house about 5 minute's walk
from the mill and was under the control of superintendents. Discipline was strict, with
punishments enforced for indiscretions, but there is no evidence of the cruelty which
occurred elsewhere. It is the testimonies of runaways brought before local magistrates
which have given us the insight into daily routines at the Apprentice House.
Contemporary View of Quary Bank Mill
At first the children came from local parishes such as Wilmslow and Macclesfield, but later
he took them from South Cheshire, Liverpool, Staffordshire, London and East Anglia in an
effort to find the sort of young workers that he required for his mill. To encourage factory
owners to take workhouse children, people like Greg were paid between £2 and £4 by the
parishes for each child they employed. Greg also demanded that the children were sent
to him with, “two shifts, two pairs of stockings and two aprons”. 99
At the time, the 90 children (60 girls and 30 boys) at Styal made up 50% of the total
workforce. For their work the children received board, lodging, and two pence a week.
The younger children worked as scavengers and piecers, but after a couple of years at
Styal they were allowed to become involved in spinning and carding. Some of the older
boys became skilled mechanics. The earliest surviving apprentice indentures for Quarry
Bank Mill date to 1785. The Greg’s' preference was to employ children from aged 9 years,
despite being legally entitled to do so from aged 7, and favouring girls as it was felt that
they were more obedient than boys. (Idem)
The daily regime was designed to enforce institutional life, but offered the hope that,
through self-improvement, the individual could advance their status. Their diet was basic,
but relatively plentiful for the time, with produce grown or farmed locally, some from the
kitchen garden at the house, tended by the apprentices. Greg employed Peter Holland,
the father of the Royal Physician Sir Henry Holland, First Baronet and uncle of Elizabeth
99 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TEXgreg.htm
67
Gaskell, as mill doctor. Holland was responsible for the health of the children and other
workers, and was the first doctor to be employed in such a capacity.100
The work could sometimes be dangerous, with fingers being occasionally lost. However,
most children were willing to work in the mill because life at a workhouse would be worse.
They would work long days with schoolwork and gardening after coming back from the
mill. Unusually, for apprentices in this industry at that time, there were opportunities for
employment upon completion of the indenture period. Apprentices were provided with
some education, and with a range of industrial skills beneficial to their future careers. There
are instances where an ex-apprentice rose to the position of overlooker, and one case
where an apprentice eventually became Mill Manager.
Mill records reveal that over 1,000 children served their apprenticeships at the Greg Mill,
many of whom continuing to live and work in Styal as adults, raising their own families in the
village. Even today, there remain Styal residents who are able to trace their families back
several generations to work at the Mill. By the 1820's, the cost of employing apprentices
was higher than that of free labour, and the system began to lose favour nationally.
However the mill persisted with it until the abolition of the apprentice system in 1847. Today
the old Apprentice House is open to the public with tours being conducted by costumed
guides. (Idem)
Later, Greg recruited Peter Ewart as a partner. Ewart was an engineer who had been
involved with James Watt and Matthew Boulton in the production of the early steam
engines. Ewart's technical expertise was considered to be so important that Greg was
willing to offer him a quarter of the spinning profits in return for an investment of £400 in the
company.
He had been working for Boulton and Watt but in 1792, frustrated by administering the new
and, as yet, unreliable machinery, he went to work in partnership with Samuel Oldknow in a
cotton bleaching and calico printing venture. He anticipated this being a profitable
concern but the partnership was dissolved within a year and he returned to engineering.
101 In 1798 he went into partnership with Samuel Greg, installing an innovative water wheel
at Greg's Quarry Bank Mill on the River Bollin in Cheshire. This iron water wheel was designed
by Thomas Hewes. The over head shafts above the machines were attached to the water
wheel by a belt. When the water wheel turned, the motion moved the belt and powered
the machine. With this and two more water-wheels, Greg was in a position to buy spinning-
mules for Quarry Bank. Greg continued to use water-frames for coarse yarn but the mules
enabled him to produce finer yarns as well. After Samuel Greg died in 1834 his son, Robert
Hyde Greg took over the business and soon took the decision to introduce weaving at the
mill.
The original wheel finally broke in 1904. After that the River Bollin continued to power the
mill through two water turbines. When steam engines were made, the mill bought a
Boulton and Watt steam engine and then a few years later purchased another. Due to the
effects of dry weather, water was much less in the summer and that situation often brought
production of cloth to stand still in some years. Steam engines were consistent and
produced power all year round.
By 1816 Quarry Bank employed 252 people and was producing 342,578 pounds of cloth.
Ten years later, the mill was employing 380 and output had reached 699,223 pounds. As
well as taking a large share of the home market, Samuel Greg was also selling cloth to Italy,
France, North America, Russia, Germany and South America.
100 Daber, A. Spinning the Web: The story of the Lancashire Cotton Industry. Manchester City
Council 2001
101 Musson, A. E. & Robinson, E. The Origins of Engineering in Lancashire. The Journal of Economic
History. Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association) 20 (2): 209-
233. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2114855. (June 1960).
68
The estate surrounding the mill was also developed by Greg and it is the most complete
and least altered factory colony of the Industrial Revolution. The mill continued in
commercial production until 1959. The estate and mill were donated to the National Trust in
1939 by Alexander Carlton Greg and they are open to the public.
The success of Quarry Bank encouraged Greg to open mills at Caton (150 workers),
Lancaster (560 workers), Bury (544 workers), Bollington (450 workers). By the time Samuel
Greg died in June, 1834 his company was producing 0.6% of all yarn and 1.03% of all cloth
produced in Britain.
John Marshall at Temple Mill, Leeds and also at Shrewsbury
Marshall had some difficult times establishing his flax spinning business in Leeds and it is said
that his employees at Temple Mill were well-treated. They worked a 72 hour week. Two-fifths
of the people employed by Marshall were young women aged between thirteen and
twenty and about one fifth were under thirteen. Marshall treated his workers better than
most factory owners. Overseers were forbidden to use corporal punishment to control the
workers. Marshall also installed fans and attempted to regulate the temperature of the mill.
However, Elizabeth Bentley worked at Temple Mill, Leeds and in

1832 she was interviewed by Michael Sadler's Parliamentary
Committee. Part of her evidence reported that:
“I worked from five in the morning till nine at night. I lived two
miles from the mill. We had no clock. If I had been too late at
the mill, I would have been quartered. I mean that if I had
been a quarter of an hour too late, a half an hour would have
been taken off. I only got a penny an hour, and they would
have taken a halfpenny.”
Between 1803 and 1815 Temple Mill made a healthy profit. By

1820 Marshall was worth over £400,000. Leaving his sons to run
the business, Marshall began to take an interest in social
problems. He believed that the only way, “to promote the
improvement of the rising generation was through education”.
In 1822 he persuaded the owners of several other firms in
Holbeck to join him in establishing a school in the area.
69
During the day children were taught to read and write. Girls also learnt to sew and boys did
a course in accounting. Evening classes were held for the older children who worked during
the day in the mills. The charge was 3d. a week, or 2d. if they brought their own candle. The
teaching methods used at the school were based on those popularized by Joseph
Lancaster. Under this system one master taught a select group of older pupils, the monitors,
and these in turn taught the rest.
However, all was not as right as it might seem from some of these reports especially as we
read here at the Marshall’s mill at Shrewsbury. Jonathan Downe was interviewed by
Michael Sadler's Parliamentary Committee on 6th June, 1832. He said:
“When I was seven years old I went to work at Mr. Marshall’s factory at Shrewsbury. If a child
was drowsy, the overlooker touches the child on the shoulder and says, ‘Come here’. In a
corner of the room there is an iron cistern filled with water. He takes the boy by the legs and
dips him in the cistern, and sends him back to work.”
Eliza Marshall was born in Doncaster in 1815. At the age of nine her family moved to Leeds
where she found work at a local textile factory. Eliza was also interviewed by Michael Sadler
and his House of Commons Committee on 26th May, 1832. She responded to questions as
follows:
Question: What were your hours of work?
Answer: When I first went to the mill we worked for six in the morning till seven in the
evening. After a time we began at five in the morning, and worked till ten at
night.
Question: Were you very much fatigued by that length of
labour?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Did they beat you?
Answer: When I was younger they used to do it often.
Question: Did the labour affect your limbs?
Answer: Yes, when we worked over-hours I was worse by a
great deal; I had stuff to rub my knees; and I used
to rub my joints (for) a quarter of an hour, and
sometimes an hour or two.
Question: Were you straight before that?
Answer: Yes, I was; my master knows that well enough;
and when I have asked for my wages, he said that I could not run about as I
had been used to do.
Question: Are you crooked now?
Answer: Yes, I have an iron on my leg; my knee is contracted.
Question: Have the surgeons in the Infirmary told you by what your deformity was
occasioned?
Answer: Yes, one of them said it was by standing; the marrow is dried out of the bone,
so that there is no natural strength in it.
Question: You were quite straight till you had to labour so long in those mills?
Answer: Yes, I was as straight as any one.
70
George Addison's Bradley Mill, Near Huddersfield
Joseph Hebergam was born in Huddersfield in 1815. When he turned seven, he started to
work. He didn't have any school education and his family was poor. All of his siblings had
been made to work whilst still very young. Telling about his work situation, Joseph recounts:
“Since our first day of work, we had to get to George Addison's

Bradley Mill by five in the morning; the mill is a mile away from
my home. The work day ended at 8 pm. We were mercilessly
whipped until our skins turned blue if we were five minutes late
to work. I did this labour for ten years and my health grew
worse and worse. My brother died after he hurt his spinal cord
because what his work demanded was way beyond his
strength.
Then I started to resent the factory system for all this misfortune
and hardships happening to me. However, it is also a reality
that I wouldn't have a way to live otherwise. Again, my family
was really poor, my child labour made most of the money,
and I don't have any knowledge, nor know how to read or
write. I have no way to be relieved.”
He went on to say that he did not agree with making young

children work in the mills. He blamed his early forced labour for the damage to his left leg
that brought about an inability for it to function properly. He believed that parliament
should pass legislation making it illegal for children under the age of twelve to work in textile
factories and said that his life had been ruined because of the mills. He continued, “If I had
a thousand pounds, I would use them to have use of my limbs again.”
He was adamant that the long hours of work were detrimental to a child’s health and well-
being and he did not consider it fit for children to have to work in the same conditions as he
did. “I would not like to bestow what happened to me on another innocent child.”
Photograph of Bradley Mills by courtesy of Alan Brooke
When he was questioned by Michael Sadler and his House of Commons Committee on 7th
July, 1832, Joseph Hebergam answered:
Question: At what age did you start work?
Answer: Seven years of age.
Question: At whose mill?
Answer: George Addison's Bradley Mill, near Huddersfield.
71
Question: What were your hours of labour?
Answer: From five in the morning till eight at night.
Question: What intervals had you for refreshment?
Answer: Thirty minutes at noon.
Question: Had you no time for breakfast or refreshment in the afternoon?
Answer: No, not one minute; we had to eat our meals as we could, standing or
otherwise.
Question: You had fourteen and a half hours of actual labour, at seven years of age?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Did you become very drowsy and sleepy towards the end of the day?
Answer: Yes; that began about three o'clock; and grew worse and worse, and it
came to be very bad towards six and seven.
Question: How long was it before the labour took effect on your health?
Answer: Half a year.
Question: How did it affect your limbs?
Answer: When I worked about half a year a weakness fell into my knees and ankles: it
continued, and it got worse and worse.
Question: How far did you live from the mill?
Answer: A good mile.
Question: Was it painful for you to move?
Answer: Yes, in the morning I could scarcely walk, and my brother and sister used, out
of kindness, to take me under each arm, and run with me to the mill, and my
legs dragged on the ground; in consequence of the pain I could not walk.
Question: Were you sometimes late?
Answer: Yes, and if we were five minutes late, the overlooker would take a strap, and
beat us till we were black and blue.
Question: When did your brother start working in the mill?
Answer: John was seven.
Question: Where is your brother John working now?
Answer: He died three years ago.
Question: What age was he when he died?
Answer: Sixteen years and eight months
Question: What was his death attributed to?
Answer: He died from a spinal affection after working long hours in the factory?
Question: Did his medical attendants state that the spinal affection was owing to his
having been so over-laboured at the mill?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Have you found that, on the whole, you have been rendered ill, deformed
and miserable, by the factory system?
Answer: Yes. If I had a thousand pounds, I would give them to have the use of my
limbs again.
72
Part Three —
Accidents in the Textile Industry
And their Consequential Deformities
Unguarded machinery was a major problem for children working in factories. One hospital
reported that every year it treated nearly a thousand people for wounds and mutilations
caused by machines in factories. A report commissioned by the House of Commons in
1832 said that: “there are factories, no means few in number, nor confined to the smaller
mills, in which serious accidents are continually occurring, and in which, notwithstanding,
dangerous parts of the machinery are allowed to remain unfenced”.
The report added that the workers were often, “abandoned from the moment that an
accident occurs; their wages are stopped, no medical attendance is provided, and
whatever the extent of the injury, no compensation is afforded”.
In 1842 a German visitor noted that he had seen so many people in the streets of
Manchester without arms and legs that it was like, “living in the midst of the army just
returned from a campaign”.
John Allett started working in a textile factory when he was fourteen years old. Allett was
fifty-three when he was interviewed by Michael Sadler and his House of Commons
Committee on 21st May, 1832. He was asked:
Question: Do more accidents take place at the latter end of the day?
Answer: I have known more accidents at the beginning of the day than at the later
part. I was an eye-witness of one. A child was working wool, that is, to
prepare the wool for the machine; but the strap caught him, as he was
hardly awake, and it carried him into the machinery; and we found one limb
in one place, one in another, and he was cut to bits; his whole body went in,
and was mangled. 102
A Dr. Ward from Manchester was interviewed about the health of textile workers on
25th March, 1819. He stated:
“When I was a surgeon in the infirmary, accidents were very often admitted to the infirmary,
through the children's hands and arms having being caught in the machinery; in many
instances the muscles, and the skin is stripped down to the bone, and in some instances a
finger or two might be lost.
Last summer I visited Lever Street School. The number of children at that time in the school,
who were employed in factories, was 106. The number of children who had received injuries
102 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRchild.main.htm
73
from the machinery amounted to very nearly one half. There were forty-seven injured in this
way.” (Idem)
William Cobbett paid a visit to a textile factory in September 1824 and in the Political
Register of 20th November 1824 he reported that:
“The 1st, 2nd and 3rd of September were very hot days. The newspapers told us that men
had dropped down dead in the harvest fields and the many horses had fallen dead in the
harvest fields and that many horses had fallen dead upon the road. Yet the heat during
these days never exceeded eighty-four degrees in the hottest part of the day. What, then,
must be the situation of the poor children who are doomed to toil fourteen hours a day, in an
average of eighty-two degrees? Can any man, with a heart in his body, and a tongue in his
head, refrain from cursing a system that produces such slavery and such cruelty?”
William Dodd wrote about Mary Bucktrout and said that she was a fine girl of fourteen years
of age. “She was working in the card-room of Mr. Holdsworth's flax mill in Leeds, and met
with an accident while taking out some waste flax from the machinery, by order of the
overlooker. She said that he; “threatened to fine her 6d. a time, if she did not keep her
machine clean”.
“She has lost by this accident and by a preceding one: her right arm, a little below the elbow;
and the thumb of her left hand. For this loss her master had given her one shilling, which is all
she received; and the father of the girl, who is a poor working man with five children, has
been obliged to support her since.
She had been working two years in the same mill. She is a remarkably interesting girl, and is at
present in St. John's School, under the care of Dr. Hook, the vicar of Leeds, receiving such
instruction as may enable her to undertake the management of an infant school. I was
extremely pleased to hear her read, to see her write. The manner in which she holds her pen is
rather curious; for this purpose she has a contrivance made of leather, somewhat similar to
the two forefingers of a left-hand glove; these are fixed together, in close connection with a
small leathern tube, for holding the pen, which, by means of this tube, is made to lie on the
upper side of her two forefingers, and is moved up and down, in the act of writing, by the first
and second joints of the said finger. In this school there is also a governess, who has lost one
arm by an accident in a factory.” 103
Physical Deformities
On 16th March 1832, Michael Sadler introduced a Bill in Parliament that proposed limiting
hours in all mills to ten for
persons under the age of
18. After much debate it
was clear that Parliament
was unwilling to pass
Sadler's bill. However, in
April 1832 it was agreed
that there should be
another parliamentary
enquiry into child labour.
Sadler was made chairman
and for the next three
months the parliamentary
committee interviewed 48
people who had worked in
textile factories as children.
103 Dodd,William. The Factory System Illustrated. In A Series of Letters To The Right Hon Lord
Ashley. London, John Murray, 1842.
74
On 9th July 1832 Michael Sadler discovered that at least six of these workers had been
sacked for giving evidence to the parliamentary committee. Sadler announced that this
victimization meant that he could no longer ask factory workers to be interviewed. He now
concentrated on interviewing doctors who had experience treating people who worked in
textile factories. Several of these doctors expressed concerned about the number of textile
workers who were suffering from physical deformities.
Sir Samuel Smith worked as a doctor in Leeds. He was interviewed by Michael Sadler's
House of Commons Committee on 16th July, 1832. He told them:
Question: Is not the labour in mills and factories ‘light and easy’?
Dr. Samuel Smith: It is often described as such, but I do not agree at all with that
definition. The exertion required from them is considerable, and, in all
the instances with which I am acquainted, the whole of their labour
is performed in a standing position.
Question: What are the effects of this on the children?
Dr. Samuel Smith: Up to twelve or thirteen years of age, the bones are so soft that they
will bend in any direction. The foot is formed of an arch of bones of a
wedge-like shape. These arches have to sustain the whole weight of
the body. I am now frequently in the habit of seeing cases in which
this arch has given way. Long continued standing has also a very
injurious effect upon the ankles. But the principle effects which I
have seen produced in this way have been upon the knees. By long
continued standing the knees become so weak that they turn
inwards, producing that deformity which is called "knock-knees" and
I have sometimes seen it so striking, that the individual has actually
lost twelve inches of his height by it.
Question: Are not the females less capable of sustaining this long labour than
males?
Dr. Samuel Smith: Yes. In the female the pelvis is considerably wider than the male.
When having to sustain the upright posture for long periods, the
pelvis is prevented from being properly developed; and, in many of
those instances, instead of forming an oval aperture, it forms a
triangular one, the part supporting the spine being pressed
downwards, and the parts receiving the heads of the thigh-bones
being pressed inwards. When they are expecting to become
mothers, sometimes because of the development of the bones of
the pelvis, there is not actually space for the exit of the child which is
within the womb. Under these circumstances, it is often the painful
duty of the surgeon to destroy the life of the child in order that he
may preserve the more valuable one of the mother. I have seen
many instances of this kind, all of which, with one exception, have
been those of females who have worked long hours at factories. I
believe if horses in this country were put to the same period of labour
that factory children are, in a very few years the animal would be
almost extinct among us. Every gentleman who is in the habit of
using horses well knows the effect produced upon them by too long
continued labour; you may give them what corn you please, but
nothing will counteract the effects of too long continued labour.
Mr. Tomlinson was a Preston surgeon who had attended the Penwortham mill , “four or five
times a week”. He found, “That the children were in a wretched condition from being
overworked; a great number of them had crooked legs; that they used to work night and
day; that he had seen children sleeping over their supper, who were to go to work in about
ten minutes for the whole night, owing to their having got up so early in the day, and tired
themselves”. Most specifically and shockingly, Mr Tomlinson, recollected very well the
circumstance of the parish apprentices from the factory ... when they failed, having been
turned out upon the common, to find their way home as best they could”. Dutton claimed
75
to have been, “Motivated by feelings of humanity to look into the mills”, and to have
found, “A system of oppression incompatible with the principles of our constitution”. 104
Factory Pollution
One on the major complaints made by factory reformers concerned the state of the
buildings in which the children were forced to work. A report published in July 1833 stated
that most factories were, “dirty; low-roofed; ill-ventilated; ill-drained; no conveniences for
washing or dressing; no contrivance for carrying off dust and other effluvia”.
Sir Anthony Carlile, a doctor at Westminster Hospital visited some textile mills in 1832. He later
gave evidence to the House of Commons on the dangers that factory pollution was
causing for the young people working in factories: “Labour is undergone in an atmosphere
heated to a temperature of 70 to 80degs. F. and upwards”. He also pointed out that going
from a very hot room into damp cold air will inevitably produce inflammations of the lungs.
Doctors were also concerned about the dust from flax and the flue from cotton that
contaminated the air that the young workers were breathing in. Dr. Charles Aston Key told
Michael Sadler that this impure air breathed for a great length of time must be productive
of disease, or exceedingly weaken the body. Dr. Thomas Young who studied textile workers
in Bolton reported that factory pollution was causing major health problems.
Most young workers complained of feeling sick during their first few weeks of working in a
factory. Robert Blincoe (John Brown, Idem) said he felt that the dust and flue was
suffocating him. This initial reaction to factory pollution became known as mill fever.
Symptoms included sickness and headaches.
The dust and floating cotton fibre in the atmosphere was a major factor in the high
incidence of tuberculosis, bronchitis, asthma and byssinosis amongst cotton workers.
Child Worker Punishments
Children who worked long hours in the textile mills became very tired and found it difficult
to maintain the speed required by the overlookers. Children were usually hit with a strap to
make them work faster. In some factories children were dipped head first into the water
cistern if they became drowsy. Children were also punished for arriving late for work and for
talking to the other children. Parish apprentices who ran away
from the factory were in danger of being sent to prison. Children
who were considered potential runaways were placed in irons.
Sarah Carpenter was interviewed about her experiences and

these were published in The Ashton Chronicle on 23rd June 1849.
(See also p.41) She told the newspaper the following:
“The master carder's name was Thomas Birks; but he never went by
any other name than, ‘Tom the Devil’. He was a very bad man — he
was encouraged by the master in ill-treating all the hands, but
particularly the children. I have often seen him pull up the clothes of
big girls, seventeen or eighteen years of age, and throw them across
his knee, and then flog them with his hand in the sight of both men and
boys. Everybody was frightened of him. He would not even let us
speak. He once fell poorly, and very glad we were. We wished he
might die.
76
There was an overlooker called William Hughes, who was put in his place whilst he was ill. He came up
to me and asked me what my drawing frame was stopped for. I said I did not know because it was
not me who had stopped it. A little boy that was on the other side had stopped it, but he was too
frightened to say it was he. Hughes starting beating me with a stick, and when he had done I told him
I would let my mother know. He then went out and fetched the master in to me. The master started
beating me with a stick over the head till it was full of lumps and bled. My head was so bad that I
could not sleep for a long time, and I never been a sound sleeper since.
There was a young woman, Sarah Goodling, who was poorly and so she stopped her machine.
James Birch, the overlooker knocked her to the floor. She got up as well as she could. He knocked her
down again. Then she was carried to the apprentice house. Her bed-fellow found her dead in bed.
There was another called Mary. She knocked her food can down on the floor. The master, Mr.
Newton, kicked her where he should not do, and it caused her to wear away till she died. There was
another, Caroline Thompson. They beat her till she went out of her mind.
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 would follow. She went out but no
one followed her. The master found out about this and sent for her. There was a carving knife which
he took and grasping her hair he cut if off close to the head. They were in the habit of cutting off the
hair of all who were caught speaking to any of the lads. This head shaving was a dreadful
punishment. We were more afraid of it than of any other, for girls are proud of their hair.”
Another matter that Blincoe reported to John Brown was:

“The blacksmith had the task of riveting irons upon any of the apprentices, whom the master
ordered. These irons were very much like the irons usually put upon felons. Even young
women, if they suspected of intending to run away, had irons riveted on their ankles, and
reaching by long links and rings up to the hips, and in these they were compelled to walk to
and fro from the mill to work and to sleep.” (Brown, Idem)
In his autobiography, Samuel Fielden of Todmorden writes:
“Todmorden lies in a beautiful valley, and on the hillsides are small farms; back about a mile
are the moorlands, which could be made into fine farms, as the topography of the moors is
more level generally than the enclosed land. There are numerous large mills in the town,
Fielden Brothers being the largest; it contains about 2,000 looms.
When I arrived at the mature age of 8 years I, as was usual with the poor people's children
in Lancashire, went to work in a cotton mill, and if there is any of the exuberance of
childhood about the life of a Lancashire mill-hand's child it is in spite of his surroundings and
conditions, and not in consequence of it. As I look back on my experience at that tender
age I am filled with admiration at the wonderful vitality of these children. I think that if the
devil had a particular enemy whom he wished to unmercifully torture the best thing for him
to do would be to put his soul into the body of a Lancashire factory child and keep him as
a child in a factory the rest of his days. The mill into which I was put was the mill established
by John Fielden, M.P., who fought so valiantly in the ten-hour movement.
The infants, when first introduced to these abodes of torture, are put at stripping the full
spools from the spinning jennies and replacing them with empty spools. They are put to
work in a long room where there are about twenty machines. The spindles are apportioned
to each child, and woe betide to the child who shall be behind in doing its allotted work.
The machine will be started and the poor child's fingers will be bruised and skinned with the
revolving spools, while the children try to catch up to their comrades by doing their work
with the speed of the machine running. The brutal overlooker will frequently beat them
unmercifully, and I have frequently seen them strike the children, knocking them off their
stools and sending them spinning several feet on the greasy floor.” 105
105 Fielden, Samuel. Autobiography of Samuel Fielden (1887)
77
Lord Ashley and Child Labour
Anthony Ashley Cooper was born on 28th April 1801. He was the eldest son of the 6th Earl of
Shaftesbury. At the age of seven he was sent to boarding school and five years later he
was transferred to Harrow. At the age of ten, Anthony was given the courtesy title of Lord
Ashley. Harrow was followed by Christ College, Oxford and at the age of twenty-five he
was elected as MP for Woodstock, a pocket borough under the control of the Shaftesbury
family.
Lord Ashley's early political career was undistinguished and political reporters of the time
complained that his speeches in the House of Commons were inaudible. Lord Ashley
began to take an interest in social issues after reading reports in The Times about the
accounts given to Michael Sadler's Committee investigating child labour. Lord Ashley wrote
to Michael Sadler offering his help in his campaign for factory reform. When Michael Sadler
was defeated in the 1832 General Election, the Rev. George Bull, the Evangelical curate of
Bierly near Bradford, asked Lord Ashley to become the new leader of the factory reform
movement in the House of Commons. Ashley's critics claimed that he took up the factory
question, “as much from a dislike of the mill owners as from sympathy with the mill-workers”.
Lord Ashley agreed to George Bull's request and in March 1833, he proposed a bill that
would restrict children to a maximum of ten hours work each day. On 18th July, 1833,
Ashley's bill was defeated in the House of Commons by 238 votes to 93. Although the
government opposed Ashley's bill it accepted that children did need protecting and
decided to put forward its own proposals. The government's 1833 Factory Act was passed
by Parliament on 29th August.
Under the terms of the new Act, it became illegal for children under nine to work in textile
factories, whereas children aged between nine and thirteen could not be employed for
more than eight hours a day. The main disappointment of the reformers was that children
over thirteen were allowed to work for up to twelve hours a day. They also complained that
with the employment of only four inspectors to monitor this legislation, factory owners would
continue to employ very young children.
In 1840 Lord Ashley helped set up the Children's Employment Commission. Its first report on
mines and collieries was published in 1842. The report caused a sensation when it was
published. The majority of people in Britain were unaware that women and children were
employed as miners. Later that year Lord Ashley piloted the Coal Mines Act through the
House of Commons. As a result of this legislation women and children were prohibited from
working underground.
Lord Ashley also continued to lead the campaign for a reduction in the hours that children
worked in factories. In 1841 Ashley received a manuscript from William Dodd about his
experiences as a child worker. Lord Ashley, arranged for it to be published as A Narrative of
the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd a Factory Cripple. Lord Ashley decided to
employ Dodd to collect information about the treatment of children in textile factories.
William Dodd's research was published as The Factory System: Illustrated in 1842. William
Dodd's books created a great deal of controversy.
In 1851 Anthony Ashley Cooper's father died and he now became the 7th Earl of
Shaftesbury. He continued to campaign for effective factory legislation. In 1863 the Earl of
Shaftesbury published a report that revealed that children as young as four and five were
still working from six in the morning to ten at night in some British factories.
Other social issues that interested the Earl of Shaftesbury included the provision of working
class education and was chairman of the Ragged Schools Union for over forty years. By
78
1850 the organisation had established over a hundred schools for poor children. Anthony
Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, died on 1st October, 1885. 106
Later Child Labour Conditions during Victorian and Edwardian Times
For a male member of the working class in the late Victorian and Edwardian era,
there was rarely any neat chronological division between school and work. Long
before the adolescent school-Ieaver began full-time employment, he was likely to
have been in some way a member of the workforce.
Throughout his childhood, the working-class boy had usually acted upon any
opportunity to earn that had presented itself, these efforts ranging from occasional
errand running to permanent and time-consuming employments out of school
hours. Investigators in this period were often shocked at the proportion of
schoolchildren who were part-time earners.
In 1910, 23 per cent of Liverpool elementary schoolboys aged eleven to fourteen

were working, while in Nottingham the figure was 25 per cent. One author
estimated that in London roughly one-half of working-class children worked before
or after school.
A committee investigating in 1901-2 thought that perhaps 300,000 children worked

while still at school, equalling about 8 per cent of the total population below the
age of fourteen. These were, however, figures from single points in time. The oral
evidence suggests by contrast that virtually every working-class boy had an after-
school or before-school job at some time during his pre-teen years. These employ-
ments could be temporary or permanent; a matter of a few hours or the equivalent
of a full week's work. 107
The working schoolchildren who came under the notice of legislators and authorities
usually fell into one of two groups: half-timers and street traders, each with its own
special characteristics. Half-timers were largely defined by geography, being mainly
confined, with the exception of rural areas, to the textile areas of Lancashire and
Yorkshire, while street traders were recruited largely from the poorer children in
urban areas throughout England. Beyond these special groups, however, was a
large and shifting mass of working schoolchildren, employed in a host of jobs and
experiencing a range of different conditions.
Partial exemption from school in order to work half-time was possible in some areas
until the end of the First World War, although many local authorities (notably London)
had used enabling powers to prohibit the practice at an earlier date. The major
exceptions were rural areas and the cloth towns of the north, where half-time work
continued to be common until the end of the Edwardian period. Children who
availed themselves of the half-time provisions had first to pass an educational exam
and undergo a medical check-up. The latter was rather perfunctory, while the
former was an open farce. “I never knew a single case of a child failing this
examination”, remembers one woman.108 The future activist Harry Pollitt, himself a
half-timer, stated that, “the mill-owners who controlled the educational bodies took
106 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRashley.htm
107 Childs, M.J. Labour's Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian
England. Hambledon Press, 1992. ISBN 1852851031
108 Burnett, J. (ed.) Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from
the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane, 1982.
79
precious good care that the biggest dunce in the school could pass it”. 109
Unless a child was obviously physically unwell, there was little to prevent him being
sent half-time to the mill as early as ten years old in 1870, eleven in 1883, or twelve in
1899.110 Half-timers worked in the mills either mornings or afternoons on alternate
weeks, the early shift going from 6 am. to 12:30 pm., the later one from 1:30 pm. to 6
pm. 111
The consensus seems to be that morning work was the worst, especially in the winter.
It was a difficult job getting up at half past five to run to work and start at six o'clock
112; and half-timers were notorious for falling asleep in afternoon class.113 The
governments of the day took the view that the half-time system in general was
beneficial rather than harmful, being educative, remunerative, and character-
building. More plausibly, civil servants also noted that the prohibition of half-time
might simply, “swell the numbers of children employed in the irregular or unskilled
occupations which can be followed out of school hours”.114
There was, in fact, much to this latter argument because in areas where half-time
factory work was common, parents often used the provisions to get children working
half-time in other employments as well. Where half-time was prohibited, children
instead usually worked part time (often for long hours) after a full school day.115
Nonetheless, the defects of the half-time system were increasingly noted by social
workers in this period, and calls for its abolition became more strident. Half-time
employment usually precluded the accomplishment of any serious educational work
in the school portion of the week, since the children were often too tired to
concentrate. In addition, half-time work was probably physically harmful as half-
timers had a rate of physical disability five times that of their full-time schoolfellows.116
The working conditions for half-timers were also rather reminiscent of the early
industrial age. Half-timers were sometimes forced to sweep the looms while they
were running — “it was illegal, but it was done” 117 — and they seem to have often
been the victims of casual violence by overlookers and adult workers when they
were not quick, nimble, or subservient enough. 118 For these dubious ‘educative’
benefits, a half-timer earned an average of 1s.6d. in Lancashire and 1s.8d. in the
West Riding in 1908. 119
Although the numbers of children that were swept into this system generally fell
over the years, there were important fluctuations in the trend. While, for instance,
the number of half-timers fell from 110,654 in 1897 to 47,160 in 1906; the figure nearly
109 Pollitt, H. Serving my Time. London: Lawrence and Wishart 1940. The Poor Law Officers'
Journal. London: 1892.
110 Files at the Public Record Office, Kew, H045.10378.16273.4: Notes on the results of
employment of children, if full time was enforced, 1908.
111 Turner, B. About Myself: 1863-1930. London, Humphrey Toulmain, 1930.
112 Turner, B. Idem
113 Pollitt, H. Idem
114 Files at the Public Record Office, Kew, H045.10378.162723.4: Notes on the results of
employment of children, if full time was enforced, 1908.
115 Labour Gazette, vol. 1, no. 4, August 1893, 86.
116 Greenwood, A. The Health and Physique of Schoolchildren. London; PS King & Son, 1913; 58.
117 Childs, MJ. Idem. 75
118 Childs, MJ. Idem. 75
119 15 Files at the Public Record Office, Kew, H045.10378.162723.5: Labour Department to the
Board of Education, 11 May 1908.
80
doubled again to 84,298 the following year.120 Employers were not averse,
obviously, to employing these young children if the exigencies of trade demanded
it.
It would take prohibitory legislation to finally extinguish the practice. Having its
origin in the first attempts to regulate the lives of child labourers and to ensure that
some provision for their education was made, the half-time system is an example of
a reform that becomes in time an abuse. Once compulsory elementary education
had been introduced, the usefulness of the half-time system was apparent only to
those who directly profited from it, yet the fact that these included adult spinners
and weavers as well as employers delayed its abolition for half a century.
Street traders as a group also came under a good deal of investigation and were
subject to various attempts at regulation in the Edwardian period. The street Arab
of Dickens' time was, by the Edwardian era, seen as a sociological problem rather
than, as in the United States, a sentimental or exotic character practising the
bourgeois virtues of independence and initiative. Newspaper and match boys had
a tendency, said one report, to spend their earnings immediately on sweets and
cigarettes, music halls and gambling; 121 while another report noted that, “such
street employment also seriously interferes with the education of many children of
young age and frequently leads to begging, street gambling, sleeping out and
felony ... the majority of children sent to Certified Industrial Schools have been
engaged in street work.” 122
Many of the street traders came from homes where incomes were less than a pound per
week and yet it was claimed that few of the pennies earned on the street made their way
back to the family exchequer. In many cases, this was because there was no family.
Thirty percent of Liverpool street traders in 1900 came from homes in which one or
both parents had absconded, were dead, or were in gaol.123 It was said that,
“street trading has a disastrous effect on the character of every child who has the
misfortune to get there”, and many traders were thought to end up as, “race course
touts, ... travelling thieves, and loafers.” 124
In Birmingham in 1901, of 550 boys under sixteen who were engaged in street selling,
419 had been prosecuted for various offences in the previous six months.125 An
interdepartmental committee investigating the problem in 1901 produced
recommendations that were put into effect in the Employment of Children Act 1903.
Aimed mainly at street trading, the law prohibited children under eleven from any
selling and those under fourteen from selling before 6 am. or after 9 pm. These hours
could be moved inwards by local authorities, who were also given enabling powers
to establish a licensing system. In fact, since 1889 municipalities had had precisely
these powers under Section 3 of the Cruelty to Children Act, yet only four towns had
made use of them. 126
While the 1903 act set minimum standards throughout the country, an investigation
120 Simon, B. Education and the Labour Movement 1870-1920. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1965.
121 Departmental Committee on the Employment of Children Act 1903: Report, 12.
122 Files at the Public Record Office, Kew, H045.9B13.B7311A.45: Memorial of Salford School Board
to H.H. Asquith, Home Secretary, 1893.
123 Burke, T. The Street-Trading Children of Liverpool. Contemporary Review, 68; 1900; 720-2.
124 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress: vol. 20: 725. Jackson,C. Report on
Boy Labour, PP 1909 xliv [Cd. 4632].
125 Ibid.
126 Files at the Public Record Office, Kew, H045.9B13.B731A.21: Notes on the Proposed
Employment of Schoolchildren Act, 1903.
81
by the Home Office seven years later revealed that the act was a dead letter in
most of England's larger cities. By-laws had rarely been passed and were not
enforced where they had been.127 As one former street seller notes of the
supposedly licensed and regulated Liverpool, “a boy could stop there ‘til eleven
o'clock or twelve o'clock at night — makes no difference”.128
Buying twenty-six half-penny papers for 8½d. and selling them for 1s. 1d. plus tips,
and often employing younger boys, the street seller was not an easily regulated
animal.129 The fluid nature of his work and his ability to lay low whenever
enforcement was fitfully attempted ensured his continued presence while profits
were to be made.
Although one author thought large sums were to be made in the job, 130 the reality
was more prosaic. Most boys earned between 3s. and 8s. for a very lengthy week. 131
Most ended up, not as racecourse touts or thieves, but as van boys or as boy
labourers in textile or other factories. The pay in such occupations was just as good
as or better than in street trading and more assured, and the hours were usually
shorter. Working schoolboys who sold papers in the mornings and evenings usually
did so from the pressures of economic necessity and from the desire to furnish
themselves with small luxuries that their parents were unable to provide. Trading
rarely became a career once better prospects were in view; for most boys, this
coincided with their departure from the elementary school. 132
Work, then, for most boys was not the inescapable mechanical drudgery it would
soon become, but often a refreshing and exciting experience after the world of the
classroom. Moreover, it provided the means whereby the boy could purchase a
measure of independence from the potentially restrictive family. School and its ethos
dropped behind the horizon of childhood for the majority of boys, and sizeable sums
were found for the first time in these boys' pockets. It was against this backdrop of
new-found independence from family and school, relative wealth, and job
transience that the working class youth sought his entertainment and amusement. 133
127 Departmental Committee on the Employment of Schoolchildren Act 1903: Report, 9.

128 Child, MJ. Idem. 76
129 Departmental Committee on the Employment of Schoolchildren Act 1903: Report, 10.
130 Russell, CEB. Manchester Boys: Sketches of Manchester Lads at Work and Play. Manchester:
Manchester University Press 1905. 45-6. (Fourteen year olds earning 15s. per week were said to
be common. Childs, Idem 76)
131 Childs, Idem, 76
82
Addendum 1—
1— A life in the factory. 134
Life in the textile factory was an onerous one, made worse by episodic periods of
unemployment which could quickly consume a family's hard won savings. Alan Crosby 135
has very ably documented the vicissitudes and family problems in the life of diarist and
mechanic Benjamin Shaw. Public health was virtually non-existent before 1850 and
painstakingly slow to develop thereafter, whilst the concept of a balanced diet was
virtually unknown.
It had been clear since at least the American War of Independence that the textile industry
was constantly passing through a succession of good and bad periods — the Trade Cycle
— though this was as yet little understood. The Lancashire cotton industry had long
outgrown home demand, and when Europe and America developed their own industries
the trade became dangerously concentrated in the Indian and Chinese markets. Any
disruption in these distant parts — such as the failure of the monsoon in India — would lead
to a collapse of demand, and the flooding of secondary markets as merchants unloaded
their stocks there. With more goods than could be sold the price would fall below their
manufacturing cost. Mills in Lancashire would then become uneconomical leading to
closure, unemployment and bankruptcy.
In 1861 disaster struck; failure of the Indian monsoon was quickly followed by the flooding of
all markets with unsold goods, whilst the price of raw cotton soared when the American
Civil War threatened supplies from the Southern states. The long period of unemployment in
the early 1860s became known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine. In Preston and district it
was particularly severe; in December 1862, 22,400 people were relieved by the Board of
Guardians, and unemployment peaked at 15,000 in the following April. It demonstrated
very clearly the dangers of towns that depended on a single industry.
In the dying years of the century the industry began its final phase of mill construction, a
process recently traced by Colin Dickinson.136. On the eve of the First World War Lancashire
accounted for a quarter of Britain's trade, exported over seven million yards of cloth, and
employed 600,000 people.
Addendum 2—
2— Tables of Parish Apprentice Numbers
Table 1 The distribution of parish apprentices in early textile production.

Name Location Product/activity Number of parish
apprentices [known
or best estimate]
Akers and Beever Salford, Lancs Cotton spinning 200 approx
George Andrew Stockport, Cheshire Calico printing 9
Thomas Andrew Harpurhey, Lancs Calico printing 5
Samuel Ashton Middleton, Lancs Cotton manufacture 78
Atherton and Chipping, Lancs Cotton manufacture 9
Harrison
John Birch Backbarrow, Lancs Cotton spinning 256
Benyon and co Shrewsbury, Salop Linen manufacture 15
Bott, Bower and co Nantwich, Cheshire Cotton spinning 41
135 Crosby, A.G. (Ed.) Family Records of Benjamin Shaw, Mechanic of Dent, Dolphinholme and
Preston, 1772-1841. Stroud. Glos.;Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1991.
136 Dickinson, T.C. Cotton Mills in Preston: The Power Behind the Thread. Lancaster, Carnegie
Publishing Ltd, United Kingdom, 2007. ISBN: 1859360963
83
apprentices [known
or best estimate]
John Bott Tutbury, Staffs Cotton spinning 108
Brosser Macclesfield, Cheshire Cotton manufacture 8
Jeremiah Bury Stockport, Cheshire Cotton manufacture 64
Calrow Bury, Lancs Cotton manufacture 6
Benjamin Churchill Loughborough, Leics Silk and cotton 40
manufacture
Benjamin Clegg Oldham, Lancs Cotton spinning Est. 50
Cooper and Tissington, Derbyshire Cotton spinning Est 12
Matchett
Cowpe, Hollins, Mansfield, Notts Cotton spinning 17
Oldknow
Cresswell Edale, Derbys Cotton manufacture 44
Davison and Arnold, Notts Worsted manufacture 262
Hawksley
Dicken and Finlow Burton, Staffs Cotton manufacture 66
Douglas Holywell, Flintshire Cotton spinning 98+
Douglas Pendleton, Lancs Cotton spinning 151+
Fowler Tamworth, Staffs Cotton manufacture 5
Jeremiah Garnett Clitheroe, Lancs Cotton manufacture 22
William Garth Colne, Lancs Cotton manufacture 12
John Gorton Bury, Lancs Cotton spinning 38
Gorton and Cuckney, Notts Cotton spinning 32
Thompson
Samuel Greg Styal, Cheshire Cotton spinning 150
John Haigh Marsden, Yorks Cotton manufacture 101
Charles Harding Tamworth, Staffs Cotton spinning 39
Hardnumm, Norris Bury, Lancs Cotton spinning 23
and co
Harrison and Leyland Euxton, Lancs Cotton twist 40
manufacture
Thomas Haslam Bury, Lancs Cotton spinning 40
Haywood and Macclesfield, Cheshire Linen manufacture 73
Palfreyman
John Head Masham, Yorks Worsted manufacture 16
R&G Hodgkinson Worksop, Notts Cotton weaving 29
Isaac Hodgson Lancaster, Lancs Cotton spinning 105
David Holt Manchester, Lancs Cotton spinning 67+
John Edward Hudson Rochdale, Lancs Cotton spinning 29
Joseph Hulse Shirland, Derbys Cotton weaving 4
Thomas Jewsbury Measham, Derbys Cotton/calico 230
spinning and weaving
Lambert Lowdham, Notts Cotton/hosiery 41
Marshall, Hutton and Shrewsbury, Salop Linen manufacture 82
Hives
Marsland and Kelsall Glossop, Derbys Cotton manufacture 14
Nathaniel Mason Iver, Bucks Cotton spinning 15
George Otley, Yorks Cotton spinning 210
Merryweather
George Manchester, Lancs Cotton weaving 90
Merryweather
Monteith, Bogle Glasgow Cotton manufacture 54
John Morley Chingford, Essex Silk manufacture 18
Ellis Needham Tideswell, Derbys Cotton manufacture 95
Newton Cressbrook, Derbys Cotton manufacture 300+ [including after
1820]
Samuel Oldknow Mellor, Derbys Cotton spinning 100+
James Pattison Congleton, Cheshire Silk manufacture 93
Joseph Peel Tamworth, Staffs Cotton manufacture 63+
84
apprentices [known
or best estimate]
Robert Peel Summerseat, Lancs Cotton spinning 47+
Robert Peel Radcliffe Bridge, Lancs Cotton spinning 37+
Robert Peel Bury, Lancs Cotton spinning 42+
Robert Peel Bury Lancs Cotton spinning 102+
Robinson Papplewick, Notts Cotton manufacture 23
Sewell and McMurdo Hounslow Heath, Flax spinning 31
Mddx
Shute, Thomas Rock Watford, Herts Silk throwster 10
John and William Wigan, Lancs Cotton spinning 6
Singleton
Benjamin Smart Wilverton, Warwks Cotton spinning 28
Strutt Rickmansworth, Herts Cotton manufacture 23
Toplis Cuckney, Notts Worsted manufacture 762
Walton Twist Walton-le-Dale, Lancs Cotton manufacture 80
John Watson Preston, Lancs Cotton manufacture 143
Thomas Watson Watford, Herts Silk manufacture 10
John Weir Wokingham Berks Silk manufacture 17
Wells, Middleton Sheffield, Yorks Cotton spinning 100
John Whitaker Burley, Yorks Cotton spinner 200
James Whitelegg Manchester, Lancs Cotton weaving 6
Charles Woollan Hertford, Herts Silk throwster 11
Woolley and Matlock. Derbys Cotton spinning 7
McQueen
Workman, Brummel Dartford, Kent Cotton spinning 18
and Hall
Thomas Yates Tamworth, Staffs Cotton spinning and 17
weaving
Table 2 The estimated proportion of parish apprentices in a sample of textile factories
Firm Date Number of Number Estimated Percentage of

parish of ‘free’ number of parish apprentices
apprentices children employees in total
Samuel Ashton 1803 110 + 4 115 [Rose] 95
servants
John Birch, 1797 210 50? 310? 70
Backbarrow
John Bott,
Tutbury
Jeremiah Bury, 1790 200 50 300 67

Stockport
Clayton and 20 90 180 12
Walshman,
Keighley
Cowpe, Hollins, 1802 55 ?5 60 90
Oldknow
Davidson and 1800 60 [Rose] ? 600? 50
Hawksley 280 [1805: kh
Douglas, 1796 300 30 380 80
Holywell
Douglas,
Pendleton
Gorton, Bury 48 Rose
Samuel Greg, 1790 150? ? 205 [mostly
Styal apps?] Rose
Haigh, 1802 90 100 90
Marsden
85
Firm Date Number of Number Estimated Percentage of
parish of ‘free’ number of parish apprentices
apprentices children employees in total
Hodgson, 137 [1818]
Caton Rose
Hollins and Co, 1802 60 [Rose] 240 [Rose] 25
Pleasley
Merryweather 1802 260 20 300 87
and Whitaker
Needham, 1802
Litton
Toplis 1804 600 0 600 [plus a 99
handful of
overlookers]
Walton Twist 1819 [Hof 80 [Rose] 175 [Rose]
Co L]
Wells, 1802 150 [mostly 10 180 85
Middleton, non local]
Sheffield
Addendum 3—
3— Is child labour the lesser of two evils?
Although the sort of child labour considered above, whether with good employers or bad
ones, is no longer a feature of our modern society in the United Kingdom — it does have
comparable situations in other parts of the world. It is for these areas that there has to be a
discussion on whether child labour in those countries is the lesser of two evils. If the
alternative to child labour (even of a hazardous type) is starvation and health hazards of a
different type or a shorter life span, what is the philosophical and ethical answer?
In a recent report issued on World Day Against Child Labour (12th June 2011), the
International Labour Organisation has warned that a high number of children are still
trapped in hazardous jobs. The report says that some 115 million children — more than half
of the 215 million child labourers worldwide — are engaged in hazardous work.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest proportion of children in hazardous work relative to the
overall number of children in the region, according to the report, while Asia has the largest
number of children engaged in dangerous work. In Pakistan, for instance, the existence of
child labour laws has done little to improve the fate of children.
The international community says it hopes to eliminate the problem by 2016, but is that
realistic? Is working, even in hazardous conditions, the lesser of two evils? Do children in
poor countries have alternative options?
The International Labour Organization (ILO) is to mark this year’s World Day against Child
Labour with events in more than 50 countries and will study a new report by Susan Gunn,
Child Labour in Hazardous Work. The report analyzes the latest trends and estimates of
children in hazardous work, and the risk to their health from such work as agriculture,
mining, construction, manufacturing, domestic work and waste-picking. 137, 138
137 english.aljazeera.net/programmes/.../06/20116137124708847.html
138 http://www.ilo.org/ilc/ILCSessions/100thSession/media-centre/press-
releases/WCMS_156353/lang--en/index.htm
86
139
Harmful work and the ‘worst forms’ of child labour
The consequences of child labour for the children involved are wide ranging. In many
cases it stops children from attending school which continues the cycle of poverty. It can
also cause severe physical or psychological harm to the child. In its worst forms, child labour
involves children being separated from their families, living in slavery-like conditions or being
exposed to serious dangers and illnesses from a very early age. For these reasons, it is
crucial that national and international laws related to child labour are implemented to the
fullest.
More than half of the 218 million children who work are doing so in dangerous condition in
sectors as diverse as agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, service industries,
hotels, bars, restaurants, fast food establishments, and domestic service. It is found in both
industrialised and developing countries.
An estimated 8.4 million children are trapped in what the ILO calls the ‘worst forms’ of child
labour, which include: forced labour, trafficking, debt bondage, use of children for
prostitution or the production of pornographic material, use of children for trafficking drugs
and other illicit activities, as well as involvement in armed conflict. All these unconditional
‘worst forms’ must be stopped with the utmost urgency and no changes in the working
conditions can make such activities more acceptable for children to perform.
The largest category within the ‘worst forms’ is ‘hazardous child labour’ — children working
in dangerous conditions in sectors as diverse as agriculture, mining, construction,
manufacturing, service industries, hotels, bars, restaurants, fast food establishments, and
domestic service. It is found in both industrialised and developing countries.
It is crucial, then, to know how harmful work is, in order to know what should be done about
it. In the above ‘worst forms’ the harm is inevitable and so every urgent effort must be
made to help the child leave this work. In other situations of work (for example some forms
of weaving), it may be possible to prevent harm from occurring (e.g. decrease hours, do
not weave in confined spaces, avoid chemicals). However, some work does not violate
rights and can in fact contribute to the realization of rights, so can be encouraged (e.g.
light, part-time work outside of school time, to help provide for the family). It is important to
remember that we should also ask working children themselves in order to determine what
types of work are harmful to them.
Areas where Children are Exposed to Hazardous Work
Children in Malawi are still engaged in hazardous work as the country currently has a poor
social security system due to high poverty levels and limited understanding of effects of
child labour on the children. This revelation comes in the work of a recent resolution passed
by civil society in the country at a national child labour conference organised by child
centred organisation, Plan Malawi.
According to the resolution the country has continued to register increasing child labour
violations as presently district labour offices that were supposed to monitor the problem on
the ground are under resourced to handle child labour from a preventative perspective.
With an increasing number of orphans and vulnerable children due to the HIV and AIDS
pandemic, many children have been going into hazardous work. Despite efforts by
stakeholders to withdraw these children from hazardous work environments the efforts have
not been fruitful as they have not been equipped with skills for rehabilitation in their
respective homes.
139 Save the Children. Is it Legal?

http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/eyetoeye/childlabour/index.htm
87
It is considered that there is need for political will and increased concerted efforts by both
government and other civil society organisations to addressing child labour in the country
such as the creation of a national policy and code of conduct on child work, development
of child labour inspection programs and establishment of a national network on child
labour. Violations of child labour rights are not only a child rights issue but a broader human
rights concern.
Those involved are guided by the best interests of the child and the various instruments such
as the convention on the rights of the child, the African charter on the rights and welfare of
the child and the ILO conventions 138 and 182 on the minimum entry age into employment
and the worst forms of child labour to which Malawi is signatory.
Malawian children are currently not equipped with life skills that can enable them to stand
up for themselves. Meanwhile the Malawi Law Commission has been called to speed up
the ongoing debate on child trafficking bill to ensure that children in the country are
protected from hazardous labour. 140
For a report on other areas where Children are Exposed to Hazardous Work see: Children in
hazardous work: What we know, what we need to do. 141
Addendum 4—
4— Factory Acts 1802-
1802-1901 142
T h e F a c t o r i e s A c t 1 8 0 2 (citation 42 Geo. III c.73, sometimes also called the ‘Health

and Morals of Apprentices Act’) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which
regulated factory conditions, especially in regard to child workers in cotton and woollen
mills. It was the culmination of a movement originating in the 18th century, where reformers
had tried to push several acts through Parliament to improve the health of the workers and
apprentices. The act had the following provisions:
• Factory owners must obey the law.

• All factory rooms must be well ventilated and lime-washed twice a year.
• Children must be supplied with two complete outfits of clothing.
• Children between the ages of 9 and 13 can work maximum 8 hours.
• Adolescents between 14 and 18 years old can work maximum 12 hours.
• Children under 9 years old are not allowed to work but they must be enrolled in the
elementary schools that factory owners are required to establish.
• The work hours of children must begin after 6 a.m., end before 9 p.m., and not
exceed 12 hours a day.
• Children must be instructed in reading, writing and arithmetic for the first four years
of work.
• Male and female children must be housed in different sleeping quarters.
• Children may not sleep more than two per bed.
• On Sundays children are to have an hour's instruction in Christianity.
• Factory owners are also required to tend to any infectious diseases.
Fines of between £2 and £5 could be imposed on factory owners, but the Act established
no inspection regime to enforce conditions. The act failed to provide a clear law of the
hours one is permitted to work and failed to include supervision to make sure the law was
being followed. The law was largely ignored by the factories but paved the way for more
Factory Acts to follow. Richard Oastler in 1804 commented on the Act:
140 Madalitso Kateta. http://www.mywage.com/main/women-and-work/children-and-

work/malawi-children-exposed-to-hazardous-work
141 http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/ilo-bookstore/order-
online/books/WCMS_155428/langen/index.htm
142 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_Acts
88
“This Act gives little authority to parliament and less restriction on factories. How can factories
not resist to break the law?”
Mills, etc. Act 1819
The 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act (59 Geo. III c66) stated that no children under 9
were to be employed and that children aged 9–16 years were limited to 12 hours' work per
day. iii
Labour in Cotton Mills Act 1831
An Act to repeal the Laws relating to Apprentices and other young Persons employed in
Cotton Factories and in Cotton Mills, and to make further Provisions in lieu thereof (1 & 2 Will.
IV c39) No night work for persons under the age of 21.
Labour of Children, etc., in Factories Act 1833
The Factory Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV) c103 was an attempt to establish a regular working day
in the textile industry. The act had the following provisions:
• Children (ages 14–18) must not work more than 12 hours a day with an hour lunch
break. Note that this enabled employers to run two 'shifts' of child labour each
working day in order to employ their adult male workers for longer.
• Children (ages 9–13) must not work more than 8 hours with an hour lunch break.
• Children (ages 9–13) must have two hours of education per day.
• Outlawed the employment of children under 9 in the textile industry.
• Children under 18 must not work at night.
• Provided for routine inspections of factories.
Factories Act 1844
The Factories Act 1844 (citation 7 & 8 Vict. c. 15) further reduced hours of work for children
and applied the many provisions of the Factory Act of 1833 to women. The act applied to
the textile industry and included the following provisions:
• Children 9–13 years could work for 9 hours a day with a lunch break.
• Women and young people now worked the same number of hours. They could
work for no more than 12 hours a day during the week, including one and a half
hours for meals, and 9 hours on Sundays.
• Factory owners must wash factories with lime every fourteen months.
• Ages must be verified by surgeons.
• Accidental death must be reported to a surgeon and investigated.
• Thorough records must be kept regarding the provisions of the act.
• Machinery was to be fenced in.
Factory Act 1847
After the Whigs gained power in Parliament, the Ten Hour Bill (also known as the Ten Hour
Act) was passed becoming the Factories Act 1847 (citation 10 & 11 Vict c. 29). This law
limited the work week in textile mills (and other textile industries except lace and silk
production) for women and children under 18 years of age. Each work week contained 63
hours effective 1 July 1847 and was reduced to 58 hours effective 1 May 1848. In effect, this
law limited the workday to 10 hours.
This law was successfully passed due to the contributions of the Ten Hours Movement. This
campaign was established during the 1830s and was responsible for voicing demands
towards limiting the work week in textile mills. The leaders of the movement were Richard
Oastler (who led the campaign outside Parliament), as well as John Fielden and Lord
Shaftesbury (who led the campaign inside Parliament). Of course, employers found a ten
89
hour limit acceptable as it meant that workers could be run in shifts, keeping the factory
open for up to twenty hours a day.
Factory Act 1850
This Act (citation 13 & 14 Vict. c. 54) redefined the workday which had been established
under the Factory Acts of 1844 and 1847. No longer could employers decide the hours of
work. The workday was changed to correspond with the maximum number of hours that
women and children could work. The act included the following provisions.
• Children and Women could only work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the summer and 7
a.m. to 7 p.m. in the winter.
• All work would end on Saturday at 2 p.m..
• The work week was extended from 58 hours to 60 hours.
Hours of work for age 9 to 18 was changed to 10.5 hours night and day.
Factory Act 1856
This Act (citation 13 & 14 Vict. c. 54) redefined the workday which had been established
under the Factory Acts of 1844 and 1847. No longer could employers decide the hours of
work. The workday was changed to correspond with the maximum number of hours that
women and children could work. The act included the following provisions.
• Children and women could only work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the summer and 7
a.m. to 7 p.m. in the winter
• All work would end on Saturday at 2 p.m.
• The work week was extended from 58 hours to 60 hours
Hours of work for age 9 to 18 was changed to 10 hours night and day.
Factory Act 1878
The Factory and Workshop Act 1878 (41 & 42 Vict. c. 16) brought all the previous Acts
together in one consolidation.
• Now the Factory Code applied to all trades.

• No child anywhere under the age of 10 was to be employed.
• Compulsory education for children up to 10 years old.
• 10-14 year olds could only be employed for half days.
• Women were to work no more than 56 hours per week.
Factory Act 1891
The Factory Act 1891 made the requirements for fencing machinery more stringent. Under
the heading Conditions of Employment were two considerable additions to previous
legislation: the first is the prohibition on employers to employ women within four weeks after
confinement; the second the raising the minimum age at which a child can be set to work
from ten to eleven.
Factory and Workshop Act 1901
Minimum working age is raised to 12 the act also introduced legislation regarding
education of children, meal times, and fire escapes.
<<< The End>>>

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The

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard

There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud

Languages diverse, horrible dialects,

And I, who had my head with horror bound,

No fame of them the world permits to be;

Dante, Inferno: Canto III

"Whatever you neglected to do unto one of the least of these,

Not only that, but at their stage of physical

Another occupation that caught up poor children was that of

In the early factories candles were used for lighting and as

No area outside London contained the

Each of the textile factory enterprises

This is not written as a comprehensive record of child poverty, its associated

Poor Parish Children

We know more about poverty in the 19th century than in

Given the role of child labour in the British Industrial Revolution,

Breakfast — same as Supper.

Children under seven years of age:

Children of poor families, orphans and widows’

15 Lane, J. Apprenticeship in England, 1600-1914. London; UCL Press, 1996.

Is it worth the waiting for?

Oliver: Lionel Bart

33 Neate, A. R. The St Marylebone Workhouse and Institution, 1730-1965 London: St Marylebone

This section deals with details of the factories and the

The industrial revolution created a huge demand for female

What happened to children within these factory walls

Child Employment, 1851-188143

Industry & Age Cohort 1851 1861 1871 1881

41 Ure, A. The Philosophy of Manufactures. London, 1835.

In the mid-1780's, an Anglican clergyman named Edmund Cartwright developed a steam-

Illustration of scavengers and piecers at work that

David Rowland worked as a scavenger at a textile mill in Manchester. He was interviewed

Charles Aberdeen worked in a Manchester cotton factory and in 1832 he wrote:

He describes the work of a piecer:

J. R. Clynes tells of how he became a piecer in Oldham in 1879:

and Reports on Child Welfare

William Charles Lambert & Francis Lambert —

Lowdham Mill, Nottingham

An 18th-century stage wagon similar to the one in which pauper children

In his Memoir of Robert Blincoe, John Brown wrote:

56 Beckett, J. (ed.), A Centenary History of Nottingham. Manchester: Manchester University Press,

Lowdham Mill (after closure)

An artist’s impression of Lowdham Mill (Date unknown)

One of the overseers at Lowdham was a Mr Smith, a cotton-spinner. He was an unfriendly

Things could have been worse, but only just. When

The full story came out before a parliamentary inquiry of

Ellis Needham and Litton Mill, Tideswell, Derbyshire

Another parish apprentice who found himself at Litton Mill was

In March 1860 William Adam

In dozens of mills in Derbyshire and elsewhere, parish apprentices were maltreated.

Matthew Dickie had Ravenstor built in Miller's Dale as his

In 1820 the tiny cottages in Ravensdale (known locally as

The scenery around is magnificent.

Above the mill is Cressbrook Hall, the

Ainsworth, Catterall & Co at Backbarrow Mill in Lancashire

Backbarrow Mill also known as: Ainsworth Cotton Mill

In the photo adjacent, you can see the Mill in

BACKBARROW MILL ( From a painting by(Charles Towne — 1763 - 1840)

Robert Peel and Radcliffe Bridge Mill

The first documented reference to industry in

Messrs W Toplis & Co Ltd — Nottingham

Greenholme Mills — Iron Row,

Burley-in-Wharfedale, was originally a small

87 Augusta, A. & Ramsay, W.,( Idem)

91 Warwick, D. & Warwick, M. Greenholme Mills Remembered Again. Burley-in-Wharfedale