High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The new Licensing Bill came into that category. It was not the most propitious of starts for a man of high principle such as Cross, as it was designed to get the brewing trade off the Conservative party’s back. Cross felt compelled to admit ‘the evil effect of drunkenness . . . the crime, misery, and wretchedness’ inflicted on society because of the widespread availability of cheap alcohol.27 Even with the measures the previous administration had taken, there were still, in 1873, around 182,000 people proceeded against for drunkenness. English consumption had been prodigious; also in 1873, an estimated 63,500,000 bushels of malt, 40,000,000 gallons of spirits and 18,000,000 gallons of wine had been consumed. The population had increased: but between 1853 and 1873 the number of public houses had risen from 87,625 to 97,132.28 Cross alluded to the growth in real wages as a factor behind the growth in consumption; but also blamed ‘the want of a happy home’. He added: ‘If you want to go to the bottom of this evil, you must go further. You must improve the education of the people, and try to induce them to learn that there are other enjoyments than the mere sensual enjoyments of the moment, and you will do this if you make their homes happy and comfortable.’29 This presaged his own plans to improve working-class housing; and he used that as an excuse for liberalising the licensing laws, saying that better housing ‘will do more to improve sobriety than any measures you may pass to prevent the sale of intoxicating liquors.’ The cart was, however, being placed before the horse.

  Cross acknowledged that some wanted to ban alcohol altogether, an idea he called ‘impossible’ as one could not ‘legislate beyond public opinion.’ There were also those who wanted no restrictions at all, something that had been tried in Liverpool, where anyone who had asked for a licence had been given one. The result had been endemic drunkenness. So he conceded the need for regulation, notably about opening hours, preferring it to be left to local judgement rather than imposed nationally. This would allow some pubs to remain open longer, the measure most sought after by the brewers. They would be further propitiated by his plans to reduce the penalties on keeping a disorderly house, and to make it easier for people of good character to enter the licensed trade. It was a mark of his subtlety as a politician that this cynical piece of legislation embraced a decent Conservative principle – that of providing powers to local authorities rather than compelling them from the centre to act – and was also presented as paving the way for wider, less partisan reforms.

  Once he applied his considerable mind to factory legislation it became clear how far ideas of treatment of the working class had developed since Shaftesbury’s battles in the Commons in the 1840s, and how far the question of child labour had now become indivisible from that of education. With the rise of the middle class, and the spread of more progressive values, attitudes had changed sharply over the preceding 30 years. A nation that prided itself on being more civilised found some social abuses so shocking that even a Tory government committed to persuasion rather than compulsion had, in certain instances, literally to lay down the law. The 1874 Factory Act further regulated the work of women and children in textile mills. Liberals continued, with some justification, to argue that the educational provisions successive Acts had made for children in factories had had only a limited effect. The Commons was told that of 963 young women aged from sixteen to twenty-three who had been to a sewing school in Manchester, only 199 could read and write.30 Before the 1870 Education Act 2,000 children of working age in Stockport who had supposedly had part-time schooling included fewer than 400 who could read. However, better education was not why the Liberals tried to amend Cross’s Factory Bill in the Commons: it was the enlightened question of the health of the 574,000 females over the age of thirteen engaged at that time in the textile industry.

  Anthony Mundella, a Sheffield MP who would serve in Gladstone’s third and fourth administrations, argued that to have girls aged between thirteen and eighteen put to work (and there were many under the age of thirteen, illegally working in the mills too) was to endanger their health at a vulnerable time in their lives. Mundella said the strain on them would result ‘in phthisis, in indigestion, in pulmonary diseases of various kinds, and in a great deal of uterine disease’.31 He added that while maternity could not possibly be a disqualification from working, ‘when women, after being delivered of children, return to the mill at the end of three days surely something ought to be done in order to prevent the danger and the indecency of their so doing.’ Mundella said, however, that his proposed amendment would mean more work for women and not less, because of raising the lower age limit on child workers.

  One theme familiar from the 1840s remained consistent: strong opposition to a reduction in hours from MPs who argued that British competitiveness would suffer in comparison with the Continent, where, it was alleged, the average hours of work were twelve a day.32 Cross, knowing the cotton districts well, proceeded with caution. The last reports of the Factory Inspectors showed that 4,500,000 people depended, directly or indirectly, on the prosperity of the cotton industry: so government interfered at its peril. There were 2,484 mills in Great Britain, with £87 million of capital tied up in them.33 A restriction in hours would damage the trade; it would damage the banks that had lent it money; it would lower the wages of operatives. He adduced figures showing a vast increase in the consumption of cotton in continental markets over the preceding thirty or so years, but with British exports only accounting for a small part of that increase. A further anti-competitive move would have dire consequences. Cross was prepared to consider amendments to the Factory Bill, to avoid agitation, but wanted more time to consult. It was a measure of his reasonableness, and the respect in which he was held on both sides of the House, that Mundella’s amendment was withdrawn. By the middle of June 1874 Cross was ready with his bill to regulate the work of women in textile factories. Women, children and those under eighteen would be prevented from working more than fifty-six hours a week, over five and a half days, with an extra half-hour allowed at the end of the week for cleaning. No one would be allowed to be in a factory for more than twelve hours a day, with two of those twelve hours set aside for mealtimes and ‘recreation’. Cross regarded the ‘great safeguard’ on the health of women and children that they should not be allowed to work for more than four and a half hours without a meal break.34 He also proposed to raise from nine to ten the age at which a child might start work part-time in a factory – for some of the time had to be given over to education – and from thirteen to fourteen those who could be employed full-time.

  Even these quite mild regulations inspired opposition, led by Henry Fawcett, who would be Postmaster General in Gladstone’s second ministry. He wanted to know why the textile manufacturers were deemed so ‘peculiarly deficient in independence and wanting in capacity to manage their own affairs’ that they required to be legislated against in this way.35 He claimed that if all the women went home an hour before the men the factories would have to come to a halt, for the jobs done by each were dependent upon the other. He also asserted that medical evidence supplied to the government showed that the dangers to women’s health in the mills were often overstated: 163 doctors had been examined by a Royal Commission into the question, and 131 stated that the hours worked by women were not too long.

  More to the point, that Commission had itself admitted that three-quarters of women working in textiles were employed in branches of the trade that were ‘not prejudicial to health’.36 He ridiculed Shaftesbury, accusing him of exaggeration, and of always having ‘some anonymous bogey or undivulged monster’ of a mill-owner ‘at hand wherewith to terrify and alarm the timid and the prejudiced.’ As with so many other perceived social problems, Fawcett thought the key to better female and child health was better housing, not shorter hours. He cited cases of mill-owners who had built new housing stock for their operatives, and who had seen the beneficial results – one, a Mr Hugh Mason from Manchester, ended up with his area having a lower death rate ‘than was to be found in the healthies
t rural districts in England.’37 What was needed was more mains drainage, and fewer cesspools. Fawcett attacked the logic of the government’s legislating just for the factories: why not, he asked, for women who work in shops, or women in agricultural areas ‘bedraggled in mud and wet up to their middles when weeding a turnip field’?38

  The latter especially would, of course, affect the landed interest that supported the government. And, in reducing working hours, even a careful government had to start somewhere. Also, as Mundella pointed out, the 1870 Education Act was a ‘dead letter’ unless the hours children could work were further restricted.39 He also spoke up for a clause forbidding the return of a woman to her factory for six weeks after her confinement: saying that when such a measure had been introduced in Alsace, the infant mortality rate fell by 80 per cent the following year. Not to protect women in this and other ways would render Britain like Belgium, where there were no restrictions on what a woman could do or for how long she could do it, ‘and the result was that while the women in that country were working in the mines the men were drinking in the cabarets.’40 Cross, winding up, agreed with such contentions: the future of the British people would be improved, and their prosperity with it, if their women were not worn out by work, and their children not weakened as a result. The second reading passed by a handsome majority.

  In one respect, and despite attempts to legislate in the past, there was one trade in which children were still being cruelly exploited. Two Acts regulating chimney-sweeps had been introduced in 1834 and 1864 to improve the lives of the boys who worked for them. The first such Act had, indeed, been in 1788. However, in the winter of 1875 a fourteen-year-old boy called George Brewster died in a flue in Cambridge, where his master had sent him. The coroner brought in a verdict of manslaughter against the master. A child of ten had died in 1874 in a chimney in Gateshead, which Shaftesbury, who continued to campaign against such treatment, did not hesitate to call ‘murder’.41 The problem did not exist in big cities: it seemed only to happen in smaller towns. The boy in Cambridge had died of suffocation because of soot in his lungs and windpipe. The problem was, Shaftesbury thought, that some magistrates were using their discretion not to refer the cases to a higher court.

  This scandal drew out more information. It turned out that many of chimneys in Limerick were swept by climbing-boys, and the law there was largely evaded. Where such cases of flouting the law arose, the government ordered the local authorities to enforce the existing regulations. Shaftesbury, however, decided the present law was not tight enough, the enforcement inadequate and the penalties insufficient. He introduced his own bill to seek to tighten things up. At its second reading on 11 May 1875 Shaftesbury said the earlier measures had been characterised by ‘timidity’.42 The 1834 Act had banned anyone under the age of twenty-one from climbing a flue, but had been widely evaded. The worst excesses of the old days – parents selling their children of four, five or six years old to climb up chimneys – had not, however, gone after 1834: hence the measure of 1864, an Act initiated by Shaftesbury himself. An inquiry in 1863 had found children as young as four-and-a-half being trained for the job, flouting completely the existing law: and the nature of the training had been horrific.

  A Mr Ruff of Nottingham, described as a master sweep, had said: ‘No one knows the cruelty which a boy has to undergo in learning. The flesh must be hardened. This must be done by rubbing it, chiefly on the elbows and knees, with the strongest brine, close by a hot fire. You must stand over them with a cane, or coax them by a promise of a halfpenny if they will stand a few more rubs. At first they will come back from their work streaming with blood, and the knees looking as if the caps had been pulled off. Then they must be rubbed with brine again.’43 There were further tales of small children being whipped, beaten, kicked and stamped upon by nailed boots, and in the process often scarred for life, until they would do exactly what they were told. Another master sweep, a man called Stransfield, had said: ‘In learning a child you must use violence. I shudder now when I think of it. I have gone to bed with my knees and elbows scabbed and raw, and the inside of my thighs all scarified.’44 He added: ‘In some boys I have heard the flesh does not harden for years.’ Children had their flesh rubbed with a ‘lotion’ of old urine and hot cinders.

  Some boys were sent up flues that were on fire. Since 1840, twenty-three boys had been stifled. However, these were boys employed by sweeps who had not invested in the modern equipment common in big cities such as London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and numerous other towns where no climbing-boy had been found for decades. Where boys were used, magistrates found excuses not to take the crime seriously. They either refused to believe that patently small boys were under the age of twenty-one; or chose to believe that the flue in which a boy had been was in his own house, and he had a perfect right to be up it. Shaftesbury believed that magistrates who refused to enforce the law used the services of such boys themselves.

  Shaftesbury wanted the law changed so that no one could carry on the trade of chimney-sweep without being licensed: and with the licence contingent on inspection by a competent authority. His idea was welcomed in the Lords: and the Bishop of London, John Jackson, further suggested that it should be an obligation on the part of householders to ensure their sweep was licensed before they used him, with their being culpable if he was not. Once the bill had been waved through the Lords, Shaftesbury asked Cross to get it through the Commons.45 Cross had to do relatively little: there was no opposition to the bill, which reached the statute book with ease. Victorian sensibility was at last turning against the exploitation of children.

  V

  It was one thing not to exploit children, however, but quite another to maintain a laissez-faire approach towards them that would lead to those near the bottom of the ladder remaining there in ignorance and squalor. The provisions of Forster’s 1870 Education Act, now quite rightly regarded as a landmark of social reform and of the advancement of the disadvantaged, had not reached all the country’s children, and for that reason continued to provoke argument. Because of the absence of compulsion, those who saw education as a necessity inevitably regarded the question as unfinished business. A private bill to try to compel attendance was heavily defeated in 1874. There was great support for such a measure but also widespread cynicism, and not always from the quarters one might expect. As long ago as 1867, in framing his General Report for the year, Matthew Arnold had disclosed that compulsion was ‘becoming a familiar idea’ in the districts he inspected, but such was the state of schools after the Revised Code that, he wrote, ‘the difficult thing would not be to pass a law to make education compulsory; the difficult thing would be to work such a law after he had got it.’46 Prussia had introduced compulsion with great success, and it was often adduced as an example England should follow. However, as Arnold pointed out, in Prussia ‘education is not flourishing because it is compulsory, it is compulsory because it is flourishing.’47

  He added that ‘because people there really prize instruction and culture, and prefer them to other things, therefore they have no difficulty in imposing on themselves the rule to get instruction and culture. In this country people prefer to them politics, station, business, money-making, pleasure and many other things; and till we cease to prefer these things, a law which gives instruction the power to interfere with them, though a sudden impulse may make us establish it, cannot be relied on to hold its ground and to work effectively.’ Arnold also raised the question of fees. The Prussian system charged an average of the equivalent of 1d a week. In France it was 4d a week, but many children had free places, and the French were moving towards a system of taxpayer-funded State education. In England compulsion would be difficult unless more of the indigent classes had support to pay for their children to attend.

  Another attempt to legislate was made in 1875, by George Dixon, the MP for Birmingham, who had initiated the previous attempt. Dixon envisaged a network of school boards to monitor and enforce attendance. The prospect of t
his bureaucracy had been a main reason why the bill failed in 1874. The prejudice against compulsory attendance appeared to be dying out: Dixon told the Commons in June 1875 that even in agricultural districts, where parents had wanted their children to help with farm work, a feeling was growing up against ignorance. In Dorset and Somerset, Dixon said, the people were calling for school boards to be set up ‘so that the disgrace of so many men and women being unable to read and write, and believing in witchcraft, ghosts, and fairies, may not continue in this so-called Christian country.’48 In May 1875 a meeting in Birmingham of delegates representing 50,000 agricultural labourers had unanimously passed a resolution in favour of compulsion; shortly beforehand the National Union of Elementary Teachers had also passed a resolution unanimously demanding compulsory education to the age of ten, and that until the age of thirteen the amount of schooling demanded by the Factory Act be required of all children: and children would have to reach a certain standard of education before being given the certificate that allowed them to work in a factory.