High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Robert Tennant, the MP for Leeds, wanted the government to go beyond the recommendations. He conceded that conditions for workers were unrecognisably better ‘in this present age of enlightenment of public opinion and spread of education’ than when the first Factory Act was passed. However, he pleaded that ‘so long as labour requires the protection of the State, let that protection be granted equally and universally; and I trust I shall not appeal in vain to the House, not, on the one hand, to subject certain classes of manufacture to invidious restrictions and unfair competition, nor, on the other hand, to withhold from large numbers of operatives those social, educational, and sanitary blessings which should alike be extended to all.’65 On a more practical level, most parents would not have a clue at what age their children could be legally employed in any given factory.

  The bill proposed to put workshops and factories in the same category, at least. But uniformity, as Mundella pointed out, was made difficult precisely because of the different workforces employed from trade to trade. In the textile industries, 76 per cent of workers were women and children; some workshop-based trades were almost entirely men with a handful of boy apprentices. The 1876 Act appeared effective: Mundella reported that in Keighley 400 children had been examined for permission to work and 340 had been rejected as having too little educational attainment. He claimed that ‘these facts showed that nothing could better stimulate parents to attend to the education of their children’.66 But he conceded that without uniformity there was, in areas such as the Midlands where there was a mixed economy, an unfortunate loophole. Children could leave school at ten and work full-time in agriculture without having to prove any educational attainment. They could do that until they were fourteen, at which point they could work in a factory, being old enough to do so without having to present a certificate from school.

  The legislation was also widely avoided by two other sorts of child – usually boys – who worked in large numbers on the streets: newspaper sellers and match sellers. Cross argued that the authorities who should clamp down on them were the school boards, which, being largely urban entities, operated where match and newspaper sellers were most typically found. Similarly, he said that Boards of Guardians should seek to prevent abuses in the countryside. He said the bill proposed as much uniformity as was feasible.

  However, once the bill went into committee, the calls continued for children working in agriculture not to be deprived of the education that children destined to work in factories now had by law. Thirteen-and-a-half hours of school each week were required before a child aged between ten and thirteen could work part-time, and attendance could be enforced until fourteen if a child had not reached the required level by thirteen. But for children working on the land the State, as one MP put it, ‘washed its hands altogether of his education’ at ten.67 Henry Fawcett said that part of the opposition was because an army of inspectors would be required to patrol the countryside ensuring children went to school: but since the State had already resigned itself to having such an army in the industrial regions, he could not see the difficulty. The landed interest, however, did not want children in schools when they should be getting in the harvest, or dealing with ploughing and sowing. An MP said that equality between the two classes of children would simply ‘harass one of the greatest industries in the country’.68 This argument prevailed: while it was accepted that factory law could be made more consistent, there was no mood to bring agricultural workers under the same provisions.

  Cross was also keen to ensure that the conditions for adults were brought up to a modern standard too. He ensured that sanitary regulations were standardised, notably to improve ventilation in factories and workshops to try to limit the spread and incidence of disease. Part of the problem was that owners provided the means of ventilation; but the operatives preferred to work in warm conditions, and would not open windows and skylights. However, some diseases were caused by the noxious materials used in manufacturing, such as that known as ‘lead paralysis’ caused by the paint used to give a gloss to earthenware: and there were calls to ban the use of such substances. The Potteries in particular was a region where lung diseases scythed through the working population. The French had already legislated to prevent such a problem; when would Britain?

  The bill also proposed to fence in dangerous machinery to keep operatives from being injured by moving parts, and screening off vats into which they might fall. The cleaning of machinery in motion was also banned, and the length of time for which anyone could work without a break was fixed to four-and-a-half hours: though such rigidities were complained about, since they might interrupt work and processes that were, technically, uninterruptible. It was made quite clear that the employment of children under ten in factories and workshops was absolutely prohibited, as was the employment of women, children and young persons on Sundays: exceptions were allowed for Jews.

  It also fixed penalties for employers who failed to allow staff the statutory public holidays – more bank holidays had been introduced by Gladstone in 1871, an acknowledgement of the benefits of recreation – and standardised the certification of children allowed to work because of their educational attainment and their state of health. A network of examining surgeons also had to be established, at considerable expense, to ensure that factory workers were physically equal to the task: the principal way in which Cross had justified this bill was that it was sanitary. It introduced a uniform procedure for the accidents causing death or serious injury. The detail of what would now be termed health and safety legislation was remarkable: alerted, for example, to the dangers of spontaneous combustion in Turkey-red dyeing, Cross ensured that special additional precautions would be taken.

  This required a sizeable inspectorate, within easy reach of the main towns and cities. Cross resisted calls to set up offices in those towns, saying instead he would publish the addresses of the inspectors so the public could find them. The expense of offices was not something he could countenance. He also limited the right of inspectors to enter workshops where they were parts of dwelling-houses. This, though, was controversial, as many sweatshops operated in cottages, and it was known that in some of them children were mistreated. Factories and workshops were also instructed to keep their own registers and records, and to display relevant extracts from the Act for their workers to read.

  Although much appeared to have moved on since the reports of squalor familiar from the factory debates of the 1840s, in some respects the primitive conditions continued, and this bill was an opportunity to eliminate them. Sir Charles Forster, the MP for Walsall, sought to prevent girls under sixteen from being employed in chain and nail factories. He quoted a report from a Black Country newspaper to substantiate his case. ‘“I was a stranger come out of curiosity to see the chain-making country.” “And a bad place you’ve come to,” said an old woman. “It’s the worst country God ever made. The women do all the work, and the men nearly nothing.” “But they work sometimes,” I ventured to remark. “Yes, they do, sometimes,” was the reply, “but they always spend all they earn, and more too.”’ The report went on to describe a row of some four or five chain-makers’ shops in close proximity to some offensive cesspools.

  The fires of these workshops were all going, and none but women were at work. It must not be supposed, however, that the men were absent—not a bit of it. The lords of the creation were there in full force, but they were not working. They were amusing themselves with skylarking, and courting the girls who were hammering away at the chains.

  At the bottom of Cradley was a pool close to the high road, where he saw men bathing and running about naked. Chain shops were close at hand, and a small brickyard, with young girls at work there. He would ask what must be the moral condition of a district where such scenes took place?

  He added that

  it was impossible to read the Reports on the subject without coming to the conclusion that the health of young females must be seriously jeopardized by this kind of labour. They
heard a good deal, in the evidence taken before the Royal Commission, of an instrument called an ‘oliver,’ used in welding the links of the chain, whose weight was in proportion to the size of the links, some being heavier and more laborious to work than others. The evidence described the ‘oliver’ as shaking the lower parts of the body, and, therefore, dangerous to women in child-bearing . . . and yet instances were given of these instruments being used by women within a week of their confinement. Was it, then, too much to ask that in trades requiring such an instrument, the labour of young females should be restricted in the manner which he proposed?69

  Cross sympathised with the argument, but advised that the Royal Commission had heard witnesses who described nail- and small-chain-making as no more injurious than anything else women in the locality did. The Commission itself, however, had not agreed: it felt the labour required to make heavier nails and chains was too hard for a woman. It could not, however, work out where to draw the line between work that was light enough and work that was not. Cross chose to rely on the sense of women not to take on work that was too arduous, rather than seek to legislate. The bill had a third reading unopposed, except for Fawcett complaining that, when British trade was facing stiffer competition than ever, the proposed Act would represent an unwarranted interference in the commercial activities of businessmen.

  He was advancing what, after the upheavals of the preceding years, had come to appear a very eighteenth-century view.

  It was all very well to consider an ideal state of society, in which every woman, when she came to a certain age, should be married and be in a comfortable condition of life, the husband working for her and she at home looking after her domestic duties and attending to her children . . . [however] There was no fact which was truer, there was none which was more apparent than that hundreds of thousands, he might almost say millions, of women were not thus provided for by husbands, and they had to earn their own livelihood in the best way they could. If they closed to them the avenue of honest employment, depend upon it, at the same time, they opened wide the portals which led to vice, misery, and ruin.70

  Fawcett knew the House was against him, and that the country was against him: but the time would come when opinion, which he said was already beginning to shift, would demand the same liberties in the workplace for women as for men. Cross respected his opinion: but also, speaking as a representative from Lancashire, he knew how much the condition of the people had been improved by the Factory Acts throughout the preceding forty years: and he believed this one would improve it further. He acknowledged the liberty of men to work as many hours as they pleased: but he also believed in the duty of the State to protect women against things that might be injurious to their welfare.

  When the bill reached the Lords, Shaftesbury, whose own work in labour reform dated back over forty-five years, commended it. He summed up Cross’s achievement: he had ‘consolidated the whole of the existing Factory Laws—and he was lost in wonder at the amount of toil, of close investigation, and of perseverance, which the Home Secretary must have brought to bear on the preparation of this Bill. The right hon Gentleman had had to deal with 45 Acts, extending over a period of 50 years, and in many cases contradictory of each other, often impossible to understand, and impracticable to be put into operation. By this Bill, the whole of this scattered legislation would be brought into one lucid and harmonious whole.’71 Shaftesbury alluded to the outrages that went on despite the laws passed since the 1830s: such as children as young as four working in match factories for long hours each day. Where children worked in regulated factories, by contrast, they looked ‘hale and stout’, their appearance radically different from that of children from a generation or two earlier. He said that ‘some two million of people of this country would bless the day when Mr Cross was invited to become the Secretary of State for the Home Department.’72

  VII

  The 1878 Factory Act represented a significant progression in society’s treatment of women: but in many respects their lot remained not merely unequal, but downright shocking. Although much had been done since the 1850s to recognise that women had, or should have, legal rights – mostly to protect them from abuses by men – and although the head of steam that would result in the suffragist movement was building only slowly, there was still one respect in which they were treated in a fashion that outraged civilised opinion. The Contagious Diseases Act had been passed in 1864 and extended in 1866 and 1869. It gave the police power, in certain specified districts, to arrest any prostitute (or woman suspected of being a prostitute) and to subject her to a compulsory medical examination for venereal disease. If found to be carrying it, she would be confined in something termed a ‘lock hospital’, from which she would not be released until ‘cured’. The original Act was in response to a supposed epic of VD in the Army and Navy, and only advanced feminists thought to argue that this might be more the fault of the men who contracted it rather than the exploited women who gave it to them. Prostitution was a widespread activity in the 1860s, with police estimating that more than 5,000 such women worked in London, and 30,000 in all of England and Wales.73

  An attempt was made to repeal the Acts in 1875, though with the MP who introduced the repeal measure, Sir Harcourt Johnstone, apologising for bringing a matter ‘so revolting, so loathsome’ before the Commons.74 The law had, he said, become increasingly ‘despotic’ and ‘dangerous to public liberty’.75 Women whose only offence was to be drunk near a ship or a garrison could be, and had been, taken into custody, with their lives ruined as a result. Nor had those investigating the effects of the Acts been able to prove that the incidence of venereal disease in the services was any less as a result of the legislation. A commission had inquired into the operation of the Acts, examining eighty witnesses over forty-five days, so the investigation had been thorough.

  The commission showed that the number of brothels had declined since the Acts went into operation, and there had been fewer young girls going into the business. There was evidence that women detained under the Act helped drive down the figures of those diseased by receiving treatment. However, the paradox of the Acts was that they had effectively regulated prostitution, and provided an approved class of medically examined woman for the benefit of soldiers and sailors. Those who wanted repeal did so not least for moral reasons. Johnstone said three main considerations motivated him and his friends.

  They hold, in the first place, that it is not the business of the State to provide the means of self-indulgence for the Army, the Navy, or any other class of society in this country or elsewhere; secondly, that it is not the business of the State to connive at the maintenance of houses of ill-fame, but to suppress them, and that, not by a central agency, but by means of the local authorities; and the third great principle they maintain is this—that, so long as they are in this House, they should endeavour to see that no Act of Parliament should be passed that will allow any office or Department, whether the Home Office or any other, to frame and carry out regulations that are inconsistent with the liberty of the people, and with constitutional law.76

  The residents of ports such as Chatham and Portsmouth were strongly against the Acts because of the entrenchment of prostitution that they caused. It was felt they encouraged very young girls – the age of consent was still only thirteen – into a life of vice. The Acts also displaced prostitution to places outside the operation of the Acts. Women who did not wish to be regulated in Windsor, where because of the garrison the Acts operated, simply went to the village of Datchet a couple of miles away and offered their services there. However, in areas where the limits were geographically greater, the consequences were even more pernicious. ‘The moment a woman has been examined and liberated,’ Johnstone observed, ‘it is just as well known that she has been discharged as fit for the public service.’77 There was no element of reclamation – or what Gladstone would call ‘rescue work’ – in the existing laws at all. They did nothing to improve the moral health of the country, and
as such were ‘injurious to private liberty and public morality, and repulsive alike to Christianity and civilisation.’78

  Rather as when Cardwell was trying to abolish purchase, those who purported to speak for the Army in the Commons said that the health and welfare of soldiers would be imperilled if this draconian imposition on the liberties of women were to be lifted. One such, Colonel Claud Alexander, said that all the State was saying to prostitutes was that ‘if you insist on carrying on your immoral occupation we must take care that you do not communicate horrible disease to our soldiers and sailors. To do this effectually we consider periodical examination necessary, and if you should be found diseased detention in hospital. During that detention you will not be subjected to undue restraint. Chaplains, medical officers, and matrons will minister to your spiritual and temporal necessities. You will be brought under the influence of humanising agencies, and if disposed to reform you will be placed in situations or restored to your friends.’79

  He added that the examinations were useful for the women: if serious venereal disease was caught in its early stages their treatment would be straightforward. However, if a woman wished to exempt herself from such treatment, her options were clear. He noted that the petitions calling for repeal came almost entirely from areas where the Acts did not operate. Joseph Henley, the octogenarian MP for Oxfordshire, put another view: ‘It was no business of the State to provide clean sin for the people’.80 However, the House went with the evidence of the commission that prostitution and disease had declined since the Acts were enforced: the bill to repeal was thrown out. It would take another eleven years, and a vigorous campaign led by Josephine Butler to expose the hypocrisy and double standards of men, before these humiliating Acts were finally repealed and, incidentally, the age of consent raised.