Women and children endured long, gruelling, dangerous shifts

The Industrial Revolution introduced on a grand scale, potentially dangerous factory conditions, overlong working hours, exhaustion, exposure to toxins and chemicals, poor pay and the life-changing slavery that was child labour.

These grim working practices come under the microscope in Yorkshire author Paul Chrystal’s book Factory Girls, The Working Lives of Women and Children.

Lilian Marsden and friend Phyllis, both 14, working as winders in Salts Mill

Mill girls in Clitheroe, Lancashire

Crowded with textile mills, Bradford and the surrounding area was home to thousands of workers, tied to the punishing regime that gave no consideration to their well-being or domestic situation.

Many women would have to battle through a gruelling shift in the factory, six days a week, before going home to take on their duties caring for their family.

The book pulls no punches when describing the brutal lives of young boys going up chimneys to eke out a living. Their experiences are heard through the shocking testimonies of those who tried to put a stop to the practice.

‘Some are burnt, some suffocated, some tortured and half killed, or quite killed, when stuck in a chimney, by the very means used to extricate them...’ the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury - leader of the Factory Reform Movement in the House of Commons - told the House of Lords. He went on to say how one boy who died had his heart and liver pulled out of place as he was dragged down.

It took the death in 1875 of 12-year-old George Brewster whose master had caused him to climb and clean the chimneys at Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridgeshire to change the law through the Chimney Sweepers Act 1875.

This book covers social reformers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, who made a difference. It details the role of feminism and activism and the various Factory Acts that were to pave the way to improvements.

Burton's factory, Leeds. Picture: Marc Riboud, 1954

A knocker-up who woke workers early on a morning. Picture courtesy of Bradford Museums and Galleries

Mill girls in a Wigan warping room

Along the way there were many ‘well-meaning but often flaccid’ attempts to improve working conditions for the children, women and men working in mills and factories during the Industrial Revolution. The legislation, writes Paul, was often vitiated by naked self-interest among land and factory-owning MPs.

What progress was made was painfully slow, with the champions of reform beset by vested interests in those opposed to reform and by deliberate procrastination.

The first act to regulate child labour came in in 1803, under the aegis of Sir Robert Peel, whose father and grandfather were yeomen. He promoted the 1802 Health and Morals of Apprentices Act.

Various Factory Acts followed throughout that century including the Factories (Health of Women, &c) Act, 1874, giving women and children in textile factories (excluding silk mills) a working day of ten hours on weekdays - 12 hours broken into sessions of no more than four-and-a-half hours by two meal breaks of at least an hour); on Saturday six hours could be spent on manufacturing processes, and another half hour on other duties.

Pit brow girls, Wigan

The provisions for children now applied to 13-year-olds and (over a two-year period) the minimum age for children was to increase to ten.

Paul devotes a chapter to the purpose-built industrial villages dotted around the country, constructed by philanthropists such as Sir Titus Salt.

Saltaire, built by Sir Titus Salt to house workers in his textile factory, Joseph Rowntree’s New Earswick near York housing workers in the confectionery industry and Bournville near Birmingham, built for workers at Cadbury’s, are among those featured.

Built by Sir Titus Salt to house workers in his factory, Saltaire, was the first sizeable British model village to serve an industry. ‘As in other industrial villages, the houses were far superior to the stock which the worker’s were used to in Bradford.’

Clean, fresh water was piped into homes, from Saltaire’s own reservoir, gas provided lighting and heating and each home had its own outside toilet.

A knocker-up, who work up workers early on a morning

The book includes a chapter on industrial disease and occupational health.

It’s heartbreaking to read of the suffering that came as a result of simply going to work. ‘With poor ventilation, people were ‘breathing air filled with finely divided metal, grindstone, flint, clay, shell, ivory, bone, charcoal, wool, cotton, flax, silk…’ said public health officer John Simon in 1862.

Horrendous working conditions that gave rise to deformity, disease and death, were accepted by a workforce who knew nothing else.

‘The reluctance of factory workers to complain or protest about conditions was, in part, due to the fact that industrial diseases were an accepted part of working life in the same way that low wages, long hours and uncertainty of employment were,’ writes Paul.

*Factory Girls, The Working Lives of Women & Children by Paul Chrystal is published by Pen & Sword and costs £25. Visit pen-and-sword.co.uk