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The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution

NELSON NELSON MODERNHISTORY MODERNHISTORY NELSON MODERNHISTORY THE THE INDUSTRIAL Nelson Cengage has developed this series A Globalised World for Australian senior secondary students of Age of Imperialism Modern History. The series includes titles Australia 1918–1950s that encompass the period from the 18th century to the contemporary world and China and Revolution REVOLUTION they explore the social, cultural and political Civil Rights in the United States of America developments that shape the 21st century. Decolonisation Written by experienced educators and Germany 1918–1945 experts in their fields, each book builds on India a narrative framework to incorporate recent research and historiography, primary and Recognition and Rights of Indigenous Peoples secondary sources, and learning activities. Russia and the Soviet Union These key features combine to support the The American Revolution development of historical knowledge and The Changing World Order understanding and historical skills that will enable students to interpret and reflect on The Enlightenment the experience and developments that have The French Revolution created the world in which they live. The Industrial Revolution The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East United States of America 1917–1945 Women’s Movements Workers’ Rights The Industrial Revolution The development and application of steam power was one of many technical developments that drove the Industrial Revolution. The most significant modifications to the steam engine, which had first been patented in 1698, have been attributed to James Watt. Watt developed two important changes to these earlier models: the addition of a condenser and a ‘rotative’ system

TAYLOR that used a crank rather than a chain to transfer power. These improvements greatly improved the efficiency and power of the steam engine and led to a range of new uses. By 1800, Watt’s innovations were being used throughout the mining and textile industries in Britain. In the others, such as the father-and-son team of George and Robert Stephenson, applied the principles of steam power to transport, laying the foundation for the train mania of the 1840s.

James Watt (1736–1819) ISBN: 978-0170244008 A Scottish engineer who is seen by many as one of the key thinkers and doers of the Industrial Revolution. TONY TAYLOR Read more about James Watt in Chapter 2. SERIES EDITOR: TONY TAYLOR 9 780170 244008 For learning solutions, visit cengage.com.au

industrial_sb_44008_cvr_gatefold_finalart.indd 1-4 23/07/14 10:27 AM 9780170244008 changed theworld. Intheplace there emerged thefoundations of largely agricultural societies As thisrevolution spread, it Australia • Japan •Brazil •Korea •Mexico •Singapore •SpainUnited Kingdom •United States of themodernworld. Tony Taylor 9780170244008 Index 141 064 048 024 1 CHAPTER 006 001 Introduction Author acknowledgements Series editoracknowledgements About theseries Chapter Chapter Chapter The age factory Peterloo Massacre The Luddite Rebellion andthe Doers andthinkers Revolution 1750–1890 Changing theworld:Industrial 4 3 2 Contents 138 120 098 080

Chapter Chapter Chapter Conclusion Revolution Steam, steelandtheSecondIndustrial From Chartism tounionism Revolution Life anddeathduringtheIndustrial 7 6 5 vii vi iv iii developments oftheperiod. and summarisesthemajor is abird’s-eye viewofthetopic Illustrated timeline written to ensure that you develop the skills and attributes you need in senior History subjects. written toensuresubjects. thatyoudeveloptheskillsandattributesneedinseniorHistory contestability, tounderstandandinterpret societiesfrom thepast.TheactivitiesandtasksinIndustrialRevolutionhavebeen the historicalconcepts,suchasevidence,continuityandchange,causeeffect, significance,empathy, perspectivesand As seniorstudentsyouwillusehistoricalskills,includingresearch, evaluation,synthesis,analysisandcommunication, world. by whichyoualsocometobetterappreciate themakingofmodern isaninterpretive series.EachbookintheseriesisbasedonunderstandingthatHistory studyofthepast History Modern andispartoftheNelson studentsofHistory The IndustrialRevolutionhasbeendevelopedespeciallyforseniorsecondary Using The IndustrialRevolution figures and frequently include questions and activities. figures andfrequently include questionsandactivities. are biographicalprofiles and assessmentsof key historical SIGNIFICANT Developing understandings of the past and present in senior History extends on the skills you learnt in earlier years. inearlieryears. Developing understandingsofthepastandpresent extendsontheskillsyoulearnt inseniorHistory about the series INDIVIDUALS

provide acontexttotheissuesthatare addressed. CHAPTER introductions learning andrevision. documents asaready reference for definitions andsummariesof key feature briefbiographies,profiles, Key documents and c terms organisations, Key Key figures and of evidencefrom thepast. evaluation andinterpretation and activitiestoaidyour combined withquestions through thetextandare literature appearfrequently sources andsecondary of visualandtextprimary Source Studies oncepts, each chapter. you asread provide afocusfor These questions start ofthechapter. are listed atthe questions Inquiry

9780170244091 35 v

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The Newcomen engine was a simple but brilliant device. The combined weight of the and activities. engine beam and its counterweight would pull a piston, fitted in an airtight cylinder, upwards. Steam was fed into the cylinder, allowing the piston to rise. A jet of water was fed into the cylinder, the steam condensing and creating a vacuum pulling the piston DIAGRAMSback down against the beam and its counterweight. AN Thisd up-and-down movement via the beam was transferred to a vacuum pump in the mineshaft, drawing out floodwater. The problem with this system was that the cylinder constantly had to cool down to below T100ºCal to allowk theing water to condense sour the steam into creatingc esthat vacuum. This wasted areheat. The engineused was workable to but visually Watt realised that it couldsummarise be more efficient. complex ideas and events.

CHAPTER SUMMARY AND CHAPTER REVIEW ACTIVITIES conclude each chapter. They include a brief precis of the topic, suggestions for further reading, and a range of learning activities that consolidate knowledge and understanding of the chapter’s content. These tasks incorporate a range of historical understandings and skills.

THE Conclusion summarises the topic and includes a series of activities to consolidate your knowledge of it. More importantly, these final tasks will help you build an understanding and interpretation of this period in history.

Beyond this book The Nelson Modern History series includes numerous titles on a range of topics covered in senior History courses around Australia. For further information about the series visit: www.nelsonsecondary.com.au. 9780170244091 Getty Images Getty images

9780170244008 2 images of 19th century Britain. images of19thcentury who created 20th and21st-century shows. ItisDickensmore thananyone into more than 30 filmsandtelevision his works,whichhavebeenmade performer, givingone-manshowsof In addition,hewasapopulartheatre administered charitableorganisations. also editedweeklyperiodicalsand over 20books,mainlynovels.He meaning.Hewrotegiven itsmodern a timewhentheword wasyetto be energetic Dickenswasacelebrity at poor people’s attitudetosociety. The that socialreform wouldimprove poverty andcrimewere linked,and a poorbackground andbelieved that in severalofhisbooks.Hecamefrom wrote abouttheIndustrialRevolution Britishnovelists,Dickens 19th-century Probably thebestknownof (1812–1870) Charles K organisations ey figures Dick ens and

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Chapter Four

The factory age

When we think of the word ‘factory’, the image frequently called to mind is a gigantic building, probably five or six storeys high, belching black smoke from high, brick chimneys. But in the late 18th and early 19th centuries a (manu)factory was simply a place where people made things by hand. It could be just a group of houses in a street owned by a manufacturer (maker) who owned or rented the buildings and who paid the workers who toiled in his ‘factory’. This was the case in Nottinghamshire. Or it could be a owned and run by its workers. In many areas of Britain this was a varied pattern of employment that lasted into the 1840s. In this chapter we will look at how the developed and how it affected workers’ lives, often turning the workers into a form of commodity. We shall also look at how some benevolent Inquiry question factory owners operated their businesses both profitably and fairly. ++Why and how did the factory system develop? ❮ A coloured aquatint and etching of , Scotland, a model industrial ‘settlement’ established in 1785 by . 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age 66 Introducing the factory age In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, most factories in most trades in most areas were small workshops or groups of houses gathered together. Some factories were involved in a single- process trade such as candle making. Others were involved in multiple, sequenced processing tasks such as in the , where a chain of activities took place, generally beginning with washing and ending up with finishing – and often on different sites. We know that there was great variety in how and where factory work was done because there are many descriptions of how operatives worked in the first half of the 19th century and because of the 1841 Census of Population. This census showed that even in the textile industry, the trade that pioneered big factories (called mills because of their original use of water mills as a power source) of 883 000 textile workers only 345 000 (39 per cent) worked in the larger mills in the early 1840s, a time considered to be the height of the First Industrial Revolution. Another telltale sign of the gradual change in the factory system’s character and in the adoption of steam power is that the annual rise in industrial productivity was slow at first. Economic historians David Greasley and Les Oxley estimated that it was only in the 1831–73 period that the annual rate of growth in industrial productivity rose to an impressive 2.4 per cent per annum. There was no ‘big bang’ as far as the factory age was concerned. Rather, it was a slow and steady progression. AAP/Mary Evans Picture Library

Source 4.1 This 1876 drawing of Manchester shows the view from Blackfriar’s Bridge towards Victoria Bridge and the cathedral. The scene looks like an environmental nightmare, but in fact, by 1876 most of the mills for which Manchester was famous had moved to the surrounding mill towns. As the textile mills moved out, engineering and chemical manufacturing moved in and the city became polluted by iron foundries, chemical companies and coal burning in the fireplaces of the residents. 9780170244008 The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 67

These findings suggest that the stereotypical soot-covered and overcrowded industrial town centre was not a general feature of the Industrial Revolution until the 1840s. However, as the town centres gradually became more and more unpleasant in the 1840s, and as the smaller outlying settlements were swallowed up by industrial growth, another telltale sign of was merchants building new, grand houses and villas on a town’s further and higher outskirts to avoid the industrial smoke and smells described so vividly by when writing about Coketown (Manchester) in his 1854 novel Hard Times: It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854. These Dickensian urban jungles did not spring up suddenly and fully formed as is commonly thought. It is more complicated than that, as UK historian David Jenkins has pointed out in his 1993 work on the complex nature of the growth of the factory system.

Why factories? Factories and mills made great sense to 19th-century businessmen (and they were almost all men except in the ‘female’ trades such as millinery and lace-making) because workers and their activities could be concentrated in one, manageable area instead of being spread out unseen and unsupervised in scattered cottages and workshops. With factories and mills, there was one point of delivery for raw goods and one point of departure for finished goods. It was all based on good commercial logic and was a clear sign of progress, a word commonly used to describe the character of the Industrial Revolution and the character of 19th- century in nations such as Britain, Germany and the United States. New machinery too was becoming larger and more expensive and was not suited to small mills and domestic outwork. Steam engines required separate engine houses next to the mill. Improved machinery combined with steam power also meant improved efficiency and productivity. Factories Alamy/blickwinkel could operate for a set time, normally 12–14 hours a day, Source 4.2 Originally grey, over a relatively short period instead of the more casual working day of outworkers, of time the dominant variety of Manchester’s Peppered Moth thus allowing increased output and more accurate became black and brown. On soot-covered trees the lighter forecasts of production levels. variety was visible to predators and so died out. The increasing frequency of the darker colouring was first noticed in the 1840s. Thanks to the machinery, unskilled workers, By 1900 nearly 100 per cent of Manchester’s Peppered Moths including children, could be trained up quickly and were black. 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age 68

employed cheaply, since the skills needed to do the work lay more with the machinery and not so much with its operators. Although the new industries kept on the apprenticeship system for the more expert trades, machinery-minding was generally semi-skilled work. In the textile industry, mills became much larger in the 1850s. Prior to that, because of the delicate nature of the cotton in the process, steam-powered were used mainly for spinning. This changed mid-century when improved loom design meant that powered weaving became common. Spinning and weaving could now be housed in one multi-storey building, with a resulting rise in productivity.

Why work in a FACTORY? These mills and factories were attractive as workplaces to many labourers, male and female, who wanted to escape the misery and the poverty of seasonal work as subsistence-level agricultural labourers. Conditions in many industrial towns were indeed harsh but it was an improvement on the uncertain drudgery of an unskilled agricultural labouring family existing on a bare-bones diet and living in a rented rural hovel. Male and female textile workers had a reasonably steady wage, a fixed working day, the possibility of a disposable income and the opportunity to save up some money. That was, if all went well. Trade recessions, bankruptcies, wars that affected particular industries, such as cotton, as well as factory fires and individual workers’ accidents were all in the mix as potential hazards. The key point that some modern economists have made here is that if workers felt that they were better off back on the farm, they would not have moved into town. UK social historian Emma Griffin, in her 2013 bookLiberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, presented some of the thoughts of male workers on why they stayed on to work in industrial towns. Here is ‘Jacques’, writing in 1856 of his attitude to the hard grind of industrial labour: ‘My past reverses and pressing necessities had taught me the value of regular employment’. And ‘Oliver’, a miner who worked in one of the most dangerous occupations in the country, said much the same: ‘As a miner I did very well and made my earnings about seven pounds a month’. For those who did decide to go back to the village, an unpleasant welcome could await from villagers who saw the returnee as an additional competitor for scarce and unpredictable resources. On the other hand, not all was well in the factory age. Owners wanted profits and, in some cases, the relentless search for profit led to harsh attitudes towards factory workers. When it comes to the owners, Dickens had no equal in creating a cruel stereotype, as was the case with Mr Bounderby of Coketown: He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854, Chapter 4. 9780170244008 The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 69 Factory reform With the coming of the factories and mills to improve production and the opening of newer and deeper coalmines to fuel steam engines came accusations of harsh working conditions. These included claims of industrial injuries caused by dangerously exposed machinery and allegations of industrial diseases caused by, for example, poor ventilation. These charges against mill owners and coal owners were made by sections of society that saw the growth of industrialism as an unreasonable and greedy exploitation of the working class. Oddly, considering how politics is handled in the 21st century, the loudest complaints came from Tory paternalists who, and this Tory paternalist may seem odd too, wanted some kind of government regulation of working conditions in the An early to mid- 19th-century conservative new industries. politician who objected However, in the early 1800s, the view of most British politicians, both aristocratic and to what he considered middle class, was that the wellbeing of adult workers in industry and agriculture was none of were the greedy and irresponsible ways their business. The workers were to be left to their own devices and they were to rely on the that factory owners good nature and self-interest of their employers. The government policy of non-intervention treated their workers. in the Industrial Revolution led to a hard-heartedness about the condition of unfortunate Tory paternalists felt that employers had an adults who were expected to fend for themselves in both good and bad times. In bad times, obligation to look after unemployed workers and their families had to rely on an inefficient poor relief system their workers operated mainly by Church of parishes. Such governmental lack of interest in the plight of workers was about to change, however, because of the working conditions faced by children in the textile mills. Children were different. The child ‘slaves’ of Britain was not new in Britain. From the Middle Ages onwards, the family unit was organised along the lines of a small business. As head of the family, the father was responsible for working and providing for his economic unit. The mother was the domestic manager and worker, and each child, from as young as four or five, was also expected to work. In towns, the children did this either by working at home or selling goods in the streets. In rural areas, very young children worked out in the fields, bird-scaring, stone-picking or animal herding. This means that prior to the Industrial Revolution, the life of a child from the labouring poor sections of society was frequently hard and unforgiving. What changed the family life of the labouring classes during the Industrial Revolution was the concentration of work in the mills of the textile industry. The invention of powered machinery allowed small children to do what had previously been adult work. Not only that but small children with their small and nimble fingers could tie loose ends and, as ‘scavengers’, they could crawl beneath the machinery to clean out the cotton thread more easily than an adult. The benefit to the mill owner was the low cost of child labour, which was about 10–20 per cent of an adult male wage. The benefit to the child was bringing real money into the family home. But the children paid a price for this kind of work as it was the textile mills that were at the forefront of the industrialised abuse of child workers. Children in the new mills and factories, as well as in the coalmines newly-opened to meet industrial demand, often developed lung diseases, which reduced their life expectancy; they were maimed or crippled by the physical demands made on their young bodies; and they suffered serious industrial 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age 70

injuries, even death. Those who survived into adulthood presented an unfortunate spectacle, as medical worker Dr Peter Gaskell found, commenting in 1833 on Manchester mill workers: their complexion is sallow and pallid – with a peculiar flatness of feature, caused by the want of a proper quantity of adipose substance (normal fat layer) to cushion out the cheeks … their stature low – the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches [168 cm] … their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully … a very general bowing of the legs [a symptom of rickets, a bone disease caused by vitamin D deficiency] … great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures … nearly all have flat feet … hair thin and straight – many of the men having but little beard, and that in patches of a few hairs … P Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England, 1833, London, pp. 161– 62. What was also important about the move to child labour in the mills and factories was the high visibility of industrial cruelty. Before the innovative mills and factories of the Northern cities began to dominate production, child labour was a scattered and individual activity. In the isolated coalmines of the North and the Midlands where very young children carried out difficult and dangerous tasks in the pitch dark, their work was invisible to anyone who was not a member of those mining communities. The textile revolution, on the other hand, meant that cruel or inappropriately hard labour carried out by children was no longer hidden from public view and public comment. In this new and supposedly rational and progressive age, the mills could now be criticised by those who opposed rapid industrial and urban change, by those who saw industrialisation as an immoral development that encouraged sexual promiscuity, by those who envied or despised the mill owners and by those who just feared for the welfare of the mill children. As a parallel issue, reformers were to target the condition of children in the mines. In the rest of the country and in other occupations, child labour continued as before, unnoticeably and separately on farms and in workshops. These changes in attitude towards child employment happened at a time when a more enlightened approach to childhood was slowly developing among some sections of Western Europe societies. As late as the end of the 18th century, it was a commonly held Christian belief that children, born in original sin, were evil at heart and needed to have their behaviour constantly monitored and corrected by adult authority, often in a way that was cruel and sadistic. This is not to say that there was no affection or love between parents and children at that time but there was a harsh corrective attitude towards the punishment of children both in the home and in the industrial system. Was this behaviour excusable because it was what most people thought at the time? Certainly not. Many parents and some mill owners had enough sense to see that cruelty to children was wrong and they took a different, kinder course of action. Indeed, there had been the well-meaning Factory Health and Morals Act 1802 that regulated the working conditions of children but only in the cotton industry. Yet its enforcement was based on a moral position as it was voluntary and self-regulated. The motivation for the 1802 Act can be seen from its title and from this preamble:

Whereas it hath of late become a practice in cotton and woollen mills, and in cotton and woollen factories, to employ a great number of male and female apprentices, and other persons, in the same building, in consequence of which certain regulations are now necessary to preserve the health and morals of such apprentices Preamble to the Factory Health and Morals Act 1802. 9780170244008 The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 71

A more enlightened view regarding the general welfare of children came from several Methodist quarters. Quakers, a small but influential Christian sect believed in the innocence of children. A member of the chapel- based denomination Methodists, too, had a more progressive view of humanity. Also, the writings of French founded by John Wesley. Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau led some of his English followers to was a nonconformist or dissenting believe that children were innocents whose real destiny was perfection as a human being. A and reforming branch third group of reformers came from the Tory party, a loose grouping of traditionally-minded of Protestantism that members of Parliament who objected in general to what they saw as the spread of grim sought to provide social and educational services industrialism, to the unregulated conditions in mills and factories and to the possibility of to society. It avoided immoral behavior among the workers. extravagant religious displays in favour of simple acts of worship. In Australia, Methodism is now an Sadler and factory reform element of the Uniting Church. One of the best known of these reformers was businessman and Tory politician . As a Member of Parliament, Sadler gained a reputation as a social progressive by speaking up for the impoverished Irish and Scots, for the poor and against free trade and industrialism. At the same time, he spoke as a political conservative by opposing any electoral reforms.

Michael Sadler (1780–1835) Michael Sadler was born in but as a young man moved north to Yorkshire where he helped run a family Irish linen import business in . Described by an acquaintance as having ‘gentlemanly bearing, handsome dress, intelligent face, and pleasant voice’ with ‘a broad Yorkshire accent’, Sadler had left the in the 1790s to become an active Methodist and he gradually became convinced that free-trade (laissez-faire) was bad, that unregulated of factory owners was evil and it was destroying society. He also loathed the factory system. He believed it encouraged immorality and © National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery, brought ‘infant existences into perpetual (endless) labour’. In 1829, the Duke of Newcastle offered Sadler a parliamentary seat at Newark (Nottinghamshire), a borough controlled by the Duke, whose motivation was to put Sadler in place as a Tory anti- Catholic candidate at a time when Catholics had just gained the vote. Catholics were considered by Protestants to be heretics, idol worshippers and servants of the Pope. Sadler was quite a mix. He was a Tory who had left the conservative Church of England to become a nonconformist Methodist. He had married Ann Fenton, an Anglican, but was at the same time progressive in his condemnation of industrialism’s social effects and conservative in his opposition to Catholics getting the vote. 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age 72

In early 1831 Sadler supported a private bill by radical Whig aristocrat Sir John Hobhouse to restrict the hours of child labour, the first sign of where his career would take him – into regulating mills and factories. In November 1831 he wrote to his co-reformer and Tory radical, , who was manager of a large estate near (Yorkshire): The question of factory labour never has been taken up with sufficient energy in Parliament; and the law, as at present carried, is not only nothing, but actually worse than nothing … I am persuaded, and all I hear and read confirms me in conviction, that TEN hours can never be receded from by those who love children, or who wish to obtain the approbation of Him who was indeed their friend and lover … I had rather have no bill, than one that would legalize and warrant their excessive labour. Michael Thomas Sadler

Testimony of Matthew Crabtree Matthew Crabtree was a Yorkshire wool textile worker who appeared before the parliamentary Select Committee into conditions and hours of work in textile factories, out of which came the 1883 Factory Act. The committee was chaired by Sadler in 1832. What age are you? – Twenty-two. What is your occupation? – A blanket manufacturer. Have you ever been employed in a factory? – Yes. At what age did you first go to work in one? – Eight. How long did you continue in that occupation? – Four years. Will you state the hours of labour at the period when you first went to the factory, in ordinary times? – From 6 in the morning to 8 at night. Fourteen hours? – Yes. With what intervals for refreshment and rest? – An hour at noon. Then you had no resting time allowed in which to take your breakfast, or what is in Yorkshire called your ‘drinking’? – No. When trade was brisk what were your hours? – From 5 in the morning to 9 in the evening. Sixteen hours? – Yes. With what intervals at dinner? [lunch] – An hour … During those long hours of labour … how did you awake? – I seldom did awake spontaneously; I was most generally awoke or lifted out of bed, sometimes asleep, by my parents. Were you always in time? – No. What was the consequence if you had been too late? – I was most commonly beaten. Severely? – Very severely, I thought. Sadler Commission, 18 May 1832.

Questions 1 What aspects of the evidence given by Matthew Crabtree stand out, given your knowledge of modern working conditions? 2 Why did the proceedings of the Select Committee have such an impact on popular opinion at the time? 9780170244008 The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 73

Sadler believed that an individual’s energy should be guided and controlled by a community’s conscience acting through state regulation. He also believed that economic prosperity should be based on the existing political system supporting the moral (Christian) development of the workers. Encouraged by Tory aristocrat Anthony Ashley-Cooper (Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury), Sadler continued to fight for his cause against hostility and against ridicule. Eventually, on 17 January 1832, he brought in his Ten Hours Bill (first reading), which first reading forbade all employment of children under nine and insisted that youngsters under 18 could In the 19th-century British parliamentary system, a only work for 10 hours a day, with no night shifts for those under 21. bill had to go through three On 16 March 1832, the second reading of his bill took place but the Whig government ‘readings’ or discussions demanded that a further inquiry was needed before it could go any further. The bill and votes before it could be passed onto the House was referred to a parliamentary Select Committee chaired by Sadler. Between 12 April and of Lords for discussion and 7 August 1832, the committee met 53 times and heard 87 witnesses, half of them working ratification or rejection. A men. Its hearings were among the most shocking events of the Industrial Revolution, leading first reading was usually a formality. to a general public outcry and a change in the way government and people saw factory regulation.

The Sadler’s bill’s passed into law in June 1833 and for the first time, legislation allowed factory inspectors to enforce the law. The Act limited the textile industry’s working day to 12-hour shifts for 13 to 17-year-old workers and 8-hour shifts for those aged 9 to 12. Its passage was eased by the political and public response to his Select Committee investigations and by the news that six textile workers had been fired by their bosses for giving evidence before the Committee. Sadler’s bill, too, came at a time when there was a parallel campaign against slavery and when there was the surge of support for parliamentary reform, adding weight to his cause. Between 1844 and 1891, there followed six Factory Acts that regulating the work of adults and children. Sadler’s work had broken the dam but he had not managed such a revolutionary change alone. Richard Oastler, Sir John Hobhouse and Lord Ashley had all played influential parts in laying the groundwork for Sadler’s triumph. Sadly, Sadler’s career as an MP in an unreformed seat ended after the 1832 Reform Act and before his own bill was passed. Worn down by his work on the Ten Hours legislation, he retired to Northern , where he died in 1835, at the age of 55. Lord Ashley then took over the cause and, as Lord Shaftesbury, became famous as one of England’s most prominent 19th-century social reformers. Richard Oastler, Sadler’s companion and confidant, turned to a different kind of , Chartism. Meanwhile, another kind of factory reformer altogether was at work. Robert Owen, a Welsh-born mill owner who was on the opposite side of politics from Michael Sadler, was trying to create his own vision of the perfect industrial community. 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age 74

Table 4.1 The Factory Acts

Act Government Measures Comments Factories Act, 1844 Conservative Reduced work hours for children Introduced certificates of age and and regulated conditions. school attendance for children. Factory Act, 1847 Whig The Ten Hour Act limited work Sponsor Richard Oastler who hours for women and children in was a vital part of the Ten Hour most textile industries. Movement. Factory Act, 1850 Whig ‘Working day’ was defined by Normal working week to end at maximum time women and 2 p.m. Saturday. children could work. Factory Act, 1856 Maximum hours for workers Extending principles of the Whig aged 9–18 in all industries was 1847 Act to other industries. reduced to 10 hours per week. Factory Act, 1878 Conservative Children under 10 were not Compulsory education for to be employed. 10–14 -year- children brought in for children olds worked half days. Women up to 10 years of age. reduced to 56-hour week maximum. Factory Act, 1891 Conservative Safety measures on machinery Measures to control employment increased, women not to be of outworkers. employed within four weeks of birth of child. Child minimum working age increased to 11.

Britain’s first socialist? , owner of Manchester’s first steam-powered mill opened in 1789, was a progressive manufacturer. Three years after opening his steam- powered mill, Drinkwater took another radical step when, to the surprise of Manchester’s cotton traders, he appointed a 21-year-old Welsh textile manufacturer, Robert Owen, as mill manager. Owen’s salary was a very comfortable £300 per year and he went on to become one of Britain’s most celebrated, if ineffectual, social reformers. Owen, often described as Britain’s first socialist, was born in 1771 in a room over his father’s saddlery shop in the small Welsh market town of Newtown. As a young adult, Owen was always on the lookout for new opportunities and through an introduction he met , a progressive businessman and father of his wife-to-be, Caroline Dale. Owen and his Manchester partners bought Dale’s complex of four water-powered cotton Source 4.3 This 1799 colour pastel mills in New Lanark (45 kilometres south of Glasgow) in 1799. sketch by London miniaturist Mary Ann Knight is the first known portrait of Robert Owen’s first step, as a serious believer in the power of learning, was to Owen (at age 28). build a school. He then stopped the hiring of children under 10 years of age 9780170244008 The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 75

and cut the hours of the older children to 10 hours a day, as long as these children attended school part-time. Owen also began to try to lift the moral tone of New Lanark by fining workers for drunkenness and by getting overseers to pin coloured markers for behavior next to a worker’s station – black for bad, blue for average, yellow for good and white for outstanding. The idea seemed to have worked. Owen was less successful with reforming adult working conditions but he did move beyond the mills to the local community where he closed down profiteering private shops and improved the produce sold at the company’s low-cost shop. Profit from the company shop went towards the local school. Owen’s ideas about human perfectibility and collectivism, a belief that decisions should be made collectively rather than by authorities, spread throughout Europe and into the United States. In 1825 he left for the United States and set up an idealistic collective community in frontier , which struggled to succeed. He returned to England in 1828, leaving family members behind to manage the collective. Once back in England, he cut his ties with the businessmen of New Lanark and set up the Grand National Consolidated in 1833, a grand scheme that lasted just a year. Owen died in 1858, at the age of 83, having just become a convert to the spiritualist movement. Progressive employers Owen may not have made as much headway with improving workers’ conditions on a national level as he would have liked, but Britain did have other progressive employers. For example, in Lancashire, a Cooperative Manufacturing Society was set up by democratic capitalist mill owners in 1854. Investors in the society were full members, as were all employees, with A form of employer protectiveness in which bonuses paid to the workers if mill profits were in surplus. There was also a small progressive benevolent employers movement in the nearby cotton town of that was based on the democratic capitalist allowed workers to play a approach of mills in Rochdale. In Oldham, William Marcroft, owner of the Sun Mill, followed part in the running of their place of employment, even the Rochdale model with a profit-sharing scheme for workers in 1869, later to be replaced by becoming shareholders share dividends for all investors, and all employees were investors. The cooperative approach and thus benefiting directly was so successful that it spread throughout south-east Lancashire with beneficial effects, as from their own productivity author Thomas Ellison remarked in his 1886 book The Cotton Trade of Great Britain: The daily discussions which take place amongst the shareholders as to why dividends are small or otherwise, have led almost every intelligent operative to become more economical with materials, more industrious and to see what effect his individual efforts have on the cost of the materials produced. Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, London, 1886.

Hugh Mason and a workers’ colony (1817–1886) was not a cooperatively inclined mill owner but in the 1860s when mills were shutting down or the workers were put on reduced wages because of lack of cotton from a civil-war-torn United States, Mason kept his workers on full pay. After the ‘cotton famine’ ended and normal production resumed, the workers were among the first in Britain to go from a six-day week to a five-and-a-half-day week. 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age 76

When he was not helping his workers achieve a modest and comfortable lifestyle, Mason pursued a career in local and national politics, becoming, among other things, mayor of Ashton three times and Liberal MP for Ashton-under-Lyne from 1880 to 1885. His mills thrived and he remained popular with his workers, if not so much with his professional contacts and his political colleagues. When he died in 1886, a public subscription was established to erect a statue to his memory, the only subscription of its kind in south-east Lancashire. The statue still exists in Ashton-under-Lyne as a Grade II listed building as surveyed by English Heritage. In an age and area where the divisions between bosses and workers were clear and fixed, Mason’s positive approach to the welfare of his workers appeared to work magnificently, while elsewhere Robert Owen’s system failed dismally.

Sir Titus Salt Source 4.4 Mill owner Hugh Mason inherited the Oxford Mills and built a complex known as The Yorkshire town of was often seen as an example of the ‘Oxford Colony’. Mason had a keen interest all that was wrong with industrial urbanisation. Reacting against in the ‘morality and decency’ of his workers and urban squalor and industrial pollution, local mill owner Sir Titus Salt the Oxford complex included model houses, a swimming pool and a library. The colony also (1803–1876) moved his operations out of a badly polluted Bradford included a friendly society, a band, a choir, a and founded a model town at a beautiful spot located 1.6 kilometres gardeners’ society and a burial fund. In trying to keep his workers away from what were called north, near the village of Shipley. He called it . the ‘man traps’ of the public houses, Mason also This architect-designed settlement housed workers from the new provided a library, a smoking-room and a lecture complex of mills next to a canal and a railway line. The settlement hall for anti-alcohol and other educational talks. itself had a hospital, a school, allotments to allow the workers to grow their own vegetables and a recreational park. Salt reduced factory noise by installing underground drive shafts from the engine houses to the mills. In the mills, dust and other fibre particles were sucked out by extractors. To reduce pollution further, the mill chimneys were fitted with Rodda Smoke Burners, invented by a Cornish engineer. When Salt died in December 1876, the Bradford Observer published a measured obituary: Titus was perhaps the greatest captain of industry in England not only because he gathered thousands under him but also because, according to the light that was in him, he tried to care for all those thousands. We do not say that he succeeded in realising all his views or that it is possible to harmonise at present all relations between age fotostock/The Print Collector capital and labour. Upright in business, admirable in his Source 4.5 Sir Titus Salt with his biblical beard, private relations he came without seeking the honour to which was a common look among middle-class men in the mid to late 19th century. The full be admittedly the best representative of the employer beard was associated with religious piety, mature class in this part of the country if not the whole kingdom. masculinity and wisdom. It was also a visible mark Bradford Observer, 30 December 1876. of prosperity. 9780170244008 The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 77 Alamy/Mike Kipling Photography

Source 4.6 A recent photograph of George Street in Saltaire, the street named after Sir Titus Salt’s second son. These single and double-storey houses were built in 1854 and have and small front gardens, small backyards with a privy (basic lavatory) in each yard. The model village still exists, as does Salt’s mill and the whole complex is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Chapter summary ++ Michael Sadler, Robert Owens, Hugh Mason and Titus Salt were Industrial Revolution pioneers who had a genuine commitment to the welfare of the workers for whom they were, in different ways, responsible and they also had a strong commitment to community. ++ But as representatives of the business classes, these men were in a minority. For example, in Ashton-under-Lyne where Hugh Mason built the Oxford colony, by the end of the century, his two Ryecroft mills were outnumbered by 79 more conventionally managed mills. 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age 78

Further reading Briggs, A, Victorian Cities, Penguin, London, 1968 Humphries, J, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, Leiden, 2010 Jenkins, D, ‘Factories and the Industrial Revolution’, Refresh: Recent Findings of Research in Economic and Social History, no. 16, 1993

Weblinks Weblinks relevant to this chapter can be found at http://nmh.nelsonnet.com.au/industrial.

Chapter review activities

Introducing the factory age 1 Explain some of the more common misconceptions about factories in the Industrial Revolution and show how these misconceptions have been corrected. 2 Can you find any evidence to show that some industrial cities may not have been so unpleasant to live in during the early Industrial Revolution? 3 What sustainability issues can you see in this account of the growth of the factory system?

Why factories? 4 What other myths and misconceptions are discussed in this section. How have they been corrected? 5 Find out more about Charles Dickens as a writer of fiction and as a social historian. How important do you think he was to 19th-century understanding of the Industrial Revolution and to our understanding of the same topic? 6 Referring to the extract from Hard Times on page 68, to which social class does Mr Bounderby belong? Is Charles Dickens sympathetic to the values and manner of Mr Bounderby? What words and images does Dickens use to tell us how he feels about Mr Bounderby? 7 Find another passage in a Dickens work that you consider to be a vivid portrayal of the period. Discuss its strengths and shortcomings. 9780170244008 The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 79

The child ‘slaves’ of Britain 8 What was it about the employment of children in factories that led to a change of attitude to work practices in mills and factories? 9 What strikes you about Peter Gaskell’s 1833 description (page 70) of adult workers? Is he an objective witness? 10 Find out which groups favoured changes in factory conditions for children and who opposed it. On what grounds did they hold their opinions?

Factory reform 11 What, in your opinion, was unusual about Michael Sadler’s character and his interest in people he considered to be oppressed? 12 To whom was he referring and what do you think he means when he said, ‘the approbation of Him who was indeed their friend and lover’. 13 Some economic historians have accused Sadler of packing the witness list with extreme cases. Can you discover any evidence of this?

Britain’s first socialist 14 In your opinion, what did Robert Owen think were the main problems affecting factory workers? 15 What do you think it was about his personality and beliefs that led to his becoming such a well-known promoter of factory reform? 16 Why do you think his major initiatives in Britain and in the United States failed? 17 Overall, did Owen succeed? Give reasons for your judgement.

Progressive employers 18 Discuss the similarities and differences in the way that Hugh Mason and Sir Titus Salt arrived at their decisions to set up model communities. 19 Which of the two reformers, in your opinion, was the more successful? Explain your reasoning. 20 Can you discover any other reformers of this kind elsewhere in Britain? 21 If you compare Owen with Mason and Salt, did Owen get it wrong and Mason and Salt get it right? 22 Why do you think Owen remains a well-known failure and Mason and Salt are obscure successes? 9780170244008 Chapter 4 The factory age

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