Iain Rowe Child Labour and Collective Action in Cornwall’s Mines Page 1 of 43 WWhheenn TThhee KKiiddss AArree UUnniitteedd…… CChhiilldd LLaabboouurr aanndd CCoolllleeccttiivvee AAccttiioonn iinn CCoorrnnwwaallll’’ss MMiinneess.. Iain Rowe Plymouth University 2009 1 Iain Rowe Child Labour and Collective Action in Cornwall’s Mines Page 2 of 43 Child Labour and Collective Action in Cornwall’s Mines. Iain Rowe Plymouth University 2009 Contents: Introduction p.02 Chapter 1: p.07 Changing Attitudes Towards Child Labour Chapter 2: p.14 Child Labour in Cornish Mines Chapter 3: p.21 Collective Action at Cornish Mines Chapter 4: p.28 Why Did the Mine Children of Cornwall Resort to Collective Action in 1872? Conclusion p32 Appendices p.35 Bibliography p.37 2 Iain Rowe Child Labour and Collective Action in Cornwall’s Mines Page 3 of 43 Introduction In May 1872, children working on the surface of a group of mines scattered around Caradon Hill on the edge of Bodmin Moor in southeast Cornwall, joined together and agitated for more pay. This event has been overlooked by the vast majority of historians who have written about, either mining in Cornwall, or collective action and unionism countrywide. Indeed, only one mention of the event has been unearthed so far, though this was no more than a passing comment in an academic paper exploring wider industrial action by Cornish miners.1 However, no analysis was applied to the circumstances behind this particular action or its outcomes. Indeed, very little has been written, about children in history. Away from crime, punishment and education, childhood is a much neglected historic subject area. Social historians have long been fascinated with our predecessors‟ attitudes to child labour, but incidents of children acting in an apparently independent way have rarely been unveiled and explored, and as far as the author can find, never in an industrial situation. Surprisingly though, strikes by children in the past were not uncommon; on the 5th September 1911, a group of thirty or so boys marched out of Bigyn Council School in Llanelli2 to protest over the caning of one of their peers. Indeed, in this country it would seem strikes by children at school were quite common. During a presentation of research carried out by former Ruskin College pupils in 1972,3 David Marson evidenced that in 1911 alone, there were fifty seven towns that were affected by strikes by schoolchildren. Authors have also covered such events, in 1991 Pamela Scobie published The School that went on Strike,4 a historical novel based on the true story of the children of Burston County School in Norfolk who went on strike in 1914 after their head teachers were sacked by the local authorities. Overseas, collective action by children has also been reported upon Susan Campbell Bartoletti compiled enough information of such events in America to publish Kids on Strike5 in 1999. This book reports on children in nineteenth-century industrial conditions, which are similar to the events on Caradon Hill in 1872. However, the children identified by her as striking in the 1 Deacon, Bernard. „Heroic Individuals? The Cornish Miners and the Five-week Month 1872-74‟. Cornish Studies, No. 14. (Exeter University Press, 1986) p.46 2 BBC Radio Four [www] „History Section‟ accessed 09/01/09 3 The Times, Monday, May 08, 1972; p.12 4 Scobie, Pamela. The School That Went On Strike (Oxford University Press, 1999) 3 Iain Rowe Child Labour and Collective Action in Cornwall’s Mines Page 4 of 43 Pennsylvanian mining fields were part of a larger industrial action which was instigated and controlled by adults. Back in Britain one of the most appalling abuses of human labour during the Victorian period was ended by the Match Girl Strike at Bryant and May in 1888. Nevertheless, the „girls‟ were in general not as in the Caradon case, young children. Moreover, as with the Pennsylvanian case mentioned above, this action was assisted again by adults, in this case the socialist and working condition campaigner Annie Besant.6 The Victorian era is firmly etched onto the modern national consciousness as a time of conflict between the proletariat, a capitalist oligarchy who thought nothing of subjugating the country‟s youth in order to feed its bank accounts and a reformist movement looking to liberate and educate its minors. This thesis will look at the resultant changing attitudes towards children labour in order to contextualise the 1872 agitation by children. The reporting of any type of collective or strike action in nineteenth-century mines of Cornwall or West Devon7 is virtually nonexistent in the vast historiography pertaining to the Cornish miner and his labours. In point of fact, prior to Gillian Burke‟s reinterpretation8 of the previous historiography the fact that the Cornish miner resorted to industrial action at all was barely recorded. Nevertheless, they did strike, and moreover they did it quite often, as was later verified by Bernard Deacon in papers published in 19829 and 198610. Prior to Burke‟s revisionary thesis11 the reason why the Cornish miner „did not‟ resort to industrial action was the topic debated by the historians of the subject: the effects of the various types of Methodism prevalent in the Cornish mining districts are extolled as an antidote to collective action by Todd,12 Rowe,13 Rule14 5 Bartoletti, Susan, Campbell. Kids On Strike. (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) pp.82-108 6 See: www.mernick.org.uk/thhol/besant.html 7 The mines of West Devon were on the whole were regulated as part of the Cornish set-up, many of the lodes they worked existed on both sides of the Tamar, their ores were sold at ticketings in Cornwall etc. Thus, throughout the remainder of this report they will be regarded as one entity, and called Cornish mines. 8 Burke, G.M. The Cornish Miner and the Cornish Mining Industry 1870-1921 (London University, 1981) 9 Deacon, Bernard. „Attempts at Unionism by Cornish Metal Miners in 1866.‟ Cornish Studies, No.10, (Exeter University Press, 1982) 10 Deacon, ‘Heroic Individuals‟ 11 Burke, The Cornish Miner 12 Todd, A.C. The Cornish Miner in America. (Barton, 1967) 4 Iain Rowe Child Labour and Collective Action in Cornwall’s Mines Page 5 of 43 and Harris.15 Religion coupled with economic good sense was also often quoted. Rowse took this a stage further by putting it down to the „Celtic virtues‟ of the indigenous population as a whole.16 Indeed, many of those who emphasised the influence of Methodism also highlight the unique „tribute‟ system of working in the Cornish mines as a supporting element.17 This was an interpretation advanced by Gregory18 as far back as 1968. John Rowe gives us a further reason as to why the Cornish miner did not actively look to collective action: the easy availability, during the nineteenth-century, of emigration. This it is argued, made it easy to move to better prospects around the world when things got tough in Cornwall.19 However, Burke and Deacon as hinted previously, have taken issue with the longevity of these theories, positing that early on in the nineteenth-century any one of, a mixture of, or even all these theories may well have kept the Cornish miner from resorting to collective action. Nevertheless, after the copper crash of 1866 they have both identified a marked increase of such activity, resulting in widespread strike action; a sequence ignored or overlooked by previous academic writings. The copper crash arguably should have reduced the strength of negotiation of the mining workforce, and thus made industrial action less likely. However, as we shall see, it was in this case the „tribute‟ system of working - which instead of placating the miners, gave them the reason to unite against the mine owners. No historian to date has looked at where the child fits into the Cornish mining picture; perhaps they are assumed not to have been involved with any industrial activities due to their naivety or simply their young age? Nevertheless, children would have most surely been actively involved with any collective action that took place. Until the governmental legislation of 184220 there was no lower age limit relating to children working in mines, and even after the age of ten had 13 Rowe, J. The Hard Rock Men, Cornish Immigrants and the North American Frontier. Second Edition. (Cornish Hillside Publications, 2004) 14 Rule , J. The Labouring Miner in Cornwall 1740-1870. (University of Warwick, 1971) 15 Harris, T.R. Methodism and the Cornish Miner. Occasional publication (No. 1, 1960) 16 Rowse A.L.The Cousin Jacks: The Cornish in America. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969) 17 Todd, The Cornish Miner in America; Rule, The Labouring Miner; Rowe, The Hard Rock Men 18 Gregory, R. The Miners and British Politics, 1906-1914. (Oxford University Press, 1968) 19 Rowe, The Hard Rock Men 5 Iain Rowe Child Labour and Collective Action in Cornwall’s Mines Page 6 of 43 been set, many of the boys would immediately go underground with their fathers as there was no inspectorate, and most men were employed by other miners to be a member of their pare21, not directly by the mine. Once the children started work at the mine they too would inevitably become embroiled in any unrest and the resulting collective action taken by the workforce, as Scobie has exemplified happening in America . The plight of the workers on the dressing floors of the mines has received separate attention from the underground activities by Lynne Mayers.22 However, she does not focus down on the issues behind child labour, and only takes a brief look at industrial action.