Chimney sweep: Killed in chimney for tuppence a week

Jump to: navigation, search

Protection for our children today has never been stronger. But just 200 years ago, youngsters from impoverished backgrounds were made to toil up to 16 hours a day in the most appalling conditions, as Anton Rippon reports.

A diagram showing how small boys were sent up chimneys

A diagram illustrating the work done by children down coal mines

Children were supposed to have half an hour’s rest for breakfast and half an hour for dinner, but more often were worked right through and fell to sleep at their machines

Social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, who tried to improve the lot of working children, including reducing the hours they worked

Quaker and factory owner John Bright who fought hard to protect the rights of employers with the support of many parents

I’VE been down almost three years now. When I first went down, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Now I don’t fall asleep. I just smokes my pipe.”

Incredibly, the speaker was a small boy of seven. He was giving evidence to a commission on children’s employment. And the job he was talking about was that of a trapper down a coal mine.

In Siddals Road, Derby, another small boy was not so fortunate. He had choked to death on the fumes from the chimney he was sweeping – all for tuppence a week.

Such was the pitiful lot of pauper children in Georgian England.

Regarded as public nuisances to be disposed of as quickly as possible, they were sent out to work as soon as possible by families trying to exist on wages that were below starvation level.

The youngster who gave evidence to the commission was comparatively lucky. As a trapper, his job was to spend between 12 and 18 hours a day in the utter darkness of a Derbyshire mine, opening ventilation doors to let trucks through.

He could have been a hurrier or a filler. Small children were employed to load the trucks as the coal was hewn; then other children, harnessed like horses, with a girdle around their waists, dragged the heavy trucks to the foot of the shaft, along passages barely 36 inches high.

They lived with their families in numerous courts and yards behind the main streets. Their homes were small cottages with floors and walls of bare plaster. There was little light, little ventilation and appalling sanitation.

Many of Derby’s pauper children worked at the Silk Mill by the Derwent.

These mill children toiled from 6am to 6pm for a weekly wage of between tuppence and fourpence.

Conditions were bad and, besides being subjected to corporal punishment, the children were put to the most degrading work under the eye of the superintendent and kept awake by his rod.

One visitor to Derby noticed that some of the Silk Mill machinery was worked “not by water power but by children who walked on a treadmill. In one large wheel I observed an ass and two small boys walking upon it”.

Another visitor described Derby Silk Mill as “the seat of ill-health and premature decay”, and the mill was accused of exploiting the children of poor frame knitters.

Indeed, while the Silk Mill enjoys a reputation as Britain’s first “true factory”, it was a dismal place in many regards, and the invention of spinning and weaving machinery had heralded one of the darkest passages in England’s industrial history.

Today, it seems incredible that less than 200 years ago, small children were used and abused by factory owners in the most horrific circumstances.

Not only were children treated quite barbarously in factories and mines, one of the most terrible ordeals must have been that of the boy chimney sweeps.

Boys as young as five were sent up the narrow winding chimneys of Georgian England. It is almost beyond belief.

Forced up the chimneys by blows from their masters, the youngsters were often driven mad with fear. Sometimes they would become jammed and fires would be lit underneath them to drive them upwards.

The boys wore no protection. Elbows and knees were covered in the most terrible sores through friction. After a few months their flesh became hard and calloused.

The poor lad who perished in a chimney on Siddals Road was just one of a mounting casualty list.

Some towns obtained pauper children directly from workhouses and, under the pretence of apprenticeship, binding them to a slavery as bad as anything perpetrated upon the people of the African continent.

When the children arrived from the workhouse, they were locked in cellars by merchants until customers came along to choose the sturdier ones for their mills and mines.

The London parishes jumped at the scheme as a way of ridding themselves of pauper children, even making it a condition that the employers must take one “idiot child” in every 20 apprentices.

The children were bound to their employers until they were 21 and even in what was regarded as a model mill, near Manchester, the children had to work 74 hours a week.

Elsewhere, 15-hour days, including Saturdays, were common, all adding up to a 90-hour week.

One orphan called Robert Blincoe was sent from St Pancras workhouse, at the age of seven, to work in a cotton mill near Nottingham where, with 80 other children, he laboured for 16 hours a day.

He was so short that he could reach the machinery only by standing on a block of wood. When he could not keep pace with the machinery, he was beaten, kicked, pulled by the hair and cursed at.

In some areas, child workers died in such numbers that their bodies were taken a considerable distance in order that the enormous death rate might not be noticed.

However, many parents were vehemently opposed to legislation to reduce or abolish child labour.

When a Bill was introduced into Parliament in 1802, to reduce the hours which children were permitted to work to 12 each day, and to ban working between 9pm and 6am, it was quickly dropped after protests from parents and employers alike.

Amazingly, while Lord Shaftesbury fought to end child labour, the Quaker John Bright, a self-professed “Tribune of the People”, fought equally hard to oppose any interference with employers.

His words were described as “perhaps the most vindictive towards the working classes ever used in a British Parliament”.

Eventually, continued agitation by a few enlightened men aroused the public conscience. And one day the Society for the Suppression of Chimneysweep Boys opened a branch in Derby. It was too late, alas, to save the lad who had died so horribly in Siddals Road.

Pages linking here