Ten-Hours' Day

A Break-through in Factory Legislation

Lord Ashley was very surprised when he received the invitation to put the factory workers’ case before parliament. Very likely he had never met a factory “hand” in his life, and he had certainly never been inside a factory, and knew no more of what went on inside those places than what he had been able to learn from reading the newspapers. “Whatever can have been the reason”, he must have thought, “that has made them pick on me. …”

If he had been better acquainted with what had been going on in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire he would have had less cause for wonder. For thirty years the factory workers had been agitating for a reduction in their tremendously long hours of work, twelve hours a day was quite usual and fourteen not at all uncommon, and when the order-books were full the machines were kept going all through the night, with the attendant hands working in shifts.

In 1802 a Factory Act had been passed that had brought some slight benefit to the most oppressed class of the factory population, the child apprentices who were as good as sold by the workhouse authorities to the millowners of the northern districts. This had been followed in 1819 by another Act for which Robert Owen had been largely responsible, which had likewise been intended to alleviate the conditions under which the children worked in the factories. In practice, however, it had proved most disappointing, and in 1832, the year of the passing of the great Reform Bill, there were many thousands of children working in the textile mills, all of whom were entirely unprotected by legislation except those employed in cotton mills, and in those mills little children, boys and girls, of nine years of age could be made to work, and did actually work, twelve hours a day.

Still the agitation continued, and at length in 1831 it had reached such a pitch that the factory workers were filled with a fresh hope. Towards the end of that year another Bill was introduced into the House of Commons that would prohibit the employment of children under nine years of age, and limit the hours of work of all between nine and eighteen to ten hours a day. The second reading of this Ten Hours’ Bill, as it was called, was moved in March, 1832, by Michael Sadler, a staunch Churchman and strong Tory, who had a linen business in Leeds and had become horrified by the conditions under which he found children working. Sadler’s speech had made a deep impression on the House, particularly when, to illustrate his description of the savage beatings inflicted on boys and girls to keep them awake and attentive to their work, “the honourable member”, as the parliamentary report puts it, “exhibited some black, heavy, leathern thongs . . . the smack of which, when struck upon the table, resounded through the House”.

All the same, the House had not passed the Bill as it stood, but had set up a Select Committee to inquire into the conditions of Factory Children’s Labour. All through the summer of 1831 this Committee had sat under Sadler’s chairmanship, and in August he laid before the House a mass of evidence that shocked everyone who read it. Certainly it had shocked Lord Ashley, as he read the reports given in column after column of The Times. Such dreadful stuff it was; the most terrible descriptions of callous cruelty inflicted on defenceless children, many of them not yet in their teens, merciless beatings with sticks and straps, sadistic punishments for the slightest faults of clumsiness or inattention, boys and girls and young people bullied and cursed and tormented, knocked about and pushed around by those placed in authority over them.

Yes, Ashley had been horrified and disgusted, hardly able to credit that such abominable things were being done in Christian England. This sort of thing cannot be allowed to continue, he must have thought to himself, and he would have liked to give a hand in the good work. He wrote to Sadler offering his services in such small matters as presenting petitions, etc., but he had received no answer, and had given no further thought to the matter. And now there had suddenly descended upon him this representative of the factory workers, what was his name? Bull… the Rev. G. S. Bull, vicar of a parish just outside Bradford… he had never heard the man’s name before, bearing an invitation that he should become their spokesman in parliament! Really it was most extra­ordinary, and in his diary he noted that he had received the invitation with “astonishment, and doubt, and terror”.

What had led up to the invitation was this. Sadler was no longer available: at the general election that had followed the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 he had stood for Leeds, and notwithstanding the vociferous support of the factory population, who, however, had no votes, he was defeated. The leaders of the factory workers had to look round for another spokesman, and they found It difficult enough. Some of them would have preferred Cobbett, the doughty Radical journalist who had been elected for Oldham, but he was getting old and besides had the reputation of being the most quarrelsome man in England; others suggested John Fielden, but although his devotion to the cause of factory reform was undoubted he was himself a great manufacturer. Then there was Robert Owen, but he had never sat in parliament, and moreover he was no longer interested in factory legislation but was busy starting Utopian schemes of one kind or another. Who then?

Someone came up with Lord Ashley’s name: he had heard that his Lordship was very interested in social questions and had particularly distinguished himself in endeavouring to improve the conditions In lunatic asylums. Might not he be induced to take up factory legislation? And that is how it came about that “Parson Bull”, as he was styled, and though he was a clergyman he was one of the most wholehearted supporters of the factory agitation, came to make his appearance on Lord Ashley’s doorstep in London. When Ashley had collected his thoughts, he asked if he might have some time to consider the proposal. No, rejoined Mr Bull, the matter was extremely urgent, since they had reason to believe that unless they got in first with a Ten-Hours’ Bill, the Government would produce one of their own providing for a working day of eleven hours. At last Ashley was able to persuade his visitor to come back in the morning, when he would have his reply ready. As soon as the door had shut behind him, Ashley hurried round to one or two of his most intimate friends, and asked their advice. To his surprise they all urged him to accept the offer: seemingly they knew his capacities better than he did himself.

Returned home, he went to put the matter before his “dear Min”, the young and beautiful lady, an aristocrat by birth like himself, and like himself most ardently interested in “good works”, who was his wife. Frankly and freely he put the matter before her, and he was not afraid of using the darkest colours. Think what it would mean, he said, to her as well as to him: the sacrifice of leisure, being cold-shouldered by friends who took the opposite view, perpetual worry and anxiety, constant work, running here and there about the country, mixing with people of a very different type from those they had been accustomed to, many of them of the most unpleasant character… Lady Ashley listened; and then when he had finished pronounced the verdict. “It is your duty,” she said, “and the consequences we must leave. Go forward, and to Victory!”

When Mr Bull called the next morning, Lord Ashley gave him his answer: Yes. Hurrying back to his hotel, the parson wrote letters to the “Short-Time Committees” in the north who had entrusted him with his mission. Lord Ashley, he wrote, had already given notice in the House of his intention to reintroduce Mr Sadler’s Bill, “to regulate the labour of children in the mills and factories of the United Kingdom”, and the announcement had been received with hearty cheers. “As to Lord Ashley, he is noble, benevolent, and resolute in mind, as he is manly in person.”

At that time Ashley was in his early thirties. Anthony Ashley Cooper, to give him his full name, was born in 1801, and he lived until 1885. He was the eldest son and heir of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and he succeeded to the title as the 7th Earl in 1851 on his father’s death; in the histories he is usually referred to as Lord Shaftesbury, but it was as Lord Ashley that he did his most important work as a humanitarian legislator. He entered Parliament in 1826 as Tory Member for one of the “pocket boroughs”, and soon gained the reputation of being a competent, zealous and altogether honest back-bencher. He was most deeply religious, an Evangelical of Evangelicals, and he valued nothing so much as his conscience. This sometimes made things decidedly uncomfortable for him, and for others, since he could never be relied upon to follow the strict party line.

Born an aristocrat, he was never a popular figure in the pleasure-loving circles of his class and order. He had powerful relations and friends, who would have been delighted to give him an occasional shove up the political ladder, but that conscience of his would keep on leading him along unpopular by-ways. Sometimes he was accused of being narrow-minded, priggish and a bit of a humbug. Another complaint about him was that he kept the strangest company: he had not much liking for official receptions and dinners and parties, but seemed to prefer hobnobbing with people of the poorer classes, and mixed on easy terms of friendly condescension with crossing-sweepers and waifs and strays of the London streets.

This, then, was the man whom the factory workers had enlisted as their champion, and they soon realized that they had no reason to regret their choice. He made it an invariable rule never to take anything on trust or hearsay, but to see everything with his own eyes. As soon as he had accepted the mill-workers’ invitation, he went to the manufacturing districts and examined the mills, the machinery, the homes of the people, and watched the “hands” at their work. This, he declared years later, “gave me a power I could not otherwise have had. I could speak of things from actual experience, and I used often to hear things from the poor sufferers themselves, which were invaluable to me. I got to know their habits of thought and action, and their actual wants. I sat and had tea and talk with them hundreds of times.”

When Ashley reintroduced Sadler’s Bill into the House of Commons in March, 1833, the prospects seemed bright. But before long the employers rallied their friends, and it was decided to appoint a Royal Commission “to collect information in the manufacturing districts with respect to the employment of children in factories, and to devise the best means for the curtailment of their labour”. Ashley was wrathful, and the factory workers protested most strongly, almost riotously, against something which they looked upon as nothing more than an attempt to postpone the very necessary reforms. When the Commissioners appointed visited the factory districts they were often given an exceedingly warm reception.

But when the Commission reported on its findings, it was found that the case for reform had been largely admitted. The government proceeded to introduce a Bill of their own, and this was passed into law as the Factory Act of 1833. It did not go anything like so far as the factory workers wished, but all the same it was a very great improvement on what had gone before. In the first place, it applied to nearly all textile mills, whereas the earlier Acts had applied to cotton mills only. Then it excluded children under nine from factory employment altogether. While as regards hours of work, it limited those of children under thirteen to forty-eight a week, and those of young persons from thirteen to eighteen to sixty-nine.

Preposterously long as these hours must seem to us, at the time they were thought to constitute an extraordinary invasion on the rights of an employer to employ his “hands” as long as he liked. There was another clause in the Act that was to prove of even greater importance, the one which provided for the appointment of four full-time Inspectors to see that the provisions of the Act were complied with. For the first time factory inspection became a reality.

The Act of 1833 represented a compromise. Ashley accepted it as such, but some of the workers’ leaders were highly critical of his part in the affair. What they wanted was not a mere reduction in the hours of children’s labour but the establishment of a ten hours’ day for all workers, and this seemed as far off as ever. At length an Act was passed in 1847 that limited the hours of working of young persons and women in factories to ten a day, which meant in effect that the hours of the men who worked beside them were similarly limited. By a stroke of bad luck Ashley was out of the House of Commons when this victory was won. He had resigned his seat because he supported the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, in his conversion to a policy of Free Trade, and the constituency he then represented was strongly protectionist. He was returned before long for another constituency, but in the meantime the Ten Hours’ Bill had been carried under the leadership of John Fielden.

This was not the end of his efforts on behalf of the factory workers, however, far from it. The new Act had soon to be amended, and it was Ashley who had charge of the amending Bills. Then in 1840 he had extended his operations to the condition of the children, and later the women, employed underground in coal mines. At his instigation a Commission was set up, which in 1842 produced a report that shocked the nation with its revelations of little children employed as “trappers” for twelve hours a day, children of seven years of age and even younger, and of women and girls who were made to labour dragging the coal-tubs in a state of near nakedness among miners who in many cases were completely naked. The speeches in which he exposed these shocking barbarities were among the finest, the most powerful, that he ever made, and had a tremendous effect. He had the satisfaction of obtaining the prohibition of female labour underground, and of the employment in the mines of children under ten years of age.

This was, perhaps, his greatest triumph, but there were many other fields of philanthropic endeavour in which he exerted himself to good purpose. His long struggle to secure the prohibition of little boys engaged in sweeping chimneys calls for the most honourable mention, but he was equally successful in his establishment of Ragged Schools in which the outcast children of London and other great cities were rescued from squalor and infamy and given a fair start in life, the improvement of the housing conditions of the workers, and an altogether fresh and more human approach to the treatment of the mentally afflicted.

But when all is said of these many activities in which he toiled so long and with such disinterested devotion, it remains true that it was in the field of Factory Legislation that he made his most permanent and beneficial mark. As J. L. and Barbara Hammond wrote of him:

“He did more than any single man, or any single Government in English history, to check the raw power of the new industrial system,” since the chief credit for our system of Factory Law “must be given to his courage, his humanity, and his patience”.

And it all stemmed from the invitation that was brought him by Parson Bull, the invitation that had filled him at first with “astonishment and doubt and terror”, but had provided him with a challenge that had aroused all his latent gifts of mind and body and spiritual power.