Childhood in Days Gone By

David Exley

Life for most of Britain's population, prior to the present century, was above all else a constant struggle for survival. The need to earn a living was paramount, and education was a luxury which was barely affordable by the average working family until free education for all was introduced from 1870 onwards. Even with the reforms which were introduced graduallyover the next two decades, the school leaving age was still only 11 in 1893 and 12 in 1899. Looking back from today, when so many of our young people are cushioned from the world of work until they are 'grown up', it is almost impossible to appreciate the difficulties of childhood even as recently as just one hundred years ago, let alone the horrors of the 17th and 18th centuries.

When Daniel Defoe was writing about his travels around England in 1723, he reported that in Yorkshire, 'scarce anything above four years old but its hands were sufficient for its own support'. In other words even children as young as four were expected to contribute to their family's income although their work, in most cases, would have been within the home, helping their parents with whatever trade they earned their living at. It is thought that by 1800 the situation with regard to the employment of young children was even worse. What little evidence does exist indicates that most children in pre-industrial England, and almost all those of the poor, were expected to contribute to their keep long before they reached their tenth birthday.

Analysis of the 1851 census returns shows that 28 percent of children between the ages of ten and fifteen were already at work. In addition, over 42,000 children under the age of ten were also recorded as working. Given that many more children helped their parents with their work at home, and were unrecorded on the census, a dismal picture emerges indeed.

As recently as 1902 it was estimated that about 253,000 school children were employed in some capacity outside school hours. Whether they worked before or after school is unknown but in either case their ability to benefit from their time in class must have been severely reduced.

Before about 1800 most coal was obtained from shallow mines sunk where a coal seam was either at, or very near to the surface. The new industries which developed from about that time however demanded more and more coal, to fire their steam raising boilers, and it became both profitable and necessary to sink ever deeper pits in order to reach larger deposits of coal. As mines were sunk deeper however, it became more dangerous for the men, women and children who were employed in them. Reports of colliery disasters at that time usually contain details of the injuries and deaths suffered by young children involved in them. In 1842 Parliament received the report of a commission which had been set up to investigate working conditions in the mines. The report was so shocking that when Lord Ashley introduced a Bill it was passed by Parliament and became the 1842 Mines Act. This Act decreed that no women, girls or boys under ten years of age were to be employed underground and inspectors were to be appointed to enforce the law.

As employment became more and more concentrated in workshops and factories the new employers began to take advantage of the nimble fingers and ready obedience of the young children of their adult employees. The fact that they only had to pay very low wages to the children must also have been a strong incentive to employ them.

From 1867, the Workshops Regulation Act required that working children between the ages of eight and thirteen should spend half their day in school but regulation and inspection for compliance with the Act was not very effective. Many children who should have gained some respite from their labours in the mills and factories of northern England slipped through the net and continued to work the very long hours expected of them by their employers.

One result of the need for children to work from a very early age was a reduced life expectancy among the working classes. Although there were other factors at work, (including overcrowded, dirty living conditions, impure water supplies and lack of medical knowledge), the need to work long hours often in dangerous conditions obviously contributed to many early deaths. In 1841, working class life expectancy at birth in the City of Liverpool was only fifteen years, and about half of all the children of the poorer classes died before they reached their fifth birthday. Even this however represented a great improvement over the situation in the previous century where, for instance, in London in the 1750s as many as three quarters of all children died before their fifth birthday. A study carried out in 1842 showed that the average working-class age at death varied widely depending on location. In rural areas it was about 38 years, in small towns such as Barnsley it was about 28 years but in large towns, such as Leeds, it was only 19 years. Even as late as the 1890s deaths of children under one year old accounted for a quarter of all mortality and those of children up to ten years old accounted for about forty percent of the total.

Some people talk about the Good Old Days, but in view of the above facts it is obvious that today's children, at least, have never had it so good.I don't suppose that this will stop them complaining when it is time for them to return to school after the long summer holiday, but that must be better than them having to go to work in the local factory at an age when today's children are just starting at junior school.

© David Exley 1998

The above article was first published in the Journal of the Barnsley Family History Society in January 1998. It is reproduced here by permission of the Committee & Editors.
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