The Last Child Chimney Sweep To Die At Work

A blue plaque is planned for George Brewster, a climbing boy (child chimney sweep) who died on 12 March 1875 after swallowing a large amount of soot while sweeping the flues at Fulbourn Lunatic Asylum, Cambridge. 

His master, William Wyer, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six months in jail with hard labour. 

George's death was just one of many which shamed the British nation. 

Politicians and philanthropists of various hues like Jonas Hanway had been attempting to ban the use of child chimney sweeps since the late eighteenth century. 

Impoverished parents actually sold their children to chimney sweeps to use as apprentices (their small size meant they could climb up inside chimneys to clean them of soot). 

But George's horrific death finally sparked the impetus for change, and it's thought that he was the last child to die while sweeping chimneys.

Lord Shaftesbury (the 7th Earl), after several unsuccessful previous attempts, finally piloted the Chimney Sweepers' Act, 1875, through parliament. The Act required chimney sweeps in England and Wales to be licensed annually, and gave the police powers to enforce the law. 

You can read more about the story of the child chimney sweeps in my new release Young Workers Of The Industrial Age, which is still on special offer on the Pen and Sword website. 

Charles Lamb, plus Early Locomotives

 

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had a peaceful Christmas and New Year. 

The January/February 2025 issue of Jane Austen's Regency World has two features by me, on two very different subjects.

The first feature is on the tragic life and career of the author Charles Lamb. 

Charles Lamb was well known for his comic essays; but his life was marked by deep personal tragedy. 

Very sadly, the Lamb family suffered from mental illness, especially his sister Mary. 

Charles's life was changed forever after Mary, while very distressed, fatally stabbed their mother. 

Nevertheless, Lamb steadily forged a writing career, publishing plays, novels, poems, and essays (under the sobriquet Elia). He also collaborated with Mary on their Tales from Shakespeare (1807), which is still in print today.

My other feature, part of my continuing series on the industrial revolution, is on the advent of railway engines, including Richard Trevithick's ground-breaking 'Catch-Me-Who-Can', and his 'tram-engine' (1804) which hauled minerals at Pen-y-Darren ironworks, South Wales.  

Images from author's collection:

Top left: ‘Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. Illustration by Archibald Standish Hartrick (1864–1950), The Letters of Charles Lamb, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd, London, c.1903. 

Image centre right: Interior of the Bell at Edmonton, from a sketch by J. White. A friend from the country had called upon Lamb.

Bottom. Exterior of the Bell at Edmonton, in Charles Lamb’s time. W. Carew Hazlitt, Mary and Charles Lamb: Poems, Letters and Remains, Chatto & Windus, London, 1874. 

Image Left: Trevithick's High Pressure Tram-Engine, The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopedia, Vol. II, Thomas Kelly, London, 1836.

Happy Christmas Everyone!

Happy Christmas! I hope you all have a wonderful, peaceful Christmas and New Year. 

Image from the author's collection. 

Child Workers in Britain's Coal Mines

A child miner in 1842.

In 1842, a Children's Employment Commission was set up to discover the true facts about child labour in Britain's coal mines. 

We do not know precisely how many children worked underground in the middle of the nineteenth century. The commission only established the proportion of children and young people to adults, which varied according to district. For example, over one-third of the workforce was under eighteen in the Durham, Northumberland, Glamorgan and Derbyshire mines.

Wellcome Collection. Child workers 'hurrying'. 

The age when children first entered the pit depended on the thickness of the coal seams, family poverty, and local custom. Children as young as four were recorded. On average girls and boys began working underground when they were eight or nine years old. 

The youngest children were 'trappers'. They opened and closed the ‘trap-doors’ which regulated air-flow through the pit. The trappers sat alone for hours in the dark, unless they had a candle. Six-year-old Susan Reece, a trapper in a South Wales pit, said she ‘didn’t much like the work’.

Older children moved coal for the ‘getter’ or ‘hewer’ from the coal-face to the bottom of the mine-shaft. Thin seams (only twenty inches high) could only be worked by using children to drag or push the loads of coal, sometimes up a steep slope. This was called ‘hurrying’ or ‘putting’. 

Children hauled tubs of coal using a girdle or belt and chain, which they paid for out of their wages. The belt blistered and cut the children’s skin; their bodies became stunted from prolonged stooping.

Descending into the pit, 1870s.

In some pits, young boys were ‘engineers’;  they controlled the engine which wound parties of workers up and down the mine-shaft. They had to stop the basket or tub carrying the people at exactly the right moment. If not, the tub and its passengers continued up and over the overhead pulley, injuring them or dashing them into the mine-shaft below.  

In east Scotland, women and girls of all ages carried coal on their backs to the surface via a succession of steep, rickety ladders. The loads they carried were incredibly heavy. Some fathers ruptured themselves as they lifted a load onto their daughter’s back.

Women and children also worked above ground at the pit-brow in many areas. 

Coal mines were (and still are) very dangerous places to work in. Explosions from gases like fire-damp were commonplace; and there were thousands of run-of-the-mill accidents, like being run over by a coal waggon, or a roof collapse. In 1838, there were 349 fatalities in English collieries; over one-third of those killed were under eighteen. 

An explosion in a coal mine, 1870s.

The Mines Reform Act of 1842 banned all women and girls from the pits. The minimum age for boys entering the pit was lowered to ten, but they could be engine-men as young as fifteen. However, it proved difficult to enforce the Act. Boys under ten were found working below ground over ten years after the Mines Reform Act.

 

Oldest and youngest miners in a colliery, c.1906.

Regency Cheshire - Out Now in Paperback!

 

My book Regency Cheshire has been out of print for some years now - so I'm very pleased to announce that you can now buy it in paperback! It's still available as a Kindle e-book, too. I do hope you enjoy reading it! 

The Temple at Eaton Hall.

Child Workers In A Cotton-Spinning Mill

 

Mule-spinning machinery. 

Britain's early cotton factories depended on child labour. Some children and young people worked as 'piecers'; they joined together cotton threads when they broke on a spinning-mule. The youngest worked as 'scavengers'; they cleaned up the cotton dust and waste from under the mule. As the mule carriage moved forward and backward three times every two minutes, this could be very dangerous, as they might get their head trapped. 

'Creel fillers' placed the cotton rovings on the mule ready to be spun. 'Doffers' removed full bobbins of cotton thread and replaced them with empty bobbins. 

In 1819, William Royle, a 30 year-old cotton-spinner at Thomas Ainsworth's Warrington mill, paid his piecers from 2 shillings to 6 shillings a week. He earned 20 shillings net after paying his child helpers. William said he had first started factory work when he was ten years old.

Half the workforce at this mill, which ran from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., was under sixteen years of age. On Saturdays, the mill stopped at 5 p.m. Four times per week, the children stayed behind for half an hour at the mill to clean the machinery after it stopped. 

The children had no breakfast, dinner or tea break. They had to eat while they worked, so their food was regularly covered with the cotton dust or 'fly' which filled the air in the factory. The children usually had porridge for breakfast, potatoes with perhaps a little bacon for dinner (lunch), and bread and butter for their tea. 

It was hot and humid in the factory (to help stop the threads from breaking) - over 80 degrees Fahrenheit - so women and girls worked in their petticoats, with a 'brat' (pinafore) over their petticoats. Boys and men worked without their waistcoats or coats. The workers were usually barefoot, without shoes or stockings. 

As Poor As A Stockinger

 My latest feature in my continuing industrial series for Jane Austen's Regency World (November issue) is on framework-knitters (stockingers). 

Framework-knitters were extremely poorly paid. In March 1819, a Leicester framework-knitter, William Jackson, told a parliamentary select committee that none of the workmen earned more than six shillings a week (36p) on average, despite working a 15-hour day. 

Children helped their parents. Leicester had a wife and six children to support. He said that he earned eight shillings a week for making 'superfine' stockings, and he had 'put three of them into the frame' [i.e., making stockings], and they earned him 'nine shillings a week more'. William's wife did some seaming, for which she earned one shilling and sixpence. So their total income was 'eighteen shillings and sixpence'. The family was behind with their rent, and were in debt, even though Jackson had sold some of his belongings to try and make ends meet. 

Washing, fulling or 'felting' stockings. 

Probably one of the best-known stockingers was Jeremiah Brandreth, who was hanged for treason in 1817 following the ill-fated Pentrich Rising. Many contemporaries believed that Brandreth (a former Luddite), and his unfortunate companions on the gallows, was entrapped by a notorious government spy. 

Image of a stocking weaver courtesy of the Wellcome Library. 

Image of washing, fulling and felting stockings from Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Recuil de Planches de l’Encyclopédie Par Order De Matières, Tome Sixième, (Panckoucke, Paris, 1786). Author’s collection.