'Hot-Pressed Paper'

My latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World (March issue) is on the art of paper-making. Paper was needed, of course, for Jane's letters, and for her books to be printed on. 

Paper was commonly made from cotton or linen rags. Some of the process was already mechanized and powered by water - there were already paper-mills in the mid-eighteenth century - but it was a slow process. It could take up to three months to make one sheet of paper by hand, depending on its quality. 

'Hot-pressing', as mentioned in Jane's novels, involved heating a sheet of writing-paper between cast-iron plates to give a nice smooth finish. 

Louis-Nicholas Robert's 'continuous wire process' (1798) made it possible to make much larger sheets of paper by machine. Within a few years, the first paper made in a single continuous roll was made at Frogmore Mill in Hemel Hempstead. 

The paper was also cut by machinery, tended by child workers. 

And the more paper was made, the more novels could be printed!

Images from the author's collection:

Top left: Paper making by hand at Hollingworth's Turkey Mill, Maidston, Penny Magazine, 1833. 

Centre: Paper-cutting machine with child workers, Monthly Supplement of the Penny Magazine [96], 31 August to 30 September, Charles Knight, London, 1833. 

Image right: Dennison (Denison) and Harris’s Patent Paper-Making Machine, patented 1 January 1825. Luke Hebert, The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopedia, Vol. II, Thomas Kelly, London, 1836, Nigel Wilkes Collection. 

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. 

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.

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. 

'A Very Pretty Spotted Muslin'

 

In Northanger Abbey, Miss Tilney wore a 'very pretty spotted muslin'.  My latest feature in my ongoing series for Jane Austen's Regency World (May/June issue) is on calico-printing. You will be able to find out more about the lives of child workers in the calico-printing industry in my forthcoming book, Young Workers of the Industrial Age, to be published by Pen & Sword this autumn. 

Images from the author's collection:

Above: Morning Dress, Lady’s Monthly Museum, February 1801. Figure on the right is wearing a ‘printed cotton gown’ with a ‘stone-coloured pelisse, trimmed with fur. A white velvet bonnet, crossed with green velvet bands’. 

Image right: Block printer and tierer or ‘tear girl’. Children as young as six worked for twelve hours or more helping block printers. Charles Knight’s Pictorial Gallery of Arts Vol. I, (c.1862).

Calico Print Workers

My latest feature for Who Do You Think You Are? magazine (October issue) is about Lancashire calico-printing workers, and how to research your ancestors in that branch of the textile industry. 
Originally, calico was printed by hand. The cloth was stretched across a printing table, wound round a roller at each end so that the cloth could be wound on ready for the next length to be printed. The printer had a child helper, a ‘tierer’, who dipped a small brush in a pot of colour, then brushed the liquid colour evenly onto a sieve or drum floating on a bed of water. The printer then placed an engraved wooden block or copper plate (with a handle on the back), onto the sieve so that it picked up the dye. The block was then pressed firmly onto the fabric to create a pattern. Block-printing was a slow process; it could take all day to produce just six pieces of cloth printed with a plain pattern

The first recorded calico printer in Manchester is William Jordan, ‘callique-printer’ at Little Green in 1763; the trade in Lancashire gained a strong foothold the following year at Clayton’s factory in Bamber Bridge, near Preston.
The days of block printing were numbered when roller or cylinder-printing was patented by Thomas Bell in 1783. A rotating cylinder was dipped into a trough of colour dye; next, a long steel rule or ‘doctor’ removed excess colour from the cylinder. The cloth to be printed was pressed against the dye on the engraved cylinder by means of a roller, so that the pattern was continuously printed on it as it moved along. Children were employed in the print-work factories, too.
Now hundreds of pieces of cloth could be printed in a day.  
Hoyle’s Mayfield works at Manchester employed over 200 workers in the 1830s, including over 40 children; the children earned 2s 6d per week when learning the trade, then 3s 6d when ‘fully instructed.’
You can find out more about the lives of child print-workers in my book Young Workers of the Industrial Age, and the Lancashire textile industry here.

Illustrations from author's collection:

Block printer and tierer or ‘tear girl’ (above, left). Children as young as six worked for twelve hours or more helping block printers. Charles Knight’s Pictorial Gallery of Arts Vol. I, (c.1862). 

A calico printworks at Manchester in the 1890s (above, right), and a view of Hoyle's printworks from London Rd Station (left). Both illustrations by H E Tidmarsh, Manchester Old and New Vol. II, (Cassell & Co., c. 1894).