| Although there are numerous other
points, the above have some important implications. It was commonplace
for children to spend time with their parents. In an agricultural
community this can be seen to be an obvious idea. Agricultural tasks
were usually shared across the family and the community. In the absence
of schools it would be unlikely that children would ever gather in a
group larger than their family unit (with the exception of church on
Sunday).
In areas such as South Wales which
saw a gradual transformation from agricultural activities to industrial
work, the presence of children around adults merely continued into
industry. Early industries such as the iron industry were a combination
of skilled industrial processes and a variety of unskilled tasks such as
the preparation and transport of charcoal, a time consuming labour
intensive business.
A greater concentration of people occurred
with the development of the factory as a place of work. This is mainly a
story of the textile industries of the North of England in the 1760s.
Locally, the typical industries around Swansea in the seventeenth
century would have been some charcoal production, leather and tanning,
ship building, iron making, fishing and salt
manufacture. All these industries would be seasonal and fit in
around the demands of the agricultural calendar and the time of year.
They would all have had children working in them side by side with
adults in an unremarkable way.
The problem of children working in
industry appears as the scale of industrial activity increases. A small
iron furnace in the early 1700s may have only employed twenty to thirty
people for part of the year and the children would be part of the family
group that was generally involved in the concern or from the local
farms. By the 1790s the iron industry was much larger and needed much
more division and organisation of the labour into skilled and unskilled
tasks. An early nineteenth century blast furnace site for making iron
could be as many as twelve furnaces employing almost a thousand people
of all ages. It was at this point that children were often regarded as a
distinct labour force and assigned distinct tasks. In the metal working
areas, the jobs were often heavy lifting and carrying of charcoal, iron
ore, limestone, and timber. Areas of coal working found particular uses
for children who could be given repetitive tasks and be very cheap
labour. As a producer of both coal and iron, South Wales became a
considerable employer of children on an industrial scale by 1800.
Children were also heavily
exploited in the textile industries of the North of England where their
identification as a distinct labour force had a very long history. A
child's quick and nimble fingers were ideal for maintaining the machines
of the cotton mills and their small size meant that they could run in
between the masses of moving looms and shuttles where adults could not
go. Although not part of our story, the exploitation and misery of those
unfortunate children forms a dreadful chapter in Britain's industrial
history and it was the tales of horror that came out of the cotton mills
that prompted people to look closely at the issue of child employment in
the 1840s. Below: Tip girls
from the Dowlais Iron works in the 1840s. Usually between the ages of 10
to 16, girls would help clear the drams of burning cinders (waste from
the blast furnaces). |