Recording 64, page 92
CHILD LABOUR: A stain on British history
Exercise 1 Listen, read and think.
Did you know ...?
A
The Industrial Revolution in Britain began around 1750 and lasted for about a hundred years.
During this time, a large number of new factories opened but there weren’t enough workers. So factory owners had to find other ways of getting workers – they started to buy children from orphanages and workhouses.
Thousands of boys and girls became virtually the slaves of factory owners. These poor children had to sign contracts that made them the property of the factory owner.
According to the contract, children had to stay with their factory owner until they were 21. By the late 1790s about a third of the workers in the textile industry were children.
During this period many families in Britain were very poor. They took it for granted that their children had to work. Parents had little choice: they either allowed their children to work in the mill, or the family starved.
In 1840 only twenty percent of children in London between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school; the others had to work.
Poor children were often pickpockets – they stole money to pay for food. Sometimes they worked in gangs.
Children had to work long hours. They usually worked from 5 in the morning till 9 at night – 16 hours a day under awful conditions!
They started work at the age of 5, and they worked in textile factories, iron and coalmines, shipyards, construction, match factories, nail factories, the business of chimney sweeping, etc.
Most of them died before they were 25.
B
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was a famous British writer.
He wrote some of the best and most popular English novels, including Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
He was born in 1812 in Landport. His parents were very poor. His childhood was difficult and not very happy.
When he was ten, he had to work at a shoe polish factory. This dreadful experience haunted him all of his life. Because of his life story, unhappy children and poor people were often characters in his novels.
Dickens used his writing to tell the stories of those who had no voice.
He was the voice for the street children and the poor in Victorian England.
C
A true story: John Birley
(interviewed by The Ashton Chronicle on 19th May, 1836)
I had to start work when I was eight. As was usual with the children of the poor in Lancashire, I went to work to a cotton mill.
I had to work from five in the morning till nine or ten at night; and on Saturdays till eleven, and often twelve o’clock at night. And then we had to clean the machinery on Sundays.
We were not allowed to carry a watch, and there was no clock in the mill. Only the master had a watch so we did not know the time.
They did with us as they liked, but we were afraid to speak. If we were five minutes late for work, we were severely punished.
The overseer would take a strap, and beat us till we were black and blue. We had to eat our food in the mill.
For breakfast we usually had water-porridge. Supper was the same as breakfast.
In the evening, when I went to bed, I cried myself to sleep, and prayed that the Lord would take me to himself before morning.
I remember no golden summers, no games and sports, no tramps through woods or over hills. I lost my childhood.
D
Is child labour a thing of the past? Unfortunately not. Even today, poverty pushes too many children into work.
Throughout the world, there are 250 million child workers between the ages of 5 and 14. They work hard on farms, in factories and in construction work.
