Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/369

. 19, 1863.] manufacture. Among these are two thousand little fellows who were sent to work at from six to ten years old, and who may, therefore, be supposed to be the children of very poor parents. Many are the sons of widows, to whom every penny of earnings is of consequence; and more are the sons of drunken or otherwise worthless fathers. So their life begins very hardly. They go to work at six, and first light the fires, and sweep the rooms and the stoves,—the stoves being themselves little rooms of about thirteen feet square, and eight or nine feet high, heated to the temperature of an oven. The dust of the clay is particularly hurtful to the lungs, when breathed in by the sweepers; and here is the first peril to the child. When the dirt is allowed to lie, the dust has to be disposed of at last; and the dirt meantime is not wholesome; so that those who sweep daily have the best of it.

The little lads then await the men whom they are to help in the work of making plates, cups and saucers, &c. It is well for the boy who has a punctual and steady man over him; for it too often happens that the workman’s bad habits make slaves of the little fellows who wait upon him. On a Monday he may keep them idling about all day, because he does not make his appearance; and they are not surprised if this goes on through all Tuesday. Then they know that they shall be kept late every evening, to make up for lost time; and may probably not stop work for the whole of Friday night. When we see what the work is, we shall wonder how growing children can hold on from six on a Friday morning (after a short night’s rest) to dinner-time on Saturday.

A dozen of the smallest boys are turning the jigger or wheel all those hours. It makes one’s limbs and one’s heart ache to think of it. A child of seven or eight turning a wheel the whole day through, every day but Sunday, and often a part of the night too! Of course, the few people who know about this ask why the turning is not done by steam: and they get the tiresome, disgraceful old answer;—the men will not hear of it;—they would quit at once if steam were introduced to “take the bread out of their children’s mouths,” as they say. The smaller manufacturers say their business will not afford the expense of machinery; and the larger ones say that their workrooms are not convenient for the erection of shafts: so the unhappy children go on doing the work of a cogwheel.

Even they will find themselves worse off when they come to help the potter more directly in his work. Each has to run backwards and forwards between the workbench and the stove (which is close at hand), carrying the moulds with the moist soft clay just wrought into a plate or a saucer, and bringing back the moulds which are done with. The little room called the stove has shelves all round it, on which the ware is baked; and the heat of the chamber is anywhere from 120 to 150 degrees. Now and then it is actually red-hot. When the employers do not provide a plentiful stock of moulds, the poor lads have to enter this place many times a day; and, what is worse, they have to encounter a much more insufferable heat than would be necessary if the moulds were not wanted in the shortest possible time. When they are there, they try to stay till they have turned the ware baking on the shelves, lest it should warp by drying unequally: and if they cannot bear to stay, they have to enter again for the purpose. Thus their day is spent between this heat and the closeness of the workroom, and the outer cold when they go to meals; and all the hours they are at work they are breathing the powder of the clay, kicked up from the floor by their own feet as they pass to and fro. Many of them cease to grow under this discipline: many become asthmatic or consumptive, and die early; and few grow up to a healthy manhood.

The case is not quite so bad as it was; or at least not so extensive. In several of the 180 manufactories included in the small area described above, there are improved ventilation, better management of the claydust, a sufficient stock of moulds to save the necessity of the boys entering the stove so often, and, finally, a fair attempt to improve the stoves themselves. We read of a new stove in which the ware can be put in from outside by a rack, which runs in and out on a rail.

These mould-runners, as the little workmen are called, are the most to be pitied of all the eleven thousand young potters: but there are other processes nearly as unwholesome and fatiguing, under which the girls grow crooked and consumptive, and the whole number have a scanty chance of ever being healthy men and women. One hardship which is very common, is their being kept hungry, and prevented getting their meals properly, by the irregularity of the men under whom they work. The principal manufacturers of the district consider with pain what a life this is for children to lead in a Christian country, and what waste it is for these young creatures to be sometimes kept idle for half days and whole days, and then overworked, when, by a better disposal of the same time, they might be resting their bodies and using their minds in a school, without earning much less than at present.

Twenty-six of the principal Pottery firms have therefore addressed the Secretary of State for the Home Department, requesting that due inquiry may be made, with a view to bringing their manufacture under the operation of the Factory Act. They cannot, without its aid, control the men on whom the fate of the children depends: they cannot get them to school, nor secure their having proper food and rest. The moral evils arising from the present state of things have chiefly occupied the attention of these employers; but the Commissioners who have been sent down to them are emphatic in insisting that nothing can be done for the minds and morals of these thousands of children till they are relieved from their bodily sufferings. The proposal which Parliament will be asked to sanction, then, is that this Pottery District shall be placed for a time under the inspection and care of a physician who understands the peculiarities of the case, in order to be brought into a fitting condition to pass under the existing Factory Act. It is thought that a year or two of this special inspection will suffice. It will take much longer, no doubt, to replace the present set of stunted, asthmatic, rheumatic, worn-out children,