How you feel about school holidays depends upon who you are - scholar, teacher, parent, or in my case , grandparent. I have got to the end of the summer term after an academic year of looking after smallest grandchild one day a week, and am totally exhausted. Oh for the school holidays ! But has this always been so ? I certainly enjoyed the long summer holidays when my own children were young, and planned days out and picnics and bike rides, and then at the end of the summer we would have a grand day out going somewhere on a train. One favourite destination was Bradford to the Museum of film and photography and the IMAX cinema screen. This picture is called "School is out" painted by Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes (1859 - 1912) Penlee House Gallery & Museum , on the ArtUK website So what about the school holidays when I was a child ? I cannot remember that I thought they were particularly great fun. They were pretty lonely as I lived a long way from the village and other children. And there was always work to do. My eldest grandchild is now sixteen, and we have been nudging him in the direction of getting a holiday job for the summer, but this has been more difficult than it was in years gone by. There are so many restrictions on what a sixteen year old can do, how many hours, where they can work and when, that many are reluctant to give holiday jobs to teenagers. However, fingers crossed, he is starting a kitchen job in a local pub. I hope that it works out. So casting my mind back to school holidays in my childhood, the job that I was allocated was scything thistles and nettles in the pastures, as soon as I was big enough. My father managed to get me a scaled down scythe, and that was my summer job. It really upsets me now to see so many fields growing thistles and nettles and allowing them to flower and seed, meaning there will be twice as many next year, when it used to be my job to mow them all down. After the nettles had wilted in the sun for a few hours the cows would come and eat them. I had a carborundum wedged between the top stones in a stone wall, and every so often would stop to sharpen the blade, until one memorable day when I took the top off my right thumb ( the scar is still there !). So I have been thinking about childhood experiences of work and school, and if there was ever conflict between them. The village school that I went to was very flexible about holidays, unlike schools today. The school closed for the three days of the Yorkshire Show because so many children would have been absent anyway. The August holiday was shortened so that the October half term could be extended to a fortnight for 'tatie picking. All the children would have been potato picking somewhere. It took me some years to realise that whilst I was picking 'taties for my father for nothing, other children were picking for other farmers and getting paid ! It was not until I was in my late teens and met husband-to-be who worked on an arable farm, that at last I went 'tatie picking and got PAID ! Brilliant. I loved picking potatoes. So what other jobs did I do as a child ? You were just expected to pitch in and help, and as you grew you got more or different jobs. I can remember my father putting a pitch fork over my shoulder and putting battens of hay on the tines (prongs) to see how much I could carry to fother beasts a couple of fields away. There were always hens to feed and eggs to collect and calves to feed, but it was also fun. You never ever went for a walk without coming back with an arm full of kindling sticks; a Saturday afternoon job was sawing up wood on a saw horse for fuel. I used to enjoy that. Every day enough logs and sticks and coal had to be brought into the house, and even as a small child you learned how to lay and light a fire. But in days gone by, before compulsory education, the income, however small, from a child working, could be vital to the survival of a family. Children were sent out into the wide world of work at an early age and had no option to stay at school. Potato Pickers by Ernest Higgins Rigg (1868 - 1947) Bradford Museum & Galleries from Art UK website. We had skeps just like the one on the ground, but the days of horses were long gone. The Potato Pickers by John Johnstone (b 1941) in the Auchterderran Centre, Art UK website. Interesting as all the pickers appear male, and they are all bunched together in the same row. You never picked 'taties like this, you were spread across the field, each in a different row, and they have moved on to plastic baskets and not woven skeps. All this has led to thoughts of the distinction between giving a child something to do and exploitation. All the rules and regulations about hours and conditions have been fought for over centuries. The result is that childhood is being extended to late teenage years, when once a child was thrust into earning money at a very young age indeed. This is from the 1911 census for the household living at 121 Newton Street, West Bowling, Bradford. My maternal grandfather is Tom Stocks aged 14 years who was working as a marker in a Dye House. And this is from the 1911 census for a household in Wood Street, Haley Hill, Halifax. My maternal grandmother is Evelyn aged 13 years who is at school part time and the rest of the time a worsted spinner. Her younger sister Sarah Ellen also was a part timer a few years after this census. Going back further, this time in the rural North Riding of Yorkshire, this is from the 1841 census for an address on the edge of Leyburn called Hill Top. The head of the household was the Reverend Miles Booty and he employed three female servants [F.S.] who were my relatives. Nancy Gill and her younger sister Elizabeth Gill were the sisters of my great grandfather. Margaret Chapman was the sister of their aunt. All came from Coverdale, so had not travelled far to be servants, but Elizabeth did then spend many years of her life in domestic service which had certainly begun by the age of 11 . The conditions in the household of the Reverend Miles Booty in Leyburn would be so different from a dye house in the textile districts of the West Riding. Yet the industrialisation of our country depended upon child labour. In the book "Child Workers in England 1780 - 1820 : Parish Apprentices and the making of the early industrial labour force" by Katrina Honeyman, it lists the numbers of pauper children who were "sold" from London workhouses to textile mills in the Midlands, North of England and even Scotland. She says that London Workhouses accounted for about 90% of the children in the early periods of the industrialisation of textiles. Parts of this book are on googlebooks. But you can then find who these children were on the wonderful website called London Lives. www.londonlives.org . Here there are transcripts and images of Workhouse Registers of admissions, discharges and apprenticeship bindings. So the parish workhouse of St Clements Danes in London sent a significant number of children to a cotton manufacturer at Backbarrow near Cartmel on the edge of the Lake District, called John Birch, and others to the factory of Joseph Wells at Sheffield. Johanna Johnson had already been apprenticed to Robert Lockhead in The Strand, but it had not worked out, so she was sent north to John Birch. John Birch, and other factory and mill owners, then paid the workhouses if the apprenticeships proved satisfactory. Here are the left and right pages of the St Clements Danes ledger indicating the name and the age of the child on the left, and their destination, and the right hand page had details of money transactions. In some cases two guineas was paid after seven weeks and a suit of clothes was provided. They were being sent at least two hundred miles by wagon. It was another forty years after these children were bound apprentice that there was some concern about the conditions of working children. Enter Richard Oastler who wrote about "Yorkshire Slavery". He was born in Leeds in 1789 and was politically active in the years when there was the movement to abolish slavery. He compared the exploitation of children in the dangerous conditions of mills and factories to that of slaves on plantations. He found that some were working 13 hours a day, and thus began the petition for the Ten Hour Act. The 1833 Act abolished the employment of children under 9 years in cotton, woollen, worsted and flax mills, but the legislation excluded lace and silk mills as small hands were needed for the fine threads. It also limited the hours of work to ten hours a day. Instead of passing a blanket Act of Parliament that covered all aspects of child employment, there was then a long battle within each industry where industrialists argued with philanthropists. Mines, foundries, potteries, farms - protection of children was hard won in each distinct area where children were employed. Many were the heart-rending stories of a lost childhood. Parliament commissioned inquiries to do some fact finding and interviewed children. Hannah Brown was interviewed by Michael Sadler, M.P.( who also petitioned for the Ten Hour Bill), on the 13th June 1832. Question - How early did you begin to work in the mills? Hannah - At nine years old Question - What hours did you work ? Hannah - I began at six o'clock and worked till nine at night .... The Parliamentary Commission also found children who had received terrible injuries from unguarded machinery. So I will end this month's blog with this delightful little boy. The picture is called "Nothing Doing" and the artist is Jules Bastien Lepage [1848 - 1884] and the painting is in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and also on the Art UK website. I hope that he did not get into mischief and found something useful to fill his days.
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AuthorThis is where you can share creativity with me. I believe that everyone has something creative within them, and it is a joy to find ways of being creative. Blogging is NEW to me, so here goes ..... Archives
January 2024
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