WORK AND WAGES

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 145, 22 June 1938, Page 4

WORK AND WAGES

A CENTURY AGO

TERRIBLE CONDITIONS

LABOURERS REVOLT

Continuing his lectures to the W.E.A. on "150 Years of Work and Wages," Dr. W. B. Sutch told of conditions in the mining industry in the first half of the 19th century and also dealt with the last labourers' revolt in 1830.

Up until 1832, he said, there was no legislation whatsoever limiting the conditions of work in coal mines in England. It was common to find children, boys and girls of 7, 8, and 9, working fourteen hours a day in the mines. There were even cases of children of three or four years of age doing some small task. Women were also extensively employed in mining work, one of their main tasks being to drag along, frequently on their hands and knees, the tubs of coal which were filled by the miners. The women wore a sort of harness attached by a chain or rope between their legs to the tub. The boys assisted by pushing the tub from behind. The children received, as a rule, no education, whatsoever and deaths were very frequent, especially because of the lack of safety precautions in the mines. The life of a miner was 10 or 12 years shorter than that of the average working man, and miners at the age of 30 would be prematurely old. OPPOSITION TO BILL.

Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury) introduced a Bill in 1841 to prohibit women and girls Working underground and also young children. The Act was opposed, especially in the House of Lords, the leader of the most violent opposition being the coal mine owner, Lord Londonderry. He made special objection to the clauses forbidding young children working in mines. The Bill as passed in 1842 was very much whittled down, but it did provide that no women or girls should work underground and that no boys under 10, except those already in the pits, should work below. Wages were not to be paid near or at a public house. Penalties ranged from £5 to £10, and inspectors were to be appointed. The inspector clause was for many years a dead letter if one was to judge from the accounts of mining deaths up to 1860. These deaths still included women, girls, and boys. In discussing conditions of agricultural labour after the Napoleonic wars, Dr. Sutch explained that, owing to the fact that weekly income could be brought up to subsistence level through the poor law authorities, the actual wages paid to farm labourers were very much depressed and it was not unusual for agricultural labourers to die of actual starvation. Wages were as low as Is a day in some parts of the South of England. In 1830 the disturbances spread from Kent through Surrey, Hampshire, and Wiltshire where threshing machines and haystacks were burned as a protest against the conditions of the workers. Cobbett says that the. first riots were due to the importation of Irish labourers at a time when the governing class was contending that the sole cause of distress was over-population and that surplus labourers should be sent to the Colonies. FORM OF PROTEST. Whatever the immediate cause, the revolt spread rapidly but it was by no means violent. The farm labourers were well behaved and quite often the farmers took their part. The procedure was for a mob of Villagers to ask the farmer, to raise their wages to 2s 3d or 2s 6d a day and, at the same time indicate that they were going to smash his threshing machine. This was done in an orderly way, The farmers would point out that they could not pay higher wages unless they had their rents reduced by the landed proprietors or.their tithes reduced by the Church. Often the mobs, with the farmers, would then go to the land owner or the rector and ask for the rent or tithes to be reduced as the case may be. . The so-called revolt was being handled 'fairly well by the people locally and by conciliation. The labourers had their wages raised without any physical violence taking place, but the Government—people like Peel, Melbourne, Wellington, and Grey —took a serious view and sent cavalry into the district to suppress the riots. Tradesmen and farmers had refused to be enrolled as special constables. Dr. Sutch quoted a letter from Peel dated November 15, 1830, which read: "My dear Lord Liverpool,—Since I saw you I have made arrangements for sending every disposable cavalry soldier into Kent and the east part of Sussex. General Dalbiac will take the command." . Labourers were arrested in hundreds and .: workhouses turned into gaols. A special commission was set up to go through the country and try labourers for their offences. In those t days, if a man was part of the crowd, a member of which had thrown a stone at any person, he, with the whole crowd, was liable to the death penalty. Burning a haystack was a capital offence. SEVERE PUNISHMENT. The ignorance of the labourers at the trials was pathetic. Many of them could not/read or write, and did not know the law. Some even thought that the Government or the King or the Magistrates had ordered the smashing of the machines, but, despite this, extremely ruthless sentences were handed but by the Judges. The mobs had killed no one, yet, as a result of the so-called rebellion, nine people were hanged and 457 transported to Van Diemen's Land. Transportation was a punishment so severe that the authorities considered it the most effective in suppressing the revolt. The Governor of Van Diemen's Land wrote of transportation: "I am sure that a strong case indeed could be made out in its favour. I might instance the rioters who arrived by the Eliza, several of whom died almost immediately from disease induced apparently by despair. A great many of them went about dejected and stupefied with care, and grief, and their situation after assignment was not for a long time much less unhappy." Dr. Sutch will continue his next Monday night, when he will deal with the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union initiated by Owen and also with the commencement of the Chartist Movement.

Loyal Austrian school children have been forbidden by decree to continue greeting their teachers with the proverbial Austrian "Kiss your hand." It was explained such servility was detested in a National Socialist State. Other old Austrian habits rapidly are disappearing. A decree empowered Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Governor of Austria, to dissolve 22.000 Austrian societies of purely social character. The recent appeal of Field-Marshal Hermann Goering to Austrians to "spit in the fist and work hard" instead-of following old, easy-going ways, has made a great impression on Austrians.