Sending our 10 year olds out to work in 1911

It used to be fashionable amongst some writers to lament the passing of the Edwardian Age, that short period between the death of the old Queen and almost the start of the Great War.

It can still be paraded as an elegant and almost innocent time which would soon be shattered by the horrors of a continental war which accounted for the deaths of ten million people.

And of course it all makes good telly from costume dramas to high budget films, from those images of sophisticated Edwardian men and women gliding past us to the protests of the suffragettes and a wave of industrial unrest which saw troops dispatched to many of our major cities.

Rarely do the dramas go out of the fine houses and even when they descend to those who lived downstairs we are rarely confronted with the full range of social inequality where in the words of Robert Roberts, “poverty busied itself.”*

The life expectancy of a manual worker was just 50 while for women it was only a little better.
 Life could be an uncertain struggle where illness, unemployment or the death of a wage earner could push a family into poverty and the workhouse.

And even while in gainful employment that family found it increasingly hard to manage as prices rose steadily from the 1890s but wages failed to keep pace.

Manual earnings amounted to sixteen or seventeen shillings a week compared to that of someone in the middle classes who might earn £340 a year.

So some at least surrendered to the option of allowing their children to start work at 10 and while this might not have surprised their grandparents it was shocking enough.

A full 9% of our young people between the ages of 10 and 14 were at work in the middle of 1911 which in the case of boys rose from just 1% of those aged 10-12 to 30% of those who had reached their fourteenth birthday.**

Against this we should perhaps pitch that simple statistic that the richest one percent held 70 percent of the wealth of the country.

Now in time I am going to explore in detail just what these young Mancunians did for a living and draw not only on the official records but the words of the young people themselves.

*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum page 18

 **Occupations, Manchester 1911 Census Vol 10 page 230

Ours was a young community.... stories of Public Health

I think it must be the oldest picture of Chorlton children in the collection and I guess it was taken at the old school on the green. 

Even so when it was taken child mortality had improved and these youngsters could expect to survive into adulthood. 

But fifty or so years earlier it would have been a different story.  Despite the fact that ours was a young community with children out numbering all other age groups they were vulnerable to many different illnesses.  Amongst the very young in the warm weather they were prey to diarrhoeal infections and in late winter and early spring from respiratory ailments while school children could die from diphtheria and scarlet fever.  Added this all of them might be prone to mumps, skin diseases, sore throats chicken pox, coughs, colds, bronchitis and influenza.  So during the first half of the 19^th century of the 27 children under the age of two who died during this period 18 succumbed in the warm or hot months.

You first get a sense of this by trawling the census returns and looking for the missing children who didn’t make from the 1841 to the next ten years later and then there are the parish burial records which detail young lives caught short.

But it is the parish gravestones which more than any document brings you face to face with the awful sadness of child mortality.  William Chessyre was a month old when he was buried in 1831, Mary Bell Whitelegg and John Gresty just 3 months and William Cardrew Birley son of the Reverend William Birley and his wife Maria only five months.  Some families were unluckier than others.  The Holland’s lost three of their children between 1840 and 1841 and James Gresty buried his two young sons and his wife in just a year. *

Such events were common enough in both rural and urban settings and were partly at least due to the quality of drinking water which in our case was getting worse as the 19^th century wore on, so that by the 1880s most of our wells had according to one observer either dried up or were contaminated. 

Opposite; % of child burials in the parish church by age from 1800-1850

But in 1864 the first pipe bringing in mains water from Manchester was laid and a decade later the sewage works had been opened south of the village on the Mersey.  Not that this was all progress.

There were complaints about the state of both Chorlton and Longford Brooks which according to one newspaper were akin to open sewers and well into the 1880s there were hot spots of measles in the township.

All of which I suppose goes a little way to burst that rural rosy picture that some historians fall back on as the way things were in the country.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; school children from the Lloyd collection, undated, gravestone, from the Parish church yard, 2011, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Remembering the eight children of Charles, Elizabeth, and Hannah Sharp ....... Ashton under Lyne in the 19th century

It will have been sometime in the summer of 1979 that I came across this grave stone in the parish church in Ashton-Under-Lyne.

The gravestone, the parish church yard, 1979

I had wandered past it for years and never really noticed it, but on that day by chance I stopped and looked at the memorial to the eight children of Charles, Elizabeth and Hannah Sharp who all died between 1839 and 1843.

Of the eight, only one reached the age of 18 with other seven dying between the ages of 2 months and one year and a bit.

It is a powerful reminder of the level of infant mortality in the not so distant past and is one that I have used over the years to illustrate just how uncertain were the chances of surviving to the age of 5.

And while I had transcribed it and included it in stories and articles, I have never reproduced the original memorial stone or gone looking for the family.

But today I have done just that and it has been a slow process taking up a big part of a morning and even now I have not got very far.

I know that Mr Sharp was married three times, and that his wives were Elizabeth, Hannah, and Sarah.

His marriage to Hannah took place in what is now Manchester Cathedral in June 1834 and he married Sarah in 1851 in Ashton-Under-Lyne.

This third marriage was sometime between January and March, and in April they are recorded as living at 10 Old Cross which was close to the parish church.  He described his occupation as “Hair  dresser and seedsman”, which chimes in with an earlier reference in 1828 to him in a directory as living on Old Street and earning a living as a “seedsman”.

In 1861 they had moved to the small village of Hotham where he continued to describe himself as a “seedsman” but also as a “Lodge Gate Keeper”.*

The children

Of his children I have so far only come across a reference to the baptism and death of Charles Slater Sharp, which occurred in 1843 but in time the others may come out of the shadows.

As it is, the death of Thomas aged 18 in 1839 might offer a clue as to his father’s marriage to Elizabeth which must be sometime at the start of the 1820s if not earlier.

I doubt we will ever know why Charles and Sarah moved to Yorkshire.

Places the Sharp's would have known, Ashton-Under-Lyne, 1854

It may be that they were returning to his birth county or perhaps the tiny rural village offered job opportunities and a quality of life which was no longer the case in Ashton.  Mr Piggot’s Directory for 1828 had commented that “its new streets are well built and contain many good and some elegant residences; but the old streets are narrow” and while in 1826, “the number of steam engines in Ashton was thirty-four, ..... at this period [1828] the number and power has greatly increased”, which was to continue into the 1860s.

By comparison, Hotham in 1825 contained just 62 houses and 203 inhabitants, which by 2011 had only grown to 233.**

Of course there is that darker and sadder explanation which falls back on the need to move away from such a litany of tragedy.

Location Ashton-Under-Lyne

Picture; the gravestone of the Sharp family, 1979, parish church, Ashton-Under-Lyne, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Old Ssquare, close to where the Sharp's lived, from the OS, Lancashire, 1854, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Pigots Directory, 1828, Census Enu 1s 2 Ashton-Under-Lyne, Hotham Yorkshire, 1861, page 214

**A Topographical Dictionary of the United Kingdom, Benjamin Pitts Capper, 1825, page 432

Discovering the secret of a day out on a wet August day in Heaton Park

Now a holiday in August in my experience is usually a disappointment.

I suppose it comes partly from the fact that as a teacher I remember too many sweltering days in June supervising exams as the sun cracked the paving stones, only to watch the rain come down like stair rods during August.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I was exploring a photograph in the collection.* It shows a party of girls on an outing.

There was neither date, nor a place but given that there were a lot of children who had been transported in a convoy of “special” trams I argued it  must be one of the big parks, of which Heaton best fitted.  As to a date well I thought was “in the early years of the last century” which as we all know is really a code for saying I don’t know.

If pressed I would have said that the clothes worn by the girls placed them in the 1920s, but those of the women dated from an earlier period.  My mistake was to ignore the possibility that many of the older women may have been happier with the clothes that had been fashionable much earlier in the century.

So a date in the 1920s seems more likely and it was at this point that I sought help from the Manchester Transport Museum and in particular Mr Turnbull.  They too had the same photograph but theirs had the date August 2nd 1922 with the description that this was a “child’s outing.”  And yes it was Heaton Park and that
“the tracks on which the trams are standing now form part of the route of the preserved tramway operating in the Park – the tramway originally ran into the Park from a junction on Middleton Road and terminated near a large shelter, which is out of shot to the left.  This shelter now forms the depot and museum building for the preserved tramway.”

And as you do on search quests I had trawled the records for the weather on that August of 1922.  It had been a bad summer with July and August “cool and unsettled with much rain and little sun”** Which is confirmed by the number of girls carrying umbrellas and an article in the Manchester Guardian of August 1924 bemoaning the bad summers of the last few years and citing 1920 and 1922 as pretty bad and no better that 1924.  So no change then in just over 90 years then.  And for those who really want to know it was a Tuesday.


So perhaps not the most earth shattering piece of historical detective work but nevertheless one that closes a puzzle, and although I am no nearer knowing what the occasion was, I am sure someone will be able to help me on that score.  On the other hand I am pleased that the next time I am up in Heaton Park that stretch of tram line will allow me in a sort of way to touch an event 90 years ago, and bring that photograph of those young girls a bit closer.

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/tram-excursion-on-wet-summers-day.html
**Stratton, J.M., Agricultural Records 1969

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

And a thank you to Mr Turnbull of the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester www.gmts.co.uk   
And for details of the museum in Heaton Park, contact The Manchester Transport Museum Society at  http://www.heatonparktramway.org.uk/

Children, alcohol and the Band of Hope

I wonder how many societies stretching back to the early civilisations could make the claim that they truly treated children properly.

Now before someone makes the observation that it is unfair to judge the past by present standards I fully acknowledge that they did things differently.

And merely citing odd examples out of context is not good history because in isolation such examples tell us very little.

But I don’t think that prevents us from exploring the degree to which the young or at least some of the young were ill treated, abused exploited or exposed to things we regard as inappropriate.

So while parents were no less loving or protective of their own they still set their own to work at any early age which in many cases given the harsh economic system and subsistence farming gave them no alternative. Moreover many lived in communities which saw nothing wrong with the use of child slaves.

In the 19th century we sent them down the mines, made them crawl underneath moving machinery in the textile factories and watched them work in the fields in all weathers.

Despite the efforts of the early labour movement and progressive members of the establishment there remained real opposition to a change in the system and when the first legislation was finally passed restricting the use of child labour it was restricted to the textile factories and was not supported by a rigorous system of inspection.

Later still it was not till nearly the end of the century that serious efforts were made to stop young children hawking in the streets of our cities.

And not till 1901 was it made illegal to sell alcohol to children under the age of 14 and even then it did not apply if the container was in a corked or sealed container. Earlier in the century according to Annemarie McAllister in “The lives and souls of the children”: The Band of Hope in the North West* “A select committee reported that in public houses in Manchester ‘on a single Sunday in 1854 there were 212,243 visits to drink shops and 22,132 of these were made by children, some of whom went to drink on their own account – some to fetch drink.’”

Much the same is evidenced in the engraving Sunday Afternoon in a Gin Palace from the Graphic in 1879 by Charles Green.  Here amongst a collection of drinkers of all classes are two children one of whom is drinking gin and another about to be served.  It is an image as Annemarie McAllister points out that could be seen over a hundred years earlier in Hogarth’s Gin Lane which features children drinking from small glasses.

And gin in a way supplies the context.  It was a real problem and was commented upon by many social observers of the period.  In Manchester while the population had doubled “the consumption of gin and whiskey has quadrupled.......... Drunkenness has infused itself into the bosom of society.  Habit has conquered shame, and that which formerly drew a blush from the men, is now regarded as a daily habit by women and children. ”    **

In 1830 in an effort to break the hold of gin the Government passed the Beer Act which allowed anyone who was a rate payer and could afford the yearly license of two guineas [£2.10p], to brew and sell beer from their own homes without permissions from the Justices of the Peace,.  The beer they sold was stronger but they were not allowed to sell spirits or open on a Sunday.

The result across the country was an explosion in the number of beer shops.  In Manchester just ten years after the Beer Act there were 812 beer shops compared to 502 pubs which rose to 920 in 1843 as against 624 pubs and 31 inns and hotels.   ***  Ten years later there were 1572 beer shops compared to 484 pubs.

The full enormity of this provision can be gauged from taking just four streets in the densely packed warren which ran behind Great Ancoats Street.  In these four streets could be found 90 pubs, taverns and beer shops in the years 1841-50.

And here in Chorlton we had our own fair share, some of which lasted for most of the century while others opened and closed almost overnight.  Most I suspect were not the attractive bright palaces that pubs were to become but as best small rooms in private houses and at worst just a place to buy beer in a jug to take home.

But their potential for social damage led some to advocate temperance and it is this that is explored in some detail in the article and much is made of the movement’s attempts to draw young people in.  So as well “as aiming to reclaim any young drinkers, such organizations acted on the premise that children provided blank sheets  for the temperance message on the principle that ‘if they never use intoxicating drinks, they never will know the want of them’.”*****

And that is about where we started.

Pictures; from The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, Trollope, Frances, 1844, and Victorian Pub, from the exhibition at Salford Museum


*McAllister Annemarie, “The lives and souls of the children”: The Band of Hope in the North West, in Growing Up in the North West, 1850s-1950s, Manchester Region History Review Volume 22 2011
** Faucher, Lean, Manchester 1844 Its Present Conditions and Future Prospects, 1844 Abel Heywood 1969 Frank Cass pages 48-49
*** Ibid Faucher, page 48
**** Eric J. Hewitt A History of Policing in Manchester 1979
***** Gun Street and Henry Street ran parallel behind Great Ancoats Street and crossed Blossom Street and Jersey Street Piggot & Slater’s Directory 1841, Slater’s Directory 1850
***** ibid McAllister Annemarie page 4

Heaton Park, some trams, and lots of children on a summer's day in 1922

It’s a postscript really but if I am honest it isn’t over even yet.  

Now earlier in the month I explored the story behind this photograph of a group of girls arriving by tram at a park sometime in the early 20th century, and with the help of Mr Turnbull at the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester and a bit of deduction we were able to pin the place to Heaton Park and to August 2nd 1922.*

It helped that the Museum had a copy with the date and the place.  Now they have gone one better, and found a copy of the picture in an extract from the Manchester Evening News captioned, “The children are grateful to you, here are some of the guests of the Evening News readers disembarking at Heaton Park from the cars provided for free by the Manchester Tramways Department for their Joy-day trips.” 

All of which leads me off to trawl back copies of the Manchester Evening News because there are now more unanswered questions.  What were Joy-day trips?  Had the children entered a competition or were they needy cases and how had Manchester Tramways Department been persuaded to run free trips?  All I am sure will be revealed either by me and back copies of the newspaper or by someone who remembers their parents talking of the event.  We shall see.

Not as I said before earth shattering detective work but nevertheless a little bit of the past brought out again into the fresh air.


You can follow the older stories at http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Stories%20behind%20a%20picture

Picture; from the Lloyd Collection

A tram excursion on a wet summer's day

Sometimes a photograph just defeats you.  Of all the images in the collection this is one of only a handful that has no accompanying notes or date.  Nor are there any reference points which could fix its location, time or purpose.

And so we are forced back on the picture.  It is a wet day sometime in the summer and I think in the early years of the last century. There are a lot of children who have been brought by a convoy of “special” trams so we are dealing with a big event.

Now they are all girls and so it would be logical to think that it might be an event linked to the Girl Guides.

The obvious venues for what seems such a large group must be the big parks, but one where the tram terminates.  This I think rules out Whitworth Park and Platt Fields.  Chorlton wasn’t laid out till the 1920s which just leaves Philips Park and Heaton Park.  Of course it could be somewhere in Salford but there my knowledge runs out. But I doubt it these are Manchester trams.

A a search of the Manchester Guardian for the first twenty years of the 20th century threw up large numbers of references.

My pal Allan Brown is working on the trams as a clue and I suppose there might be someone out there who can take the search further.  But at present the trail has petered away.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection