publichealth-4a

Transcriber:	Yvonne Cherne
Brief Bio:
Date finished:	8-29-2007
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So briefly now I'd like to consider a signature piece of early
legislation that was instituted in Britain in the 1830s which, if
you remember, was around about the same time that debates and
discussions were taking place over the relationship between the
environment and health that resulted in the sanitary reforms that
we discussed in a previous class.

So in 1833, the First Factory Act was passed in Great Britain.
And this just didn't come out of nowhere. It was the result of 3
decades of agitation over the conditions of work and its
relationship to health. So for example in 1802, there was an
earlier piece of legislation called the Health and Morals of
Apprentices Act which forbade night work for (pauper?)
apprentices in cotton and woolen factories. This was not strictly
a factory act, and it related specifically to apprentices, that
is, young people entering and learning a trade. So it didn't
apply to the totality of the working population or even the
totality of the working population who were engaged in
manufacturing cotton and wool.

By 1831, three decades later, some legislation had been
introduced relating to night work and to children. So by the
early 1830s, anybody who was under 21 years of age was not
allowed to work a night shift, and for all workers under 18 years
old, there was a limit to the number of hours per week that they
were allowed to work. So teenagers were not allowed to work more
than 69 hours a week. So by 1831, you had some legislation that
regulated particular aspects of work and a particular segment of
the working population: adolescents and children.

And this in some ways was legislation that created the way for
the 1833 Factory Act in Britain. And this applied to all textile
factories except lace. And so given that it applied to all
textile factories, it clearly had important consequences for a
large proportion of the working population and especially in the
towns and cities in England and northern England where factories
and mills were a very important source of employment for the
working population.

And there were a number of key aspects to this 1833 act. First of
all, it prohibited the employment of children under 9 years of
age. And for children above 9 years of age, it restricted the
hours that they could actually work. So children between the ages
of 9 and 13 were not allowed to be employed for more than 9 hours
a day or 48 hours a week. Children between 13 and 16 years of age
were limited to a 12-hour day or a 69-hour week.

There are other aspects that related not to the hours of work but
to the actual processes that took place inside the factories and
the mills. So for example, machinery was not allowed to be
cleaned whilst it was moving. And for those of you who have ever
been, had the opportunity to see a factory or say a cotton mill
in action at a museum or at a heritage site, you'll know that the
machinery moves very quickly, it's very large machinery, and it
is very noisy indeed. A lot of industrial accidents took place
because that machinery used to be cleaned while it was actually
turned on and working. So there were regulations put into place
that said the machinery had to be stopped whenever it had to be
cleaned so that you reduced the chances of the loss of limb. And
it wasn't uncommon for arms to be chopped off or hands to be
lost, especially for children who, because of their, the fact
that they were small and they were quick and they could run to
either ends of machines very rapidly and because they could get
into difficult-to-reach parts of  machines tended to be those
most at risk from that sort of accident.

And also significantly, as well as these work place restrictions
on hours, on processes that went on inside the factory, the
Factory Act in 1833 appointed 4 inspectors. These were
essentially located in London, but they were empowered to enter
any factory at any time, they were empowered to call witnesses,
to take evidence about particular problems in particular
factories, and they were able to pass minor regulations that
restricted certain practices in factories and mills. And the
information that these inspectors collected was used to produce
annual reports on factory conditions.

So clearly the Factory Act is not only about instituting
protection for workers, particularly children, for instituting
good practices in relation to the cleaning of machinery, it is
also important in our consideration of the monitoring of what
goes on within factories, the collection of information, how that
information is stored, analyzed, and how that information then
gets reproduced to inform future legislation.

One of the other aspects of the 1833 Factory Act was that it
stipulated that factory owners had to provide 2 hours schooling
per day for all the children that they employed. And this image
shows one example of the sorts of things that the Factory Act was
trying to institute within the factory system. This is a very
well-known image of workers at Robert Owen's Spinning Mill in the
early 19th century. And Robert Owen was generally - is generally
accounted for as one of the founders of British socialism. He had
a meteoric career as a cotton spinner after moving to Manchester
in 1788. His reputation was built on the success of the mills
that he managed at New Lanark. And he tried to combine high
profits with experimental efforts to improve the conditions of
his workers, especially in housing - so the housing that he
provided for his workers was generally considered to be of very
high quality - and also in infant and child education.

The image that you can see here is of the children participating
in agreeable recreation 3 times a week. And so you can see that
the children stood in line or in groups. It looks like they are
undertaking some form of dancing instruction. You can see on the
right-hand side of the image that there is a map on the wall, a
map of Great Britain and Europe. So there is some indication
there that the children were being at least taught in some shape
or form geography. And that's also indicated by the images that
go across the windows in the middle section. And that's also
indicated in the murals that appear at the center of the picture
across the windows that portray exotic images from the British
Empire, and they are bringing these exotic images to the children
and probably helping along with the geography education that is
indicated by the map on the right-hand side. And you can see also
around the side of the hallway the proud parents looking on,
maybe also vestors in the factory who are there to observe the
classes that are taking place.

And so these are the sorts of things that Robert Owen was
undertaking but never really were instituted at a significant
level in the factory acts other than the idea that factory owners
had to provide 2 hours of schooling per week for all the employed
children. So these are the types of things that Owen was
attempting to introduce and was operating in his factory
environment and, as I said earlier, the educational aspects did
find their way into the 1833 Factory Act in that factory owners
were compelled to provide 2 hours education per day for all the
children that they employed. But many other aspects of Owen's
model factory system didn't find their way into the legislation,
and agitators for factory legislation and intervention were
generally disappointed that the 1833 Factory Act concentrated
almost solely on child employment as opposed to conditions in the
factories for not just children, but also women and men.

So that's a brief summary of the earliest legislation that
appeared in Britain in the early 19th century. What I want to do
in the next section is to go on and discuss the inputs of doctors
and physicians and medical opinion to the development and the
implementation of legislation in the work place in Britain in the
19th century.