THE WOMEN WORKERS AND THEIR APPEAL; EXCESSIVE HOURS, INSANITATION, AND
OTHER UNCIVILISED CONDITIONS
“‘It’s gey handy to have the likes o’ you,’ a Scottish mother said
when consulting Miss Vines on the effects of employment on her
daughter’s health.”[9]
The outstanding characteristics of the working women of our country that
immediately appealed to the Women Factory Inspectors were their courage
and their endurance, their ready trustfulness, and their loyalty.
Instances of timidity, or fear of losing employment—hard to get and
easily lost—by evidence necessary to establish infringements of the law,
these did but throw up, in high relief, the dominating traits of the
majority. The exceptions were only natural in the days of severe
competition for poorly paid work, especially before the organisation in
1898 of the Industrial Law Indemnity Fund[10] for aiding workers
dismissed by employers after giving evidence that led to proof of
breaches of industrial laws.
A few months after my appointment to the Factory Department I went into
a factory just as a girl of fourteen years had been carried to the local
infirmary suffering from a compound fracture of her leg and other
injuries. “She had been at work at a card[11] for several weeks and was
esteemed as a careful, clever, and good worker. In the endeavour to keep
her card in good order by steady cleaning, her skirt had been caught in
the driving band and the mischief was done.... She had kept perfectly
clear and conscious, and had been chiefly concerned that no one should
alarm her mother, who was ill at home.”[12] The managing foreman was
much moved as he told me of this Lancashire girl’s serenity and
unselfishness under the sudden shock and suffering. Instances as strong
and stronger could be given by any Inspector of the way that a high and
fine spirit predominates when accidents and casualties occur in a
factory. Other examples in 1913, eighteen years later, may be compared
with that one. “Of a girl partially scalped,” Miss Martindale says: “Her
pluck and bravery were noteworthy; in fact, the qualities show
themselves in a remarkable degree in working girls when they meet a
severe physical shock;” of another, whose hand had to be amputated after
vain attempts to save it, she says that the girl mastered her
disappointment, and in two or three days after the operation began to
practise writing with her left hand, and in a month had become almost as
proficient as with the right. Or again, Miss Tracey says of fifteen
cases of serious lead poisoning among women employed in a workshop,
where they were “heading” yarn (dyed with a chromate of lead dye), “I
visited these workers at their homes and found them in different stages
of illness and convalescence. Their pluck will always remain fixed in my
mind; although many of them were unable to put into words the suffering
they had gone through, yet not one of them but was eagerly wishing to be
well enough to go back to work.”[13]
This is a spirit that is one with that we saw in the innumerable
“substitute” women and munition workers in the War. And before that
movement had well begun, an American employer in London had said in my
hearing that British women’s labour was the “best in the world,”
versatile, patient, and uncomplaining.
What were the characteristic features in the earlier days that the
Inspectors saw—drilling and testing the women? _First_, a mute sense of
industrial inferiority, outside the great textile industries, though
even of them a “mill girl” could write: “Mill girls need a sensible and
educated woman to further their cause.... How many of our women are
there that have to spend most of their lives in unhealthy, badly
ventilated and unsanitary mills, and must go on and tolerate the
condition of things silently, not daring to complain, and even if they
have courage they shrink from telling a man. A Woman Inspector would
often see irregularities without being told. Her own instinct would
enlighten her: I think that is one thing in her favour.... In cases
where the law had no power to enforce alterations, frequently the Woman
Inspector has by gentle arguments and reasoning caused the employer to
see that it was to his own advantage as well as the workers’ comfort to
effectuate the improvement.”[14] _Secondly_, an absence in the great
majority of factories of any woman in a position of authority.
_Thirdly_, in spite of protective laws, a working day and week in which
the standard hours worked by women frequently exceeded those for which
men, in certain great trades, had by means of trade unions secured
recognition from employers. _Fourthly_, a frequent lack of suitable or
even decent and sufficient sanitary accommodation, of cleanliness of a
domestic nature, and of other hygienic requirements, sometimes
injuriously affecting conduct and morals. _Fifthly_, not only low
average and individual wages, but on the part of pieceworkers an
intolerable uncertainty as to what their rates really were; and, for
all, a liability to arbitrary deductions for fines and alleged damages
to work, which often brought earnings below subsistence level.
These are all evils that specially and peculiarly weighed upon women, in
a haphazardly evolved factory system over which they had absolutely no
control. They shared with their fellow-men other frequent, though
certainly not universal, ills: excessive heat in active, and cold in
sedentary, occupations; exposure to inadequately controlled dust, steam,
fumes; badly drained or damp floors; handling of dangerous or injurious
materials; often poor and sometimes very bad general ventilation; lack
of washing conveniences, and means of preparing and taking meals. The
great matters in which men’s risks far exceeded women’s lay in injury by
accidents from dangerous machinery, explosion, and other causes, and
these remain still the largest risks to be reduced by guidance of a
thoroughly skilled Inspectorate, combined with safety control through
workers and employers.
A single illustration may bring home the roughness and irresponsibility
of supervision of girl workers, sometimes associated in the nineties
with all the hardness of factory life. The circumstances were in some
features exceptional, but by no means solitary, in roughness and even
barbarity, as will appear in later pages of this book. It was found, on
investigation of a complaint from an onlooker, that in a large textile
factory an incompetent managing foreman had, nominally as a means of
discipline, turned a great fire-hose on to a large group of young
tenters and weavers. The water, drawn from the mill pond and filthy, was
directed over a partition upon them while they were jammed in a narrow
vestibule in which they took refuge. The girls (of whom forty were
examined by the Inspector) were then turned out on a cold March day,
dripping, to walk in some cases several miles to their homes. The whole
matter was outside the Acts and nothing could be done by the Factory
Department beyond visiting the head office of the mills and drawing
attention to the circumstances.[15] A reprimand to the foreman and his
apology was so far satisfactory, but many years passed by before the
idea of supervision by a woman was considered in textile mills at all.
It required the shock of the Great War to secure provision in a broader
way, as through the Act of 1916, which first brought welfare supervision
and conditions of welfare within administrative control.
The great majority of the earlier complaints related, year after year,
to hours of work and sanitary matters; the former predominated,
especially in the London area, and until the year 1912 complaints of
legal and illegal overtime led in numbers. Complaints relating to
uncertain wages under the Truck Acts and lack of piece-rate particulars
steadily mounted, but this distinct subject merits a separate chapter,
as do also the employment of mothers and dangerous trades. The totals of
all kinds of recorded written complaints (in addition to many verbal
that we received annually) rose from 381 in 1896, to 729 five years
later, and to 2,025 in a further ten years. Confidence grew steadily and
rapidly, until in 1919 a woman organiser could say that women working in
factories of every kind of industry, in the north as in the south,
strongly and “passionately” call for visits of Lady Inspectors.
Long hours of work, then, at the outset of our career were the greatest
trial for working women—with home duties claiming much of their strength
in most instances. The ordinary working day generally took what the
Factory Acts allowed, and in the main still allow, although for at least
the past ten years hours of employment have fallen to reasonable limits,
not through amendment of the law, but through movement of public
opinion, growing strength of women’s organisation, and commonsense of
many employers. In textile factories for young persons and women these
hours were, from Monday to Friday, ten, and on Saturday six and a half.
In non-textile factories the hours might be respectively ten and a half,
and seven and a half on Saturday.[16] A spell of work in textile
factories could not exceed four and a half hours, and in non-textile
factories five hours, without at least half an hour for a meal. In the
latter case firms often found it convenient to work two five-hour spells
with a break at midday of one hour, and on Saturday an unbroken spell of
five hours. The heavy burden of labour on this basis was a perennial
source of complaint from women and girls for which there was no remedy
in the Factory Acts, and was a cause of anxiety and regret to the Women
Inspectors, until the pressure of wartime production proved its
ineffectiveness for increasing output.
We must also bear in mind that the legal hours in unorganised industries
were frequently and widely exceeded.
A liberal allowance was made in the Acts for overtime in many non-
textile industries and processes.[17] In such cases overtime could, if
notified to the Inspector, be used on forty-eight occasions in the year
(reduced in 1901 to thirty occasions) for an additional two hours. This
applied, until amended by the Act of 1895, to young persons as well as
women. From 1896 onwards, the scandalous length of a fourteen-hours’ day
on forty-eight days in the year no longer legally overtaxed young
workers of fourteen years and upwards.[18] Elasticity in the law for the
causes allowed appeared reasonable at first sight, but what was
authorised as an exception became under stress of competition a
principle, and one has sympathy with the young woman who said, with a
chorus of approval from her fellow-workers, to the first Woman
Inspector, “The overtime exception just spoils the Factory Act!” Equally
readily did a fellow-feeling rise for the workgirl who asked, “What sort
of half-holiday it was that began at four o’clock in the afternoon?” In
_illegal_ overtime the bad habit was continued for years, and many raids
and devices were necessary to overcome it. Dual employment of women in a
combined retail shop and workshop was for long a source of excessive
hours. Thus, when they had finished the legal day in the workshop, they
might have to serve in the shop until late at night. This dual
employment was not limited to the normal daily period lawful in a
workshop for women until after the passing of the Act of 1901.
Inspectors had to watch overstrain of this kind helplessly for years—
where they could not move an employer to see the harm it was doing. The
case of the little thirteen and fourteen-year-old “matchers” in
dressmaking establishments had to wait for effectual remedy from another
source.
A complaint we received in 1903 brought to light extreme, but by no
means unprecedented, overstrain of a little girl of fourteen, legally a
young person. She “was engaged to clean and sweep the workrooms, run
errands, match ribbon and silks at shops, and generally do work required
of young apprentices in the trade; in addition, however, she cooked the
occupiers’ meals, including supper; did the work of the house; arriving
at the workshop first in the morning to light fires and ‘tidy up,’ she
did not leave till 11 p.m., and appeared utterly worn out.”[19]
In the early years the impetus of our endeavours to repress excessive
hours was, at times, almost checked by a possible consequence. Portable
articles of manufacture could easily be, and often were, sent home with
the worker at the close of the legal day, and all the more easily in
trades and quarters where there was legal and legitimate “outwork” by
non-factory workers. This evil grew to considerable proportions, until
the law was strengthened so as to make this evasion more difficult. It
was really rooted in starvation wages, and eventually the advent of
Trade Boards removed most of the incentive to this insidious mode of
“sweating.”[20] It was often extremely difficult for the wage earner on
a narrow margin to risk losing an immediate addition to her wage (even
if earned by excessively long hours), through co-operating with the
Inspector by giving evidence as to long hours at home. This co-operation
was essential, as the Inspector’s entry into the home did not rest on
the same powers as entry into the factory. Yet many successful
prosecutions were taken in serious cases. For example, in 1911, a girl
of fifteen, working for a feather manufacturer, after working 8.30 a.m.
to 7 p.m. in the workshop, took work home, and worked 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.;
or a girl knotted “lancer” feathers, taken home, from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.,
and from 5 a.m. next morning until she went for her day in the
factory.[21] Here and in many other places the girl was compelled to do
extra work in order to earn enough to live.
In certain processes (making preserves from fruit, preserving or curing
fish, making condensed milk) overtime was legal to the extent of a
fourteen-hours’ day on no less than ninety-six days in the year, until
the Act of 1895 reduced the figure to sixty days. The “gutting, salting,
and packing of fish immediately on arrival in the fishing-boats” was
altogether outside regulation by the Acts, whether for hours or
sanitation—for all workers, not excepting children. By the Act of 1901
children received the protection of the Acts as regards hours of
employment in this industry as in others. In 1910 at Lowestoft some
women attempted a revolt against late night hours, but without success.
Again, at Grimsby in 1911, a group of very young women struck against
hours that were usually sixteen in the twenty-four. They were obliged to
return to work, as the employer, who also employed them at other
stations on the East Coast, pointed out that they had broken their
contract and could claim neither wages nor return fares to their homes.
At length, when a record catch of herring at Yarmouth had brought the
workers’ endurance to an end, a limit of daily and weekly hours was
negotiated by the Factory Inspectors and voluntarily agreed to by the
leading fish-curers. This has, since 1913, lessened the trials of the
hardy fish-curing girls and men. The hours, unlimited during the summer
months—June to September, of workers engaged in the “process of cleaning
and preparing fruit, so far as necessary to prevent the spoiling of the
fruit,” have also been brought within a certain degree of legal control
by an Order of the Secretary of State.[22]
Regulation of hours in laundries followed a tangled course too long to
be told fully here. There was, in 1895, within and without that trade,
great opposition to any control whatsoever on account of the special
character of the work and its relation to the community, only half-
developed as it was from domestic to factory status, and closely
dependent on conservative household arrangements. This led to a loose
and ineffective form of limitation of hours in the Act of 1895. The
elasticity of the governing section immediately appeared to give
sanction to the late hours and long days of work, “hitherto regarded as
unnecessary evils tolerated in an unregulated industry.... The fourteen-
hours’ day met with outbursts of indignation from women, who would ‘like
to see how men would stand fourteen-hours of this work in heat and
steam.’”[23] Packers and sorters alone benefited by a net reduction in a
weekly total of hours that had for them often exceeded seventy hours.
Sixty hours became the normal legal period, augmented, however, in
seasons of pressure by permissible overtime to sixty-six hours. And
these hours might be compressed into five instead of six days in the
week, and could even extend, on a single day, from 8 a.m. to 11.30 p.m.
The amending and consolidating Act of 1901 made no improvement in these
hours, but in 1903 I was able to give the first account of a new and
hopeful feature, in the “steady growth of a strong section of employers
who have set their minds on inaugurating a more rational system of
employment in conformity with ordinary factory hours.”[24] This alone,
the employers claimed, in views ably expressed in a new periodical, _The
Power Laundry_, would raise the standards of work and workers. Very
considerable improvement followed from the Act of 1907. Thus, in
laundries, as in textile factories a hundred years earlier, the first
determined efforts towards reform sprang from an enlightened section of
employers—in this instance, however, encouraged by the Inspectors. In
1899 and 1900 they gave much time to discussing these problems with
directors at the head offices of multiple laundries, run by companies.
Efficient management has no doubt found that it could in course of time
compete successfully on shorter hours with less efficient management
working the full legal hours. There has been high social value in the
experiments in hygiene and welfare made by leaders in industry fitted by
their position to secure an effective trial—in the interests not only of
the worker, but also of the whole community.
Without more study of details, so much may suffice to indicate the
public outlook in past days, as expressed in the law so hard to amend,
on the working capacity of human beings in manufacturing industry; and
it may serve to measure the change that has come about in ideas and
habits in these matters.
The movement within industry itself has almost sufficed to bring the
whole problem of hours out of the region of compulsory regulation into
that of a reasonable, voluntary control that ought to be the natural
birthright of workers in a factory system possessing unlimited capacity
for large-scale production by applied power. Christian, after much
suffering with his friend Hopeful in the dungeon of Giant Despair,
remembered the key in his bosom that “could open any lock in Doubting
Castle.” And so they came out to “The King’s Highway” and fared on to
the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, whose names were “Knowledge,
Experience, Watchful and Sincere.”
While the illusory belief in a need for exceedingly long hours lasted,
it bore most severely on the weakest manual workers—women and girls.
Although the best hours for any kind of industry can only be reached by
skilled scientific study, the rough-and-ready, if slow, method of
amendment by complaint has had effect. After the Acts of 1891 and 1895
had increased the means of control of illegal overtime, and when an
increased Inspectorate came into activity, the first step was to enforce
the legal limits. Nowhere can a more vivid account be read of the
immense evil of excessive illegal employment, and of the protean forms
of evasion of law, with connivance of intimidated “sweated” workers,
than in the pages by Mr. Lakeman, in the Annual Reports of 1893 and
1894—published at the very time that the tide of complaints began to
flow to Women Inspectors. They also said much to substantiate Mr.
Lakeman’s contentions that “overtime is an evil, socially, morally,
commercially,” weighing upon “a vast aggregation of people slavishly
earning a poor living from hard taskmasters,” particularly in the East
End tailoring trade, where one sweating employer oppressed another below
him, and the worker at the lowest end of the scale was utterly helpless.
The Women Inspectors were the first to be free of a certain handicap in
dealing with the evasion and obstruction that led to concealment of girl
and women workers in lavatories and bedrooms, and they were the first to
be able to unravel tangled threads of evidence by confidential visits to
the women’s own homes. Even in a very extreme case of evasion by locking
of outer gates and darkly shaded windows, a Woman Inspector has been
known to enter the premises before closing time and wait in a dark
corner of the yard, in order to arrive in the workrooms at a suitable
moment for a complete personal observation of the extent of overtime.
So marked was the gain in detection of hidden evils that a proposal was
made in 1895 by some Members of Parliament to bring bedrooms in the same
building with a workshop, used by women or girls, within the scope of
the Factory Acts, and to give the Woman Inspector special power of entry
and inspection. Fortunately, however, the proposal was not accepted, and
peculiar power was not allotted to the Woman Inspector. She was able by
quick observation and action, and use of the Inspectors’ ordinary powers
of entry and investigation, to achieve what was needful in such cases of
concealment; exceptional powers would have been fatal to that
intangible, yet potent, personal influence of an Inspector, which rests
largely on having no more distinction from the ordinary citizen than is
just necessary to effect the work required. Inspectors have always been
able to investigate matters not strictly breaches of the law and yet
needing regulation. In tentatively sending a complaint of such matters,
the Secretary[25] of the Women’s Industrial Council once wrote: “I know
how very much can be done by the tact and personal influence of an
Inspector, and even if the Inspector effects no change, her visit does
afford the workers a sense of protection which is very soothing when
they are feeling aggrieved.”
In manifold ways similar testimony was afforded by communications from
officers of the Women’s Trade Union League, the Legal Advice Bureau for
Working Women, the Industrial Law Committee, and, above all, by the late
Miss Mary MacArthur.
As the work grew in publicity through press reports of prosecutions,
confiding supporters sprang up in many unexpected directions. They
appeared among customers of dressmaking businesses, clergy and district
visitors, club leaders, schoolmistresses of half-time child workers,
doctors, and many others, not to speak of parents anxious to save a
daughter’s health without risking loss of her employment. One of our
longest and most tangled enquiries sprang from a communication from a
casual reader of the _Star_ newspaper.
“Immediately on receipt of a complaint”—from one or other of such
sources, once wrote one Inspector to another—“we made a raid on Saturday
afternoon between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.,[26] and had a splendid catch, three
rooms full. The man set in the yard to watch for the Inspector _offered_
to let us in ‘to see the housekeeper’; I merely remarked that ‘that
would do very nicely for us,’ and he did not realise his mistake until
we were half-way up the narrow staircase!” The Inspector momentarily
“felt a pang” for the watchman—but a prosecution followed in due course,
and the firm, of European and Transatlantic reputation as modistes and
furriers, were convicted.
The theatrical costume industry, though not large, was one that for many
years exercised the ingenuity and taxed the vigilance of Women
Inspectors—complaints being perennial. Excessive hours, Sunday
employment, illegal homework, overcrowded workrooms, and obstruction of
the Inspector, were reported in 1902–03[27] and at intervals in a
succession of years. In 1911 there was evidence of a deliberate and
organised breaking of the law in the matter of overtime that did not
appear in any other industry. One London occupier, who was prosecuted
twelve times in ten years, was found on three separate occasions in 1911
seriously contravening the law, a typical instance of long hours being:
Friday, 8 a.m. to 12 midnight, followed by 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday,
with some Sunday employment following. Penalties of £20 and costs on
conviction were evidently not deterrent.[28] In the great majority of
their concentrated attacks upon illegal hours of employment in other
industries Inspectors found that most occupiers tended to capitulate, in
the end, to firmness and persistence in enforcing the legal limits.
Seaside laundries, busy in the summer season, offering residential
employment to laundry girls from inland towns, presented another serious
problem in suppression of evasions of the law.
Suppression of “time-cribbing” (that is, exceeding legal limits by small
instalments)—during prescribed pauses for meals and just before 6 a.m.—
in many textile mills in the North was a task of a detective character,
on a large scale, beyond the small numbers of Women Inspectors, but one
in which they at least took their proportionate share with their men
colleagues. Undoubtedly women’s services in bringing home to the
employer contraventions of legal limits were more peculiarly needed
where proof turned not so much on the exact moment of starting a huge
engine driving machinery in a large mill, but rather on patient
examination of witnesses in their homes as well as the workplace.
By the year 1912 an increasing number of complaints showed a growing
determination on the part of women workers to secure such limitation of
hours as was enforceable under the Factory Acts. One complaint of
excessive hours in a fancy stationery factory disclosed quite an
ordinary, and _legal_, state of affairs: “Fifty girls over eighteen
years of age had been working weekly from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on three
days, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on two days, and from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on
Saturday, as they were expected to do for from six to eight weeks in the
busy season.” For young pieceworkers the resulting fatigue can easily be
imagined.[29]
In our earlier years of service, complaints of defects in general
sanitation in the factory and workshop were, as already said, fewer than
complaints of excessive or illegal hours of employment. Later on,
especially after voluntary improvement in hours had begun, the workers’
help in matters of general sanitation in the workplace grew in volume
and understanding. The value of these complaints, in bringing the
Inspector to the spot for observation of the concrete facts, was more
direct and immediate than in complaints of hours where evidence was
requisite from the workers. Even a vague complaint such as: “Please I
would like you to call and see what sort of a place the women have to
work in, as it is in an awful condition,” was good, provided the correct
address of the shop was given.
There were many and increasing complaints of lack of messrooms,
wholesome drinking water, seats, cloakrooms, and washing conveniences,
which were outside the Act until 1916. Underground and ill-lighted
workrooms were also the subject of complaint, and these still, in 1921,
await full hygienic control by the Factory Acts. Until the year 1901
even general ventilation of such places could not be secured, and the
result may be seen in a description in 1900 of a low underground
workroom, packed with machinery, the narrow window slits at street level
being the sole means of ventilation, admitting dust from the street,
just where the gas engine was placed. “In the back part, where pallid
women stand at the machines, gas light is always burning. Here again we
are powerless to order means for introduction of tolerable air.”[30]
Ill-ventilated, badly drained, uncleanly or otherwise defective
workrooms, were the subjects of many complaints on hygiene of the
workplace, yet complaints on defects in sanitary accommodation[31] and
extremes of temperature were even more numerous. Lack of means of
heating or failure to use means of heating was increasingly a subject of
complaint down to 1914. Many recalled the words quoted by Miss Abraham
in the Annual Report of 1894: “Is it not possible to compel Mrs. —— to
give her workgirls a fire?... It may really mean death to some of the
girls. I do not know what it will be like to-day, when they get there
with their skirts and feet wet after the snow.” The problem shifted, in
that as in other matters of health, after successive amendments of the
Act had given Inspectors power to intervene more effectually. Increased
stringency of the Acts appeared to extend the number of employers
anxious to improve the conditions of factory life beyond the statutory
minimum. It was not only the employer, but, sometimes even more rapidly,
the workers who found enlightenment in seeing standards improved or
strengthened by legal requirements. At first all the weight and mass of
complaints helping our administration came from the most elementary
needs. And, even there, too many workers were mute, until awakened by
proof that improvement was _possible_. It was only later that the
natural intelligence of the worker could co-operate in building up
larger and more specialised conditions of welfare. Speaking of a great
step onwards in sanitation, Miss Paterson wrote, in 1902, that the
indifference of the employer had resulted in a corresponding
indifference on the part of the worker, who, “acquiescing at first in
conditions which she feels powerless to improve, gradually ceases to
feel them an offence to her. There is no doubt one loses sensitiveness
to indecent arrangements just as surely as to impure air, but the moral
effect in the one case is much the same as the physical effect in the
other.”[32]
Ten years earlier some working men representatives of the Yorkshire
textile industries gave it in evidence before the Royal Commission on
Labour that mill life under the then existing conditions and
organisation of work was “not conducive to ideas of propriety,
gentleness, and nobility.” Against such conditions the Women Inspectors
never ceased to strive, by varied and vigorous attack on insanitary
conditions that blunted perceptions of suitability, and by friendly
appeals to employers that sometimes met with excellent response.
Sometimes, again, action had to be taken against indescribably bad
conditions that were obviously a legacy from mediæval standards, by the
indirect method of laying an information against the occupier of the
factory for effluvia in hot spinning rooms, before the law provided for
direct attack on the ground of the unsuitability of the provision made.
In a case that I took, in 1896, against a Limited Liability Company in
Lancashire, after repeated written warning to the management, one of the
directors appeared in court to say they had not realised the state of
affairs in the mill. After a long hearing, the magistrates asked me to
meet the directors out of court, with their solicitor, which I did (the
Inspector in charge of the district accompanying me), in the gilded
council chamber of the municipal authority. The dignified group of
directors asked me then to “take the chair,” and we rapidly came to a
conclusion, as to the necessary constructive work, that satisfied the
local sanitary authority as well as myself.
Sometimes a local authority would act vigorously on receipt of notice of
such defects from a Factory Inspector, one asking for more
notifications, another inviting conference as to other mills, and they
were most ready to move where they had not themselves to take the
primary initiative against fellowtownsmen. A single illustration may be
given in the case (by no means the worst of its kind) of a large old
textile mill, where local authorities, acting on our notice, took up
such matters with increasing thoroughness. “Dark, unventilated
conveniences, used indiscriminately by men and women, opened directly
off hot spinning rooms.... No attempt to secure privacy was made, the
doors were without fastenings ... the whole connected, not with a drain,
but a huge cesspool—a state of things more injurious to morals and
health can scarcely be imagined. The amount of accommodation was
seriously inadequate, besides being unsuitable and unhealthy.”[33] There
was an element of hope in spite of the overwhelming amount of work to be
done, in that most of the very worst conditions of this kind were found
in the oldest industries and factories, such as Lancashire, Yorkshire,
Staffordshire Potteries, and the Black Country, where the blunting of
perceptions had been longest at work. This factor checked our occasional
feeling of despondency at often finding the most barbarous conditions
where trade union organisation was at its highest strength. Incidentally
it at once confirmed the Women Inspectors in thinking that they really
had a new mission as well as a more enduring place in the guardianship
of women in industry. Even although this matter of sanitary conveniences
was but an elementary one, yet it was fundamental, and the Women
Inspectors were only too anxious to clear the way for their more
progressive and difficult work in respect of health and physical fitness
of the women and girls expressly allotted by the Home Office to their
care.
The legal provisions for the sanitation of the workplace are complex;
the meagre basis of law on which we had to build at first, and a few of
the results secured, can only be slightly indicated.
When we began our work there was no definition in the law of what
constituted overcrowding of a workroom, and only on proof (a difficult
matter) of actual danger or injury to health of the persons employed
could any abatement of overcrowding be enforced. Some of the worst
examples were found in country towns and in attic workrooms, often used
as bedrooms. Miss Paterson cited a case in 1894 where only 91 cubic feet
of space was allowed per person in a room with a roof 6 feet 4 inches in
height. Overcrowding was always rare in factories, however, and
complaints chiefly led us to cases of crowded floor space, not
definitely illegal. For general _ventilation_, as distinct from
mechanical exhaust for dust, gases, vapours, and other impurities
generated by the work, there was no legal provision before 1901, and to
this question in its connection with lighting, heating, and cleanliness
I will presently revert. There was no provision at all touching
maintenance of a _reasonable temperature_ before the Act of 1895. The
provision then made was quickly found defective, and we had to wait
until 1901 for powers to enforce means of heating that did not interfere
with purity of the air. _Drainage_ of workroom floors liable to become
wet could not (except under a special clause in the Act of 1895
affecting laundries only) be enforced before the Act of 1901. Power to
determine what was _sufficient and suitable sanitary accommodation_ by
an order of the Secretary of State was first provided for by the Act of
1901. This had no legal force where local sanitary authorities—with
widely varying standards—had adopted certain powers to regulate the
matter under the Public Health Acts. In 1903 such an order was first
made, based on the experience and recommendations of the Women
Inspectors. This order gradually set the standard frequently adopted by
local authorities, but still, in 1921, this remains merely a voluntary
matter in the majority of sanitary districts outside Scotland. “The new
rules are just coming into force here,” said one working woman
correspondent to an Inspector, in 1903; “they give us just what we
need.”[34] In the previous years “a rain of resolutions and petitions”
reached my office from organised working women, which demonstrated that
working women were, to use their own words, “most ardently favourable in
respect of the draft order of the Home Secretary” just referred to, “so
that decent and satisfactory arrangements may be completed and the hands
of Inspectors strengthened in the discharge of duty.”[35] As regards
_cleanliness_ of the workplace, that universal need, there has been
since 1878 an absolute requirement in the forefront of the Act that
every factory shall be “kept in a cleanly state.” The duty of periodical
cleansing by lime-washing (or other prescribed methods) of walls,
ceilings, etc., has too often been read as covering the whole ground,
and methodical and regular cleansing of floors and benches, by moist as
well as dry methods, has always been a subject to which Women Inspectors
have had largely to devote their powers of persuasion.
The provision of _drinking water_—a fundamental need of human beings
engaged in physical labour, and a subject of frequent complaint from
1894 onwards—was left solely to regulation by local sanitary
authorities, until an order was made in 1917, under powers given by the
Factories and Miscellaneous Provisions Act of 1916. This secured, at
last, that an order requiring a conveniently accessible supply of
wholesome drinking water could be enforced in every factory or workshop
employing twenty-five or more workers. The _lighting_ of factories and
workshops, whether natural or artificial, has never yet been generally
regulated by any of the Acts from 1878 to 1916, although there are many
references to it in our published reports from 1897 onwards. In 1911 the
special Report on “Illumination in Factories,” by Mr. D. R. Wilson,[36]
ultimately brought the matter under general review, and in January,
1913, a Committee was appointed by the Home Secretary; this was to
enquire into and report on the conditions necessary for the adequate and
suitable lighting (natural and artificial) of factories and workshops,
having regard to the nature of the work carried on, protection of the
eyesight of workers employed, and the various forms of illumination.[37]
Miss Squire, who had given much attention and study to defective
lighting and its remedies in factories, was made a member of this
Committee in November, 1920.[38] The bearing of this problem of lighting
on safety and accident prevention as well as on health has been long in
receiving the attention that it deserved from the British legislature.
In 1897, I drew attention to its recognition by French, Belgian, German,
and Austrian legislatures. That the workers felt an intense need of
skilled attention to the question is evident from a letter of complaint
in 1909 which besought an Inspector to “give a call unawares and see the
black holes of workrooms we have to try and work in, with scarcely any
light.... Please say nothing about receiving this letter, but act on its
contents, and do for us what we need in the way of proper light and
ventilation.”
Probably the most important of the early contributions of Women
Inspectors to improved sanitation in the factory lay in their
insistence, year after year, on the close relation between good general
ventilation, cleanliness (including freedom from dirt, dust, effluvia,
and organic impurities), lighting and temperature, and on the value of
exact tests and standards in these matters. Time after time phthisis was
found to be rampant in particular factories where anæmic, poorly
nourished girls worked long hours, in light sedentary work, and at
dainty white work, under combined defects in cleanliness, ventilation,
lighting, heating. In such places, before the days when canteens and
playing-fields were considered suitable adjuncts to factory life, the
steady undermining of health that went on was really greater than in
many a factory under special rules for dangerous processes, or supplied
with good exhaust ventilation for injurious dust. In such instances the
co-operation of local Medical Officers of Health under the Public Health
Authorities, both directly and in their reports, was invaluable. As Dr.
Niven in his Annual Report for Manchester in 1902 observed: “Unless the
workshop is free from dust no mode of ventilation can be quite
satisfactory. The first requisite, then, is cleansing, carried out in a
proper manner. Ventilation must be considered in reference to each
individual case, but cleansing is a universal requirement as to which
definite rules can be laid down ... it is imperative in the interests of
health that cleansing should be by wet sweeping.”
The extra need of fresh, pure air for maintenance of their efficiency at
work is a marked constitutional feature in women and girls, and their
sensitiveness to cold and draughts is proportionate also to the
sedentary character of much of their work. The Women Inspectors were
thus rapidly brought up against the interdependent problems of
artificial lighting and heating. Fine garment-making and embroidery call
both for good lighting and for freedom from presence of coal-dirt and
smuts in the air, whether admitted by open windows or by combustion
inside the workroom. When we began our inspection, closed windows and
absence of fire in the grates was the rough-and-ready way of securing
“clean” air for delicate fabrics, while warmth had to be secured chiefly
by using gaslight burners of the bat’s-wing type, as a means of
maintaining a temperature in which nimble fingers could carry on their
skilled work. Later, from January 1, 1896, the unhooded gas stoves—some
of the crudest type—fitted in many workshops and smaller factories in
consequence of the first legal requirement in the Act of 1895 that
“adequate measures shall be taken for securing and maintaining a
reasonable temperature in each room in which any person is employed”
constituted strong new arguments for powers to require good general
ventilation. Even so dangerous a gas as carbon monoxide, produced in
appreciable quantities by some of these stoves, not being an impurity
“generated in the course of the manufacturing process,” could not be
held legally subject to the provision for exhaust ventilation.[39] Nor
was there any legal remedy until the Act of 1901 embodied a requirement
that the measures taken for securing a reasonable temperature should not
interfere with the purity of the air.
A great deal of work by the Women Inspectors in support of cleanliness
has directly furthered maintenance of good natural light in workplaces.
Not only have they pressed for regular cleansing by wet methods of
floors, but also for the same treatment of windows and skylights; and
the attention of occupiers was constantly drawn to the value of such
aids as reflectors, luxfer prisms, and the like, in mitigating darkness
or prolonging natural light in underground workrooms. Innumerable
confidential complaints from workers furthered our activity in this
direction. “In all the rooms of one badly lighted factory the windows
were so dirty that ... artificial light had to be used during the
day.... The gas with old flickering bat’s-wing burners being always in
use, large numbers of the girls complained of headache and weariness.
This they attributed to the bad light more than to the impure air.”[40]
It was about 1903, after the amended provisions regarding temperature
and ventilation had had time to work, that women began to send
increasingly definite complaints: “Nearly all the workers suffer from
colds ... now the present gas fire, whenever there is a down draught,
drives into the workroom poisonous carbonic acid gas.”
The discomfort of low temperatures was intensified in some occupations,
such as aerated water works, where floors, usually of concrete or stone,
are liable to be very wet, and bottles and siphons alike cold to handle.
Bottle washers got some comfort where the water was hot, but liability
to soaked garments aggravated suffering from cold rooms in wet places.
Extremes of temperature in the workplace at the other end of the scale,
rising to 100° F. or 110° F., or even higher, are specially connected as
a rule with the nature of the processes, and sometimes increase the
risks of dangerous and injurious industries, especially where lead is
present, as in certain pottery processes. There the problem is to limit
the heat without injuring the process. In other cases the heat results
from the work, and can be mitigated without injuring it. In laundries,
for example, as a mother once put it, young girls can get “all faded”
through unregulated heat and laborious work; and sometimes sunlight
streaming through inadequately shielded skylights, say, in pressing-
rooms of clothing factories, or in jam factories, causes temperatures of
96° F. and numerous cases of fainting amongst the girls. Painting or
whitewashing of such skylights, where blinds are not practicable, was
advised in mitigation of the discomfort.
It is mournful to contemplate the amount of slow injury to the human
system, insidiously at work and showing its effects in disturbed
physiological functions and malnutrition, sometimes with resultant
desire for stimulants. This must have long handicapped not only the
workers—vainly appealing for removal of half-understood defects—but also
the efficiency in industry and the prosperity of manufacturers. The old
British neglect of scientific control of ordinary hygiene in the
workplace has to answer for much. Even when the nation was apprised of
the relation of disease to dirt, in environment, including air, and lack
of means for maintaining personal cleanliness—how slow-moving was action
to apply the knowledge effectively, through laws for protection of the
health of the industrial workers! The relation of disease and accidental
injury to darkness and to unnecessary use of defective artificial
lighting, an old problem, is only beginning to come into serious
consideration at the close of the period covered by this book.
Along with recent advance in these matters we have to reckon the
benefits accruing from the recent rational reduction in hours, and from
development of other fundamentals of welfare—before all, the means of
partaking of good food in many works.
It was significant that the Women Inspectors, as a branch of the Factory
Department specially charged with the duty of interpreting and
responding to the needs of women workers, received throughout their
service certain appeals and complaints on questions of conduct, or
conditions in the factory essentially affecting morals. These appeals on
matters not directly under the Factory Acts were never numerous, though
markedly increasing in the last few years before the War, when women
workers were growing bolder in self-expression and self-help. The
relative smallness in their number was balanced by their intensity.
From about 1896 onwards, the mere possibility of the visit to any
factory of a Woman Inspector coming from headquarters in Whitehall—
strongly bent on sanitary reforms connected with increased cleanliness,
fresh air, light in the factory, physical fitness of the worker,
suitability in lavatory arrangements—had a wide and marked effect. She
gave a new meaning to the technical requirements of the law by her
steady insistence on the value of responsible superintendence of working
conditions. The very concentration of the Women Inspectors in a team-
work that could be applied in any area or centre, or to any particular
problem in any industry, tended to co-ordinate the work of the whole
Department in these technical things, as well as to unify the outlook.
Employers, sympathetic to advance, were helped to come into contact,
sometimes at their own express wish being put in communication with each
other. Undoubtedly this whole movement, linked as it was with a little
united band of enthusiasts, moving up and down the very dusty ways of
industrial life, did much to hasten improvement also in things affecting
manners and morals.
“Why have I never had a visit from a Lady Inspector before?” was a
question from an employer that indicates a sentiment expressed more and
more frequently as the Women Inspectors increased in weight of
experience. Nothing, however, excelled in importance the confidence
engendered between the woman worker and the woman Factory Inspector
through the successful steady rooting out of abuses. In 1902 a girl, who
had given evidence for Miss Squire two years earlier in a prosecution
for illegal employment, wrote to her of a criminal assault made on her
by a fellow-workman on a dark winter morning in the factory, and she got
help and advice, though not under the Factory Act. At such wide
intervals as 1900, 1904, 1907, 1912, I see in our published reports
records of complaints of brutal conduct by managers, foremen,
overlookers, towards young girls. Even an employer in a spinning mill
was implicated in one of the earliest of these. “It seems scarcely
credible that nowadays (1900) little doffers should be knocked down by
grown men, violently struck on head and shoulders ... yet there was
evidence of little half-starved, undersized creatures who had suffered
at the hands of a burly overlooker and a tall imposing member of the
firm ... too strong to be doubted. When tackled with such conduct and
warned, neither denied the charge.” Another complaint, in 1912,
disclosed similar conditions. The visiting Inspector, again Miss Squire,
chanced while half-screened by a pillar in a workshed, to witness an
example of such brutality, when a foreman seized, shook, and flung from
him a young girl. She brought this, with various serious contraventions
of the Act that she found in the factory,[41] before the managers, and
“shamed them into taking action to bring about real improvement in the
conditions.” Cases of drunkenness and abusive language and complaints of
immorality were similarly dealt with and improvements secured. In some
cases the police, investigating immorality of an employer towards
workgirls, sought our aid. In other directions, employers would seek our
guidance in controlling moral risks. All such occasions afforded a
welcome opportunity to the Inspector for giving information to the
occupier about the well-attested gain of wisely chosen, trained women’s
superintendence in matters of hygiene and welfare in the factory. In one
noteworthy instance the discovery by Miss Martindale of some oppressive
treatment of little half-timers in a great textile mill in Belfast led
the active-minded manager to ask her whether he could find a trained
woman to carry on, daily, in the mill such work as she had done at a
single visit. The woman was found, and she did much for the health and
welfare of men, women, and children there.
In 1896 it was first recorded that letters of thanks from workers for
improvements effected by the Inspectors were coming in, sometimes
without any clue to the writers. And an Inspector would be stopped in
the street by a group of girls, who had previously complained verbally
during an inspection, to say how much better things were going since
“fining had been reduced”; or a railway porter lifting an official bag
into the train would give a word of thanks on behalf of a sister or
friend whose overtime had been reduced. Or one workgirl confiding a
hardship in her workplace to another girl casually met outside, would be
told to “come along to the Lady Inspector who helped me a year ago,”
and, investigation and prosecution following, would set in train a
similar series of remedial activities.
Ireland had, as in so many other things, special ways of her own in
appealing to and thanking the Inspector for aid needed and rendered:
“Please ... would you kindly see to the heating of our Room ... the
stitching department is not ventilated, it is terrible fusty you would
never want a headache if you had to work in it ... thanking you in
anticipation. We have proved your worth before, every worker knows you
are a lady.” Another hopeful set of complainants, who wrote of lack of
any means of heating in a draughty finishing loft, signed themselves,
“Yours expectant,” and the Inspector, Miss Martindale, on her arrival
was greeted with: “Thank God, you’ve come.” Or, again, another wrote
thanks and pled for continuance of her watchfulness: “Thank you, mem,
for coming to X. They are doing what is right since you were here if you
only knew how much good you done ... please mem be sure and watch
them.”[42]
In England the expression of such thanks was generally more impersonal,
but not less grateful and confident. One letter I received stands out in
my memory always, in its prompt response to investigation of a complaint
of overtime by Miss Paterson. “It is no use to send an Inspector to ask
the girls questions, for they depend on their living and dare not say
much; but I must say that the lady sent was just the sort of friend a
dressmaker requires.”[43] Miss Tuckwell wrote in 1897, as Honorary
Secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, that the confidence of the
factory women was “based on the fact that their representations are
received and distributed by a woman, and by women enquired into and
redressed”; “Our Women Inspectorate has adapted itself exactly to
English needs, and, as a Yorkshire workgirl remarked, ‘We are well
suited by the Lady Inspectors.’”[44]
In all this part of the history of administration of the Factory Acts
one sees conclusive evidence of the very great need there was of
intuitive insight and extraordinary persistence in probing or tracking
down ills peculiarly affecting industrial women and girls that, as a
whole, were never laid bare until the women had access to a woman in
authority armed with legal powers to initiate the remedies. These ills
afflicting women formed in some respects a parallel to the earlier
though grosser abuse of child labour at the opening of the nineteenth
century, and recall the words of Mr. Cooke-Taylor:
“It is of great and increasing importance that that story be kept in
memory; that it should never be suffered to become extinct; as a
pitiful ... warning against the preposterous doctrine ... that human
affairs can be entrusted to impulses of mere cupidity without shocking
and degrading consequences.”[45] It is difficult now, even for the Women
Inspectors, to reconstruct in the mind the barbarous and grinding
conditions that they were called to disclose and to help to transform.
The woman worker was “subject to” mechanical power, and it needed a
labour of love to help her to free herself.
In nothing does this appear more clearly than in the sphere of wages,
touched on in the following chapter.