EMPLOYMENT OF MOTHERS; YOUNG WORKERS; CHARITABLE INSTITUTIONS
“Every wise woman buildeth her house.”
“Give your women economic freedom, assure them access to the sources
of culture and you can safely leave eugenic experimentation to them”
(“Interpretations and Forecasts,” by Victor Branford, 1914).
Hitherto this survey of women’s life in the factory and workshop has
simply accepted the fact of productive labour by women and its clear
social and economic necessity. While admitting the existence of
differences and handicaps, physiological and social, that in part
distinguish them from male industrial workers, we have only, in one
instance, touched on the influence of marriage and maternity on their
employment. The sinister secondary effects of lead poisoning on maternal
functions inevitably raised question of factors that, in a civilised
community, must place certain limits or conditions on complete liberty
of women’s employment in factory production as hitherto carried on.
This, already long recognised in the United Kingdom in regulations
excluding women and young persons from some of the most dangerous lead
processes, has been followed or extended in other industrial countries
since the Washington Convention.
No one will deny, said the Report of the Women’s Employment Committee,
1919, that “woman should be guarded from strain, from accident and
racial poison, to a greater degree than man is guarded,” and that report
fairly indicated standards and tests of suitability in occupations for
women.
In this present chapter we pass from the general human considerations
controlling industrial conditions over to special groups of persons,
where the “human machine” to be safeguarded can least of all be regarded
simply as an economic, producing unit. Here the interest of the
community as well as of the individual requires consideration from a new
angle of vision.
Children, the earliest objects of humanitarian aims in the factory
system, came first under a Factory Act in 1802 in certain textile
factories; adult women first in 1844. Not until 1891 (after the Berlin
Conference in 1890) was any provision whatever made in this country for
obviating the necessity of employment of a woman too early after
childbirth—in a factory system such as that we have been considering in
previous chapters. And then it came only in the form of a prohibition of
employment: “An occupier of a factory or workshop shall not knowingly
allow a woman to be employed therein within four weeks after she has
given birth to a child.”[155] Effects, not causes, seem alone to have
been held in view; what was to become of the woman, without other
resources, seeking employment at such a time, was left to be
sufficiently disclosed by the Women Factory Inspectors, who from 1896
onwards tried to give effect to the prohibition by warnings and
prosecutions of the occupier so far as he could be shown to be legally
responsible for infringements.
Inmates of charitable and reformatory institutions, engaged in
production or manual labour of the nature covered by the Factory Acts
and not already under Government inspection (as in workhouses, prisons,
certified homes, etc.), first seem to have come, somewhat accidentally,
under serious consideration in connection with these Acts through
proposals to include laundries within their scope. For laundry work was
by far the most general industrial occupation in charitable and
reformatory institutions—where the work was done not for the institution
itself but for outside clients, although not carried on by way of trade,
and where the inmates were not working under a contract of service or
apprenticeship. Occupiers of ordinary commercial laundries were willing
to be included within the Act only if these institutions were also
included. The opposition of the institutions was, however, sufficient to
secure their exclusion from the Act of 1895, which in some degree
covered commercial laundries; they remained outside until partially
brought in by the Act of 1907, after we had for some years inspected
convent laundries on a voluntary basis. Opposition of the managers
melted away steadily, as the advantages of friendly advisory inspections
were experienced.
For all but the last of these three classes of specially protected
workers, the legal or the administrative position has substantially
changed at the close of the period 1893 to 1921. And most of all has it
changed in the care of child-bearing women employed in industry, who
were before 1911 completely dependent on the Woman Factory Inspector for
disclosure of evidence on their position. The change in the
administrative point of view is most quickly realised when one recalls
the fact that responsibility for applying the prohibition of employment
in factories and workshops of women after childbirth has in 1921 been
transferred from the Home Office to the Ministry of Health by Order of
His Majesty in Council. It is thus formally recognised as a “matter
affecting and incidental to the health of the people.”
The cases of employment within four weeks of childbirth were frequent in
our experience. As it was generally extreme poverty or desertion or
illness of the husband that drove mothers back to work, and the
prohibition was well known (being included in the official abstract of
the Acts affixed in the workplace), they would in some way conceal the
date of birth from the occupier or manager, or sometimes change the
place of employment. Thus in comparatively few instances could any legal
action be taken at all; even where it could, the painful dilemma of the
suffering woman became evident.
The first case taken into court under Section 17 of 1891 was in the year
1897, by Miss Squire. It was a clear case for testing the effect of the
section, and it revealed much. The mother, working in a textile mill,
had been sent for by the foreman, who was short of workers, on the ninth
day after her confinement, although he had been informed of the reason
of her absence on the day she left. Although she made some attempt to
screen her employers when called as a witness, she was dismissed from
their employment, after they had been convicted and fined. She obtained
employment from one of the magistrates soon after he had heard the case,
and this relieved her immediate need. The effect of this dismissal on
the minds of the other workers remained.[156]
In 1898 old and new difficulties attending the application of this
section again made action difficult or impossible. A laundry visited on
a complaint of infringement of the section yielded only the information
that the woman was at home, the regulation well known, and “as soon as
it was permissible she would return to work.” The Inspector, wishing to
make sure of all the facts, “went straightway to see the woman in her
home, and found her in the act of doing heavy washing for the laundry in
question.” The occupier was only legally responsible for knowingly
employing the woman in his laundry within four weeks of childbirth,
accordingly he had “sent the work to be done in the home. The laundry
was clean and the surroundings ... in point of fatigue-saving appliances
incomparably superior” to those in which the woman was found. “Her
husband was a labourer, she had four living children, and the entire
family inhabited two rooms; the woman was washing over a tub raised on
two stools in one of the rooms, a small paved and drained yard lay at
the back; it was a rainy day, and she had pulled the tub into the room
to be under cover from the wet; she dragged it into the yard to empty
when needful.”[157] More often the difficulty of taking action turned on
the impossibility of proving knowledge of facts on the part of the
occupier, a knowledge which in such a matter it was only natural he
should avoid. In any case it was shortly discovered that a young mother
of sixteen or seventeen was not covered by the section, being not a
“woman,” as defined in the Act (_i.e._, a person of eighteen years and
over), but a “young person.” These enquiries soon drew my attention to
the high rate of infant mortality in districts where women were largely
employed in heavy labouring work, such as brick-making in the
Stourbridge area, and the galvanised bucket industry in the Lye
district, and some enquiries were made to learn how far such work
affected infant life.
In 1902 a conviction, with penalty, was again secured in one of the
instances of re-employment of a woman within four weeks of childbirth.
In another case of re-employment—this time within a fortnight of
childbirth—in a wholesale clothing factory, although a deplorable state
of affairs was disclosed, action was impossible owing to the entire lack
of evidence of responsibility for supervision anywhere in the place. The
Inspector took occasion to press home the need of superintendence by a
competent woman, which in this case was promised by the employer. She
found that young single women going to the workhouse for a confinement
were usually discharged at the end of a fortnight if their state of
health made it possible, with the result that their re-employment within
three weeks was practically unavoidable.
The whole position was, as Miss Squire put it in 1897, that “Section 17
of 1891, although of so great importance to the community no less than
the individual, must remain for the most part a dead letter owing to the
difficulty of proving the employer’s knowledge of all the circumstances,
as well as for other obvious reasons.”[158]
A welcome opportunity for wider dissemination of knowledge and
understanding of the whole problem of employment of mothers arose
through the appointment of the inter-Departmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration in September, 1903. An invitation was extended to me to
give oral evidence on the effects of factory and workshop employment on
the health of women and girls, which I did at some length. Fuller
information was sought by the Committee on the effect of industrial
employment of mothers both on themselves and their infants. By the help
of my colleagues, I set intensive study of the matter on foot in three
separate and distinctive industrial centres for women’s employment: in
Dundee (jute trade), in Lancashire, in Preston, Burnley, and Blackburn
(cotton trade), in the Staffordshire Potteries, in Hanley and Longton
(earthenware and china trade). Two of these towns, Dundee and Preston,
were particularly characterised by an absence of employment for men of
the same class as the women so largely employed. In all the centres of
study infantile mortality was high, although not higher than rates to be
found elsewhere—_e.g._, in mining centres where mothers are not
industrially employed. Widely varying conditions in local sanitation and
housing obtained in these towns. Wide variation also was present in
nature of the industrial work done by the women, speed and pressure of
work, length of daily hours, presence of dust or lead in the processes,
and other circumstances.
The main effect of this enquiry, with the following up of many cases of
re-employment of mothers after childbirth, was to establish more clearly
than ever before that such re-employment was not, as had hitherto been
often alleged, largely caused by the women’s preference for factory over
domestic life, but by the pressure of poverty, or actual want, on the
mothers. Much help was given by officers of the local health authorities
in making the enquiry.
In 1904 I presented to the Committee a memorandum on “Employment of
Mothers in Factories and Workshops,” containing full details, and what
the Committee described as a “wealth of information” from the three
Inspectors, Miss Paterson, Miss Squire, and Miss Martindale, who had
carried out my scheme of enquiry. The Committee gave full publicity to
the results in the memorandum, including it as an appendix in their
report, besides favourably commenting on its conclusions. They further
definitely recommended fuller investigation, on the lines suggested,
into infant mortality rates; locally, for particular areas in industrial
towns, and into general infant mortality rates for selected industries
throughout the country, and the specifying of the occupation of all
mothers (married or unmarried) in the Registrar-General’s records. They
also recommended a strengthening of the prohibition of employment within
four weeks, either by throwing onus of proof on the employer or by
requiring a medical certificate from the mother.
The Committee attached great importance to observations of the
Inspectors in the memorandum on the stress and strain involved, through
many existing conditions in factory life, “in the employment of women
from girlhood, all through married life, and through child-bearing”;
they specially noted the fact that when decreasing physical capacity
brought the prospective mother “at least some relief at the hands of the
manager of the mill and she is sent away,” it is often only “to take up
the equally unsuitable occupation of charwoman or scrubber.” No general
notion had then arisen, or at least it had not been publicly expressed,
that national responsibility for release of child-bearing women from
wage-paid employment should be recognised by the provision of some form
of maintenance at the time of their greatest need. The Committee, on
this financial point, only included in their recommendations a
suggestion that “charitable efforts in manufacturing towns might be
directed towards endowing and maintaining insurance organisations to
which employees, assisted by voluntary subscriptions, could contribute
while in work, and from which they might receive assistance during a
confinement and afterwards.” I had pointed, in my memorandum, to the
experience at Mulhouse in Alsace that organisation of a maternity fund
by manufacturers, to which both employer and employed contributed, had
resulted in a reduction of infant mortality by half. I had also
suggested that “whether by local trade effort, or larger national
effort, provident insurance of the kind might be expected in time to
eliminate the cases where infant lives are lost ... and needless
suffering caused to hard-working, valuable mothers by total absence of
skilled attendance.” I had also laid stress on the need for fundamental
reorganisation of antiquated charities, in harmony “with increased
scientific knowledge,” and with the “changed economic conditions of
women’s lives.”
On this side the earliest help that came was, of course, through the
National Health Insurance Act of 1911. In 1904, and onwards down to
1913, Women Factory Inspectors continued to gather and to present
information on this subject, which never seemed to them less poignant in
the details, though it took seven years to issue in any provision for
the sufferers. A summary of all that we learned, as Miss H. F. Cohen
said when she prepared such a summary from my Annual Reports for the
Women’s Employment Committee in 1919, “gives only a faint idea of the
state of things—it is only the cumulative effect of instance after
instance which enables one to realise the impotence of the law.”
In 1904, in twenty-one cases of employment within four weeks of
childbirth investigated in Scotland by two Women Inspectors, only three
were found suitable for proceedings, and a conviction was recorded in
only one. “The others were dismissed, one without trial, on the ground
that a Limited Liability Company could not be charged with the offence;
the other on the ground that the woman was not “knowingly” employed,
although it was proved that the reason for leaving the mill was known to
the foreman, who re-engaged her without enquiry. In the majority of
cases the woman did not return to the same factory as that in which she
worked before confinement.” In a very bad case of re-employment at one
and the same works the woman, working under a contractor, was employed
in very laborious work, the setting and drawing of kilns. The manager of
the works ordered the contractor to send her home, as she was obviously
not in a fit condition to do the work. Ten days after the child’s birth
she was re-engaged by the manager who had ordered her to be sent home,
and employed at the same place in loading wheelbarrows at the canal bank
and other work. “Sixteen days after its birth the child died.... The
occupier, who goes daily to the works, endeavoured to shift the legal
responsibility on to the manager, the latter on to the contractor. Until
the Woman Inspector put the matter before them in what was evidently a
new light, it had not occurred to anyone that it was worth
consideration, or that even a legal, let alone a moral responsibility,
rested on anyone.”[159] In Lancashire, in the same year, one out of many
cases of too early re-employment was taken into court. The fact that the
mother was back at her loom fourteen days after the birth of the child
was proved; it was also proved that the manager and tackler, as well as
her fellow-workers, knew the reason for the weaver’s absence, but the
case was dismissed (after long and earnest deliberation by the
magistrate), because the manager had not had the simple enquiry made as
to the age of the child, and therefore did not “knowingly” allow her to
be employed. In this case the reason for the return was poverty, the
husband being out of work, and the woman had been alone and untended at
the birth of her child. The futility of the unamended law for the
protection of industrial mothers against pressure of either poverty or
negligence was more than established.
“Some of the most pathetic incidents came to one’s knowledge,” says
Miss Paterson, in some notes written at my request for this book, “in
the administration of the section which requires absence of mothers
from work for the short period of four weeks after the birth of a
child, for the poverty or the fear of permanent loss of employment
which drives her to cut short her time for recovery generally means
that she is indeed in straits. Customs vary in different parts of the
country, and it is Scotland that is in my mind chiefly when the figure
comes before me of the work-worn woman who appeared to have a choice
to make whether she would go out to work or stay at home and work, but
who had in reality no alternative but to earn, at once, what she
could. ‘If he could bring in a pound a week constant,’ said the wife
of an unskilled labourer to me, ‘I would never think of going out,’
and I believe this represents the feeling of the Scottish married
women, though they would not all put their minimum at so modest a
figure.”
In the returns of persons employed in factories and workshops for 1907
the first attempt was made to obtain official figures to show the extent
of employment of married women in industry. The information could only
be obtained by voluntary returns, which were in many cases not
forthcoming. On the figures so obtained it appeared that in textile
factories 24·1 per cent. were married, 71·8 per cent. unmarried, and 4·1
per cent. widowed; in non-textile factories 16·3 per cent. were married,
79·3 per cent. unmarried, and 4·4 per cent. widowed. A high proportion
of power-driven laundries made the return, and in these 28 per cent. of
the women were married.
The worst cases of too early employment of mothers did not, however,
necessarily appear in the industries that were most characteristically
women’s, but rather in poor or underpaid industries and in towns or
districts where women were largely employed without a sufficient balance
of men’s staple industries to enable the husband and father to be the
main breadwinner of the family. Any high degree of unemployment for the
latter, of course, immediately affected the security of the mother’s
support at the time of child-bearing. Many of the worst examples of too
early employment after childbirth came primarily from that cause.
“I know,” wrote Miss Paterson in 1907, “of no more tragic figure than
that of the toil-worn woman striving ... to do the work of two persons
with, as her background, the unemployed or insufficiently employed
man ... desolate and oppressed are the words which seem then to
describe her the best.”[160]
Some of the very worst examples came to our knowledge in the five years
preceding the modest relief that came for maternity through the National
Health Insurance Act of 1911. In that year, at the Congress of the Royal
Sanitary Institute at Belfast, Miss Martindale gave an address on
Hygiene and Industrial Employment, in which she stated that in that city
she had “come across women returning to work of a hard manual nature,
entailing hours of standing, within ten days, and even four days of
their confinement.” She was convinced that “no woman would return to
work within the month if it were not poverty which compelled her to do
so. As one poor tired woman remarked, ‘Could I remain away from work for
more than a fortnight with five children under six years of age starving
at home?’” The emigration of men in Ireland often threw the burden of
breadwinning on to the women.
To those who wish to understand, even partially, the extent of suffering
and injury endured by poor working mothers before any national attempt
was made to help them at the time of childbirth, I can only say that the
subject must be further studied in the section of my Annual Reports from
1907 to 1911 dealing with employment of women before and after
childbirth.[161] The monotonous recital, year after year, of facts
revealed by complaints investigated can alone give any idea of the
matter. One characteristic example must close the recital here. The
occupier of the factory had not “knowingly” re-employed the mother
within the four weeks’ limit; the woman’s husband, a carter, had been
out of work seven weeks before the confinement, and the Guardians gave
relief in money and kind for fourteen days after the birth. The third
week they refused an application for continuance of the relief, and the
woman returned to her employment—her husband being still workless. The
Inspector asked the health visitor to interest herself in the matter and
secure assistance if possible for the woman. Section 61 of the Act of
1901 only took effect generally by bringing to our knowledge facts that
might otherwise be overlooked, and prevented inconsiderate employers
from directly requiring women to return to work too soon after the birth
of a child.[162] Ultimately, when due care has been secured for the
poorest child-bearing woman, the tale of their past suffering and
neglect will seem a terrible and incredible thing.
Let us now turn to the young worker in industry. Strong though the
appeal of this subject was to the Women Inspectors—taking much of their
time and thought—in a sense it lies outside the limits of this book, and
it is far too great for adequate notice in a fraction of a chapter. A
few illustrations of ways in which we came in touch with industrial
employment of children must suffice. “Children in the factory” is a
thought that irresistibly carries memory back to tragic past wrongdoing,
in cruel overstrain and misuse of children’s forces that no one of our
race or nationality can cheerfully recall to mind. Yet we are bidden by
the foremost historian of the factory system, Mr. Whately Cooke-Taylor,
never to suffer the story to be forgotten lest its pitiful warnings
against the blinding power of false doctrine should also die out.[163]
The earliest legal remedies for the worst evils of child labour under
the factory system were threshed out in the first half of the nineteenth
century by English men themselves, long before it was imaginable that
women might enter the Civil Service and help as Factory Inspectors to
apply these remedies. It was, indeed, through the sufferings of little
children that the whole humanitarian movement for reform of factory life
by law and administrative action began, and that it found its chance to
grow against many and powerful adversaries, as may be seen in the life
of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury.
The sacrifice of the young workers made the first opening through the
outer framework or crust of society, built up as it had been in the
nineteenth century on a basis of “machinery and steam.”[164] The
children had been drawn, as the children were drawn by the Pied Piper,
“A wondrous portal opened wide
As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed.”
They had been drawn into the factories as helpless dependents of the
machine for the purely economic reasons that were then generally deemed
valid and all-sufficient. In turn, they furnished the most unanswerable
argument against the doctrine of _laissez faire_, and thus involuntarily
helped to bring about its discredit.
The main provisions in the Factory Acts for protection of the young
worker had been framed, and the very worst evils repressed, when Women
Inspectors entered the service in the last decade of the “economic”
century. Yet much remained to be done, as has already been seen in
certain examples of hardness and barbarity, particularly in Chapter II.
The very institution of the “half-time system,” which first came as an
enlightened practical remedy for excessively long daily hours, and as
the original provision for compulsory elementary education, had in our
early official days begun to be more than suspected as an evil in itself
among reformers. It lingered until the close of the War, for its
prestige had been great; it had grown into the very structure of textile
industries; and it had secured at least that whatever schooling a
factory child had was given to it in the daytime. Many pages scattered
through Annual Reports of the Chief Inspector record the injurious
effects on health (as observed by Women Inspectors) following on the
attendance of young workers at night school permitted by some education
authorities in cases of family poverty, as a condition of allowing the
young worker of thirteen and fourteen to work full time during the day.
This latter point came out so markedly because of the close attention
that was given by myself and my staff to applying the provisions for
securing a reasonable degree of physical fitness in young workers in
factories. We did all in our power to bring home to parents as well as
employers that examination by the certifying surgeon of the child for
half-time or young person for full time employment, as to their physical
fitness for “working daily for the time allowed by law in the factory,”
was a serious, not a merely formal, matter. We freely used our powers as
Inspectors to suspend a child or young person for re-examination,
wherever it appeared to us that she was unfit by “disease or bodily
infirmity” for the daily work during the legal hours. Out of this came
the evidence that led to strengthening of the law by giving to the
certifying surgeon power to examine any process, and to qualify the
certificate by conditions as to the work on which a child or young
person is to be employed. The younger the child the greater our concern
for all this, and from the first we worked in close contact with the
teachers in the schools attended by half-timers, whose age or delicacy
called for our enquiry. Incredibly small and baby-like were some of the
eleven-year-old children still lawfully employed in factories up to the
year 1899. A few ten-year-old children were still lawfully employed in
1893 when the first Women Inspectors began their work.[165] In some
notes sent me by Miss Paterson at the close of 1921, written for this
book, she says:
“Amongst the changes in the law during my official service few were so
completely satisfactory as those which have contributed to the passing
of the half-timers. Each advance of a year in the age for entering on
employment was accompanied by gloomy forebodings of the result to
industry of preventing a child from acquiring facility while its
fingers were still supple—as if a non-wage-earning child sat with
hands folded in inaction—and (by some people) of the effects on
character of too much leisure in youth. A well-known sheriff added to
his reluctant convictions of several firms for illegal employment of
children an exhortation to me to consider carefully what I was doing
before bringing more such cases to this court. In his opinion I was
doing much to fill the place with young criminals who would have me to
thank to some extent for their ruin.”
Some remarkably enlightening information came out of enquiries made by
Miss Paterson in order to find an answer to the question, “What becomes
of young workers rejected by the certifying surgeon in a factory as
physically unfit for the work?” It was carried on, as much of our work
was, in co-operation with the certifying surgeon. In 1900 79 cases of
rejection were followed up to the child’s home, 56 having been rejected
as under age, 11 for weakness or disease of the eyes, 6 for skin
disease, 1 for deficient intelligence, and 5 for personation of another
older child. It became clear that the children did not go back to
school, that they tended to go either into casual employment outside the
factory system, or into a workshop where the certificates were not
required and where a register need not be kept, that the work they went
to was as hard as, or harder than, that for which they were rejected,
and that the children lived under pressure of circumstances impossible
for them to combat—sometimes selfishness, oftener the extreme poverty of
parents, sometimes carelessness or indifference of employers. This
information was embodied in evidence I gave to the Departmental
Committee on Employment of School Children in 1901,[166] and thus
fortunately became promptly utilised. The interest of the general
community in the matter became evident, and not only from the standpoint
of future efficiency of the child; for example, it was ascertained in
one case that a child rejected for a contagious skin disease went into a
process not under the Factory Act—namely, the picking and cleaning of
fruit for making preserves. The close enquiry into the reasons for
rejection brought out again very clearly what I had pressed forward
several years earlier, the unsatisfactoriness of the conditions of
publicity, noise, etc., under which the certifying surgeons had to make
their examination of the young worker in the factory and the handicap
they felt in trying to make it sufficiently thorough.[167] The
uselessness of a perfunctory examination became the clearer as one saw
more of the wide range of possible occupations in a large factory. It
was recommended on the results of this enquiry that better arrangements
should be made for the examination, that the surgeon should have power
to qualify his certificate, and that enquiry should be systematically
made as to what became of a rejected young worker. Miss Squire had two
years earlier laid bare, in vivid words, the narrow basis on which a
surgeon then had power to reject.
“The certificates must by law be granted if the child or young person
is of the proper age, and is not ‘incapacitated by disease or bodily
infirmity for working daily for the time allowed by law in the factory
named.’ The number of girls and boys so incapacitated is small; is the
number of those physically unfit for the employment to which they are
set also small? Certainly appearances in the factories are often
against such a conclusion. Many a factory is a town in itself; the
processes of manufacture carried on within its walls are as different
in character and conditions as they can be; a boy or girl is certified
as physically fit for them all. Yet it is conceivable that a child or
young person may be physically fit for one department or process and
physically unfit for another; quite fit, for example, in a silk mill
for winding, quite unfit for the intense heat of the gassing room;
quite fit in steel pen works for sorting or stamping, quite unfit for
the strained position and dust-laden atmosphere of the grinding shop;
quite fit in fancy box factories for pasting on the paper, quite unfit
for waiting on the glue room by carrying up and down heavy pails; or
physically strong for rough work, but with eyes unfit for strained
attention on work requiring close application. Could not certifying
surgeons have power to exclude from a certificate a specified
department or process, or to name in the certificate one department or
process only, and for this purpose have power of entry to factories in
order to see the work in relation to the child? In a district known to
me where both these powers are, with the co-operation of occupiers,
exercised, no one regards a certificate of fitness as an empty form; a
dead system has been galvanised into life.
“I have often thought whether the doctor who saw the little, delicate,
narrow-chested girl in the office, and was ‘satisfied that she was not
incapacitated by disease or bodily infirmity for working’ for the
legal time, were to see her as I see her in the stress and strain of
work toiling up flights of stairs with a load I cannot lift, streaming
with perspiration in steam and heat, bent double straining over minute
work, he would have been able to certify her as physically fit for
such employment had such a certificate been requisite. Having regard
to eyesight alone, what misery entailed by impaired vision might not
be spared by the exercise of a judicious control over the kind of
employment permitted to boys and girls with defective eyes.”
Frequently, when it was necessary for an Inspector to suspend a child or
young person from work until re-examined by the certifying surgeon, or
to prosecute an employer for neglect to obtain a certificate for the
young worker, it was found that the occupation itself had increased some
constitutional delicacy or weakness.[168] In such cases the young worker
had to be sent for medical treatment. Many prosecutions were taken for
entire failure to obtain the certificate, but so frequent was the
neglect that most of them were taken into court only after warning, and
on account of unhygienic conditions to which the young workers were
exposed. Heavy weight carrying and other kinds of injury have been dealt
with as regards workers generally in the chapter on dangerous trades.
Here I must record the strong impression early made on the Women
Inspectors by the liability of children to suffer overstrain of many
kinds in the factory, simply because of the general lack of sufficient
superintendence by someone whose duty it was to protect them, and
because of their own eagerness and readiness for effort. It was, as Miss
Paterson said, “almost incredible the extent to which details connected
with employment are allowed to be nobody’s business.”
“The use of heavy irons, carrying or dragging of heavy loads,
continuous strain of one kind or another, is just as often as not the
result of that want of thought on the part of responsible persons
which occasions, in all circumstances of life, so much misery, and
which it is so hard to overcome.... It was my duty early in the year
to take proceedings against a firm in whose factory I found a little
girl engaged in work for which she appeared to me to be physically
unfit. I served a notice on the firm requiring them to discontinue her
employment unless the certifying surgeon, on a re-examination, found
that she was fit for it. On a revisit I found her still there, neither
dismissed nor re-examined. It would have been easy for the firm to
have replaced her ten times over from the immediate vicinity of the
factory, so that there was no reason for the disregard of the
instructions except carelessness and indifference.”[169]
As time went on, and especially after the certifying surgeons had the
power given by the Factory Act of 1901 to attach conditions to
certificates of fitness for individual girls and boys, interest grew
among employers and managers in setting the young workers on to more
suitable work under more favourable circumstances. They realised the
possibilities for good in the examination as they had not done under the
past more formal methods. In cases where young persons were employed in
very dusty processes—bronzing in printing factories, shaking up and
cleaning feathers in quilt and cushion works—those who complained of ill
effects were found to be “mouth-breathers” on account of nasal
obstruction, and by arrangement with the occupiers these were removed to
non-dusty processes.[170] In potteries where a good many prosecutions
had to be taken for neglect to obtain certificates of fitness—so
necessary for the heavy work to be done there by young workers—good
effects were particularly seen in new potteries. At one, notices were
distributed by the occupier at intervals to all the sub-employers in the
different departments[171] reminding them of their duty immediately to
report the engagement of workers under eighteen; in another a clerk was
set in official charge of the general register and health register with
the duty of regularly ascertaining whether the prescribed examination
had been carefully carried out. Enquiries were systematically made into
reasons for and results of rejection, and an extensive report on such
activities may be read in the Annual Report for 1905. Official visits to
medical officers of health as well as conferences with certifying
surgeons in the special question of rejections for uncleanliness led to
development of co-operation between the different authorities. By 1913
co-operation with education authorities and the juvenile labour exchange
was added. Great advance in the care of children was then brought about
by co-operation between the school medical officer and the certifying
surgeon. When a child, known to have a physical defect or weakness, goes
from school to the factory, the certifying surgeon is notified, and he
subjects the child to a searching examination.
Careful investigation in earlier years of the certificates of school
attendance of half-timers showed the attendance to be good. The
possibility of securing a labour certificate at thirteen years of age
for full-time employment had a good deal to do with this in places where
the certificate was granted on a high standard of attendance. This
meant, said Miss Paterson:
“Hard work at school in the years before the child is twelve years of
age ... and between school work and factory work the Lancashire full-
timer is often pitifully small, thin, and nervous. In a Scotch cotton
mill I noticed a little girl, twelve years old, exempted from day
school on condition of attending a night school, and working full time
in the mill on the ground that her work was not employment within the
Act. She had been examined by the certifying surgeon and passed for
‘messages only, not to work in the mill,’ and carrying messages
upstairs and downstairs from one department to another was her work
from 6 a.m. till 6 p.m. Her home was not far from the mill, but the
night school which she attended from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. was a mile from
her home, and altogether her day’s work was one that few people double
her age would willingly undertake.”[172]
And yet, in spite of much serious, heedless overstrain of children and
of deplorable illegal employment in Great Britain in our time, Ireland,
and particularly Belfast, exceeded all other parts of the United Kingdom
in what must be described as exploitation of child labour. Economic and
political conditions there, accompanied by backwardness in education, no
doubt retarded a general improvement in public appreciation of the vital
interest of the community in conservation of the strength and care of
the natural development of the child. And it was the additional
misfortune of the Irish child that the conditions of the chief industry—
flax—in its many dusty and humid processes, inevitably contained much
that was undesirable for the physical well-being of the young growing
worker.
“Public opinion,” said Miss Martindale in 1908, “on this subject of
child labour in Ireland lags far behind that in Great Britain.[173] I
have never so vividly realised this as when I prosecuted a firm on
behalf of five little girls who had been employed full time in fairly
strenuous work. Three of them were twelve years of age, and had been
employed full time since they were nine or ten years of age. It is
impossible to describe the antagonism aroused in the whole district by
this prosecution ... and the case was dismissed on a small technical
point.... Several cases of illegal employment ... could not have
occurred except for public opinion in that district.... In a flax
scutching mill one morning I found a little girl aged twelve years
‘stricking’ flax with a rapidity and dexterity which showed
considerable practice. My enquiries met with the most bare-faced
untruths.... I was told that the child was at the mill for no other
purpose than bringing tea to the workers. On visiting the school ... I
was told that this little girl and her sister, aged ten and a half
years, worked alternate weeks at the scutching mill, and were employed
there from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on every week day, including Saturday. I
could not hear of any steps having been taken by the teacher or
managers to stop this obviously illegal employment. In another factory
I found a little girl of thirteen years working full time with a
certificate which showed clearly she was only in Standard IV., and of
the illegality of the employment the teacher must have been
aware.”[174]
It was evident from the Report of the Belfast Health Commission,
published in 1908, that very adverse circumstances affected the health
of adolescent workers in Belfast, though housing conditions and
unhygienic conditions of schoolrooms may have been answerable as much as
working conditions. Although the infant under five years of age had a
better chance of life in Belfast than in Manchester, not so the young
persons aged fifteen to twenty years; in that age-group the mortality
was found to be double that for the same age-group in Manchester.
“It needs,” said Miss Martindale, “little power of imagination to
realise the pain and wretchedness which must have preceded these
deaths, and as the death-rate is a sign of the standard of health, it
is not difficult to picture the number of children who are living on,
but who are robbed of that health which brings vigour, buoyancy, and
light-heartedness. Mrs. Dickie, the Local Government Board Inspector
of boarded-out children, who has had many years’ experience of work
amongst Irish children, has, I think, put her finger on one factor in
the cause of the high death-rate when she says of half-timers:
‘Commencing as they do just at the time when all their physical powers
are needed for the merging of childhood into adolescence, the strain
of the long day in the hot, noisy mill or factory leaves them without
the reserve of strength necessary to support growth of mind and
body.’”[175]
In a wonderful degree the publication of the reports I received from
Miss Martindale on such considerations, and on many details and aspects
of the employment of children in Ireland, arrested attention there, and
aroused true sympathy for the cause of child protection. Not only were
the reports, and her very words, widely quoted in the daily Press, but
regularly there were leading articles to drive her points home when the
Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories annually appeared. In June,
1909, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church passed the
following resolution:
“That the assembly feeling deeply the obligation for the safeguarding
of child-life, especially in manufacturing districts, recommends
ministers of this Church to study official documents bearing upon the
question of child labour, and to endeavour to arouse public opinion in
favour of enforcing the law with a view to the protection both of the
children and of the law-abiding employer.”
In the counties of Antrim and Down, out of 50,686 persons employed in
textile factories at that time, not less than 13,691 were under eighteen
years of age, and of these 4,144 were half-timers. Thus the question was
not a small one for these districts, having regard to the heavy and
debilitating atmosphere of dust or humidity, in which so much of the
work was done. Miss Martindale felt that a spinner was right when she
said, pointing to a group of half-timers, “Ah! indeed, they are hard
enough wrought.” It was not surprising that the Belfast half-timer was
undersized and delicate. A little girl aged twelve (one of many of the
same size) she had weighed in a factory in 1906. Her weight was 58
pounds, instead of the 76 pounds that might have been expected for her
age.[176]
The total number of young lives in factories and workshops under some
degree of protection by the Factory Acts in the United Kingdom in the
first decade of the twentieth century was approximately 1,099,841
persons under eighteen years of age, and of these 459,698 were under
sixteen years of age; of the latter, 37,129 were half-timers, the
majority, 19,211, being girls. The lowest age-limit of admission had
been established and duly observed without difficulty over the greater
part of the kingdom, but in Ireland we had many attempts at evasion to
contend with—generally from the side of the parents; both Miss
Martindale and her successor, Miss Slocock, frequently had to follow up
falsified certificates, and prosecution of a father was repeatedly
necessary.[177]
A great deal of valuable work was done in Lancashire and Yorkshire
textile districts by Miss Squire and her staff, and by Miss Vines in
Scottish textile districts, not only in giving effect to the actual
requirements of the law, but in watching over details of employment that
seriously strained the young worker, such as bobbin carrying up and down
stairs, weft carrying by the tenter in the weaving shed (“the tenter has
always a tired look”). Conditions affecting them in Dundee jute, hemp,
and flax factories were in many ways quite as bad as conditions in
Belfast factories.
It is impossible to give here more than this bare idea of the scope of
our activities in the matter of child labour, and I can merely refer to
the fresh care that had to be devoted to the question during the
pressure of wartime. At that time the eagerness of children to help
again led to much illegal employment before the legal age of admission,
or to full time when only half-time was permissible, to employment in
school holidays, and at all kinds of illegal hours in many miscellaneous
industries. Many prosecutions had to be taken in London, Birmingham, and
the North of England, and in Scotland. Increasing support was given by
magistrates and sheriffs in repressing this evil. In 1917, in one case
taken by Miss Vines, where very young girls had been employed for
excessive hours, and a defence was set up that the pressure of work had
led the management to overlook the youth of the workers, the sheriff
severely observed that “no one could be so busy that he could not see a
girl of thirteen was not eighteen.” In Birmingham, Miss Martindale in
the same year prosecuted nineteen firms and five parents for illegal
employment of children, and in Coventry she prosecuted a firm for
employing a child of ten years in a bakehouse. In an outstanding case in
the North-Western Division a fruit preserving company was prosecuted by
Miss Tracey for employing little girls of eight to ten years, mostly in
the intervals between school, in preparing fruit for bottling, two of
them being in poor health and absent from school. There was found to be
great and special need during the later years of the War for
watchfulness by the Inspectors against serious overloading of young
workers or their employment near dangerous machinery.[178]
We have already seen above that certain religious and charitable
institutions first came within the purview of the Factory Acts in 1907
as regards industrial work of their inmates, and the question of their
inclusion or exclusion had long been a subject of controversy—in fact,
ever since the Act of 1895 had partly regulated commercial laundries. It
is somewhat surprising, in view of the long discussions and the fear
frequently expressed by ordinary laundries of unfair competition from
the side of institutional laundries, when one learns that the total
number of working inmates of institutions under Section 5 of the Act of
1907 never exceeded round about 9,550, of whom 9,417 were engaged in
laundry work for persons outside the institution, 4,068 of these inmates
being engaged in laundry work aided by power-driven machinery. In
commercial laundries fully regulated by the Act of 1907, the last
returns to the Factory Department—published in 1911—showed that 103,635
women and girls were employed, besides 11,466 men and boys, and that
75,774 of the women and girls worked in power-driven or “factory”
laundries. When it is further remembered that even the largest
institutional laundries are relatively small compared with very many
large commercial laundries, it is evident that the question of their
competition with these laundries barely arises, and that the
administrative question of chief importance in the institutional
laundries always has been, What was the form of regulation most likely
in the special circumstances to aid in securing the well-being of the
inmates? The latter are mostly brought into the institution for
charitable aid or reform, or special training or special protection
against their own weakness, and generally they lack the self-protecting
habits of normal industrial workers. The Factory Acts were in no way
devised for controlling, nor competent to regulate, either the domestic
conditions in the lives of these inmates or their training or education.
The aim of inclusion under the Factory Act was simply to secure that,
when they were actually engaged on industrial work (for purposes outside
the institution itself, even if not by ordinary way of trade), they
might be assured of conditions of work, health, and safety, not less
favourable in their circumstances than those enforceable for a worker
employed in a factory or workshop.
It was about the year 1899 that we began, as a branch Inspectorate, to
come in touch with certain convent or religious institution industries;
first, through the complaints of the ordinary trader that they were in
an unfairly favoured position, and, secondly, through the research of
Miss Deane and Miss Squire in Ireland, into convent industries really
carried on by way of ordinary trade. Here the workers were definitely
employed under a contract of employment in lace making, knitting by hand
or machine, embroidery, shirt making, laundry work, and weaving of
flannel, tweeds, and linen. Some of these were inspected for the first
time in 1900 by Miss Squire. She and the instructions she gave under the
Act were well received by the Superiors. The successful example and high
standard set by the Rev. Mother Superior of Foxford Convent, county
Mayo, where a woollen factory with dye works had long been carried on
(with profit to the peasants of the district as well as the convent),
inclined other convents, attempting to carry on small manufactures, to
welcome the visit of a Woman Inspector. These were not places for
reformatory or protective occupation of girls and women—not so-called
penitentiaries—but real productive establishments. In no such place
previously uninspected did Miss Squire find any objection to her
official visits; a hope was, however, expressed that the Inspector might
always be a woman; she came to the conclusion that occasional friendly
inspections were all that was necessary to secure that the spirit and
intentions of the Acts would be complied with. When I had the pleasure
of visiting them myself later on, beginning with the interesting Foxford
Factory, where the nuns managed the business and supervised the work in
the worksheds, I found the same spirit, and in that particular factory
an attractive combination of successful management with picturesque
charm.
The discussions in Press and Parliament in 1900 and 1901 on the problem
of regulating the other type of religious institution workplaces, of a
reformatory or charitable character—largely for derelict women and
girls—when the Act of 1901 was passing into law, led me to enquire into
comparative methods of regulating such places in the chief industrial
countries of Europe. My enquiries of the officials of sister Factory
Departments in France, Belgium, and Germany led to my receiving warm
invitations from the Inspectorates of these countries to visit them and
see their method of administration. The invitations were accepted, and
this was altogether a happy experience; details may be read in the
Annual Reports for 1901 and 1902.[179]
It was not only the friendly, helpful reception that was gratifying, it
was the discovery that in these countries, and most completely in France
and Germany, the general hygienic and safety provisions of their
industrial laws applied to the religious, charitable, and reformatory
workplaces equally with ordinary industrial establishments, and were
enforced by the same administrative methods. In France the Inspector had
“not to enquire whether a charitable institution works for gain or the
technical instruction of its workers; it sufficed that there is manual
labour for the law to apply.” Regulation was the more necessary in that
there were no less than 1,472 religious or charitable establishments
employing 48,432 workers, of whom the majority were under eighteen years
of age. The long time, over twenty years, during which regulation of the
hygiene and safety of these institutional workplaces, including
laundries, had been carried on under the ordinary safeguards of the law,
gave me a helpful object lesson in France. Commercial laundries had,
moreover, been regulated as other factories and workshops had been, and
for the same length of time. Thus I saw in them a higher standard of
cleanliness, ventilation, and fencing of dangerous machines than had yet
been obtained under our more recent regulation of laundries in England.
In Germany, where I was received in the Grand Duchy of Baden as a
colleague, and accorded the privilege of attending a staff conference of
the Inspectorate, under the late Dr. Wörishoffer, their learned chief, I
was interested to find how strict was their protection of young workers
against risks of severe accident or dangerous machinery, and how much
less they were employed in factory work than with us.
After this experience followed our regular voluntary inspection for
several years of a considerable proportion of charitable and religious
institution workshops and factories (chiefly laundries), which had
submitted themselves to such inspection at the invitation of the Home
Office. In Ireland, where the institutional laundries were larger and
more numerous than in England, I made some personal visits in 1905 to
representative institutional laundries and other workplaces possessing
varied characteristics and aims, and began a study of similar English
institutions. A few were found to be entirely willing to receive and act
on advice from Inspectors in the carrying out of standards laid down for
commercial workplaces as to hours, sanitation, safety; others were
willing to comply in part. Objections to compliance were sometimes on
the score of expense in providing safeguards to machinery, screens, and
ironing stoves and so on; sometimes on the ground that great care in
supervision obviated need for other safeguards; sometimes that precise
limits in hours or fixed mealtimes, or affixing notices and abstracts of
the law interfered with discipline; the last-named, and the possibility
of an Inspector speaking to a worker, were the measures of protection
for the working inmates that were most frequently opposed. Explanations
tended, on the whole, to smooth away obstacles, yet in an undue
proportion of the institutions nothing was changed under “voluntary”
inspection, and in these cases, finally, the only course was to refuse
to continue the inspection. Full reports on the results of inspection on
such lines, by Miss Deane and Miss Martindale in Ireland, and by Miss
Paterson and Miss Tracey and other Inspectors in England and Scotland,
appeared in Annual Reports for 1905, 1906, and 1907. Remoteness from
ordinary life in the atmosphere of these workplaces, too strong a
tendency to place production for profit before thorough training of the
workers, and too close a dependence on laundry work alone instead of
experimenting with varied occupations—in preparation for life outside
the institution—were among the defects most frequently commented on by
the Inspectorate. Lack of understanding of elements of personal hygiene
for the worker as well as of hygiene of the workplace was widely found,
and, even after the law and compulsory inspection applied, striking
illustrations of resultant ill-health among the inmates were repeatedly
reported. At the same time illustrations of good and understanding care
(always found in some places) grew in number and greatly developed in
enlightened ideas as time went on. Some of the extraordinary risks found
in certain places—_e.g._, an unfenced power wringer fed by a feeble-
minded girl; an uncovered hydro with friction cones and driving belt
totally uncovered fed by a girl of sixteen with long, loose hair;
newcomers set to feed an unguarded calender, for the greater part
apparently without accident—tended to suggest that leisurely methods and
care in supervision did to some extent lessen risks. In an orphanage
laundry with an uncleanly wash-house and very long hours of work, little
girls were found with sore eyes, and some cases were also seen among
inmates who were domestic workers. The Sister said they had had a great
many cases lately, and that it seemed “almost as if the children
infected each other”![180] Poor feeding of inmates often came to the
knowledge of the Inspectors through uninvited communications from the
managers or Sisters, and records of accounts in printed reports of the
institutions showed a very low average expenditure per head on this
item—_e.g._, 2s. 1Od. per inmate weekly in one Scottish institution—many
inmates being young, undeveloped girls, and here the hours were 8 a.m.
to 7 p.m., with one and a half hours’ intervals for meals; in another
the report stated that the average cost of dieting superintendents and
inmates was 3s. 11d. per week, and average cost of clothing inmates £1
10s. per year. After application of the Act of 1907 to these
institutional workplaces we occasionally learned of serious outbreaks of
ill-health among working inmates, and invariably we called in the
services of the local medical officer of health, or the certifying
surgeon, or both—improvements following. In one case escape of sewer gas
into the house; in another defective management of working conditions,
with dreary routine and absence of play or outdoor exercise for growing
girls; in yet another pressure for output, with long hours of work, was
found to be the immediate cause of cases of illness occurring. In very
many institutions, however, the inmates are of poor constitution to
begin with, and not equal to standard industrial hours until after some
care for the building up of their health. At first we had many places to
inspect where inmates were more or less feeble-minded, but gradually
these have passed under care of the Board of Control for the Mentally
Deficient.
In 1907 the last of the “voluntary” inspections were specially welcomed
by managers, who increasingly applied for advice and information. In
1908 compulsory inspection was generally cordially welcomed and
Inspectors were often pressed to return. Conferences on aims and method
of conducting the institutions increased among associations of managers.
Educational and character-forming occupations were in a few places added
to laundry work or substituted for it, and attempts were here and there
made to try and suit the special needs of individuals. For example, a
woman who made nothing of laundry work or needlework took whole-
heartedly to the printing of programmes and notices. One began to see
hope of the passing of the listless, lifeless condition of many inmate
workers, and of the coming of something of the vital, “alive,” and
frequently graceful movements of the “factory girl.” It is not
impossible even with laundry work as the chief occupation of the
institutional workers to find happy activity among them—when the Sister
Superior or manageress is sufficiently young in spirit to develop
“hobbies” in recreation, and to encourage in the girls a sense of
responsibility. I know of one institution where the Sister Superior aims
at self-government in the best spirit of a “public school.” And here,
when charming baskets made by the laundry girls were brought out for my
inspection, they asked eagerly that I might also “see Sister’s work.”
Still, it must not be supposed that there was not very much to be done
to secure compliance with the letter and spirit of the Act of 1907
during the seven years following its coming into force.
Although desire of exceptional treatment in the matter of hours
declined, still, on the whole, the total extent of hours spent at work
is more nearly drawn out to the full permissible limits than is recently
customary in commercial workplaces. Safety of the machinery and
sanitation of the workplace were gradually secured, but it was a slow
and tedious process to develop any enlightenment as to the value of
shortened spells and hours. In a few cases there was obstinate
resistance to instructions in the requirements of the Act, and reform
was not secured until the Home Office had exercised the power of
withdrawing all privileges allowed under the Act. The last reported case
of that kind was one in 1914. Yet “in the great majority of homes under
Section 5 of 1907 there continues to be faithful observance of the
law.”[181] The War brought reverberations into these workplaces as well
as into all others. New ideas were aroused among managers by the varied
experiments in special workrooms for unemployed women, during the first
few months of the War, under Queen Mary’s Fund.[182] The great general
demand for women’s and girls’ labour altered the whole position for any
of them willing to retrieve themselves by service to the nation, and it
was interesting to learn that the numbers in the Homes markedly
declined. After the War, girl inmates began to show their new powers of
initiative by writing to the Senior Lady Inspector, thus showing the
value of abstracts and notices with names and addresses affixed in the
workplace.
In one such place a complaint was seriously justified by the
investigation that followed. Long hours of work for very young girls,
total absence of outdoor games, with poor dietary, had resulted in much
sickness. I visited the head of the Sisterhood, of which this
institution was a branch work, with the Senior Lady Inspector, and we
found her open to the reception of new ideas. A change in management
followed, with happy results. We received, some months later, direct
from the girls and their new Sister Superior, a hearty and welcome
invitation to attend their annual festivity.
CHAPTER VI
THE LIFE OF THE INSPECTOR AND ITS INFLUENCE ON LEGISLATION; EXPERIENCES
IN COURTS
“I doubt very much whether the office of Factory Inspector is one
suitable for women.... It is seldom necessary to put a single question
to a female.... Possibly some details, here and there, might be
superintended by a female Inspector, but looking at what is required
at the hands of an Inspector, I fail to see advantages likely to arise
from her ministrations in a factory ... so opposite to the sphere of
her good work in the hospital, the school, or the home.”—_Chief
Inspector of Factories_, October 31, 1879.[183]
“The men’s and women’s sides of the Inspectorate ... will be
amalgamated into a single organisation. Women Inspectors will be
regarded as eligible for all posts. While the complete fusion, which
is the ultimate aim, can only be brought about gradually, the main
principles will be put into effect from the commencement.”—_Chief
Inspector of Factories_, June 8, 1921.[184]
While we await the development of the later of these two extremes in
official views on the possibilities of employment of Women Factory
Inspectors, there is ample material in the intervening Annual Reports of
the Chief Inspector, and in comments and conclusions in Parliamentary
Debates upon them, for grasping the realities in the life and activity
of the Inspectors.
In the reports it is clear that they were engaged all the time on work
that really mattered in its immediate effect on the life and conditions
of women as workers in the factory and workshop, as outworkers, as
mothers, and as industrial inmates of charitable institutions; and that
the Inspectors brought new light, health, and safety into working
conditions for adolescent girls and children. Their work was not formal,
nor simply a question of detail, but constructive for the nation in the
things that most needed new thought and perception. The fact that they
never instructed occupiers of factories about “fencing” of dangerous
machinery[185] that was operated solely by men did not lighten their
work. It simply set them free to concentrate on immense human problems
needing their special attention. Women workers had also to be drawn to
confide in the Inspectorate, and to co-operate intelligently in
transforming factory conditions from within. Growth of the spirit of
self-help in the women was noticeable in details of Annual Reports from
1896. I was able expressly to point to its growth in 1901 and onwards.
As regards “a great many provisions” in the Factory Act of 1895, Mr.
Asquith, speaking in the House of Commons on July 31, 1896, said he was
“quite satisfied from recent experience, that these provisions could not
be satisfactorily enforced except by female inspection.” And Sir Matthew
White Ridley, then Home Secretary in succession to Mr. Asquith, replied
that “much good had been done in the interest of female workers of the
country by the appointment of these Lady Inspectors.”
In 1904 Mr. Asquith, in pressing on another Home Secretary, Mr. Akers-
Douglas, the need of really sufficient additions to the number of Women
Inspectors (then numbering twelve), did so for the reason “that the
girls and women of the country might be more efficiently protected.”
This had followed many annually repeated pleas in the House by various
members, foremost Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. H. J. Tennant, for more
liberal development of the work of the Women Inspectorate, and
suggestions were made for placing them in district charge in centres of
many women’s industries—_e.g._, in potteries, in Ireland—and
commendation was expressed of an experiment of this kind in the West
London Special District.
Mr. Theodore Taylor, speaking as a factory owner in the debate on Home
Office Estimates on August 4, 1904, desired “to acknowledge the very
great debt of gratitude which employers generally were under to the
Women Inspectors. There were very many abuses which employers were not
aware of until they were brought to light by the Women Inspectors ... he
joined in the strong request that the number should be largely
increased ... the adoption of this course would tend to the efficiency
of factory labour.” Mr. John Burns held that “their work had to do with
matters which no average man could understand,” echoing a point made in
earlier debates by Mr. Asquith, that the Women Inspectors could “bring
themselves into close contact with the workers and obtain from them with
greater spontaneity actual facts of the real duties of their lives and
work,” and that this freedom of communication resulted in much better
administration of the law.[186] Mr. Akers-Douglas, replying in 1904 to
the demand for increase in the Women’s Branch of the Inspectorate, “had
been very much struck by the unanimous opinion expressed that day,” as
he had been also, he said, by “reading the very valuable report” of that
year on the work of the Women Inspectors.
Members of Parliament, indeed, showed throughout that they were entirely
convinced that efficiency and economy followed on the spontaneous
character of the work of the Women Inspectors’ Branch, and that the
confidence reposed in them by the workers, for whose aid they were
appointed, was appreciated. As Mr. McKenna said on March 8, 1898: “We
know the very high favour with which they are looked upon by the working
classes.” The only definite exception that I can find to this general
commendation is in a complaint by Mr. Jesse Collings on June 29, 1903,
that they went beyond their province of seeing that the laws were obeyed
by doing “missionary work.” This complaint seems to refer to their
steady endeavours to encourage employers to go beyond the law in
promotion of welfare conditions—an aim which came into wider public
consideration during the Great War.
There are many passages in the Debates to show that it was not only the
direct work of applying the Acts and Orders, but even more the faculty
of acting both as an intelligence branch and as a missionary arm of the
Department that was valued by the country in the work of the Women
Inspectorate. Not only was the extension of localised administration, by
women for women, in great centres of women’s industry urged over and
over again from 1899 onwards; Sir Charles Dilke also led many members,
particularly in 1906, in emphasising the value of their special
enquiries and reports on such questions as employment of women after
childbirth; the need of after-care of young persons rejected for
physical unfitness in the factory and thereupon employed in less
regulated occupations and workshops; industrial disease and poisoning
among women and girls; observance of special regulations peculiarly
affecting women and girls; fines and deductions from wages; sanitary
arrangements; and other matters in which the needs of women workers
necessarily vary from those of men. “The great organised trades,” he
said, “are to some extent able to protect themselves, but women workers
depend,” to a great extent, on legislation and enforcement of the law,
and “on the Women Inspectors especially falls the duty of enforcing the
law,” “where the inspection is most necessary.”
In July, 1908, Mr. Herbert Gladstone, speaking as Home Secretary, and
alluding to a 40 per cent. increase in numbers of the Women’s Branch
(which brought them to eighteen), said: “The time has come when the
demands of the country for more Lady Inspectors cannot be resisted,” and
he declared that the “increase would be gradual in the future,” and that
there would be “no change in the character of the excellent work” done
by them. At this figure, eighteen, the numbers remained for several
years. Then in 1911 we find Lord Henry Cavendish Bentinck asking for
more, and expressing disappointment in finding that the numbers “remain
the same”; in 1912 he and Mr. Alfred Lyttelton referred again to the
subject, and the former pointed to the valuable concentrated “experiment
in the way of fencing machinery” that was going on in laundries in the
special West London district, under a Woman Inspector, with resultant
decline in number of accidents. He referred also appreciatively to their
work throughout the country under the Truck Act.
The lively interest that members took in reading the published reports
of the Women’s Branch, with their “vivid and humane representation of
the facts of our factory system,” was emphasised by Mr. Morrell and Mr.
Ramsay Macdonald in July, 1913, and Mr. Hills and Lord Henry Cavendish
Bentinck returned to the old charge, that, for the sides of the work
affecting women and young workers, efficient administration could be
secured only by setting the Women Inspectorate to do it. “It is quite
true that it is the duty of the male Inspectors as well as of the female
Inspectors to look after those women and children,” but for these Mr.
Morrell urged “the work cannot be effectively done except by women.”
This, then, was the Parliamentary mirror of the toils and adventures of
the Women Inspectorate. There is, however, a word to be said on an
aspect that appears to be neglected. Undoubtedly it was helpful to the
Women Inspectors on the one side to know, during so many years of
difficult and heavy work, that Parliament grasped the extent of their
task and the nature of the work that they were reaching out to achieve
in response to the appeal made to them by the industrial womanhood of
the nation. Yet, on another larger side, there was much pain also in the
feeling that this repeated emphasis tended to obscure any general
perception of the highly urgent need that required strong support, for
Men Inspectors in dealing with preventable accident and injury, and far
too rough and unhygienic conditions for the manhood of industry, in
places where women were little employed or not employed at all.
As far back as 1898 my own belief was that effective reorganisation of
staff involved not only concentration of experienced Women Inspectors on
the main conditions affecting women workers, but, even more, a
lightening of the cares of Men Inspectors on this side to allow of their
greater concentration on prevention of accidents and on very dangerous
trades where women may not enter as workers. In 1920 accidents affecting
male workers numbered 124,580, of which 1,363 were fatal, as compared
with 14,122 affecting female workers, of which 41 were fatal.[187]
Examples of the great accident producing industries are extraction and
conversion of metals, shipbuilding, docks, construction of buildings,
foundries, locomotive, and other large engineering works. In Parliament
the conclusion has invariably been reached that, in health and safety
problems for women and girl workers, Women Inspectors are primâ faciê
the more competent. Is it not in the great safety problems for men and
boys that a field of specialisation lies for Men Inspectors of a nature
as absorbing as that which enthralled the Women Inspectorate during the
last twenty-five years? The fusion of the men’s and women’s sides of the
Inspectorate, while avoiding some old problems of administration, raises
up new ones, not less large. A solution appears clearly within reach,
but discussion of it is outside the scope of this survey.
On neither side—men’s safety problems nor women’s health problems—is
skilled enquiry by the Inspectorate or experimental development of
regulation finished. The difference of potential or actual maternity
alone (without consideration of claims on girls and women as the
homemakers of the nation), according to Dr. Janet Campbell in her
memorandum to the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry,[188]
absolutely prevents equal competition of women with men in industry. She
lays stress on the need of further investigation into the physical
effects of employment in industry upon adolescent girls as well as adult
women, and this view supports the considerable enquiry made in the past
by Women Inspectors into heavy work done by girls. The persistent call
of Women Inspectors during many years for welfare conditions saw both
its justification and its fruit in the industrial warwork of women. The
extensive employment by the Ministry of Munitions of Women Dilution
Officers, to strengthen and promote employment of women dilutees in
engineering trades, ran also in harmony with the idea of specialisation
rather than fusion of function. Dr. Josefa Joteyko, in her “Science of
Labour,”[189] deals with experiments she had made showing the differing
modes of expenditure of energy in industry by man and woman. She says:
“Each represents a distinct function,” although each form of energy is
equally necessary to industry for its own purposes. While her
experiments established endurance as a characteristic in the feminine
sex requiring a slow and gradual expenditure of energy to avoid fatigue,
muscular force or strength with a power to act instantaneously under a
stimulating impulse are shown to be characteristic of the masculine sex,
and to be accompanied by ability to recover rapidly from fatigue. “Most
careful selection of working women with regard to their muscular
powers,” she considers, is necessary for successful industrial labour.
Whatever the issue of these various considerations, Parliamentary and
medical, on women’s work, it is well for the general community to
understand the ways in which the Women Factory Inspectors actually
worked during the past quarter of a century. During this period, says a
writer in the _Women’s Industrial News_ of January, 1915, the “direct
influence” of Women Inspectors on “enactments affecting women and young
people is very great, and they also helped to raise the standard of
legal regulation in the British Isles by study of foreign industrial
legislation.”[190] She traced out the questions in which their work had
affected development of the Acts and Orders from 1895 to 1907, and
mentioned among others the following: overcrowding, insufficient or
unsuitable means of heating workrooms, defective and unsuitable sanitary
accommodation for women, dangers from locked doors in fire or panic,
excessive overtime, need of power to qualify certificates of fitness for
young workers by specification of the class of work to be done,
insufficient general ventilation, need of inspection of institutional
laundries, regulation of fines and deductions, etc. “The social progress
of recent years,” she said, “has been the result of an unprecedented
attention to matters of detail. Investigation and administration have
begun to go hand in hand, and the scientific spirit which has been so
long in coming to its own in matters social may now be said to have
arrived ... the great advance which the Women Inspectors have been able
to bring about in factory legislation has been largely due to the
sympathetic insight which has made them virtually representative of the
people.”[191]
During the whole period 1893–1921 these Inspectors were, by official
instructions, directed especially to enquire, report, and take action in
behalf of women and girls; a task to which they addressed themselves
with hearty loyalty and intense interest.[192] They had Inspectors’ full
powers of action, and worked under their own women officers from 1896 to
1921. It was from 1902 onwards that they directly instructed occupiers
on fencing and prevention of accidents in the clothing and laundry
industries, of which they had made special study. Earlier in the same
year full authority was entrusted to me, as head of the branch, for the
sanctioning of their prosecutions, a power hitherto exercised subject to
approval by the Chief Inspector. Except for slight variations in the
early stages, co-ordination of their special work with the general work
of the male District Inspectors followed a steadfast prescribed course
from 1898 to 1921.
The very boundaries set to the work of the women officers led, as things
were, to what may be called their “higher education” in the nature of
the representative and judicial administration of their country. The
thorough general knowledge they acquired, all over the British Isles, of
conditions in every productive or manufacturing industry employing women
and girls, sprang also from their concentration as a branch on this
aspect of industrial employment. They made close acquaintance with local
as well as central methods of administration by daily dealings with
health and education authorities and their officers, as well as with
magistrates, sheriffs, and their clerks. They had to act for themselves—
most fortunately, for “power to do comes of doing”—in courts of summary
jurisdiction, learning procedure and something of the “law of evidence”
as they went along, and gaining an understanding of the details and
principles of the Truck Acts and Factory Acts, that could only be
acquired by personally testing them in the courts.
Probably in nothing did we owe so much to the first tentative efforts of
Miss May Abraham and Miss Mary Paterson as in their adventurous
readiness from the outset to try their powers in police and sheriff
court proceedings. I may confess that my own first feelings were chiefly
of consternation on learning that I had, a few weeks after entering the
Department, personally to prosecute an occupier for illegal employment
of girls—never having previously entered a police court. I suggested to
the District Inspector that he might conduct the first one, just “to
show how it was done,” but fortunately and wisely he declined. It was
not very long before I found a new interest in methods of
administration, through my discovery of a clause in the Factory Act
under which I might ask the magistrates to “make an order in addition to
imposing a penalty on an occupier for failure to keep his factory in
conformity with the Act”[193]—the magistrates actually complying with
the request, on condition that the terms of the order were drawn up by
the local medical officer of health and myself. This discovery was
indeed crowned when, in a great mill employing about a thousand workers,
it resulted in the closing of ancient and insanitary conveniences
pouring effluvia into heated spinning rooms, to the erection of passable
temporary sanitary conveniences, and, finally, to completed construction
of a modernised water-carriage system of conveniences.
It was not only in courts of summary jurisdiction that our education was
carried on. Between 1894 and 1916 we had sixteen appeals on points of
law to the High Courts of England, Scotland, and Ireland issuing from
cases taken by Women Inspectors in the Courts of first instance. Through
these we learned something about interpretation and the bearing of
“decided cases,” as well as the thoroughness with which trained lawyers
prepared a case; we also came in contact with legal advisers, law
officers, Queen’s and King’s Counsel, Treasury solicitors, Procurators
Fiscal, Sessional Crown solicitors, and so forth. Appeals to Quarter
Sessions on matters of fact occasionally gave us further enlightenment,
and, after a while, subpœnas served on Inspectors to give evidence in
civil claims of workers against their employers opened up for us new
chapters in the law of the land.
Without warning an Inspector would find herself when in a police court
arguing her case not merely with an experienced solicitor acting for the
defendant, but sometimes with a well known Q.C. (or K.C.). Our armour on
such occasions was a thorough acquaintance with the facts and
circumstances, and with the scope of the Acts which we were trying to
enforce. Much of the professional point of view and technique had
rapidly to be caught up not only on these occasions, but also during the
hazards of passing cases over to the Treasury, or to the Sessional Crown
solicitor in preparation for an appeal. The range of subjects that we
sent up was sufficient to introduce us to not a little of the lighter
and more humorous sides of legal proceedings, as well as to the tedium
of delays. In our record year for participation in appeals on points of
law—the year 1901, when Miss Squire was concerned in three appeals and
Miss Deane in one—there was some entertainment in spite of more serious
elements. Three of these appeals seem to deserve rescue from oblivion
for other than purely legal reasons. In _Deane_ v. _Hulbert Beach_ we
learned that the section (of which we had hoped much in the way of
remedy for workrooms either cruelly cold or stuffy because unprovided
with any proper heating apparatus), providing that “adequate measures
shall be taken for securing and maintaining a reasonable temperature in
each room in which any person is employed,” secured nothing whatever but
a reasonable altitude of mercury in the thermometer, however improper
the “measures.” In this instance these measures were described in the
Court of Appeal by counsel as “stuffing the room with a number of women,
heating with gas jets, stuffing up chimneys, and so on.” He argued,
first, that the “legislature must have meant that it shall be reasonable
having regard to the object in view—namely, the health of the person
employed,” but when asked by one of the Judges, “When you say ‘it,’ what
do you mean by ‘it’?” his reply was, “The warmth or temperature.” A
moment or two later he admitted, “It is a slip in the Act,” and the
Judge replied, “They ought to have used the word ‘ventilation’—adequate
ventilation.” On which counsel remarked, “Yes, that is the short point.
It has been brought up with a view to amending the Act this
session.”[194] In _Fullers, Ltd._ v. _Squire_ there was an appeal by a
defendant employer against a conviction and penalty for employing young
women through the night, on Saturday afternoons, and on Sundays in
packing and decorating wicker hampers and ornamental boxes, and filling
them with bonbons and sweetmeats in fancy patterns, tying up with bows
of ribbon and the like. The argument for appeal was, substantially, that
the work was incidental to sale, not production, and that the place was
a shop, not a workshop. No legal argument was verbally attempted by
counsel for the respondent (the same counsel as in the previous case),
but sample boxes, as packed and decorated with bright ribbon bows by the
young women, were shown to the Judges and made a fine splash of colour
in court. The appeal was dismissed, the Judges declining to interfere
with the discretion of the magistrate in deciding the individual case on
the facts before him. In _Squire_ v. _Bayer & Co._ there was, from an
Inspectors’ point of view, more tragedy than entertainment in the
decision, but the whole case is a very good measure of the distance that
has been travelled in our industrial and social standards since the year
1901. A case had been brought before the magistrates in order to test
the legality, under the Truck Act, of a rule posted up in the
defendant’s factory, that “all workers shall observe good order and
decorum while in the factory, and shall not do anything which may
interfere with the proper and orderly conduct of the business thereof,
or of any department thereof ... a fine of 6d. (or less at the
discretion of the manager) shall be paid by each worker who shall be
guilty of any infringement of this rule.” Under this rule numerous fines
had been imposed upon young girls for speaking, laughing, sneezing,
etc., and they could not know beforehand what “acts or omissions” on
their part would render them liable. The intention of the Act had
apparently been to secure such knowledge to the workers before they were
liable to a fine. The Inspector selected for her test case two girls
who, among others, had been fined for amusing themselves in the dinner
hour by singing and dancing to a small harp in the workroom where they
were allowed to remain, no mealroom being provided on the premises. The
High Court held that the case was not free from difficulty, but that
they could not say that the justices had come to a wrong conclusion in
finding that the fines were imposed under a lawful contract. “It would
be going too far to say that the language prescribing a fine for breach
of good order and decorum is necessarily too general.” The appeal was
dismissed. In these later days, since the War, the girls would not only
have a legal claim to take home their minimum wage clear of all
deductions, but employers very often think it natural and proper to
provide a messroom, and sometimes even a recreation room and a piano;
dancing in the dinner hour is occasionally not only encouraged, but
teaching also given at the employer’s expense.
In the year 1900 a case was decided in the High Court (_Tracey_ v.
_Pretty_) which brought us an experience extending over nearly two
years, that can have fallen to but few, if any, other litigants. It
arose in our endeavour to test the powers of the Factory Department to
act in default of a sanitary authority for securing conformity to some
standard of sufficiency and suitability in the provision of sanitary
conveniences. The case had been heard three times, first by two Judges
who differed, then by three Judges, one being the Lord Chief Justice,
Lord Russell of Killowen, who reserved judgment, but died before giving
the decision. It was heard for the third time by his successor, Lord
Alverstone, and the decision defined for the first time what was meant
by the “proceedings” open in England and Wales (outside London) to an
Inspector whose duty it was to act in default of the local authority.
The Inspector assumed all the powers of the authority, acting on the
advice of their surveyor, and could serve a notice under the Public
Health Acts on the occupier of the factory, the magistrate having no
authority or duty except to enquire whether the notice was properly
served and, if so, to convict. Appeal on the reasonableness of the
notice could be made to Quarter Sessions.[195]
In 1901, our interest having been thoroughly aroused as to the
possibility of increasing capacity for the legal side of the work and of
improving methods in conducting prosecutions, an invitation was given by
the Women Inspectors, through Mrs. H. J. Tennant, to Mr. R. B. Haldane,
K.C., M.P., since Lord Haldane, to address us on the “Conduct of Cases
under the Factory Acts.” To this he made a generous response, and both
Men and Women Inspectors had the great advantage of listening to a
distinguished advocate on the subject, at a gathering at Mrs. Tennant’s
house on April 18, 1901. Starting from the standpoint, familiar to a
Factory Inspector, that the Crown does not fight a case unless it
believes itself in the right, nor until satisfied of the truth of the
matter in question, he gave new meaning to some of our experience in
preparing and prosecuting a case, and need of readiness to meet
unforeseen contingencies; he also gave us new points for handling
evidence and witnesses. We were cheered by the stress he laid on “the
assurance, which is a very real one, that every case you lose brings
with it fresh experience, perhaps more than the case you gain,” and that
it is “only continual practice and dogged perseverance that makes people
grow in this as in other respects.” This same assurance was given me
personally by my own early experience, but yet more by watching the
growth in power, in this field, of colleagues working under my
direction. Of one of them I had the gratification of once reading the
opinion of a lawyer well qualified to judge, who was in court at the
time she was conducting a difficult Truck case, that it “could not have
been better done.” Sometimes words of praise for prosecuting Inspectors
would appear in a local paper. A single instance may suffice; in 1905,
when a presiding magistrate was reported to have said of two Women
Inspectors, concerned in a lively case of obstruction (of the Inspector)
and illegal employment (of women) before him, that “His Majesty was to
be congratulated on the possession of two Inspectors who did their duty
so conscientiously and well.” The one, he said, had “very ably and
properly conducted her own case”; the other (who had pursued retreating
workers in the factory down a trap-door into a dark cellar) “seemed to
have behaved with great pluck and activity.”
On this side of their work, in patience, resourcefulness, and
persistence, and in the high percentage of success in results, the
record does appear somewhat remarkable. Taking only the years from 1898
to 1914, the Women Inspectors brought 4,962 cases into court against
1,974 occupiers, and secured convictions in 4,715 cases. And the average
penalty imposed by magistrates rose, on the whole. The years of greatest
activity in the courts were between 1901 and 1911. Though many
interesting cases came in earlier and in later years, the tendency
increased, after 1911, to place more reliance on conference with or
persuasion of occupiers. The nature of infringements of the law has
largely appeared in preceding chapters, and the proportion of cases was
(as in complaints): first, illegal employment; secondly, defects in
sanitation and infraction of health regulations; thirdly, irregularity
in payment of wages.
It seems very natural that a high proportion of our younger Women
Inspectors have been impelled to read for the Bar in 1920–21 so soon as
such a step was open to them. Long after some of them have been called
to and are successfully practising at the Bar, it may touch them to read
of early experiences of Women Factory Inspectors during the arduous
battles they fought on behalf of many extremely poor and hard-driven
women workers. The life they led can only be given by fragments.
Here is a little extract from a diary, the flotsam of time:
“_Midnight ... December 31_ ... we are at L——, cold, miserable. Came
here to see ... Sessional Crown Solicitor about case to be stated _re_
order of D—— magistrates in the case of X——.
“_January 1._—We listened to the clock striking the new year while
making copies of draft-stated case which we had drawn up ourselves and
which ... Sessional Crown Solicitor had approved (we are very proud of
this draft). At 8.30 a.m. we started in a wagonette with two horses,
one of which had no shoe, with snow on the ground.... Arrived D—— 6.30
p.m., found Sessional Crown Solicitor and two resident magistrates,
had long conference, read them our stated case, which they adopted _in
toto_.
“_January 2._—Conference all day long and attendance in court, when J.
P. signed stated case with exception of.... Sat up till 2 a.m. copying
stated case ready for service next day. Atmosphere very damp, also
cold.... Slept under nine thicknesses of blankets and two
counterpanes.
“_January 3._—All day trying to get stated case signed by outstanding
magistrate, who flatly refused, saying, ‘I know X—— was in the wrong,
but it’s making too much of it to take the case to Dublin.’
“_January 4._—At 4 a.m. we started for our fifteen-mile drive to
nearest railway-station, bright starlight, lovely sunrise, nearly
choked with clothing and hot bottles, and sat nursing our best hats on
our knees.”
For “peripatetic” Inspectors the difficulty was a real one; the fitting
in of visits of special enquiry, general routine visits of inspection,
visits on extremely varied kinds of complaints, with the successful
prosecution of prolonged legal activities in widely scattered places.
Yet I know of no case where action failed through omission by an
Inspector to serve a notice or complete any legal formality or be at the
necessary spot at the prescribed time. There was a flame burning within
that seemed to consume obstacles by the way, and rendered innocuous even
very adverse climatic and other conditions. Long cross-country drives in
Ireland (undertaken at times simply to carry out a formal act) would
sometimes last all day in an open car in pouring rain, or a day in a
tiny, stuffy police court might have to be preceded by a drive beginning
before daylight on a stormy winter morning to fetch intimidated
witnesses for the case. In Lancashire a start might have to be made at
4.30 a.m. from a hotel (with the aid of knocking-up by the night
porter), to reach a distant country mill, unobserved, by a new route, in
order to detect time-cribbing before 6 a.m. Tussles with manageresses to
obtain the luxury of clean sheets on the hotel beds, and struggles to
secure amendments in conditions of uncleanliness (about which “Lord X——
Y——, here last week, had not complained”), were much more against the
grain. Yet all seemed small in comparison with such conclusions as that
of the _X—— Sentinel_ that the Lady Factory Inspector had “emerged
triumphant” from her case; that the “Truck Act has a living force for
the protection of a worker as far away as Altnagapple”; and that “the
publicity given to these prosecutions is likely to have a beneficial
effect throughout the county.” Or, again, the comments of the _Daily C——
_ on the prosecution of a firm employing a number of young girls in
processes scheduled as “dangerous” was enlivening. A certain town which
was “famous for its magistrates in Shakespeare’s time yesterday let off
notable offenders lightly. For employing four young girls without the
certificate of the doctor which the law requires a fine of 10s. in each
case was enforced—this being positively the first offence of the sort;
and for an incredibly mean breach of the Truck Act, by means of which a
girl had her wages stopped for two whole years to pay her father’s rent,
the firm had to pay three guineas. Grinding the faces of the poor is
cheap down in ——, and but for the Woman Inspector who found out what was
going on it would cost nothing at all.”
Consolation sometimes came swiftly to the Inspector on a refusal of
magistrates to convict in a closely contested case for, for instance,
heavy deductions from the girls’ small wages, or for waste in
production. In such a case, the firm, before leaving court, offered to
meet the Inspector’s views by lowering the scale of deductions for the
future to figures that, if yielded at an earlier stage, would have
obviated the need for prosecution. Publicity in such things was ever our
most potent helper. Something of the “setting” of this case, in the
court, may be brought up from the past by means of a stray leaf of a
letter, come back to me from the colleague to whom I wrote it in 1899:
“The firm had arranged quite a dramatic scene for us—no less than
three barristers, with wigs and all. Mr. Y——, Q.C., defended, with the
help of his friend, Mr. S——, and another friend of theirs who came in
from the Assize Court to enjoy himself. All the four partners were
there, and their solicitor. It would take too long to tell the whole
story now, but ... it was worth while fighting, and we were in court
until 3 p.m. I had breakfasted at 6.30 a.m. in London, so you will
believe that I was glad when lunch-time came. The stipendiary and the
magistrate’s clerk listened with the greatest interest to Miss
Squire’s clear exposition ... but, alas! our witnesses were not nearly
good enough. One of them was like wax in the hands of Mr. Y——, who, as
one of the sergeants of the court confided to me, ‘was not one of your
bullying sort, but quite gentlemanly.’ The stipendiary could not make
up his mind, however, and is going to think it over and give his
decision on Tuesday.”
His decision then was to dismiss the case on the evidence before him,
but not as a precedent to govern other cases. The deductions had been so
large, in relation to the wages of the girls, that they could only be
levied by small weekly instalments, extending over months.[196]
Two Inspectors in the same year had an almost incredible series of
experiences in Donegal (details of which can be seen in the Blue-books)
when trying to limit very long hours of employment of women in
“kippering” processes on an island, and to secure payment in coin for
outworkers on the mainland engaged in knitting. A study of legal
procedure was involved that proved enlightening to the Inspectors, while
one of them most deeply engaged in the latter of these cases lived for
the most part practically under police protection. She was “much cheered
by the sympathy and gratitude of the peasants,” on whose behalf she
doggedly prosecuted the case against local agents giving out the work.
In the “kippering” case there were two hearings. At the first, there was
equal division of the magistrates, ending in its being “dismissed
without prejudice.” At the second, there were five magistrates, and the
case was dismissed by a majority of three on the ground of exemption of
the processes from the Act. The hearing was largely “occupied by the
elaborate speech of the solicitor for the defence.... The climax of his
oration was reached when he appealed to the magistrates not to allow”
the Inspector “to hie herself back to the Home Office bedecked with the
plumes of victory.” The case which was stated for appeal “never reached
a hearing, owing to a failure to observe a legal requirement” on the
part of the legal agent, to whom it was entrusted when it passed out of
the hands of the Inspectors.[197]
It would require a separate book of some size to tell of many more of
our memorable experiences in the courts, and of the wonderful, varied
play of human circumstances and character there. It may be, as one of
the Women Inspectors once observed to me, the most difficult thing in
the world to tell—or to secure the telling of—“the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.” Yet the first business in a Court of
Justice, however summary, is to secure the presentation or unfolding of
truth, and truth being always near the mainspring of life, this is
perhaps the reason why so much entertainment, interest, and strange
attractiveness is to be found there. Possibly we had far too many cases
in which the size of penalty for serious contraventions seemed not at
all deterrent. And yet all the time a process was going on—of which we
saw glimpses now and again—in the recognition by employers of the thing
that really mattered, their moral, as distinct from their legal,
responsibility in matters affecting health and well-being of the workers
in the factories and workshops. And memory lingers on a case in which
deterrent penalties were obtained in circumstances where every interest
of the locality appeared to be against an impartial hearing:
“The employment of the women from 8.30 a.m. of one day until 5 a.m. on
the next was on a mourning order for the magistrate’s clerk. The
magistrate, before whom the informations were brought, at first
refused to sign them, and only did so on the recommendation of the
magistrate’s clerk. The active partner in the business is a
magistrate. The Mayor (in the chair) is the other workshop employer,
who was cautioned for illegal employment of a child. At the hearing of
the case a strong opinion was expressed by some of the Bench that the
offence was merely technical, and that the Factory Acts were hardly
intended to apply to such country towns. Under these circumstances ...
all concerned are to be congratulated ... on the fact that sufficient
penalties were imposed to mark the offence as more than merely
technical.”[198]
In this chapter I have, so far, mainly considered the side of the
Inspectors’ work that followed from the need of enforcing observance of
the standards in the Acts, a need which was greatest in the earlier
years. Routine daily inspection of factories and workshops at all times
took a large place and increasingly so, until it was far the largest
part of the life of the Woman Inspector. It was, of course, vital that
she should visit as many as possible of the tens of thousands of places
where female workers were employed, to give both employers and workers
all that can be given and that they desired from such routine
inspection. It has already been seen how new light was thrown on many
questions of health, safety, and welfare, how fresh attention was
aroused to the importance of many sections in the various Acts, and how
the Women Inspectors, by special concentration of attention on these in
the workplace, amassed fresh material for advance in legislation and
administration. In an ordinary year, let us take 1913, they would
effectively inspect between 6,000 and 7,000 factories, between 3,000 and
4,000 workshops, visit many outworkers, factory workers at their homes,
besides hospitals, local authorities, and the courts. They would
investigate many reported cases of industrial poisoning, between 600 and
700 accidents to women and girls in laundries and wearing apparel
industries. Contravention notices to occupiers would number 9,000 or
more; prosecutions in 1913 numbered 373 against 142 occupiers. It is
evident that the direct action of the Woman Inspector stretched far
beyond the investigation of specific complaints (of which 2,014 were
received in 1913), or the following up of contraventions serious enough
for prosecution.
Seeing that over 10,000 workplaces could be inspected by the women
officers in the year, and that in each one the name and address of the
local Senior Lady Inspector was affixed on the abstract of the Acts, a
great deal was gradually done to give the women workers that access to a
Woman Inspector that they so earnestly desire. Much more than is
generally realised was added by the fact that these officers of the
Department systematically sent a letter of advice, instruction, or
caution—as the case required—to the occupier after an inspection, and
that this had incomparably more attention from him than a merely formal
notice of contravention ever had. A large part of the effect of an
inspection is missed when a necessary instruction is given on a form
instead of in a written letter. The latter not only secured, for
example, better fencing and better ventilation, heating, and welfare,
but it also stimulated reflection and aroused a new sympathy for the
aims and objects of the Acts which bore sometimes surprising fruit.
Replies of thanks from the employers asking for more help came in
increasing numbers, and it was very pleasing during the war period to be
told how heads of firms sometimes specially appreciated visits from
married Women Inspectors, who were employed at that time by the
Department in a temporary capacity. The influx, then, of many women
employees, as dilutees or otherwise, into many factories, which had
never previously employed a woman or girl in process work, awakened a
good many employers to the special problems of supervision and welfare
that arise in organising joint industrial employment of men and women,
boys and girls.
As soon as the number of Women Inspectors grew beyond the small figure
necessary to cope with the appeals and complaints of the women workers
themselves, my own endeavour was to allot their services, as far as
practicable, to the various main women’s industries over the whole
country, in a scale proportioned to the numbers of girls and women
employed. When the statistics of those employed in each trade became
available, one could find the necessary clue. Textiles absorbed over 43
per cent. of the women and girls, clothing trades over 26·5 per cent.,
laundries 5·4 per cent., food preserving 4·6 per cent., warehouses,
calendering, and finishing 2·2 per cent., earthenware and china works
nearly 2 per cent. Other determining factors of course came in, such as
special risks, questions of Truck or piecework wages, excessive seasonal
overtime employment, and so on, but where these, or the women’s own
complaints, did not compel our concentrated attention, relative
allotment of routine inspection was more or less governed by the
proportional extent of women’s employment.[199]
“While we can see,” I said in 1913, “a great number and variety of
deplorable contraventions of the actual requirements and spirit of the
law and ... apparently preventible suffering and overstrain and injury
to life, limb, and health that is grievous to dwell upon (except for
action in the way of removal), we can see also most clearly signs of
improvement and the promise of much more. The promise lies in the fact
that the movement to secure better conditions is not confined to any
one class or group. The women and girls at last begin to press their
claims for a better life ... not only by increasing appeals to
Inspectors ... but also by criticism of the limitations of the law and
by fresh courage in organising and voicing their needs to the
employers. Employers are initiating reforms not only as outstanding
individuals and firms, but are beginning to do so, at last, by
associated action and effort.”[200]
Mrs. Drury (Miss Whitworth), formerly an Inspector of Factories working
under a Senior in a division, sends me the following memory sketch of a
characteristic special day—any day that had to be withdrawn from routine
work in order to cope with a variety of miscellaneous claims needing
prompt attention. It might have happened in 1912 or 1913:
“Many days were very full, all were interesting.... Let me suppose I
was first off to investigate an accident in a laundry. With the
prescribed report from employer and certifying surgeon in my hand, I
knew that a girl of fourteen had had her arm drawn in between the hot
rollers of a collar polishing machine. There was first the examination
of the machinery to see if a proper guard was provided and maintained,
then the examining of workers to find out the usual way in which the
rollers were cleaned, and whether sufficient instruction had been
given by those in authority about use of this dangerous machine; in
short, why the accident had happened and how similar ones could be
prevented. If a serious breach was found it was necessary to take
sufficient evidence in support of possible legal proceedings—a general
inspection of the whole laundry followed and notes would be carefully
made as one went along. Finally, one would see the manager and discuss
each point and instruct as necessary. A visit to the patient followed,
probably in hospital, and her story would be heard. Light was then
thrown on what it is difficult to realise without quietly seeing the
workers alone. Help as to how to set about getting compensation was
often asked for, and the worker could then be referred to the Working
Women’s Legal Advice Bureau. If there was any defect in the machine,
so that risk of accident in cleaning it was high, a visit to the
makers of the machine or their agents might be made, then or later, to
try to persuade them to do their part—an educative proceeding even if
fruit was slow in showing.
“It would by now be lunch-time, and one learnt to sometimes take the
meal in odd places: it is not to be wondered at that when ‘on leave’
an Inspector enjoys a nice comfortable meal at home and is not a lover
of picnics. The meal was usually soon over, and timed, perhaps, so as
to be at the police court at 2 p.m. to lay informations against a
firm, before the magistrate, a formal ceremony soon over. The next
thing might be a visit to a large biscuit factory to investigate a
complaint that a certain workroom was hot and unventilated. After
taking the outside temperature I remember going to the manager’s
office, handing in my official card saying I was going at once to the
factory. The representative knew his obligation, and I went straight
to the block complained of.... Before it was time to send in my report
two letters reached the Chief Inspector, one from the employer to say
I had hurried into the factory, without even waiting to announce who I
was, the other from a trade union official to say I had been quite
half an hour talking to the manager in his office, so that, of course,
the workroom was well ventilated by the time I arrived, and my visit
useless. An Inspector has all eyes on her; she may well go about her
work warily and keep her eye on the ball.
“After such a day’s work I once found a wire waiting for me at home
from my Senior, ‘Meet me Aldgate East Station midnight for overtime
inspection.’ This was thrilling, the Junior Inspector is always ready
for an expedition of that kind ... and I went to the appointed spot.
We then walked to a tailor’s house in a street full of these
workshops, having a borrowed lamp.... I went to the basement with my
lamp, and my Senior went upstairs to an empty dark workroom, then we
met together in the sitting-room, where there was a mass of unfinished
coats and trousers evidently thrown down in a hurry; then in the
bedroom we found, in bed, fully dressed, a little girl of fourteen I
had seen before.... Proceedings followed, but these entailed more
days’ work, for the employer disappeared, and was traced with much
difficulty.... It was 2.30 a.m. before we reached home that night, but
what play could give more insight into some of the ways of man than a
good day’s inspection?”
Such days and nights of work of a Junior Woman Inspector, working in a
division as part of a well-organised staff under a Senior, show the
unity that lived on in the branch from its earliest years. The chief
difference that came with the years was in getting to closer, more
detailed, grips with the mass of work to be done. Perhaps pioneering
risks became less evident, but initiative in devising methods remained a
strong need, and variety and human interest continued equally present.
The thoroughness that persisted in investigation of complaints and in
special enquiries is roughly but picturesquely expressed by the remark
of a trade union secretary to a Woman Inspector: “I know you; you belong
to the same lot as Miss ——. I remember when she came down to our place,
long ago, like a ferret in a rat ‘ole, she were.” It was of the same
Inspector that a girl in a factory once said to the deaconess of the
parish, “I am glad when she comes to our factory, she makes me feel so
safe.”
To another Inspector, a Senior in her office, once came seventy or more
mill girls, in shawls, straight from their mill, bent on redress of a
complaint; twelve came into her room, the rest were on the stairs and
extended down into the street. It was not often so many arrived at once,
but peace of some degree in the factory generally followed on
deputations of this kind.
When it became known that my work was nearly finished, and retirement
imminent, a trade union organiser came to see me at the Home Office. It
was to bring farewell messages from the workers, and I said how very
much I was touched by such messages when I had personally seen so far
less of them in recent years in the factories than I could have wished.
“They knew you from the Women Inspectors whom they did see,” was the
instant reply.
“There is nothing you cannot ask and expect of the British worker, man
or woman—they have ability for anything,” an employer said to me in the
year following the War when I talked with him about the women’s wartime
work during his convalescence from severe illness due to overwork on
munitions in his foundry.
Ability, loyalty, and an understanding heart—what a foundation this
country has, in its workers, led by such employers, on which to build up
beautiful industries in the future!
CHAPTER VII
THE WAR AND WOMEN SUBSTITUTES; NEW LIGHT ON HOURS, LABOUR-SAVING,
FATIGUE, FOOD, AND EFFICIENCY
“Lo, strength is of the plain root virtues born:
Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn,
Train by endurance, by devotion shape.
It is the offspring of the modest years.”
Those who have had patience to go with me so far, in gathering
illustrations of the conditions under which women worked in factories
down to the eve of the War, and who agree with my conclusions as to the
spirit and character of the women themselves, will perhaps follow on
with me in applying the words of George Meredith to their achievements
in the years from 1914 to the close of 1918.
Unless one turns back to the very numerous documents, official and
unofficial, relating to women’s industrial war work, it is not easy, at
the close of the year 1921, to recall the full measure of pride
expressed by the nation in what the women did for it in time of need.
Almost immediately after the Armistice all the munition workers poured
out of the factories and the substitute women followed gradually, as the
demobilised men returned to their industrial occupations. A tide of
industrial activity then rose and re-absorbed practically all available
industrial women in their own normal trades. The tide turned suddenly in
June, 1920, and increasing unemployment in 1921 has dimmed the memory of
their achievements.
Many a non-official observer, unfamiliar with the great extent and
variety of skilled manufacturing work, or with the heaviness and
roughness of much of the less skilled work, done by women and girl
industrial workers before the War, was astounded by the ability with
which women turned to the new kinds of work. “Not only,” said one such
observer, “has the War provided an incentive to women’s work on a scale
never dreamt of in times of peace, it has caused women, more
particularly those engaged in new occupations, to realise as they have
never done before their own capacity.”[201] The old barriers against
their employment on work suited to them and valuable to the community
were, for the time, steadily and firmly removed one after another, and
with surprising rapidity when guidance of State officials was applied to
this removal. Women in the factory realised—some with astonishment—that
they were entitled to high praise, and to hold a new confidence in
themselves through the natural capacity and zeal shown by them; first,
in intensified production in their own old industries[202] of unheard-of
quantities of cloth, articles of equipment, rations, and so on, for the
Army and Navy; secondly (and later), in speeding up the supply of
munitions of war. The emphasis on their merits as industrial war-workers
was greater than had ever been explicitly laid on their ordinary life-
preserving activities as homemakers and mothers. Nevertheless a new
impetus was given, through this enhanced valuation of women, to public
health work for mothers and infants and care of the child—or maternity,
infant and child welfare, as it became customary to call such work.
To return to women as “substitutes,” a new generation of adolescent
girls had time to come into this form of industrial occupation for
female workers—while the scope of “munitions of war” grew until they
nearly engulfed ordinary peacetime kinds of production. These girls had
never known anything but wartime manufacture. They also had what very
few British girls before them had had under the factory system,
opportunities for training by intensive instruction, and they laid hold
of these opportunities with remarkable power.
A new version of an old couplet came into my mind on thinking over an
incident in a remote rural district when, one evening in the fourth year
of the War, a friend of mine spoke to a village girl on her way to a
meeting at the lately founded Women’s Institute:
“‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’
‘To hear of substitute women,’ she said.”
The girl spoke as if it were a subject of lively interest to herself,
and one that would of course interest any intelligent human being.
“Women substitutes!” What could anyone have made of such a term before
A.D. 1915? Of butter or leather “substitutes” we had heard, but not of
women “substitutes.” And yet many books were written about them in the
last three years of war. Books that will be studied by historians of the
future seeking to explain the extraordinary growth during a critical
stage of the War—when millions of men had been taken away from the
possibility of production—in the supply of shells and guns to the
waiting artillery batteries; in the inexhaustible production of
aeroplanes; in the fitting and refitting of the Army with its boots, its
razors, its surgical dressings, its millions of tins of preserved
rations, its millions of smoke helmets; and in the gigantic supplies of
the hundreds of other kinds of “munitions” all ceaselessly mounting in
quantity.[203]
It is impracticable, and it is indeed unnecessary, to re-tell in detail
here the story of the growth in production and in supplies, or to
estimate exactly the share that women and girls took in making the
expansion possible. Those who have not access to the literature can by a
visit to the National War Museum put themselves in possession of the
principal facts. Our concern is with the health conditions and the
attendant circumstances of the women’s employment. It helps, however, to
a true impression to sum up shortly the main stages of their entry into
new forms of work.
When men first trooped in their hundreds of thousands, voluntarily, to
the colours in 1914, industrial women found their outlet for the same
impulse to serve the nation in intensified and extended work at their
own more or less customary callings. They found it at the sewing
machine, knitting machine, weaving loom, boot-upper stitching machine,
tin-cutting power press, soldering bench, at tinning of meat, fruit and
vegetable preserves for rations, and so on. Even with this added
intensity of their work and the lengthened hours of employment factory
women could do “a bit of knitting for the soldiers and sailors”—so that
some of them could say, “We never seems to get any rest, but if we did
not do it, no one else could.”[204] They had to play an indispensable,
and, in some cases, a predominant part in supplying the Services with
textile materials, clothing, blankets, mattress covers, with various
kinds of bodily equipment, such as haversacks, bandoliers, light
leather, and miscellaneous small metal articles, and with tents, and all
kinds of general equipment, some time before their share in the
production of “munitions of war” in the form of ordnance, ammunition,
aircraft, chemicals, etc., was even thought of. And claims for women’s
aid in the general service of the home community, in transport,
distribution, clerical and commercial work, were strongly pressed before
the great part they were to play (chiefly by aid of dilution of labour)
in engineering and the larger metal trades came in sight.
A second phase in the industrial wartime employment of women came with
the first thoughts of the “substitution” of women to release men for
military service in the less essential manufacturing industries, next in
industries essential for national needs, and in those where important
export trade could (it was then believed) be developed or maintained.
At the request of the Army Council, the Home Office and Board of Trade
began a series of conferences with associations of employers and workers
to consider what reorganisation of work might be necessary to free as
many men as possible. This work, requiring some diplomacy, was largely
under the guidance of Factory Inspectors, men and women, and it was
necessary to negotiate temporary suspensions of recognised trade union
rules, at the same time providing safe and suitable conditions for the
women employed in processes that were new to them, and heretofore
arranged to suit men’s different ways of working. Agreements were
secured in a number of trades, including hosiery and other textiles,
boot and shoe manufacture, leather tanning, woodworking, baking,
earthenware and china manufacture, printing, and glove making.[205]
These agreements aimed both at preventing misunderstandings and
dislocations at a critical time, and at getting security for future
maintenance of the established standard of the life of industrial
workers.
Orders, known as “Emergency Orders,”[206] were made by the Home Office,
allowing relaxations of the law relating to hours and times of work of
women and young persons, both in munitions and non-munitions industries,
to meet the exceptional circumstances of the time. Certain fresh
safeguards for health or safety were embodied in these Orders, of which
foremost was an obligation laid on the employer to provide means for
preparing and taking meals at the works, and next supervision by
competent women to maintain good conditions.
There were certain large and heavy trades where no agreements between
employers and workers could be arranged owing to lack of organisation on
one side or the other, either of employers or of workers, and here the
Inspectors closely guided the course of replacement of men and
substitution of women—_e.g._, in flour milling, rubber manufacture, oil
and seed crushing, soap making, sugar refining, paper making, cement
making, and in gasworks. In all these “non-munition” industries—which
tended more and more to provide material of war, and thus to become
technically “munitions” as the War progressed—they advised employers on
the necessary modification and reorganisation of processes, as well as
on good conditions for production. In the factories, where women had not
before been employed in process work, a noticeable solicitude was
frequently shown by the employers and managers for protection of the
health and safety of the women, and all paid tribute to their
adaptability and natural quickness, as well as to their fine spirit.
It was in a large shell factory, early in 1915, before the immense
development of the Ministry of Munitions, that a foreman said to me as
we stood watching the then novel and arresting sight of numerous women
and girls intent upon their work at lathes, “There is more in this than
people think; women have been too much kept back.” Several Inspectors
said that the cotton workers, set free by unemployment in their own
great trade, particularly enjoyed their new work in shell making, and
found it less heavy, and conditions better, than in the textile
factories. Munition factories in Birmingham profited early in 1915 by a
temporary depression in the Staffordshire Potteries, receiving
contingents of intelligent women from gilding and painting shops—high-
grade labour—for the new work. In Lancashire one heard of young women
proud to have learnt how to grind tools and set machines. In wire-
drawing and engineering trades an Inspector said it was remarkable,
considering the half-heartedness of the initial experiment of employing
women, how general was the satisfaction over its success. It was an
everyday occurrence to be told frankly by foremen that “the women are
doing very well indeed, much better than I ever thought they could.”
Then came the third and, technically, the greatest experiment in women’s
employment during the War, under the organisation of the Ministry of
Munitions—their concentration on engineering and munitions supplies with
much dilution and with highly specialised training in processes. It was
this stage that led not only to the immense additional power in
repetitive production, but also to the discovery in engineering, by
enthusiastic “dilution” officers, of certain processes requiring manual
dexterity and delicacy of touch, in which women could do better than
men, and some even which women alone could do.[207] This phase can only
be fairly studied in published documents, catalogues, and illustrations
issued by the Ministry of Munitions, and at the National War Museum. It
was under the Ministry of Munitions that the first systematic attempt
was made to superimpose personal conditions of welfare—an essential for
good output—on the general hygiene of environment in the factory already
required by the Factory Act. And one of the earliest steps taken by Mr.
Seebohm Rowntree, the Director of Welfare, appointed in the close of
1915 for “controlled” munition factories, was to obtain through me from
my staff of Women Inspectors a detailed survey of conditions actually
obtaining in each large “controlled” and national factory, with our
recommendations on the arrangements desirable for the welfare of the
women and girls.[208] This work was carried out in 1916 and 1917, and it
is touched on in my next and last chapter.
The fourth and final new experience for industrial women, during the
War, came with the urgent need in 1917 and 1918 of trying to substitute
them for men, not only in process work that was likely to be suitable
for them, but also in many processes and manual work heavier than had
yet been attempted—for example, in the forging of bullet-proof plates,
in driving overhead cranes, in certain heavy foundry processes, in a few
operations in shipbuilding yards, in retort-house work, in internal
scaling of boilers, in ferro-concrete pile making, and in new varieties
of heavy labouring work. None of these (surviving the experimental
stages),[209] except possibly scaling of boilers, appear to be heavier
or more laborious, however, than work done long years before by women in
tinplate works, in fireproof brick works, in timber yards, or
galvanising works; and certainly none surpassed in dirt or
disagreeableness the old work of women in such processes as gut
scraping, rag sorting, or “breeze sifting.”
It was chiefly in these last two years of the War that development of
women’s employment took place in chemical works, heavy metal works, and
in gasworks. Some really interesting developments took place. In forge
work—for example, in one factory making heavy tank parts—the whole of
the process work was done by women, numbering 300; men, numbering six,
being employed solely in keeping machines in running order. “The women
work the furnaces, moulding presses, and do the grinding, besides
trolleying, stacking, loading on to wagons, and women ‘chemists’ also
take the temperatures.”[210] Here close investigation (made by one of
the “first-aid” Inspectors) showed that there were no signs of serious
injury amongst the women. The same conclusion was reached by her as
regards women drivers of large overhead cranes—a dangerous occupation,
however, in which some women met with fatal accidents. A cement works in
Scotland was run almost entirely by women’s labour, and their employment
in this heavy work had been made successful by the aid of mechanical
appliances, the only men being rotary kiln men—doing very heavy and hot
work, needing considerable training—besides foremen and engineers. At a
large steel works in Yorkshire, where the managers were of opinion in
1916 that women would be useless to them, there were, in 1917, 300
employed to their satisfaction in yard work, painting, labelling, and
crane driving. “Loading and unloading of ore is heavy, and can only be
done by the women without injury if they take the work slowly and
quietly.”[211] Inspectors found that some women, either from the natural
but dangerous desire to show their strength or to get through their work
quickly, lifted weights far too heavy for them. A foreman, however, in
charge of construction work at a blast furnace who had trained women
under him, “spoke exceedingly highly of them, and said he would be
willing to undertake any ferro-concrete work with women only.” They had
made over 1,000 piles 31 feet in length; they were bending and preparing
all the steelwork used in the construction of the wharf, bridges, etc.;
they worked the stone-crushing machines and concrete mixer, stacked the
piles when made, and discharged stone, iron, etc., from railway trucks.
Managers of gasworks expressed surprise at the good class of women found
willing to undertake this hot, heavy, and rather dirty work. In the
severe winter of 1916–17, when women were first being tried in heavy
processes in gasworks, a manager, praising their grit and pluck, said,
“If they stick this, they will stick anything.”
In such places good protective clothing and specially adapted
implements, such as light barrows and shovels, automatic weight-lifting
appliances, and other labour and fatigue-saving plant and machinery,
played an immensely important part in enabling the women to do the work.
Inspectors unanimously held that at no time had legislative protection
for women, and competent inspection, been more needed than in these
final years of the War, when women were eagerly pressing into processes
and heavy labour of a kind new to them. There was generally an ample
supply of women available, and the only places where one heard of
shortage were in some of their old factory occupations, where conditions
often remained at a lower level than in the new occupations, and where
wages did not rise until later to meet the increased cost of living.
In 1917 and 1918 also, some marked development of women’s employment
took place in relatively light processes, both skilled and semi-skilled,
in certain non-munition industries, which were perfectly suited to their
physical ability, and for which some intensive training was open to them
in technical colleges. The most interesting examples, I think, were
scientific instrument making, in which industry, by March, 1918,
substitution of women had become general in some processes and frequent
in others; and in leather-case making and fancy leather work. Especially
in the former of these industries new openings appeared for women as
works’ chemists or in laboratory research at the factory, as well as in
the manufacture of glass prisms, lenses, thermometers, and many metal
processes. As regards the future, the Home Office Memorandum on
Substitution of Women declared in 1919 that there were “good prospects
for women in this industry.”[212] Early in 1920, however, “the steady
withdrawal of women from employment in men’s industries that began after
the Armistice was almost completed.” And I was obliged to conclude at
the end of the year that there was “as yet no fulfilment of the
expectations that after the War a body of industries and operations
offering a hopeful field of fresh employment would be open to women
where their War experience could be turned to account. On the contrary,
an automatically operating force has closed all these expected new
avenues.”[213]
As the number of Men Inspectors decreased during the early part of the
War, through claims of military duty and other national service where
their technical knowledge and experience was invaluable, the number of
Women Inspectors gradually increased, but only to a total of thirty.
Much of the almost incredible amount of work they managed to get through
was done by conference with, and information and advice to, other bodies
of workers—the Women Welfare Officers and Dilution Officers of the
Ministry of Munitions, the Superintendents of Women’s Labour in munition
works, and the Local Advisory Committees (under the Ministry of Labour),
concerned with the welfare outside the factories of the immense
aggregations of workers who were drawn away from their homes into great
centres for production of munitions of war. Some of them served also on
various Central Committees, of which the two foremost were the Health of
Munition Workers Committee and the Women’s Employment Committee under
the Ministry of Reconstruction. When the Ministry of National Service
was set up, the main lines of the great task of fitting substitute women
into men’s industrial work were already planned, and much of the
substitution was already carried into effect under the guidance of the
whole Factory Inspectorate in co-operation with the Employment
Department, Ministry of Labour; and when several of the Men Inspectors
were “seconded” to the Ministry of National Service the work continued
by co-operation between the Departments.
Much had to be done in bringing factories, and whole industries, up to
the same standard in making the necessary substitution. In some
factories the advance was more rapid than in others—far more reliance
being shown in putting women into positions of real responsibility. For
example, in only one malting house was it found that a forewoman was in
complete charge of the women’s work, with technical responsibility for
regulating the temperature of the kiln and judging the right time for
“turning” the floors. And in an exceptional fruit-preserving factory
output was doubled and engineers’ repairs reduced by half for the
season, when a forewoman was put in complete control, a control which
included not only the jam-making department, but also the maintenance in
good working order of machinery, boiler, and engine.[214]
Inspectors sometimes expressed disappointment at the limited confidence
shown by employers in substituting women in the higher posts of
industry, but enough was done to “suggest a fair promise of future
development of women’s natural aptitude for organising.” The difficulty
lay even more in that direction than in process work, through lack of
sufficient opportunity for women to obtain broad and sound technical
training in the short time available. In large munition works, however,
in two ways useful examples were given of technical control by women;
women “charge-hands,” having gone through intensive training in
processes, controlled the operations of small groups of workers,
sometimes men and boys as well as women and girls; and in the work of
Women Welfare Superintendents there was a tendency to develop their
responsibility in the direction of carrying out some of the functions of
a manager.[215]
Although a large number of women came for the first time, from domestic
work and from home life, into industry during the years of strongest
demand for substitutes and munition workers,[216] a considerable
proportion of the increase in these two classes came from the return to
the factories of former industrial workers, and by their transfer from
the less essential trades. The highest proportion of those entering from
domestic work or home life was usually found in factories situated in
localities where other industries were not present. For example, in two
chemical works in the country it was found that half the women came from
home life, one-quarter from domestic service, and the remainder from
other factories. In a Manchester flour mill one-third came from home
life, a few from domestic service, and many from miscellaneous
factories.
It was in such places as these, where the substitute women were
unfamiliar with factory life and with the safeguards provided by Factory
Acts and Orders, that protection by a trained Inspectorate was found to
be most needed. Two points of considerable interest came out in the
complaints from women themselves. In the years 1914–15, when long and
exceptional hours (whether entirely illegal or else sanctioned by
Emergency Orders) were at their highest point, the women worked
willingly; and they complained only rarely and in extreme cases. On the
whole, there was a great proportionate rise, on the other hand, in the
complaints relating to matters of sanitation and safety, 63·1 per cent.
of the whole in 1917, as compared with 47·3 per cent. in 1913.
The working of excessive and irregular hours, a natural outcome of the
confused haste for enormous production at the beginning of the War,
seemed to bring new light to many employers on the uselessness of long
hours and long, unbroken spells for continued large output, however
great the generally prevalent willingness of the workers to help to
their utmost. Already before the War, as we have seen in Chapter II., it
was a commonplace in Inspectors’ reports that the strain of the legal
twelve-hours’ day of absence from home[217] was too great, having regard
to the home duties of most women, who had frequently also a long
distance to travel to and from work. In the first year of the War the
Inspectors showed that the main resistance to excessive overtime came
more from the employers’ side (in spite of exceptions among them) than
from the workers. In a Crown factory the experience was “that any
lengthening of the day, beyond 6 p.m. and a total of eight and a half
hours’ work daily, exhausts the workers, and is of no advantage in
increasing output.... A well-known wholesale clothier employing a
thousand women on Government contracts gave it as his well-considered
opinion that the full period allowed under the Factory Act ... is
sufficient, and any work beyond this is useless: it exhausts the workers
and does not pay.... The manager of a powder-bag factory ... found,
after some weeks’ experience, that the pieceworkers were making less
during overtime than during the normal period of employment.... A
cardboard box manufacturer told me he had put his workers on shorter
hours only to find that their output and earnings were equal to those on
the full factory day.”[218] The interesting and very valuable researches
made by scientific investigators for the Health of Munition Workers
Committee and for the Home Office regarding fatigue, did but amplify and
give scientific confirmation to the commonsense reasonings and
conclusions of many manufacturers about hours of work. Nevertheless, at
the beginning of the wartime pressure, it was clear that some deviation
from the fixed Factory Act limits was necessary to counterbalance delays
in getting out contracts, dislocations in movement of supplies of
materials, and other interferences with a continuous run of work in
making up articles. The Emergency Orders granted to numerous individual
firms at the beginning were unquestionably necessary. Later, as
experience grew, it was possible to standardise these for whole
industries and groups of industries, greatly to reduce night work and
overtime, nearly to abolish Sunday work, and ultimately to prohibit the
night work for young girls under sixteen and for boys under fourteen
years, that had been temporarily permitted at the outset of the national
emergency. The new evidence gathered by scientific investigators gave
increased strength to older humanitarian arguments, as well as fresh
point to the conclusions of certain practical managers that excessive
hours without regular intervals defeat their purpose of speeding up
production. The experiments that were made, under Home Office orders in
various shift systems,[219] showed how increased output might, in times
of pressure, be obtained from limited plant and machines without
exceeding the working powers of the delicate “human machine.” The
finding of the Health of Munition Workers Committee in 1915, that the
strain of long hours had not, so far, “caused any serious breakdown
among workers, though many statements indicative of fatigue had been
received,” was confirmed by reports of Factory Inspectors coming from
all parts of the country. No marked increase in sickness rates could be
found, yet among foremen and managers, who were less able than workers
to take time off, and among individual older men and women, there were
cases where health certainly suffered from the strain. After the War was
over an experienced Welfare Superintendent told me of great lassitude
amongst girls under her care, and she said that it had been necessary to
send a high proportion of them to holiday homes before they quite
recovered their natural elasticity and capacity for a full ordinary
day’s work.
Women’s weekly and daily totals in the stress of the earlier years of
War, long and fatiguing as they were, rarely rose (apart from special
aberrations which successful prosecutions did much to check) to the
extremes too commonly reached by men munition workers. Forewomen and
women superintendents were more often employed in the later than the
earlier years, and thus were spared some of the excessive overstrain
that at first fell on foremen and managers. In factories where the long
double twelve-hour shift system with alternate weeks of night and day
work for each shift obtained, evidence of absenteeism and poor
timekeeping made it highly probable that accumulating fatigue and
overstrain had been partly averted by the natural tendency of the
workers to take an occasional day or halfday off. It was truly
fortunate, however, for the ultimate health of the people that as
strictness of discipline, in controlled factories, in enforcing regular
attendance of the worker under penalty grew, some reasonable
standardisation of shift systems and considerable development of
canteens and other welfare arrangements had been secured.
By the end of 1917 it was evident that for whatever reason, probably
through better wages, providing much better food than formerly, and
through increased personal care of the workers in the factories,
sickness among the women was not increasing, but rather
diminishing.[220] The evidence given before the Health of Munition
Workers Committee was that sickness benefit was lessening, and I learned
by special enquiry that an almoner’s records in a large general hospital
in a great munition area showed that as few as thirty women and girl
munition workers had attended as out-patients in six months.
Even though much detail as regards the best daily and weekly period and
spells of hours remains to be worked out by practical experimentation
for different types of factory work with differing kinds and degrees of
effort and strain involved, the large-scale demonstrations regarding
conditions and output in wartime have both added to our knowledge and
also popularly spread that knowledge. It may be doubted whether the full
potential strength of the social motive in industry—the sentiment of
national service—has been at all fairly grasped in its bearing on true
success in industrial production. Yet the leaven is there, its workings
can be seen, and it is the one unalloyed gain that came from the
stupendous and terrible effort of production for “munitions of war.” The
new lights that this effort brought on the dependence of good output and
efficiency on right adjustment of hours, labour-saving appliances,
fatigue prevention, food, have but a limited value for the commonwealth
if the aims of industry continue to be “merely material production of
wealth and things unrelated to spiritual values” or social ends.[221]
Women’s extended entry into industry from 1915 to 1918 did indeed bring
social considerations into the conditions of work, and some of these
things remain. Yet they can hardly last if they do not lead to “the
ordering, the comforting, and the beautiful adornment of the State” in
its organised industrial capacity.
During the time of the greatest zeal for introduction of women as
“substitutes” into men’s industries, and well on into 1919, it seemed
almost at times to be forgotten how essentially noneconomic and
temporary both basis and framework of the introduction were. Except as
regards some extensions within women’s own traditional industries, women
were in reality in these new places simply as “substitutes,” and, in
nearly all, under a solemn covenant that it was solely for the duration
of the War. An entirely new peacetime departure is needed for
application of women’s freshly proven powers to new industrial
developments. In the future women will surely attain their better
industrial status not as “substitutes,” not as secondary men, but in
their own fields (with aid of better training), and also in other
carefully chosen fields, as joint labourers with men. The War emphasised
a very true and natural interchangeability of men and women for many
emergencies. The new “Science of Labour” has perhaps come at the very
time of most need, with insistence on the essential complementariness of
the industrial aptitudes of men and women.[222] There at least—in
industrial labour—their complete fusion would mean an economic and
social loss.
While the hopeful expansion in industry following very soon after the
War lasted, there was a remarkable, though temporary, re-absorption of
women into their own former occupations. They took with them certain
great gains from their recent experiences. They brought into their old
industrial environment new ideas of fellowship as well as knowledge of
fresh processes and of better rates of pay; they brought strengthened
capacity for trade union organisation as well as new ideas of the value
of intensive training. Not least, they brought a new demand for better
means at the works of preparing and taking sufficient food, which is the
material foundation of all efficient labour.
We may here sum up the possible permanent gains to industry as well as
to women themselves, brought from their wartime experiences in
factories, ready for the time when expansion of trade again begins.
It has been seen that in many ways women have far greater powers of
endurance, activity, and enterprise—quite apart from new forms of skill—
than was formerly admitted or expected of them. We know that they gain
in health by fresh kinds of outdoor and labouring work not previously
customary for them. We have seen conclusive evidence of their capacity
to quickly become proficient at engineering tasks—with the aid of semi-
automatic machinery that is often intricate—and of their powers of
sustained interest in such work under great pressure for output.
The enquiries and valuable memoranda of the Health of Munition Workers
Committee[223] brought out, more completely than any previous official
reports had done, the practical importance of selective care in setting
women and young workers on to work, as well as the need for the improved
personal conditions and skilled supervision by women, that are
considered in the next chapter.
In addition to the gain of a higher standard in women’s own expectation
as regards their conditions, there is a new atmosphere in the factories,
traceable to the women’s increased self-reliance engendered by the
appreciation that has been expressed for their work and capacity. No one
can realise this more thoroughly than Women Factory Inspectors, meeting
it as they do on the spot, and there comparing past and present. In a
factory where formerly a woman worker would not have disclosed the fact
that she belonged to a trade union, there is a woman shop steward ready
to come forward and show the Inspector round, the manager expecting her
to do so.[224]
There is a new outlook on the possibility of applying science as well as
humanitarian motives to use and care of labour. To no workers is this
more important than to women, with the dual claims on them of home cares
and breadwinning. The studies of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board
have a special significance in their application to women in industry.
Another gain from War experiences peculiarly affecting women—although it
has also a much wider bearing—is the very considerable testing of the
practical value of well-designed appliances, adapted machinery and
lifting tackle, for saving human labour, quite apart from its power to
lessen cost of production. The aim of lessening human toil for its own
sake, not merely for commercial reasons, has a new interest.
Before the War there was for women and girls in industry, outside one or
two ancient skilled occupations (such as weaving, high-class
dressmaking), so little arrangement for training that it was negligible.
During the War, by special organisation of training for women
substitutes and dilutees in technical schools and colleges and in
instructional factories, women’s technical and personal capacity was
publicly measured. And for the first time national resources were
applied, under the kind of direction that suited women, to adaptation of
the means of technical training in process work to the results best
obtainable from them. At last, there was a demonstration on a scale
sufficiently large to make the truth incontrovertible, that women
workers are not necessarily the less valuable for production to meet the
nation’s daily need because their pace and natural ways of working
differ from those suited to men.
And with all these new lights came also the political enfranchisement of
women, which enables them to survey with new eyes the too passive and
subordinate position that they have in the main hitherto held in
industry. Though from time to time a set-back may occur, they are surely
summoned to take their full share in the building up of a better
industrial life for the people—as fellow-producers with men, but with
their “other” point of view as guardians of the home.
CHAPTER VIII
FACTORY WELFARE AND ITS RECOGNITION BY PARLIAMENT; WORKS’ COMMITTEES AND
WELFARE MANAGEMENT
“The sweat of industry would dry and dye but for the end it workes
too.”
“The sweat of industry!” It was in a factory where excessively hot,
heavy, and humid work, in which women bore their share, was carried on
that a foreman once said to a Woman Factory Inspector: “We are told that
man should earn his bread in the sweat of his brow, but here we earn it
in the sweat of the whole body.” The saying implied a sense of the need
of a new standard of control. It is with a new social way of control
that this final chapter is concerned, and we were only at the beginning
of seeing what it might achieve when the period covered by this book
closes.
Labour of a sustained kind, bodily or mental, is, as it always has been,
the lot of the greater part of civilised mankind, and on the wealth it
produces depends the possibility of any means of ordinary welfare for
the community. Since the dawn of history energy, and the sustained
capacity for the essentially human function of work,[225] have been the
test of racial quality, and the power of a people to survive and develop
has depended on power in some measure to socialise the use of that
function. And yet, until the idea lately arose of analysing the
psychological and physiological capacity of the human agent in industry,
and of studying the rhythm of fatigue and rest, custom and instinct were
the main, and sometimes the only, safeguards of the natural pleasure of
exercising this function. Among the great majority of consumers of
articles produced by the factory system there was, even more fixedly
than among employers, a blind acceptance of the fact that:
“... for them many a weary hand did swelt,
In torched mines and noisy factories....”
They had little means of knowing definitely, however, what it all
involved, and it was a great encouragement to the Inspectors to see, as
the facts came out gradually, through the publication of Annual Reports
of the Chief Inspector and of police court proceedings, the growth of
various societies for the help of the workers.
The overstrain, the overloading, and occasionally the misuse of the
delicate human motor that has persistently characterised much of our
factory production even by young workers, can, in some measure, be
gathered from facts touched on in Chapter IV. The frequent lack of
simple conditions and appliances conducive to energy and preventive of
unnecessary onset of fatigue has been seen in Chapter II. And yet, in
spite of all, the marvellous capacity for much contentment, sometimes
even joy, in work never perished. “Weaving is a wonderful art, you are
never done learning,” was a saying, expressing the enlightening power of
thought, by a Yorkshire textile trade unionist, but the pride with which
a woman weaver will inform you that she has been reckoned “a champion
weaver” tells the same tale of the power that the exercise of skill in
the old trades had over workers’ minds (and thus over their bodies). And
the spirit appears in far humbler workers, sometimes on apparently
monotonous work; even more strikingly did it appear in the new processes
opened up for women in the War.
That “created man is made to create, from the poet to the potter”[226]
is an idea that in some degree, however inadequately, has always been
implicitly accepted for men with their special aptitudes in exercise of
energy. As for women with their dual service in social life, in the home
as well as in productive work, realisation of the essential part that
they played in industry was slow in coming, even after the development
in the early part of the nineteenth century of textile industries on a
great scale by aid of women and children. It needed the second great
“industrial revolution,” referred to in the last chapter, to make it
plain to the whole community that a great deal of women’s pre-War
industrial work was either more skilled or heavier than had yet been
generally admitted, and that, whether skilled or heavy, it was
indispensable to the success and welfare of the trades into which it
entered. During that testing time the share that women workers held in
the racial reserve endowments of endurance, adaptability, and capacity
for labour also came out clearly.
While it was the unprecedented part played by massed factory production
in the Great War that brought the essentially social service rendered by
industrial labour into public recognition, it was the prominence of
women’s share in it that finally made legal provision for “welfare”
possible.
The injurious manner and extent of employment of children in the
beginning of the factory system had, as we have seen,[227] first made
possible any effective Parliamentary intervention to secure elementary
conditions of health and safety in factories and workshops. The
experience and its lessons were not forgotten, and it was almost common
ground between employers and the State in 1916 that rapidly extended
employment of women and girls must be accompanied with measures for
their welfare and safety to prevent injurious consequences for society.
Voluntary welfare, with here and there a little co-operation from
science, had grown up into a conscious “movement” in industrial life in
our country during the twenty years preceding the War. In its principles
it differed little from those of which Robert Owen reminded his fellow-
manufacturers in 1813 when he showed them that, just as power-driven
machinery was improved by being carefully tended, kept clean, and well
lubricated, so the far more delicate living human motor could be
benefited if carefully studied and well cared for. Yet the only possible
basis on which the movement could grow vigorously in such a factory
system as that of the nineteenth century was first laid when State
administration began effectually to enforce on all employers alike
national standards in hours, health, safety, defence against industrial
diseases, and finally against sweated wages.
Those reformers and administrators who wrought ceaselessly between 1892
and 1914 to give effect to new safeguards of health in the factory
surroundings of the worker were laying foundations, better than they
knew, for social aims in factory administration. The Women Inspectors,
indeed, as we have seen, had persistently invited employers to pass on
from hygiene in the factory to better care of the welfare of the
workers, but they never doubted that completion of the former was the
indispensable groundwork of voluntary welfare.
A new stage and a new opportunity for the factory system in Great
Britain began when, in 1916, Parliament first made provision for
“securing the welfare of the workers,”[228] and when (almost at the same
moment) statesmen and administrators called for the aid, in many ways,
of joint industrial councils of employers and workers who could follow
up welfare provisions and help to make them correspond to the needs of
the workers. The legal provision by itself could carry “welfare” only a
little way: development of the means of co-operation between workers and
employers, and between both of them and the Factory Inspectors and
scientific investigators, was an indispensable adjunct in this new
enterprise. The very unrest and suspicion that met some of the first
systematic attempts of managers at welfare supervision, in controlled
munition factories lacking representative works’ committees, made that
plain.
The legal provisions in the Act of 1916 were framed, of course, for the
welfare of both men and women workers, but it was the large-scale
introduction of women substitutes and dilutees into men’s trades, and
their migration by tens of thousands to centres of munitions production,
that, in fact, had made the starting-point for the new socialising
measure. And so, at last, in factory production we had come full circle,
and “the guiding ideas of women in regard to conditions essential for a
good industrial life of both men and women” could begin to influence
industrial life, openly and unofficially, as well as through Inspectors
and a few enlightened employers. Scientific aid from many investigators
could also be brought to bear effectively on the task of civilising
working conditions when a true social structure in factory production
had once begun.
In England, work of a scientific kind for the reform of the factory
system had been hitherto occupied chiefly in the directions shown in the
chapter on dangerous processes. From the Continent of Europe[229] came
the earliest direct researches of physiologists and psychologists into
causes and prevention of industrial fatigue and into the possibilities
of vocational selection of workers; while from America came “motion
study” and the work of the efficiency expert. True to the humanitarian
bent as a whole of her factory legislation, it was Great Britain that
first planned a statutory basis for promoting the welfare of industrial
workers. It is open to one to wonder whether this factor was not
decisive in leading to the great place given in the Peace Treaty to
constructive work by the League of Nations for the social welfare of
labour.
Before attempting to sketch the legal and administrative position in
promotion of the welfare of the factory worker in Great Britain between
1916 and 1921, the completing of the outline of the story told in this
book requires a backward glance at some of the experiences of the
Inspectors while voluntary welfare grew up. Without the pioneer work of
employers by works’ welfare committees and other agencies encouraged by
the sympathy and advice of the Inspectors, and without the long
succession of Inspectors’ Reports recording that work, the legislative
step would have been difficult if not impracticable.
We can neither here treat the subject of factory welfare systematically,
nor attempt to cover ground now being gradually covered by textbooks and
pamphlets. We are concerned simply with the voluntary growth of
attention to the matter before 1916 in an economic system that was built
up on a theory adverse to its implications, and with the immediate
outcome of the new legal experiment.[230] When the great pressure came
for munitions and all the indispensable commodities in the field of war,
the voluntary movement had gained so much experience that it was
possible to make strikingly rapid application of measures and means for
canteens, first-aid and ambulance work, cloakrooms and washing
conveniences, suitable protective clothing for very varied processes,
rest rooms, recreation for the large new aggregations of workers in
crowded centres, some trained welfare supervision—in fact, for all the
specific subjects that were included in Section 7 of the Act of 1916 as
primâ faciê necessary to the health and welfare of the workers.
Selection of workers for particular types of operations and some
increased care for prevention of unnecessary fatigue naturally followed.
The scattered efforts and examples, all over the country and in every
kind of industry, were rapidly wrought up into an officially guided
movement by the combined efforts of Departments concerned, under the
Home Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Labour, and
last, but not least, by the Canteen Committee of the Board of Control
(Liquor Traffic), and by the non-executive Committee above-mentioned,
the Health of Munitions Workers Committee, with all its important
published memoranda.
Before all else in the welfare movement it was the work for canteens,
for access by the hard-pressed munition workers to something like
adequate food decently cooked and conveniently served, that was the
decisive factor in enabling them to sustain their intense fatigue. The
great need in many places for tolerable means of preparing and taking
food at or near the works had been the earliest and most strongly
expressed of all the demands of the woman worker for elementary means of
welfare. For years the most frequent of the complaints I had to classify
in my annual reports as “outside the Acts” was that messrooms (or food
and drinking water) were not accessible or not well maintained; and many
workers found it hard to understand or believe that the law did not
intervene in this matter except where dangerous processes came under
special regulations or where poisonous materials were handled.
The success of the movement for canteens in those years of war strain
has effected a completely changed outlook on the question in the
factories themselves, that makes the past conditions remembered by the
Factory Inspectors—especially between the years from 1893 to 1903—seem
now well nigh incredible. For no workers was this change more greatly
needed than for the poorly fed women and girl workers. The first time,
however, that I specifically used the word “welfare” in an annual report
in connection with lack of means for the personal well-being of the
workers was, not as regards either food or rest, but as regards the
incomprehensible general failure to supply means of maintaining personal
cleanliness, which came especially to the front in 1899 in the early
pressure of preparing soldiers’ rations in another war. The failure to
include the matter in the English Factory Acts was the more difficult to
understand when one saw how carefully access to washing conveniences was
provided for in French and German codes. “Employers,” I said, “who have
sufficient ... interest in such matters to make the experiment, quickly
find their profit in provision for the welfare of their work-women, in
particular those which tend to raise the whole standard of self-respect
among them.” And again: “The need for washing appliances, increasingly
felt among the women and girls, has a moral and social value as well as
a strictly hygienic aspect. It is a matter for surprise how frequently
the effort is made in the most unlikely and difficult circumstances by
working women to turn homeward with a neat and cleanly appearance.”[231]
On the moral and social side, the right and claim of the woman worker to
have her conditions of work supervised by competent women appeared to
the Woman Inspector, from the outset, the only effective remedy for many
kinds of complaints that, like the lack of canteens, were “outside the
Acts.”
And trained women’s superintendence was also conceded during the Great
War, not only in the controlled and national factories, but in the
factories where the Home Office granted exceptional hours under an
Emergency Order or urged the substitution of women to secure the release
of men. It was contended by a workers’ delegate, in 1917, at an inter-
city conference in Sheffield of local advisory committees, that
“welfare” is an ethical and spiritual matter more than it is a material
one; she was sure that working women would always press for the former
elements. However strongly one sees that both material and spiritual or
ethical elements are inherent in the very meaning of “welfare,”[232] one
must pay tribute to the prominence of the latter element in the
complaints from factory womanhood.
In 1900 I was able to quote, from the Inspectors, testimony to the
growth of instances of welfare supervision in factories, where women of
intelligence, refinement, and kindliness are placed as superintendents
or forewomen and exercise a wonderful influence for good over the
workers whom they control.[233] At the same time instances were shown of
very great need for such control, and in various subsequent years it
appeared that it was frequently from such places that serious complaints
came. In great food-producing, sugar, confectionery, and other
factories, the names of manufacturers of world-fame are well known as
pioneers in this movement, but in the older and greater textile
industries employers were slower in taking a definite share in it. When,
in 1907, some striking examples were given of introduction into large
textile mills of _trained_ women superintendents (the first note of a
professional stamp in such appointments), the aim was specifically given
as “an experiment ... to bring about a higher standard of civilisation.”
The manager explained that he was of the opinion that “a woman’s
influence was needed in his mill and that he proposed to appoint a woman
whose duty it would be to supervise health conditions ... ventilation,
temperature, humidity, cleanliness, the registration of all Home Office
requirements, the passing of the children by the certifying surgeon, the
supervision of dining-room and catering arrangements, and occasional
visiting of cases of distress.” A doctor was also appointed,
arrangements were made for special access of the children to public
baths, for good meals for the half-timers; and various other amenities
followed.[234] It was frequently the motive of improving the standard of
health that caused thoughtful employers to embark on these schemes, and
always in such cases efforts were made to provide access to wholesome
food at prices within the reach of the workers. The other side of the
picture may be seen in the following words from Miss Whitworth in the
same year:
“Young girls of fourteen frequently go to work with only three-
halfpence or twopence with which to provide their dinner in Poplar and
Hackney; this kind of worker is greatly in need of some place like the
‘Welcome Institute’ (Isle of Dogs), where she can get a proper meal
for that price. Although some employers have dining-rooms provided
with ovens and women employed to cater for the workers, there are
places where the girls have not even seats that they can use in the
mealtime, and they take their food sitting on the floor, in paper-
sorting works, in laundries, in rope works, and others; cloakrooms are
almost unknown. One finds hats and coats bundled together in passages,
under tables, and along the walls of workrooms and anywhere except in
properly warmed cloakrooms. When girls come a long way to work they do
need to have somewhere to dry their clothes and boots on wet
mornings.”[235]
For years, and perhaps most pressingly from 1906 to 1913, the Inspectors
had emphasised the importance of these and allied matters, and the
urgent need for reform. Their communications, as far back as 1902,
aroused outside sympathies as well as the attention of employers: the
Christian Social Union Research Committee made independent enquiry into
it, and this stimulated among various social workers a movement for
opening simple dining-rooms in localities where there were many
workgirls employed in factories or workshops far from their homes, and
in these some of the help and comfort of a club was provided. The evils
of lack of any care, supervision, or comfort at mealtime pauses was
strikingly obvious where workers were legally bound to be excluded from
workrooms during mealtimes because of the presence of dust, acid, or
other matter in the manufacture, making the place unsuited for the
consumption of food.
It would take too long to quote from records of our earlier work in this
connection. The evil was sufficiently brought out through the enquiry in
1911 (already referred to) by Miss Whitlock, M.B., into dusty processes
in the Midlands. She said then:
“Absence of a messroom or of proper washing accommodation was the rule
in the Sheffield buffing shops, and quite common in the Birmingham
ones. The rule forbidding the taking of meals in these shops was
absolutely neglected, and the conditions under which the women ate
their meals were sometimes appalling. In combined asbestos and rubber
works, where the dust of some rooms and the naphtha fumes in others
might certainly suggest the desirability of a messroom, this was not
infrequently wanting. It is, of course, quite common to find wet
spinning rooms with numbers of workers sitting on cloths on the wet
floor to take their dinner—and upturned tins in carding rooms—because
seats or tables for the occasion, even where a messroom is provided,
cleanliness, proper heating, and a cheerful appearance, are by no
means common. At one factory the messroom was known amongst the girls
as the ‘dead house,’ and certainly the resemblance to a mortuary was
not imaginary. At another I found shortly before the dinner a
temperature of 40°F., and was informed that the heating apparatus had
been out of order for some time.”[236]
The formation of two dinner clubs by an association of factory girls in
Sheffield followed on the Inspector’s systematic instructions to
occupiers that the section enjoining exclusion from dusty workrooms
during mealtimes must be obeyed. Similar results followed the same kind
of concentrated work in other towns. Employers gave some help to the
movement, and it developed into greater local activity during the great
production of munitions.
Many interesting examples reported in the years 1908 to 1912, both of
good and careful provision, and its total absence, drove home the
importance of direct endeavour by manufacturers to promote conditions of
ordinary human welfare in their factories for the workers who spend so
many hours in them. One Inspector would comment on the “pathetic
gratitude” of rag-sorters for a decent mealroom in districts where any
provision at all was rare:
“The subject is one of the utmost importance for workers, who often
leave home at 5.30 a.m., or earlier, and have nearly an hour’s walk.
They have to take their food with them, and the only means of warming
it is the steam-heated sink in the yard.... I counted nine
confectioners’ and fried-fish shops in three-quarters of a mile in a
main road all besieged by workers during the dinner hour.”
Another Inspector would urge that nothing could exceed the discomfort in
which meals were often taken, the food on the edge of a workbench
covered with work that must not suffer from contact; the worker seated
on the most unrestful kind of stool.[237] In 1909 and 1910 Miss Escreet
repeated the special requests of cardboard box makers for seats to
obviate (as they said) the necessity for sitting either on the table or
the floor at mealtimes—their work being mostly done standing, and
messrooms and cloakrooms being then almost unknown luxuries in that
industry. “In the large places gas-cooking stoves are provided and a
woman is kept who serves the workers in various ways, warming their
meals, heating their glue, etc., but for these benefits the workers
generally pay at least in part.”