Child labour in the Blanchland area in the mid

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UNDERGRADUATE ADVANCED DIPLOMA IN LOCAL HISTORY 2011/12
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD DEPARTMENT FOR CONTINUING EDUCATION
Module 2, Assignment 7: Article for local history journal
What did Blanchland’s parents of the mid-1800s value
more: their children’s learning or their labour?
By the mid-1800s an industrialised Britain relied on the labour of more than half a million of
its children, while in working class homes, schooling had to compete with food and fuel for a
share of the household economy.1 This analysis uses the 1861 census enumerators’ sheets
to explore child labour and education in the Blanchland area on the Northumberland and
County Durham border, examine the factors that determined whether children earned or
learned, and evaluate whether parental altruism overcame economic expediency.
The census ‘pieces’ for the chapelry of Blanchland, the township of Newbiggin and the
parish of Hunstanworth have been combined because the three settlements are almost
inextricably linked, largely through the area’s complex network of close kinship ties and the
shared lead mining past. In many ways, though, the villages and outlying farms could hardly
be more different, Blanchland in Northumberland being situated in the pleasantly wooded
but remote Derwent Valley, and Hunstanworth, two miles away on the County Durham side
of the border, high up on an exposed heather moorland (Figure 1). Blanchland was founded
as a Premonstratensian abbey in 1165 and dissolved in 1539. The bishop of Durham,
Nathaniel Lord Crewe bought the estate to relieve the family debts of his wife Dorothy
Forster, and it is run to this day by the charitable trust founded on his death in 1721. At more
than 1,200 feet above sea level and too high an altitude for arable farming, Hunstanworth is
mentioned in County Durham’s Boldon Book in 1183 as a pasture cleared for breeding
cattle. Still, today, the hillsides are dotted with livestock, although most of the Newbiggin and
Hunstanworth Estate was sold off in 1948 and the land consolidated to create larger farms.2
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Figure 1: An early nineteenth century plan showing the lead veins around Blanchland, Newbiggin and
Hunstanworth. Source: Northumberland Archive Service
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Lead mining had been a small but important part of the area’s economy since at least 1468,
but at the turn of the nineteenth century the industry had stagnated.3 New owners took over
from the Quaker-run London Lead Company, invested in steam and water power, and by the
mid-1800s production was at its height, the mines yielding more than 1,000 tons of lead a
year.4 Once above ground, the ore had to be separated and cleaned before smelting,
requiring the unskilled, much cheaper labour of boys as young as nine.
While the census provides a very rich source of data, its highly structured format is deceptive
and presents a host of methodological dilemmas. To explore the learning and labour of
children, some rules have been drawn up to overcome the ambiguities inherent in the
source. The ‘workforce’ has been identified as waged labour – so occupations such as
‘mason’s daughter’ or ‘widow of lead miner’ where people do not appear to be earning an
income have been omitted, along with the individuals whose occupations have not been
recorded at all.
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Figure 2: Occupations in Blanchland and Hunstanworth, not including scholars, wives, widows.
Source: 1861 Census
The 1863 statistical report on the 1861 census introduced a new six-class system subdivided
into 18 orders which has been adopted – and adapted – for the analysis (Figure 2).5 All the
scholars who, with wives and widows, were included in the Domestic class along with waged
occupations such as ‘Housekeeper’ and ‘Charwoman’ have been removed from calculations
relating to the labour force. The wives’ and widows’ work, unless it seems to be waged, such
as ‘Dressmaker’, is also discounted if it is not specified in the data. On this basis, the whole
population of Hunstanworth, Blanchland and Newbiggin Township – called ‘the Blanchland
area’ - totals 1,320 people in 249 households, and the waged workforce has been calculated
as 608, or 46%.
Forty per cent of the entire community is made up of 522 children between 0 and 14 years
old – even higher than around 35% nationally at the time.6 Of these, 64% are five or over,
the age when they might attend school. And 194 (37%) are aged from nine, the youngest
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working age recorded in the census, forming a sizeable 15% chunk of the whole population
(Figure 3).
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Figure 3: Population pyramid for the Blanchland area showing the broad base of children aged 0-14.
Source: 1861 Census
Child labour and the local economy
In 1842 the Children’s Employment Commission published 24 reports into child labour in the
mines of Great Britain, six of which centred on the north-east of England, and one specific to
the lead mines of Durham, Northumberland and Cumberland.7 At Blanchland, the Derwent
Mining Company’s own agent John Robinson was one of 42 workers to give evidence in the
lead mines report. He had arrived in the Blanchland area around 1806, and had seen the
industry mushroom from just eight miners 36 years earlier to 440 by 1842.8 Almost 20 years
later the census shows that 299 men and boys were earning their living extracting and
processing lead ore, constituting 49% of the waged workforce of 608 employees.
Figure 4: The lead ore washing floor at Allenheads, 15 miles from Blanchland (photograph thought to have been
taken before 1880). Source: Life and work of the northern lead miner, A. Raistrick and A. Roberts
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The 299 males working for the Derwent Lead Mining Company and living in the Blanchland
area were aged from 9 to 74. Of these, 19% were aged between 9 and 14, nearly all
employed as lead ore washers (Figure 4). The only larger age group at 60 employees was
the 15- to 19-year-olds, making 51% of the mining workforce aged 24 or under. This
situation was the norm for mines of the period, where in the mid-1800s children could
represent between 20 and 50 per cent of workers.9 While the 1842 child labour inspector
James Mitchell was concerned that the young lead ore washers worked outdoors “!with
nothing to shelter the poor lads from the freezing blast!”, he concluded that compared to
children in the coal mines they did not work as long or as hard.10 In the Durham coalfield, he
reports, girls and boys as young as six work long shifts underground in complete darkness,
with no time for meals.11
But although conditions for the lead ore washers seem much better than their coalmining
counterparts, there is a curious mismatch between Blanchland agent John Robinson’s 1842
evidence and that of the census in 1861: “A boy begins work in the mine at 11 or 12, (we
think 12 little enough age) and gets about 4s 6d a week!” he says, yet the 1861 census
shows that 23 of the lead ore washers are between 9 and 11 years old – that is 40% of the
workers aged 9 to 14 (Figure 5).12 Nationally that year, new regulations were being put in
place prohibiting anyone under 12 being employed in a mine unless a teacher could testify
to their literacy.13 But from the 1850s onwards, the price of lead ore had been dropping year
on year because of cheaper foreign imports.14 Was this driving down miners’ wages, placing
families below the level of subsistence consumption to the point where younger children
were having to work to supplement the household economy? The relationship between low
‘breadwinner’ wages and child labour in the Blanchland area will be investigated later as one
of the factors that determined whether children earned or learned.15
Figure 5: Early nineteenth century sketch of children working on a washing floor.
Source: Science Museum, Science and Society Picture Library
Domestic service – particularly among women - was another key occupation in Blanchland
area’s economy, as it was in much of the country at the time.16 Sixty inhabitants were
recorded as ‘Servant’ in relation to the head of the household, and a further 67 worked as
housekeepers, farm servants or were ‘In domestic employ’ outside their own homes. So
altogether domestic service constituted 21% of the waged workforce of 608, or 9.6% of the
whole population. Twenty-four girls and one boy aged between 10 and 14 are listed as
employed in domestic service, making up 20% of this occupation category.
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In all, 83 children aged between 9 and 14 are employed either at the lead mines or in
domestic work, constituting 14% of the total waged workforce in the area (Figure 6). Nearly a
quarter of the 5- to 14-year-olds in the Blanchland area have jobs, which is dramatically
higher than the national 14.5% of ‘Sons and Daughters engaged in Occupations’.
Conversely, the national figure of 26.5% ‘At home and others of no stated Occupation’ is
also at variance with that of the Blanchland area, which is much lower at 18.5%.17
Other work opportunities, such as apprenticeships, seem to have been extremely limited;
only three young people appear in the census as apprentices, two blacksmiths, aged 15 and
17 and one dressmaker aged 16. It is worth remembering here that the unwaged, informal
labour – mainly women’s and girls’ work - was largely disregarded in the census, but a count
of the instances where ‘Occupation’ is left blank possibly indicates the scale and nature of
this ‘hidden’ labour. Of the 92 girls aged from 9 to 14 in the Blanchland area, the occupations
of 17 are unrecorded, whereas of the 102 boys in the same age group, only four are
unaccounted for. By definition, there is limited information on this ‘invisible’ group, but they
have been included as part of the whole child population, as their aggregation can perhaps
provide implicit detail about the children who are ‘At home’.
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Figure 6: The occupations of the 335 children aged 5-14 in the Blanchland area. Source: 1861 Census
Schooling in the Blanchland area
There should be no such ambiguity in the occupation of ‘Scholar’, but in 1861 this could
encompass day or evening school attendance, learning at a Sunday school or even tuition in
the home.18 In the Blanchland area, according to the census enumerator’s records, 57% of
the 335 5- to 14-year-olds are going to school, which compares with the national figure of
58% of the country’s 4.4 million children.19
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Education in Blanchland seems to have been high on the parents’ agenda as early as the
mid-1700s.20 A 1778 petition to the Lord Crewe trustees signed by 13 parents complains
about the quality of teaching: “Several who went many years to that School not being able to
read and write fit for business.” The grumbling continues with instances of villagers sending
their boys to ‘Mr Bonny of Frosterley’, 13 miles away in Weardale, and ends with a plea
!“that a man may be appointed who will use his abilities and devote his time to that truly
Christian purpose.”21 Only boys are mentioned in the petition, and it is perhaps significant
that of the 13 signatories, the only woman on the list has to sign with ‘hir mark’. Teachers
have clearly been found, and girls are being taught by 1819, though, for a list of scholars at
Blanchland runs to 38 boys and 21 girls (Figure 7).22 In 1842, inspector James Mitchell is
pleased by the way education was an integral part of life in the lead mining communities,
noting throughout the North Pennines the National schools, Sunday schools, reading rooms
and libraries. “The children of the lead country have the benefit of the example of their
parents, and their encouragement to attend to their education!”, he says, whereas in the
coal mining areas! “scholastic education is in a very low state.”23
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Figure 7: An 1819 job advertisement in the Newcastle Courant for teaching positions in Blanchland
Source: Newspapers online
So far the analysis has been concerned with was has been called ‘Blanchland area’, which
combines Blanchland itself, the nearby Newbiggin Township and the parish of
Hunstanworth. But by breaking the data down into its three constituent settlements, some
clear distinctions begin to emerge (Table 1). For instance, while the overall proportion of
scholars appears to roughly correlate with the national figure, an analysis by settlement
reveals that although Hunstanworth is home to just over two-thirds of the 5- to 14-year-olds,
only 53% of them are going to school. Even worse is Newbiggin where just 51% are
scholars. The settlement which raises school attendance close to the national figure is
Blanchland where 46 out of the village’s 59 children – 78% - are receiving an education. On
the other hand, the proportion of children in work is highest in Hunstanworth at 30% while in
Blanchland only 10% of the children have jobs. At Newbiggin, 19% - all boys - are working
as lead ore washers, and of the 30% whose occupation is not recorded, 14 are girls, so
there is a possibility they are part of the ‘hidden’ informal labour force discussed earlier.
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Table 1: Children aged 5-14 and their occupations Source: 1861 Census
Earning or learning: determining factors
Historians cite several factors which might determine whether a child went to school or made
a contribution to the family economy, the main one being income. As mentioned earlier, if the
male ‘breadwinner’ wage was too low to sustain the household, one strategy for
supplementing it would be for children to go out to work.24 School fees had to be paid as
well, so hard-pressed parents had to consider the actual cost of education as well as the
‘opportunity cost’ of the loss of income.
While the census can provide clues to a household’s financial circumstances, such as taking
in lodgers to make ends meet, it does not contain any actual fiscal data. To try to address
this, details from the 1860 Highway Rate assessment for Blanchland and Shildon (on the
Lord Crewe Trust estate but evaluated as part of Newbiggin Township in the 1861 census)
have been matched with the census data using nominal record linkage (Table 2). The
Highway Rate was assessed according to a property’s rateable value, and every household
had to pay, so could be a useful indicator as to the relative wealth or poverty of households
in the area.25
From the 79 Highway Rate records available, 66 linked positively with households’ heads’
names in the census data, which is 56% of the 113 households in Blanchland and
Newbiggin Township. Rateable values range from the very lowest at 10 shillings paid by
Thomas Jameson, a 68-year-old widower who is a labourer in the lead mines right up to the
£234 for Jasper Stephenson’s property, a farmer of 4,500 acres across nine farms who
employs eight men on the land and four servants in his home.
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Table 2: Head of household’s occupation class (1861 census report) and the Highway Rate property value of 66
homes in Blanchland, 1860. The coloured area shows the 40 lowest value properties. Source: 1861 Census
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What is immediately noticeable is the lowest rateable value homes are situated in Shildon
rather than Blanchland. Forty of the 66 records combining the census and Highway Rate
data are for properties valued at £1 10s or under, and 27 of these lowest value properties
are in Shildon. While women head up 26.5% of all the households in the area, being 66 of
the 249 heads, 42% of these 40 lowest value households have female heads. One of these
women is 69-year-old lead miner’s widow Susanna James, living in a house with a rateable
value of £1 10s with her two miner sons George and William. In an 1859 letter to William,
who had emigrated to Ballarat, Australia to seek his fortune in the gold mines, Susanna
reassures him that she is coping on her own – and reveals her strategy for survival as one of
the poorest in the community: “I have 3 lodgers at present. They bring me 4/- per week and I
have 2/6d parish money so you see I am not taking any hurt as yet and I have killed my
pig! I intend to sell it in bacon.”26
Exploring the census data for households that adopted Susanna’s survival strategy of taking
in lodgers – and for those that could afford to pay for domestic help - would seem to further
confirm that Blanchland was the more affluent of the three settlements, and Newbiggin and
Hunstanworth the less well-off (Table 3). Blanchland has the highest proportion of servants
with 23% of the 56 households employing help, while it has the lowest percentage of
households with lodgers.
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Table 3: Aspects of household composition indicating relative wealth or poverty, including the 40 ‘poorest’
households identified in Highway Rate 1860. Source: 1861 Census
Lead mining is the predominant occupation in the 40 ‘poorest’ homes; 17 of the 40 heads
are lead miners, and 50 of the 164 inhabitants works at the mines, representing 17% of the
total mining workforce of 299. Lead mines all over the North Pennine orefield operated a
particular payment system which could lead to chronic financial hardship, as Derwent Lead
Mines agent John Robinson explains in the 1842 report. The miners would be given a
regular quarterly advance from the company, but their actual pay depended on them ‘falling
in with rich ores’. While some men could earn the average wage or above, that still meant
many could be taking home much less, so that: “! when they come to reckon have no
money to take, and are left with a debt against them to begin the next account and this may
go on for year after year.”27 The average lead miner’s wage in the Blanchland area in 1862
was 15s 2d; if a family of two adults and four children were spending around five shillings of
their weekly income on flour alone, a child’s ‘washing floor’ wage of three or four shillings
could make a substantial contribution to the household economy.28
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The 40 ‘poorest’ households contain 36 children aged between 5 and 14, and at 22% this is
a lower percentage of the population than the 25% figure for the whole community. Exactly
half of the school-age children are scholars and this is 7% below the overall school
attendance figure. Ten boys are working as lead ore washers which is 28% of the 40
household total and 3.5% higher than the overall figure. There is a higher incidence of nonrecording at 22% of the children from the 40 poor households; overall this is 18.5%. So while
the numbers here are relatively small, they nonetheless follow a consistent pattern and
would seem to indicate that children in poorer homes in the Blanchland area were more
likely to be earning an income rather than learning the ‘three Rs’.
From the census data, Hunstanworth has the highest proportion of lead mining households;
out of 136 homes in the parish, 46% are inhabited by lead mining families. Unfortunately no
similar source to the Highway Rate document has been located to assess the value of the
properties in Hunstanworth parish, but a paragraph in one of Susanna James’ letters to
Australia implies that housing there is of even lower value than her humble Shildon home. In
October 1870 she has moved out to Allergate, a house standing alone almost equidistant
from Blanchland and Hunstanworth villages: “We have shifted for the better. We only pay 5
shillings for eight weeks where we had to pay betwixt 9 and 10 shillings and which make a
great cost to us.”29
Widowhood and want
Children of lone parents were generally more likely to earn than learn in the mid-nineteenth
century – and lead miners’ work inevitably took its toll, shortening the lives of the men and
leaving wives and families without the ‘breadwinner wage’.30 In 1842 the Derwent Mining
Company agent John Robinson told commissioners: “When a miner comes to 55 he is an
exhausted man. At 50, or 55, he is able to give his judgement, and to drill, but is unfit for
hard work! There is a great quantity of sulphur in the spar, and the miner inhales it.”31
By 1861, the male breadwinners’ mortality levels appear little better; across the Blanchland
area, 30% of the 249 households are headed by widows – 58 by women and the remaining
16 by men (Table 4). This is much higher than the national figure of 18% widowed heads.32
But surprisingly while 18% of the 335 children between 5 and 14 live in households where
the head is widowed, 60% of them are attending school. With the overall proportion of
scholars at 57%, it would seem that rather than being a barrier to education, the children of
homes headed by widows are faring slightly better than the 5- to 14-year-olds from couple
households. Once again this is a general overview created by bringing all three settlements
together; teasing them apart reveals an unusual discrepancy between Blanchland’s better off
inhabitants and their neighbours in Newbiggin and Hunstanworth.
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Table 4: Widows in the Blanchland area and their children aged 5-14 Source: 1861 Census
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That the wives of lead miners faced widowhood at a younger age seems to be borne out by
the census data. Of the 58 female widowed heads of households, 18 actually state they are
widows of lead miners as their occupation; only one of these is in Blanchland, whereas six
are in Shildon and 11 are living in Hunstanworth. While in Hunstanworth 26% of the
households in the parish are headed by widows, they tend to be much younger than those
who have lost their spouses in Blanchland. The mean age of the Hunstanworth widows is 55
– a full five years younger than those at Blanchland and Newbiggin, where there is a mean
age of 60. The widows of Hunstanworth are also more likely to have children aged between
5 and 14; 53% have children there while at Blanchland the figure is 47%. But at
Hunstanworth it seems as if the children of widowed households have a much better chance
of being at school than their two-parent peers; 61% of the children of widowed households
are scholars while just 51% of the two-parent household children are in education.
Conversely in relatively affluent Blanchland, two-thirds of the widowed household children
are scholars while 83% of married household children are attending school.
Returning to the household survival strategy of taking in lodgers, it would seem that the
widows have less need of rental income than the married householders; of the 74 widowed
households across the whole area, only six have lodgers, and of these, three have schoolage children living in them and three have no family at all. Two of these properties appear in
the 40 ‘poorest’ households of Blanchland and Newbiggin identified by the Highway Rate
document, and three are in Hunstanworth. In the 153 married households there are 30
lodgers across 17 homes (11%), again pointing to Hunstanworth and Newbiggin as the
poorer settlements with 12 and four properties respectively and only one in Blanchland.
Family size and sibling support
Large numbers of siblings competing for limited family resources was another factor
influencing whether a child earned or learned.33 To find out if this was the situation in the
Blanchland area, households containing seven or more children have been examined in the
1861 census data (Table 5).
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Table 5: Family size in relation to condition of head of household. ‘Numbers of children in family’ relates here to
all sons and daughters, grandchildren, nieces and nephews regardless of age. Source: 1861 Census
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Twenty-five of the area’s 249 households contain seven or more children. Of the 254 people
in these homes, 53% are between 0 and 14 years old, and 37% of these are between 5 and
14. Fifty-seven per cent of the 5- to 14-year-olds are scholars, which exactly matches the
figure for the whole area. Thirty per cent are at work though, which suggests at 5% higher
than the overall figure, the children from larger families are more likely to be working than at
home.
If it were simply a case of the larger the family, the more likely a child would be working, then
it would be reasonable to expect the very youngest of the labour force might be found
among these 24 households. But only one of the six 9-year-old lead ore washers – the
youngest workers in the area - belongs to the group of 24 families with seven or more
children. Four of the young boys live in Hunstanworth parish, in families where the father and
brothers are also working at the lead mines; the other two live in the 40 ‘poorest’ households
identified earlier by linking the Highway Rate data with the 1861 census.
These nine-year-old workers are helping to send even younger siblings to school. John
Gardner lives with his widowed mother Margaret, aged 48 who is a lodging house keeper.
The family home is a property with a rateable value of just 15 shillings, the second lowest
value in the Highway Rate list. Her two eldest sons William, 12 and John are lead ore
washers, while 5-year-old Thomas is at school. The other 9-year-old lead ore washer,
Thomas Colpitts, lives in Shildon with his roadmaker father William, aged 36, mother Jane,
30, and four younger brothers and sisters, and the family home has a rateable value of £1
5s. Thomas is the eldest and already working, while Phebe, 7 and William, 5 are scholars.
Thomas has two younger brothers, John, 3 and 7-month-old Robert.
Figure 8: The scholars of Blanchland school, circa 1860. Source: Private collection of Alan Shaw
As the eldest child, Thomas’ case in particular demonstrates it was not just a case of family
size, but of where a child came in birth order which had a bearing on their earning or
learning.34 In the 1861 census, of the 92 9- to11-year-olds in the whole community (below
the acceptable working age according to local lead mining agent John Robinson in 1842), 57
are scholars, 25 are working and 9 are unrecorded. The scholars aged 9 to 11 have 86
younger siblings and 121 older, while the working and unrecorded children in the same age
range have 67 younger and 59 older. The scholars have a younger:older sibling ratio of 3:4
while the workers and unrecorded children have a much closer ratio of roughly 1:1,
!
!
indicating that those attending school were more likely to have older brothers and sisters
adding their wages to the family income.
Cultural differences in attitudes to education
One final factor could have had a particular influence on parental attitudes towards child
education and labour in the Blanchland area: a tradition of learning inculcated by the
Anglican paternalism of Lord Crewe and his charitable trust and the old lead mining
company’s strict Quaker doctrine.
In their 1861 parliamentary report, education commissioners suspected that up to a third of
the nation’s children were absent from school because of parent apathy – or even downright
hostility to the idea of learning.35 The London Lead Company, however, once the owners of
the Blanchland mines and still operating across the North Pennines, are held up as
exemplars for the compulsory education system they run for their workers’ families. But the
company’s beneficence comes with strings attached; the boys attend school from age six to
12, while for the girls it is six to 14... “!the reason of the difference being that boys of twelve
are available for lead washing!.”36 And there are dire consequences for the ‘breadwinner’ if
he fails to send his children to school; he may not be taken on for the next quarter’s work.
The London Lead Company had relinquished the Blanchland mines more than 50 years
earlier, but perhaps even by 1861 the Quaker company’s controlling values were still
‘hardwired’ into the local psyche.
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Table 6: Birthplace of heads of household in relation to distance from Blanchland area. Four of 249 heads’
birthplaces are unknown. Source: 1861 Census
To explore this possibility in the census data, the heads of households and the distance of
their birthplace from the Blanchland area were analysed to see if there was a discernible
difference in the behaviours of the more settled, ‘indigenous’ families and those from further
afield (Table 6). Fifty-four per cent of Blanchland’s heads were actually born in the
immediate area of four miles or less, whereas at Hunstanworth only 37% and 24% at
Newbiggin were ‘local’ heads. Hunstanworth had the most ‘incomer’ heads with 40% hailing
from locations 15 or more miles away; Newbiggin had 36% and Blanchland was the lowest
at just 34%. There also seems to be a correlation between the proximity of the heads’
birthplace to the Blanchland area and the proportions of their children going to school and
work (Table 7). Of the 335 children aged between 5 and 14 in the whole population, nearly a
third comes from homes where the head was actually born in Blanchland or Hunstanworth.
Of these children, 67% are scholars and 16% are working, with another 17% unrecorded.
Moving out further, but including the previous group, 63% of the school-age children are
!
!
from households headed by people who were born 14 miles or less from the Blanchland
area, and 58% of these are at school, which matches the national average exactly. Twenty
per cent of the group is working – but another 21% are unrecorded.
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Table 7: The occupations of children aged 5 to 14 in relation to heads of households’ birthplace distance from
Blanchland and Hunstanworth. Source: 1861 Census
The group of children who are in households where the heads were born between 15 and 24
miles away (places like Allendale in Northumberland, Middleton in County Durham and
Alston in Cumbria) are much more likely to be working than the children in locally headed
households; of the 77 5- to 14-year-olds in this group, 37% are employed, and only 51% are
scholars. Only 47 of the children are in households where the head was born more than 25
miles away, which includes southern counties of England such as Devon and Cornwall, and
Wales and Scotland. On its own, this group is too small to draw any real conclusions as by
now the numbers break down to individual families, but adding these to the 15-24 mile group
indicates that of the 124 children in households where the heads were born 15 or more miles
away from the area, only 55% are learning – below the national and local average and 3%
below the children of people born less than 15 miles away. Child labour shows a marked rise
among this group; 31% have paid jobs – a full 11% more than the children of ‘local’ heads.
Only 14% of this group (17 children) are unrecorded, though, in comparison to the 21% of
the group whose heads were born 14 miles or less from Blanchland.
This would seem to show that children of the households whose heads had grown up in the
area and inherited its cultural values were more likely to attend school than go to work; the
further away the heads were from their birthplace, the greater the chance their children
would be earning a living. Without further evidence the link is too tenuous to be conclusive,
but it is possible that local culture played a part in influencing parental attitudes towards child
education and labour.
The ideal versus the reality
This study began by considering the settlements of Blanchland, Hunstanworth and
Newbiggin in the mid-1800s as a small, homogenous ‘cultural pays’, but analysis of the
census data has shown that each location had its own distinct economic characteristics,
which had a direct impact on whether a child worked or learned. After half a century of
industrialisation, by 1861 this remote rural community was relying heavily on child labour, but
it seems the poorest families were bearing the brunt, with the youngest of the working
children coming from the most disadvantaged settlements.
Blanchland seems to have been the more affluent settlement, with a stable community that
had benefited from more than 150 years of the Lord Crewe Trust’s patronage. Families in
Blanchland had deeper roots in the area, set down by previous generations, and the children
!
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of these long-established families were more likely to attend school and less likely to be
earning a living or helping around the house.
The township of Newbiggin, while being home to the richest resident in the Blanchland area,
farmer of 4,500 acres Jasper Stephenson, also contained some of the neediest people in the
community, amongst them a lone widower still working in the mines at the age of 68 and an
orphaned family of young lead ore washers.
Hunstanworth was equally if not more impoverished, with its generally younger, ‘incomer’
lead mining families having to weigh up the ‘opportunity cost’ of sending children to school or
joining their older brothers and sisters at work. Lead miners predominated in the parish,
living in poor quality accommodation and facing the prospect of infirmity or even premature
death through work-related illness. But the census data indicates that while the widows in
Hunstanworth lost their spouses at a younger age than those in Blanchland, widowhood did
not plunge families into destitution as it might in other places. The fact that their children
were much more likely to attend school than those in two parent homes, and that they did
not appear to need the added income lodgers could bring as the married couples did,
indicates that some kind of robust support system, perhaps a pension from the Derwent
Mining Company, was in place to help the lead mining widows get the household through
the loss of its male breadwinner.37
Family wellbeing in the Blanchland area relied on sometimes desperate survival strategies
which were underpinned by parental values that ultimately had their children’s welfare at
heart. And these strategies could be successful, as widow Susanna James’ daughter
Thomasine Sparke illustrates. In 1861 Thomasine is living in one of the very poorest houses
in Shildon, valued at just £1 in the Highway Rate, with her lead miner husband Robert and
their two young children, Thomas aged 3 and 1-year-old Mary Ann. Ten years later she
writes with pride to her distant sister Mary in Australia: “Thomas Sparke your nephew has
passed two days’ examination by a School Master and a Priest and he has got a PupilTeacher’s place at Townfield National School. There were a good many applications for the
place but we was well recommended and Mary Anne Sparke had the first prize for writing
awarded to at Christmas examinations...”38
Approaching the 1861 census data from several different analysis directions has highlighted
consistent correlations between the established local families of Blanchland and education,
and the poorer lead mining families of Hunstanworth and child labour. The parents of the
Blanchland area may have valued their children’s learning as an ideal, but the aspiration
could only be realised if the household had financial stability; the reality for families wavering
constantly above or below the poverty line was that the child’s education or work was always
under review, depending as it did on fluctuating circumstances.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Notes
1
Figure on working children aged 5 -14 from 1861 General Census Report, p.145, tables
102 and 103 on children’s occupations – Histpop website (http://bit.ly/J2xYZL - consulted
29/4/12)
!
!
!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
British History Online page on Hunstanworth (http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=76316 - consulted 9/6/12) and Whellan 1855 Directory
page on Blanchland (http://www.blanchlandhistory.org.uk/ages/directory - consulted 3/7/12)
3
W.K. Pirt and J.M. Dodds, Lead mining in the Derwent Valley (2002), pp.34 and 51
4
Ibid, pp.58 and 82
5
A vision of Britain through time website, 1861 Census General Report (1863) Section
entitled Occupations of the People (http://bit.ly/JXtVSi - accessed 29/4/12)
6
@
P. Horn, Children’s work and welfare 1780-1890 (1995), p.5
!All the Royal Commission reports can be downloaded as PDFs from the Coalmining
History Resource Centre website
(http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/site/literature/royalcommissionreports/index.html)
!
9
!Children’s Employment Commission report on the lead mines in Durham, Northumberland
and Cumberland (1842), p.42
(http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/cms/document/1842_Durham_Lead.pdf - consulted 17/5/12)
!
8
!
!J. Humphries, Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution (2010), p.30
7D
!1842 lead mines report, p.13
77
!1842 South Durham coalfield report, p.14
(http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/cms/document/1842_S_Durham.pdf - consulted 22/6/12)
!
7:
!
!Lead mines report, p.42
7<
!Education Commission report into the state of popular education in England (1861), p.216
(p.239 in PDF)
(http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Report_of_the_commissioners_appointed_to.html?id
=5B4CAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y - consulted 23/5/12)
!
7?
!
!Pirt and Dodds, Lead mining in the Derwent Valley, p.82
7=
!Humphries, Childhood and child labour, p.26: In economic models of labour markets
containing child workers, the ‘luxury axiom’ asserts that parents will only send their children
to work if forced to by poverty, implying altruistic motives.!!
!
7;
!
7@
!
79
!
78
!
!
!B. Reay, Rural Englands (2004), p.53
!1861 General Census Report, p.145, table 102 (http://bit.ly/J2xYZL - consulted 29/4/12)
!E. Higgs, Making sense of the census revisited (2005), p.104
!1861 General Census Report, p. 145, table 102
!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
:D
!A 1758 note among the Lord Crewe Trust papers deposited in Northumberland Archives
mentions Blanchland’s schoolmaster as having left his job. A transcription of this note and
other Blanchland school documents (NRO 452/D/8/4/13/B) is available at http://bit.ly/KArS3p!!
!
:7
!
::
!
!Ibid, http://bit.ly/KArS3p
!Ibid, http://bit.ly/KArS3p
:<
!1842 lead mines report, p.36 and Durham coalfield report, p.29
!
:?
!P. Kirby, Child labour in Britain, 1750-1870 (2003), p.28
!
:=
!A scanned PDF of the 1860 Highway Rate list for Blanchland and Shildon is available at
http://www.blanchlandhistory.org.uk/docs/HighwayRate1860.PDF
!
:;
!Passages from these unpublished family letters to Australia from Shildon, near Blanchland
in the mid-1800s have been used with the kind permission of descendant Dorothy Soulsby.
!
:@
!
!1842 lead mines report, p.27
:9
!Pirt and Dodds, Lead mining in the Derwent Valley, p.27 (lead miner’s average wage);
Reay, Rural Englands, p.75 (family spending on flour) and 1842 lead mines report, p.30
(child’s wage in lead mines)!!
:8
!
<D
!
<7
!
<:
!
<<
!
!D. Soulsby, family letters!
!Kirby, Child labour in Britain, p.28
!1842 lead mines report, p.42
!1861 General Census Report, p.11 (http://bit.ly/LMwyEt - consulted 16/6/12)
!Humphries, Childhood and child labour, p.126
<?
!J. Humphries and S. Horrell, ‘”The exploitation of little children”: child labour and the family
economy in the industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), p.505
!
<=
!1861 Education Commission report cited in!A.C.O. Ellis, ‘Influences on school attendance
in Victorian England’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol 21 No 3 (1973), p.317!
!
<;
!1861 Education report, p.218 (p.241 in PDF)
!
<@
!S. Pollard, ‘The factory village in the Industrial Revolution’, The English History Review,
Vol 79 No 312 (1964), p.521
!
!
!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
<9
!D. Soulsby, family letters
Bibliography
Cunningham, H. (1990) ‘The employment and unemployment of children in England,
c.1680-1851’, Past & Present, No 126, pp. 115-150
Ellis, A.C.O. (1973) ‘Influences on school attendance in Victorian England’, British Journal
of Educational Studies, Vol 21 No 3, pp. 313-326
Heesom, A.J. and Duffy, B. (1981) ‘Coal, class and education in the North East’, Past &
Present, No 90, pp. 136-151
Higgs, E. (2005) Making sense of the census revisited, University of London
Hobsbawm, E. (1975) The age of capital 1848-1875, Abacus
Horn, P. (1995) Children’s work and welfare 1780-1890, Cambridge University Press
Humphries, J. (2010) Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution,
Cambridge University Press
Humphries, J. and Horrell, S. (1995) ‘”The exploitation of little children”: child labour and
the family economy in the industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, No 32, pp.
482-516
Johnson, M. ‘Crew, Nathaniel, third Baron Crew (1633–1721)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
(http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/6683 - consulted 11/6/12)
Johnson, R. (1970) ‘Education policy and social control in early Victorian England’, Past &
Present, No 49, pp. 96-119
Kirby, P. (2003) Child labour in Britain, 1750-1870, Palgrave Macmillan
Levine, D. (1985) ‘Industrialisation and the proletarian family in England’, Past & Present,
No 107, pp. 168-203
Pirt W.K. and Dodds J.M. (2002) Lead mining in the Derwent Valley, Northern Mine
Research Society
Pollard, S. (1964) ‘The factory village in the Industrial Revolution’, The English History
Review, Vol 79 No 312, pp. 513-531
Raistrick, A. and Roberts, A. (1984) Life and work of the northern lead miner, Alan Sutton
Publishing, Gloucestershire
Reay, B (2004) Rural Englands, Palgrave Macmillan
!
!
!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Snell, K.D.M. (1999) ‘The Sunday school movement in England and Wales: child labour,
denominational control and working class culture’, Past & Present, No 164, pp. 122-168
Sturt, M. (1967) The education of the people, Routledge and Keegan Paul
West, E.G. (2000) Education and the Industrial Revolution, Liberty Fund
Wrigley, E.A. (1988) Continuity, chance and change, Cambridge University Press
Primary sources
A vision of Britain through time website, 1861 Census General Report (1863) Section
entitled Occupations of the People (http://bit.ly/JXtVSi - consulted 29/4/12)
Ancestry.co.uk, 1861 Census sheets for Blanchland (TNA ref RG9/3856) and Newbiggin
(TNA ref RG9/3856 in Northumberland and Hunstanworth in County Durham (TNA ref
RG9/3726)
British History Online page on Hunstanworth (http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=76316 - consulted 9/6/12)
Education Commission (1861) Report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the
state of popular education in England (available from Google Books at
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Report_of_the_commissioners_appointed_to.html?id
=5B4CAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y - consulted 23/5/12)
Histpop website (Online Historical Population Reports) 1861 Census General Report, p.145,
appendix – tables 102 and 103 on children’s occupations (http://bit.ly/J2xYZL – consulted
29/4/12) also p.11 on heads of households’ condition (http://bit.ly/LMwyEt - consulted
16/6/12)
Mitchell, J. (1842) Report on the employment of children and young persons in the lead
mines &c in Durham, Northumberland and Cumberland,
(http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/cms/document/1842_Durham_Lead.pdf - consulted 17/5/12)
Also Mitchell’s report on the South Durham coalfield
(http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/cms/document/1842_S_Durham.pdf - consulted 22/6/12), both Ian
Winstanley and Picks Publishing (1998)
Whellan Trade Directory 1855 page on Blanchland
(http://www.blanchlandhistory.org.uk/ages/directory - consulted 3/7/12)
Unpublished sources
Blanchland History website, Shildon and Blanchland Highway Rate (1860),
http://www.blanchlandhistory.org.uk/docs/HighwayRate1860.PDF
!
!
!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Northumberland Archives, Lord Crewe Trust papers, NRO/452/D/8/4/13/B (transcription
available at http://bit.ly/KArS3p)
Soulsby, D. Transcriptions of family letters between Shildon, Blanchland to Ballarat,
Australia from 1859-1883 (permission given to reproduce passages 25/6/12)
Elfrieda Waren, Thursday 5 July, 2012
Word count: 5,483
!
!