The Other Woman
Private Secretary to a Daughter of Exxon
Oil
APPENDIX
CHILD SLAVES:
A NEW
LANARK/DALE/OWEN STORY
(The
following was written for my nephews, Garrett, age 10, and Evan, age 8.)
March 5, 1998
A Sad True Story
Hello Boys,
I was interested in your news of seeing
the old movie about Scrooge and his visions of those ghosts. You both sounded
like it scared and worried you, but you were so glad it was just a movie. I
remember seeing that movie, A Christmas Carol, when I was about
your age. It was set in England in the 1840s and really impacted me, too. I
remember the crabby boss, Scrooge, the worried worker and his little son with a
crutch, and all those strange ghosts who finally got that meany Scrooge to be a
better person. Yes, it was a pretend story written by Charles Dickens. But
unfortunately, I just learned that real life for workers in Scotland in the
1780s (60 years before Dickens wrote his famous story) was worse.
I just finished reading a book, David
Dale of New Lanark by David J. McLaren. It is a true, historical
study of a man in Scotland, David Dale, who lived from 1739 to 1806. You both
have met the lady I work for here in New Harmony, Mrs. Owen. Do you remember
last summer meeting her husband, the real old man who walked with a fancy
walking stick, Mr. Owen, that day when we were petting the cat in that big
yard? Mr. Owen is related to David Dale. Mr. Owen's full name is Kenneth Dale
Owen.
David Dale started life as a poor child,
and herded sheep for his first job. Later, because he was smart and determined
to have a good life, became a merchant, then a banker, and then became very
very rich when he built and owned the “factory” cotton mills in New Lanark,
Scotland. In this book are shocking facts about the common practice of making
orphan children be slave laborers to work at the mill. Dale was considered to
be a better boss than other mill owners. Sad, but true.
Dale owned this famous mill from 1786 to
1799. Today, it is a popular tourist attraction and a designated World Historic
Site near Glasgow, Scotland. The records show that this mill employed 1157
people in the manufacture of yarn, whether cotton, wool, or linen. Yarn is what
makes fabric, that’s the work of weavers. Weft and warp, and a yard of fabric
for sale! Prior to mill “factories” all this hard work was done by small groups
of people working in their back shed, to either make yarn, hard work, or once
yarn is available, weavers took on work to make yards of fabric, also in back
sheds by a few folks working together.
The idea of having lots of people working
at the same place had never been done, thus “factory” was a totally new idea
and mistakes were made. Lots of mistakes. A few people with engineering smarts,
often clockmakers, figured out a way to make larger machines to make yarn,
really big machines. And just then, about 1780s, other smart people were
figuring out how to turn cotton balls into cotton yarn, a long and hard
process, but the profit was worth the work. Before cotton, fabrics were made from
sheep wool, linen from flax plant, and silk from - well, do some research,
boys. Of course there were many types of fabric within this limited source
material, so weavers could make very expensive yards of fabric when they could
purchase high quality yarn for the purpose. Wealthy people loved to sport their
wealth by wearing expensive clothing. Common folks were extremely fortunate if
they had one nice suit or dress for special occasions, and rough clothes for
everyday life. No closet full of extra clothes, no. Now back to New Lanark mill
life.
Of this number, 1157 people, 795 were
children (in those days you became an adult at age 16). Of these 795 children,
520 came to work each day, lived nearby with their family and got a small wage
for their labor. Before the 1780s no parent would ever send their children to
work this way, but by the 1780s many “common” families had no work, no money.
It was with great shame that the parents sent their children to work in the
mill, but David Dale’s bonus for all his children workers was FREE education,
that was unheard of until Dale started it.
Parents realized that by sending their child to work at the mill, that
child could learn to read, do basic arithmetic, and write as a perk for working
there.
Before Dale provided free education for
his child workers, it had never been done anywhere ever. Before this, the only
way any child learned to read, do figures and for extra fee learn to write, is
if parents paid a school for their child to learn these basic concepts,
basically getting a 3rd grade education. There was no such thing as
mandatory education for children, people too poor did not send their kids to
school, no $. And that was perfectly fine with people in charge of how society
functioned. If a kid was only going to do farm work, no need for fancy stuff
like reading and writing, eh? But when the New Lanark Mill offered FREE
education to child workers, well, it mattered. The child workers at Dale’s mill
included “boarders,” and Mill village kids from family living near by. These
were the lucky children, with their family, have a job, and get educated. Keep
in mind, in those days, almost every child worked, seriously worked, by the time
they were 7 or 8 years old. Unless the family was very well-off, every child
was most usually “apprenticed” to domestic, farm work, or to a merchant,
meaning the parent signed a legal contract with employer to put that child in
the employ and most often housed at employer’s, to work at a set pay rate, for
a set number of years.
The unlucky children were slave laborers.
Records show 275 pauper children, meaning they were orphans under the legal
care of a government/religious “housing” program that kept all abandoned
children in a lock-up place until they turned 16. Mill owners could agree to
take “stout” children from the lock-up places and signed papers to make it all
legal. Of course the child had no legal rights, but the adults sure did take
authority for them. These children sent to the mills had no choice but to work,
they were not asked, they were sent. By the way, the definition of a slave -
someone who cannot quit his or her job. These children, Dale called them his
“boarders,” earned no wage for their labor. What they got instead was shelter,
clothes, food, and some education.
Here’s how it happened. Dale took children
from the Glasgow Towns Hospital, a place that kept orphaned children, sick
people, crazy people, and poor old people, all locked up together. There were
many orphaned/pauper children then. They were abandoned or given to the
Hospital because the mother and/or father could not take care of them. Famine
was a real concern every year in Scotland, add to this the fact that married
women usually had a child every year, and how to feed lots of children in a
famine year? Put those kids in the Towns Hospital, they won’t starve there.
Also, things like small pox, yellow fever, whooping cough, and many more
illnesses caused many families extreme grief to lose the working adult to a
sudden death. Some of those illnesses were so strong that a person could be
fine in the morning, sick in the afternoon, and dead three days later. Doctors
were only guessing at what to do for their patients, and for sure, only wealthy
people could have doctoring anyway. No such thing for poor people.
Dale would take some of the children from
this awful place. The kids who weren't chosen to work in the mills were really
really unlucky. He normally took 5 and 6-year-old children. The 5-year-olds
would get some schooling. When they turned 6, they started work. I repeat: at
age 6, you went to work.
Six days a week, from 6:am to 7:pm—that’s not a
mistake—13 hours, you worked, with the following exceptions. At 9:am you got a
½ hour breakfast, usually porridge (thick oatmeal) and milk. Sometimes in the
winter you would get a mixture of fermented molasses and new beer called swats,
instead of milk, to add to the porridge. The beverage, coffee, was used for the
first time in history on a wide scale in these mills; it “pepped up” the workers.
At 2:pm you got one hour for dinner (another name for lunch), usually barley
broth. Each day, ½ of the children would get a small piece of boiled meat; the
other ½ got a small piece of cheese and bread with the barley broth. Very
occasionally potatoes would be included. Potatoes were a real luxury, as famine
was a real problem, bad weather at planting time and no potatoes that year.
Really.
Work was done at 7: pm. The boarders and
Mill village worker children still had a schedule to obey. A ½ hour for supper
(no information on what was served) and then school right there. All child
workers had to go to class from 7:30pm to 9:pm, to study reading, writing and
how to “figure.” Six days a week. The Sunday schedule is ahead.
If you were a boarder, you lived right at
a mill building and slept three to a straw mat bed, in a room with 75 other
children. You had three sets of clothes: one cotton summer suit, one wool
winter suit, and one Sunday church suit. Underwear was called “linens” and you
changed these twice a month.
We are glimpsing the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution at these mills in the heart of the British Isles. There
were approximately 50 of these mills throughout England, Scotland, Wales,
Cornwall, and Ireland. Most mill owners made the pauper apprentices work these
long hours seven days a week.
Dale was considered to be kind. If you
worked for him, you worked six days a week and spent all day Sunday involved
with his religious beliefs. Church services—of course right at the mill grounds—then
Bible study and religious singing. All day every Sunday, no exceptions.
The children workers were apprentices
until they were 16. Dale’s apprentices had an advantage over the children who
worked for other mill owners. They could read, write, and do arithmetic. For
the boarders, at 16 you were given a set of new clothes, a small bit of money,
and dismissed from your job, shelter, friends, etc., and were free to go into
the world and make your way. Why didn’t they need many adult workers?
Here’s another dark side of the Industrial
Revolution—poor design. The huge machines at the mills were poorly engineered;
only small children could go underneath and inside them to untwist thread that
was stuck. Many children lost fingers in this machinery and many suffered
stunted growth and became dwarfs. Many children ran away. Many died.
Boys, I wish I could tell you that this
story was only a movie and not real. But the author, David J. McLaren, who is a
Professor at Strathclyde University in Scotland, did not make any of this grim
story up, it’s really real. He wrote the first edition of this book in 1983,
and now is preparing a new edition as he’s found out even more about how those
children were treated then. I hope the new edition comes with a box of tissue.
It just makes me want to cry when I think of what a hard life little children
had to endure, but without Mr. McLaren’s important research, we wouldn’t even
know what went on so long ago.
Here’s some more history of how children
who weren’t poor lived in the 1700s that I found with other research.
In 1799, David Dale sold his mill to
Robert Owen and other business partners. RO was put in charge of New Lanark
Mills, and became world famous for his passionate ideas of what was best for
the children workers of his mill. Owen gave speeches to promote new ideas for
child welfare and lots of people came to hear him speak whenever he gave a
public lecture. After RO and partners bought the mill, a few months later he
married David Dale’s daughter, Anne Caroline Dale. Robert and Anne started the
Owen family who are some of the ancestors of the family I worked with in New
Harmony. My boss, Jane Blaffer Owen, married into the Owen family. My boss’s
husband, Kenneth Dale Owen, was a great great grandson of Robert Owen and great
great great grandson of David Dale. Some of the current Owen family still use
the Dale name as a middle name as a way to honor their history.
Briefly, regarding Robert Owen, 1771-1858,
he improved conditions at the New Lanark mills for the resident child laborers
beyond the relatively kind conditions of the former owner, his father-in-law,
David Dale. RO’s little workers could take a variety of classes not about
religion on Sunday, including dance classes. This was very radical for the
times. Owen, a social reformer, believed in the advancement of humankind and,
by improving the circumstances of life, expected that an innate human goodness
would more readily be displayed.
And one more bit of history, let’s look at
Robert Owen’s early life. He was born to a skilled trades/merchant family in
Wales in 1771. Known to be an educated child, he would borrow adult books from
neighbors, read each from start to finish, and promptly return them. Owen
started working at age 9 as an apprentice to a draper’s shop. At age 11 he
moved to London and got a full-time job in the drapery trade. He worked 18-hour
days, six days a week. Keep in mind we are looking at a period of world history
before the idea of “teenager.” As we see in these accounts, in the 1700s,
people went from childhood to adulthood with little or no transition time,
whether well off, poor, or an orphan.
Another grim detail: West Indies and American
plantation owners purchased the cheap fabric, from cotton yarn these mills
made, in large quantities to clothe their slaves. As we know, these slaves were
slaves for life, they would have envied people who were free at 16 yrs. old.
When I was in school I learned a little
about the Industrial Revolution and child labor. Yet I never imagined this
detailed truth of the awful conditions then. I’m sure glad David J. McLaren did
his homework!
I hope this is of benefit to you.
The End.
And tons of
Love from Aunt Karen
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