Sadler report

History

On March 16, 1832, Sadler proposed the Second Reading of a Bill to limit to ten hours the workday for persons under the age of 18 working in the textile industry. The bill also involved a ban on labour for children 9 years old and younger, an eight-hour day on Saturday and a ban on night working for children under the age of 21.

Although Sadler had asserted at earlier stages that the need for such legislation was so urgent and so obvious that there was no need for a Select Committee to gather evidence relating to the Bill, at Second Reading he accepted that the Bill should be considered by such a committee. One was duly formed, with Sadler as the chairman; the committee also included John Cam Hobhouse, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Lord Morpeth, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Robert Inglis, and Charles Poulett Thomson. It held its first sitting on 12 April 1832, and took evidence from eighty-nine witnesses in the course of forty-three meetings. About half the witnesses were workers (some of whom, Sadler told the House of Commons, had lost their jobs because they had given evidence).

Sadler attempted (31 July 1832) to progress his Bill without waiting for the committee's report; when this was objected to, he withdrew the Bill. The committee reported the minutes of evidence on 8 August 1832, when they were ordered to be printed. Parliament was dissolved little over a week later, and in the election that followed, Sadler stood at Leeds but failed to be elected. Early in 1833 the contents of the committee's report began to appear in local and national papers.

Report

One early history of factory legislation described the testimony presented in Sadler's report as "one of the most valuable collections of evidence on industrial conditions that we possess." and excerpts from the testimony are given in many source books on the Industrial Revolution and factory reform and on multiple websites, together with commentary drawing the intended conclusions.

However, critics such as William Harold Hutt have pointed to - and revived - contemporary criticism of the report. Even Sadler’s parliamentary friends, such as Lord Morpeth, conceded that the proceedings of the Committee were irregular and its choice of witnesses unbalanced. Evidence given to the committee was not given on oath, and it remains unclear (and controversial) to what extent the evidence heard from former mill-children and the parents of mill children was true, and if true to what extent typical. Whilst these caveats cannot be ignored "Critics have alleged that some of the evidence was biased, incomplete, sometimes inaccurate or even deliberately misleading, and it is true that a good deal of it referred to conditions that had long been ameliorated...When every allowance has been made for exaggerations and omissions and the rest, the 'report' stands as one of the classic documents of British social history".

It painted a picture of over-work, physical severity, misery and fear as the lot of a mill-child in an unregulated mill. To give one example of the evidence to that effect, and the questioning that elicited it: Matthew Crabtree, now twenty-two and a blanket manufacturer, had been a factory child between the ages of eight and twelve. He had worked from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. with an hour for a meal at noon (there was no breakfast break); when trade was brisk work had started an hour earlier and finished an hour later. He had lived about 2 miles from the mill:

Joshua Drake, a Leeds woollen-weaver gave evidence of bad conditions encountered by his children at various mills, but his evidence gives a glimpse of a less objectionable mill. He had sent his first child, a girl, to work as a piecener in a factory owned by Benjamin Gott when she was nearly eight. Once trained to the job, she was paid 3s a week and worked from 6 am to 7 pm.

Gott's had then started working longer hours (5 am to 8 pm).

One other point about Gott's emerged during questioning about other mills: "[I]n some mills it is very unbecoming with reference to morals; in others there is a moderate attention paid in that respect. In Mr. Gotts and Mr Sheepshanks’s, and any of those established concerns, there are regular rules that no bad language is to be used; but in other mills they go on as they think proper, and as they are uncontrolled with regard to those things, their state varies according to the disposition of the occupier of the mills to look after them."

Reaction

The report of the committee was greeted with acclaim by the ten-hour movement, "At last the London Press is fairly aroused to the atrocities of this infernal system, which is at once the curse and scandal of the land. This desirable event has been brought about by the publication of the horrible evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons. GOD be thanked then we have not laboured and suffered in vain. THE MONSTER MUST NOW BE DESTROYED" but the public, the mill owners, and MPs all viewed it with alarm for different reasons.

Public

The committee report - said one paper – contained "voluminous evidence ... of a nature to make a man almost loathe his species. We can hardly believe that such systematic cruelty is practised in this country." A party political point soon emerged; why were the Whigs obsessed with ending slavery in the West Indies but blind to the worse slavery of British children in British mills? Another paper spoke of “evidence, the perusal of the greater part of which is almost enough to make the blood run cold in our veins”. Others were more sceptical, noting very leading questioning, and suspecting the picture of misery to be too highly coloured, but they still concluded the factory system was little better than slavery, and legislation was urgently needed.

Millowners

The Preston Chronicle, published in a town with cotton mills for which legislation on the employment of children already specified a minimum age of nine and a twelve-hour day, criticised the use made of the Report by other publications

The extracts made appear to apply exclusively to extreme cases of hardship or oppression, exercised by overlookers to the children employed, and these chiefly in Scotland and Leeds. From these exclusive and exparte data, however, with more zeal than candour, our contemporaries take upon themselves to denounce the whole body of manufacturers or millowners, as alike obnoxious to the charge of the most flagrant cruelty, in order to gratify their inordinate cupidity. We are far from assuming, that there are not evils connected with our manufacturing system, which it is imperative to remedy; or denying, that in many mills there are practices, particularly as affecting the most helpless of those there employed – the children – which ought to be prevented by the arm of the law: but we consider it unjust to adduce isolated cases, and on those alone to condemn the whole of the trade. In our own town, we are gratified to testify, no such cruelties and privations are, to our knowledge, practised in any one establishment; and the neat, clean, and wholesome appearance of the numerous young females in particular, (whose constitutions would most likely be readily affected by inordinate labour) warrant the assumption that they are not subjected to the hardships complained of in the cases alluded to.

In doing so it rehearsed most of the objections that the millowners - particularly those from 'established concerns' who felt themselves to be good employers - were to make to the Report and to any idea of taking it as a basis for further legislation.

Parliament

When Parliament reassembled in 1833, a Lancashire MP moved to set up a Special Commission to inquire into the use of child labour in the textile industry, the report of Sadler’s Committee being defective both for content and for due process:

… the present Parliament was as ill provided with proper information on the subject as before the appointment of a Select Committee. In fact they were much worse off as to information than they were before; because the Committee inquired merely into one branch of the subject, and that branch too, on which there was the least diversity of opinion. The inquiry was so limited also, that the result tended rather to mislead the House than to enlighten it. When the Committee was appointed, it was suggested that all the points connected with the factory system should be taken into consideration; but an influential member of the Committee said, "You had better let me make out my case before other evidence is gone into," and, notwithstanding the opposition of several members of the Committee, in this partial manner were their proceedings conducted. In consequence, witnesses were summoned from the country to appear before the Committee, but the persons to whom the selection of witnesses was intrusted were strictly cautioned not to send up any person on whom they could not rely; that is, as he had good reason to believe, not to send up any persons who would let out anything unfavourable to the views of the Chairman of the Committee. He spoke in the hearing of several Gentlemen who were members of the Committee and who could, consequently, contradict his statement if he were not correct. The witnesses thus called by the Chairman were not less than eighty, and the time occupied in establishing his case satisfactorily was the remainder of the Session. It might be supposed that the examination of these eighty witnesses would have given full evidence with respect to the state of every district of the country—every branch of trade—all the evils, and all the most eligible remedies but no such thing had resulted. Among these witnesses there were twenty-one medical men, but out of them fifteen resided in London, and had had little or no practical experience upon the subject, of which they gave an abstract opinion. There was no information regarding the manufacturers of the West of England—the centre of England, and very little indeed with regard to Scotland. To make up for this, however, there were fifty-one witnesses from Leeds and its neighbourhood. He could produce evidence of the incorrectness and even falsehood of great part of the evidence which had been given

Nobody disputed his account, and a Commission was set up to examine the issue afresh, the report of Sadler's Committee being agreed to be an unsound basis upon which to draw up legislation.

Comparison with report of the 1833 Factory Commission

The investigations of the 1833 Factory Commission were more extensive and more thorough but its report and associated testimony are less alarming than Sadler's report, and although less open to objection are also less frequently quoted from. As critics have pointed out, few of Sadler’s witnesses were prepared to give evidence to the Commission upon oath, but more than one interpretation of this is possible. The Ten Hour Movement (supporters of Sadler’s bill, through whom most of the worker witnesses had been procured) and Sadler saw no need for further investigation, agitating instead for immediate legislation. During the course of the Factory Commission’s inquiries, relationships between it and the Ten Hour Movement became thoroughly adversarial, the Ten Hour Movement attempting to organise a boycott of the Commission's investigations. Nonetheless the Commission’s report on some points supported the thrust if not the detail of testimony given to Sadler’s committee but on other points they diverged.

Long Hours

They reportedthat mill children did work unduly long hours, leading to

and that these ill-effects were so marked and significant that Government intervention was justified. Where Sadler's Bill was for a ten-hour day for all workers under eighteen, the Commission recommended an eight-hour day for those under thirteen, hoping for a two-shift system for them which would allow mills to run 16 hours a day.

Immorality

Sadler had alleged that textile mills were hotbeds of sexual immorality and taken evidence supporting this assertion; the Commission however concluded that

though the statements and depositions of the different witnesses that have been examined are to a considerable degree conflicting, yet there is no evidence to show that vice and immorality are more prevalent amongst these people, considered as a class, than amongst any other portion of the community in the same station, and with the same limited means of information.

Beating

Sadler had suggested (in his subsequently much-anthologised examination of Matthew Crabtree - see above) that you could hardly be in a mill without hearing constant weeping and that towards the end of a working day 'chastisement' was going on perpetually. The Commission confirmed that anecdotal evidence abounded of mill-children being beaten, but went on to put this in a significantly different context from Sadler. It claimed that beating was less widespread than formerly ("By all classes of witnesses it is stated, that "strapping was more customary in former times than it is now;" "that the usage of the children is very different; they are not now beat;" " that he has seen boys severely beat when he was a young man, but not for a number of years;" "that he does not use a strap now, though he did formerly." . . .") and was nowhere adopted as a deliberate policy by mill-owners.

A Scottish commissioner reported that "We had, I believe, during our progress no one intimation, even anonymously, to direct our inquiries to any quarter where any habitual ill-usage of children was insinuated to exist at present." whilst "from the statements and depositions obtained under the present inquiry in the several districts in England, and from all classes of witnesses, it appears that in the great majority of cases, corporal punishment is prohibited by the proprietors, while it is proved on oath by several witnesses that operatives and overlookers have been suspended and even dismissed from their employment for disobeying this command. It is impossible to read the evidence from Leeds, Manchester, and the western district without being satisfied that a great improvement has taken place within the last few years in the treatment of children. What ill-treatment still exists is found chiefly in the small and obscure factories, while both in the large and small factories in England it is inflicted by workmen over children whom they themselves hire and pay, and who are completely under their control."

Context

The Commission's report went on to counter any unfavourable opinion of millowners readers of Sadler's report might have formed by drawing attention to various instances of the benevolence towards their employees of major millowners such as the Strutts, to compare working conditions for children with those in other industries (after a visit to the coal mine at Worsley one of the Commission staff had written "as this was said to be the best mine in the place, I cannot much err in coming to the conclusion, that the hardest labour in the worst-conducted factory is less hard, less cruel,and less demoralizing than the labour in the best of coal-mines") and to comment adversely on the methods and true motives of the Ten-Hour Movement.

A Manchester physician writing in 1836 thought neither report had got it right: the Commission's report had taken too sanguine a view, and had been driven to do so by the 'extravagances' of the Report of Sadler's Committee:

The Factory Commissioners visited the factory districts at a time when the public mind had been filled with the most fearful details of the cruelty and profligacy existing in them; and on finding that many of these details were gross exaggerations and that in some mills an admirable system of physical and moral discipline had been established, they have gone to the opposite side of the question, and consequently are as much in error, on points of opinion, as many of the theoretical witnesses examined before Mr Sadler's Committee.

Ten Hour argument moves on

Once the 1833 Act was passed, the evidence taken by Sadler of practices in unregulated mills was strictly speaking irrelevant to any further factory legislation. In 1836, another Ten Hours' Bill was mooted. The Blackburn Standard - a Conservative paper published in a Lancashire milltown - declared its support (and hence implicitly a view that the Factory Commission recommendations had not gone far enough). However, the Standard did not base its support on Sadler's report and was scathing on about those whose arguments for the new Bill relied heavily on the more lurid evidence in Sadler's report:

…However true it may be that the barbarities which it so pathetically and powerfully deplores were practised some years ago in the woollen mills of Yorkshire, they are altogether unknown in the present day in the cotton mills of Lancashire, and the operative classes of society are of course not so degraded and oppressed as insinuated. We are advocates for the Ten Hours' Bill; but we are no advocates for misrepresentation, however well intentioned. We cannot admit the use of improper means for the attainment of ultimate good. We do not approve of any attempt to insure the objects of the "emancipators" by exciting the prejudices and stimulating the passions of the multitude... We have visited many of the mills in this vicinity, and have been surprised and delighted with the cleanliness and order which they exhibit, and the comparative ease and cheerfulness with which the children perform their certainly by no means laborious occupation. Still we are advocates for the Ten Hours' Bill, because we conceive that the atmosphere of a heated factory is not the best calculated for the preservation of health - that the children, mostly females, ought to have some opportunity for breathing the pure air of liberty, for acquiring habits of domestic usefulness, and for receiving religious and moral instruction.