Factory Acts

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Factory Acts were a series of laws passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom beginning in 1802, and they changed the lives of millions of working people across Britain. Before these acts, children as young as eight toiled in cotton mills for twelve or more hours a day, with no legal protection and no guaranteed education. The question this documentary sets out to answer is how a society got from that starting point to one where the same industries were governed by rules on ventilation, meal breaks, fenced machinery, and minimum ages for employment. The answer runs through decades of argument, setback, petition, and moral confrontation. It involves Tory MPs and Methodist mill owners, evangelical earls and organised millworkers who called themselves the Ten Hour Movement. And it begins not in a parliament building, but in a Manchester physician's report on an outbreak of fever at a mill in Radcliffe in 1784.

• 2. The First Acts and Their Limits

  ›

  Sir Robert Peel introduced the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802 in response to concerns raised by medical men in Manchester about the welfare of children employed in cotton mills. The act set down specific requirements: buildings had to have enough windows for ventilation, walls and ceilings had to be washed with quicklime and water at least twice yearly, and apprentices could not work between 9 pm and 6 am. Each apprentice was entitled to two complete sets of clothing per year, and their working day could not exceed twelve hours. For the first four years of an apprenticeship, children were to receive daily instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic during working hours, and every Sunday an hour of religious teaching was required. Local magistrates were to appoint two inspectors, one a clergyman and one a justice of the peace, to check compliance. The fines for owners who refused to comply ranged from two to five pounds.

  The act, however, covered only apprentices. Children who were not indentured and who worked for wages faced no legal protection at all. Enforcement depended entirely on local magistrates who could inspect only if two witnesses had already submitted sworn statements that a mill was breaking the law. In practice, the act went largely unenforced. The Cotton Mills and Factories Act 1819 extended coverage to all children, whether apprentices or not, and barred employment of those under nine while limiting children aged nine to sixteen to twelve hours per day. But by 1825, John Cam Hobhouse noted in Parliament that there had been only two prosecutions under the 1819 act. One mill-owner MP admitted openly that the act was widely evaded, while simultaneously arguing that this gave workers a dangerous weapon to ruin employers by selectively enforcing penalties. The gap between what the law said and what factories actually did would define the next three decades of reform.

• 3. The Reformers and Their Opponents

  ›

  In 1830, Richard Oastler published an open letter in the Leeds Mercury newspaper that dramatically shifted public debate. He exposed working conditions in Bradford factories and argued that local child labourers were worse off than enslaved people on distant sugar plantations. The rhetoric was inflammatory and deliberate; Oastler, a Tory and a Methodist, brought to factory reform the same evangelical intensity he applied to his opposition to slavery in all forms.

  Michael Sadler, another Tory MP, followed in 1832 with a parliamentary report that included explicit testimonies from workers describing brutal conditions for women and children. The report shocked public opinion. One historian described the angry reformers as "moral rather than analytical, passionate rather than sober, abusive rather than conciliatory." Calls were made in some quarters to imprison or flog uncooperative factory owners. Sadler's report was later criticised because the witnesses were all of his own selection and had not testified under oath, and when Ashley's Bill reproduced its recommendations in 1833, MPs raised doubts about the accuracy of the more extreme accounts.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, who would later become the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, took over parliamentary leadership of the factory reform cause after Sadler lost his Leeds seat in 1832 to Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Marshall, son of a leading local mill owner. Ashley remained in the Commons as a Tory MP until 1851. Most opposition to the acts came from factory owners who also opposed trade unions and believed in laissez-faire economics, arguing that market forces were better suited to set labour conditions than Parliament. They feared shorter hours would cut profits and reduce their competitiveness. A minority of owners backed the reforms, usually men with strong religious convictions; John Fielden, a Methodist and senior partner in one of the great cotton firms, was notably indefatigable in his support, giving his time and money and vouching from direct experience for the practical reality of long-hours harm.

• 4. The Long Fight for Ten Hours

  ›

  A network of Short Time Committees had grown up in the textile districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, pressing for a ten-hour day. Witnesses to one of these committees noted that there were few mill workers over forty and that workers themselves expected to stop mill work at that age because of what they called "the pace of the mill" unless hours were reduced. Sadler introduced a bill in 1832 that would have set a ten-hour day for anyone under eighteen across all textile industries, but Parliament was consumed by the Reform Bill and the factory bill was sent to a select committee. Sadler chaired the committee himself, heard witnesses of his own selection, then attempted on the 31st of July 1832 to advance the bill without waiting for the committee's report. Other MPs objected, and the bill was withdrawn.

  Ashley revived the push in 1833 but found the government had set up a Factory Commission to investigate conditions before committing to legislation. The commission toured textile districts, dined with leading manufacturers, and reported that while mill children did work unduly long hours, conditions were preferable to those in coal mines. A commissioner who visited the mine at Worsley wrote that "the hardest labour in the worst-conducted factory is less hard, less cruel, and less than the labour in the best of coal-mines." The commission recommended an eight-hour day for children under thirteen rather than Ashley's ten-hour limit and proposed a relay system in which two shifts of children would together cover sixteen hours of mill operation.

  The act that emerged from these deliberations, the Labour of Children Act 1833, set up the Factory Inspectorate for the first time, giving inspectors the right to enter premises, examine witnesses on oath, and act as magistrates. Children aged nine to thirteen were limited to eight hours per day with an hour's lunch break, and they could only be employed on proof of two hours daily education the previous week. A short amending act had to be passed in February 1834 because the original used the word "monthly" without specifying whether lunar or calendar months were intended. The Inspectorate had only four inspectors to cover all 4,000 factories on the island, and the education clauses were found to be totally impracticable within two years. The ten-hour goal remained out of reach.

• 5. Education, Dissent, and Graham's Failure

  ›

  Sir James Graham, Peel's Home Secretary, attempted in 1843 to tie a new round of factory legislation to a scheme for government-funded schools that would be effectively under the control of the Church of England. His bill proposed loans for a new class of factory schools where the default religious instruction would be Anglican; parents could opt their children out of specifically Anglican teaching, but the overall management structure left Dissenters without any formal representation. Parliament received 13,369 petitions against the bill as originally drafted, carrying a total of 2,069,058 signatures, a far greater response than the 4,574 petitions against the Corn Laws in the same session, which gathered 1,111,141 signatures.

  Graham amended the education clauses in response, but this triggered a fresh wave of protest: 11,839 petitions and 1,920,574 signatures followed. He then withdrew the education clauses entirely, but opposition continued because the withdrawal did not fully restore the previous legal position on factory education. The Leeds Mercury took the occasion to declare that all compulsory education was wrong and that government interference in religion was an inevitable consequence of compelling schooling. Graham abandoned the bill. His Factory Act of 1844 deliberately left educational questions aside, but succeeded in extending the twelve-hour working day protections that had applied to young persons to women of all ages. It also introduced detailed machinery guarding requirements, requiring that fly-wheels, steam engines, water-wheels, hoists, and all mill gearing near which children or women were liable to work be securely fenced. Factory owners were required to wash factories with lime every fourteen months and to keep full records available for inspector inspection.

• 6. The Ten Hour Act and the Compromise

  ›

  The Factories Act 1847 passed in the absence of government opposition after the collapse of the Peel administration. Lord John Russell's new Whig cabinet was divided on the question; Russell himself favoured an eleven-hour day, and the government had no collective position. The Ten Hour Act limited working weeks in textile mills to 63 hours from the 1st of July 1847, dropping to 58 hours from the 1st of May 1848; in practice this meant a ten-hour day for women and children under eighteen, reduced from the previous twelve hours. Lace and silk production were excluded. John Fielden, though not an orator, was indefatigable throughout this campaign, and Oastler led the push outside Parliament while Ashley led it inside.

  The victory proved incomplete. The Factory Acts of 1844 and 1847 had restricted daily hours without fixing the span of the day within which work could occur, leaving room for what campaigners called "the false relay system": split shifts that allowed mills to operate across the full permitted span while technically keeping any individual worker within the legal maximum. Courts disagreed about whether this was legal. The Court of Exchequer ruled in 1850 that the relevant section of the 1844 act was too weakly worded to prohibit it. Ashley sought a short declaratory act but found it impossible to draft without introducing new matter that would invite fresh debate. The Home Secretary Sir George Grey proposed instead to set fixed start and end times for women and young persons so tight that the permitted hours could only be worked if the day ran from 6 am to 6 pm. This increased the weekly maximum from 58 to 60 hours and became the Factory Act 1850. Ashley accepted it, advised the Short Time Committees to accept it also, and a Manchester meeting that gathered about 900 people passed motions regretting the loss of the 58-hour week, but nothing came of the protest. The Ten Hour Movement had effectively run its course.

• 7. Beyond Textiles

  ›

  For decades, opponents of factory legislation had argued that conditions in textile mills were actually better than in many other industries; coal mines, pottery works, and match factories were each more dangerous or more damaging to health. Once it became clear after 1847 that the Ten Hours Act had produced none of the predicted ruin, this logic reversed. The success of factory legislation in textiles became the argument for extending it elsewhere. Acts followed for bleaching and dyeworks, lace work, calendaring, and finishing, and in 1867 the Factories Act was extended to all establishments employing fifty or more workers.

  A separate act of 1867 applied to workshops employing fewer than fifty workers, but it was administered by local authorities without any requirement to actually enforce it, so effectiveness varied greatly from place to place. A blanket ban on Sunday working in workshops created difficulties for observant Jews in districts where local enforcement was active, and a separate act in 1871 permitted Sunday working by Jewish employees. The Factory and Workshop Act 1878 consolidated and repealed sixteen previous factory acts. The Factory and Workshop Act 1891 added two new protections: employers were barred from employing women within four weeks of childbirth, and the minimum age for child employment was raised from ten to eleven.

  Lucifer match making had been brought within factory legislation earlier because of the occupational disease known as "phossie jaw," caused by exposure to phosphorus; pottery workers faced heat exposure and lead glazes; percussion cap and cartridge making brought obvious dangers. Each industry's inclusion followed the same pattern: years of evidence gathering, parliamentary resistance, and eventual legislative change once it became politically untenable to leave workers unprotected.

• 8. Shaftesbury's Assessment

  ›

  When the Factories (Health of Women, &c.) Act 1874 came before the House of Lords, Ashley Cooper, now Lord Shaftesbury, delivered what he believed might be his last parliamentary speech on factory reform. He reviewed forty-one years of change. In 1833, only two manufacturers had actively supported his bill; in 1874, all but a handful supported the act before them. Employment in textile mills had grown from 354,684 in 1835 to 880,920 in 1871, disproving the prediction that shorter hours would shrink the industry. Accidents had fallen to half their former rate, and what he called "factory cripples" were no longer a common sight. In 1835 he had estimated that seven-tenths of factory children could not read or write; by 1874 he assessed that seven-tenths had "a tolerable, if not a sufficient, education." Police returns, he reported, showed "a decrease of 23 percent in the immorality of factory women." The various protective acts at that point covered more than two and a half million people.

  Shaftesbury recalled a promise made to him by workers during the short-time agitation: "Give us our rights, and you will never again see violence, insurrection, and disloyalty in these counties." The Cotton Famine had tested that promise severely, throwing thousands out of work and bringing what he described as misery, starvation, and death; yet, with only minor exceptions, order had held. His 1874 speech closed with a direct address to the Lords that framed the entire legislative project not as economic management but as an act of justice. The minimum age for factory work would rise to ten in 1874 and to eleven by 1891, and the Factory and Workshop Act 1878 consolidated sixteen previous acts into a single framework, carrying forward every protection that the decades of argument had won.