Muck and brass: The industrial town

Working conditionsWorking conditions
From the late eighteenth century, the notion that the workplace could be a significant contributor to the widespread ill-health of the urban poor began to be recognised. It could affect health, both through the long hours people worked and from the dangerous conditions they had to work in.
Today, at a time when health and safety at work is taken seriously, the workplace can still be dangerous. But for much of the nineteenth century, employers and places of work were subject to few regulations. Across a whole range of trades, workers were put at great risk. These dangers could be acute and immediate, such as catching limbs in complex machinery, or chronic and long-term, such as daily exposure to noxious chemicals.
For hundreds of thousands of employees, including children, real dangers in the workplace were an everyday reality. And once an individual had been left disabled and was unable to work, there were few safeguards to prevent them, and their families, from descending into destitution.
Inevitably, crowded workplaces also exposed employees to a whole range of infectious diseases, but specific trades brought with them specific threats to personal health. Sometimes these threats were only recognised retrospectively. The task of forging Britain into the nineteenth century's pre-eminent industrial nation carried with it the burden of early death for many of its workers.
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Fork grinders in a Sheffield steel manufacturers. From the Illustrated London News, 10 March 1866.
Textile mills
'Were the children often injured by the machinery?'
'Very frequently; sometimes they would get their heads broke; sometimes they would get the end of their finger or thumb taken off.'
Thomas Hodges, office manager of a Manchester mill. Evidence taken by the Factory Commission, 1833.
The thousands of men, women and children drawn to work in the textile mills of Manchester and other cities were essential components in a highly lucrative business. They were often very young - in 1833, 35 percent of mill workers in Lancashire were under 16. They were also among those most harmed by industrial diseases.
Given the long work shifts, the exhausting and monotonous nature of the work and the close physical proximity to rapidly moving heavy machinery, accidents were inevitable. Mutilation and death were familiar aspects of mill work. Frederick Engels, the son of a mill owner, noted that of all accidents treated at the Manchester Infirmary in 1843, approximately 30 percent were to injured mill workers.
Although accidents were common, lung damage was the real blight of a textile worker's life. Years of irritation by cotton dust in stifling, unventilated rooms could progress a morning cough through to bronchitis and end in pneumonia. Workers in the carding rooms - where cotton fibres were brushed open, cleaned and straightened prior to spinning - rarely reached the age of 50 without developing lung conditions that would permanently disable them.
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The 'dark satanic mills' towering over the city- industrial Manchester visualised in 1840.
The view from inside the Swainson Birley Cotton Mill near Preston, Lancashire, 1834.
Cotton workers were at the mercy of fluctuations in the textile market. In this engraving of 1862, the unemployed and their families wait their turn at a soup kitchen.
A scene from William Darton's mill in Holborn, London, c.1820. Many mill workers were children or adolescents and the presence of child labourers in industry was to become a major social issue in nineteenth-century Britain.
Mines
In the Victorian imagination, the mines were dark and terrifying places. Newspapers regularly reported disastrous explosions and flooding. As mines were often in small towns and villages, where three generations of the same family might be working the same pit, serious accidents could devastate communities.
However, the introduction of safety lamps in the first half of the nineteenth century had lessened the dangers from explosive gases, so, although the threat of violent death was always present, for the majority of mine workers health problems tended to be more long-term and chronic.
Today it seems obvious that nineteenth-century mines were unhealthy places to work, but in an age of rapid industrialisation and laissez-faire economics, there was much caution when it came to making explicit links between workplace conditions and ill-health. In his Sanitary Report, published in 1843, Edwin Chadwick acknowledged an occupation-mortality link among Durham miners, but also suggested other influences.
Their health problems were attributed to unventilated sleeping quarters or to their long walks to and from work.
In 1861 John Simon, Medical Officer to the Privy Council, reported that badly ventilated mines had poorer quality air than badly ventilated workplaces at ground level. Low oxygen levels, noxious gases, and dust and grit were contributing to a variety of serious lung problems, as well as skin diseases and eye complaints.
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The second explosion at the Oaks Colliery, Barnsley, December 1866. This was Britain's worst mining disaster of the nineteenth century, with 361 people killed in two separate underground explosions. Just 19 years earlier, 73 miners had been killed in an accident at the same pit.
Metal workers
Metal grinders and polishers, employed in the tool-making and cutlery industries concentrated in cities such as Sheffield and Birmingham, were skilled workers. Although machinery was required, the manufacturing processes also involved the use of a range of hand-held tools, with the worker creating and shaping each piece individually.
Without protection, workers in these dangerous trades were subject to quite fearsome risks. Exposed on a daily basis to an atmosphere heavy with fine particles of metal dust, they invariably developed severe respiratory complaints. These were progressive conditions. It would begin with a tightening of the chest and shortness of breath, then develop into expectorating cough.
This would worsen over time into bronchitis, before the tissues of the worker's lungs - assuming the sufferer could continue working - solidified and then ulcerated.
Other metal workers endured a double assault. File-makers not only breathed in metals from the toxic air, but also ingested them as they constantly licked their dust-covered thumbs to gain a better grip on their tools.
Gradual paralysis of the wrists and hands would follow over time, along with digestive problems and other symptoms of systemic poisoning.
A survey of 1843 noted that of 61 recently deceased fork-grinders working in Sheffield, 47 had not reached their mid-30s. Not one had lived beyond 50.
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Tools used in file-making, one of the most hazardous of nineteenth-century trades.
Workers grinding the blades of table knives. The workers had no protection from the fine metallic dust that filled the air. A scene from a factory in Sheffield from the Illustrated London News, 10 March 1866.
File-cutters at work in a factory in Sheffield. From the Illustrated London News, 10 March 1866.
Chemical trades
The commercial powerhouse that was nineteenth-century Britain rapidly developed and expanded its manufacturing industry for foreign and domestic trade. A wide range of new and traditional production processes was exploited. As a result, numerous employees across the country - whether in factories, small workshops or even working from home - were routinely exposed to dangerous chemicals.
Deadly poisons such as arsenic were used in a surprisingly high number of production processes. It was present in the production of many seemingly benign products, from lamp shades to children's toys. Contact with this chemical left workers with serious skin ailments, including cancer. As it was also used in the manufacture of certain paper products, even office clerks could show signs of arsenical poisoning from handling these poisoned materials.
Perhaps the most notorious case involving the persistent poisoning of employees involved the makers of matches. Match-making was a trade that employed thousands of people - particularly women and children - and it involved daily exposure to white phosphorous, a highly toxic chemical.
White phosphorous had been banned in several other countries, but not in Britain. So, over decades, numerous match-makers suffered a condition known as 'phossy jaw' - necrosis of the jawbone. It began with toothache and painful swelling of the gums and jaw. Abscesses formed, accompanied by a foul discharge as the victims' jawbones literally rotted away.
The only treatment was for the remaining jawbone to be removed surgically, leaving survivors terribly disfigured. Despite a growing awareness of the dangers, the use of white phosphorous continued. A famous strike by the factory girls at Bryant & May's London match-making works in 1888 - championed by Annie Besant, a campaigner for better working conditions for women - drew public attention to the problem, but it was not until 1910 that the chemical was finally banned.
Images with this text:
'The Quest for Instantaneous Fire' - inside an English match factory in 1870. In these apparently benign scenes, workers are routinely being exposed to harmful chemicals.
Workers on strike at Bryant & May's London match factory, 1888.
Annie Besant (1847-1933), a leading campaigner on a range of social issues, photographed c.1895.