VII - Child Employment

Summary

The development of elementary education was always closely linked with child employment. This was especially so when there was work that children could do from a very early age. The Langford School log book contains the following entry for 4 November 1872: ‘Jane Dines aged 5 and Hannah Dines aged 4 are withdrawn from school because in the words of their mother, “It is time they were earning something at plait.” ‘ There was no school attendance law that could do anything about such a situation. It should be remembered that the 1870 Education Act only empowered the passing of bye-laws for attendance in those districts which had school boards and Langford School Board had not yet been formed. For those areas where there were not school boards, attendance bye-laws did not become possible until after the 1876 Education Act, while bye-laws compelling attendance did not become mandatory until after the 1880 Education Act.

The first hesitant steps towards enforcing school attendance came through factory legislation which controlled the hours children were allowed to work and which imposed educational requirements that had to be met before they could begin work in the first place. The drawback as far as Bedfordshire was concerned was that the early child employment acts covered a restricted range of occupations, none of which was practised in the county.

Bedfordshire’s cottage industries were first scrutinised in the early 1840s but nothing was done. A further commission looked at pillow lace and straw-plaiting and similar industries in the 1860s, and although there was no specific act passed to cover them directly, they were brought under the provisions of the Factory and Workshop Act of 1867. It was one thing, however, to pass an act, it was another to make it effective. It was at first left to local authorities to administer the workshops side of the Act, and this was a failure; so, in 1871 it was changed and the factory inspectors took on the responsibility. Alexander Redgrave had overall responsibility for Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and he had James Wood as his sub-inspector, with R. Macleod as junior sub-inspector. These names, or just the term factory inspector, begin to appear in the school log books of the area from 1872 onwards.