After apprenticeship: children, work, and life course in nineteenth-century England

British industrialisation was founded on the expansion of factory textile production. This growth required large quantities of labour. Historians have generated surprisingly little detail about how this labour was mobilised and deployed. It is, however, quite well known that many of the first factory workers were women and children, and that some factories especially in the countryside made sustained use of young children workers, a substantial proportion of whom were parish apprentices. Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in parish apprenticeship has focused on the way in which poor children were disposed of by parishes and exploited by manufacturers. It is conventionally believed that parish apprenticeships were 'fictive', serving the parishes' short term goal of removing an unwanted burden but failing to bring any longer term benefits to either the child or the employer. But the study which forms the basis of this application provides evidence to demonstrate that a significant proportion of these children formed the core of the 'new' manufacturing workforce as they moved into adulthood. Factory apprentices were important because they were exposed to and acquired new ways of working; and they comprised a substantial component of the workforce of many factories for at least half a century. Many were given the opportunity to stay on at the factory where they had trained; or to use their skills in a similar enterprise, or indeed to seek employment in a different branch of manufacture. What they had learned as apprentices appears to have been valuable both for the individual child as s/he negotiated the vagaries of industrial England, and for the economy as a whole.

The question of the qualitative and quantitative significance of children in the manufacturing labour force between 1820 and 1880 is explored in this project using a sample of parish factory apprentices who were supplied to textile mills from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. It is recognised that textile manufacturing was not representative of all industry; indeed it may have been exceptional. It was certainly a dynamic sector. Yet the available evidence provides an opportunity to explore a particular group of children as they interacted with business activity. This study takes a selection of the 4000 named individuals identified from parish and business records and fifty of the firms to which they were originally apprenticed and, integrating a wide range of sources explores three themes. The first of these comprises the employment patterns of the initial cohort of factory apprentices as they became adult workers. The individuals are traced through the linkage of two or more sources drawn from business records, census returns, letters, settlement examinations and parliamentary reports, to develop a series of detailed life histories. These provide evidence of generational re-creation of labour. The longer term performance of the firms in which this cohort had been trained forms the second theme. Approximately forty per cent of the businesses selected did not endure but the remainder survived for a least a further generation. The evidence collected demonstrates both employer preference for retaining children trained in their own or a neighbouring firm, and the relationship between profitability and the proper treatment of apprentices. The third theme considers the development of central and local government strategies towards the employment of young people and their influence on regional and national labour market requirements and concludes, through close investigation of parish and parliamentary reports, that until late in the nineteenth century the employment of children remained central to Poor Law practices, to State priorities, to commercial success and to family survival.