Sadler report
The Sadler Report, also known as the Report of the Select Committee on Factory Children's Labour or "the report of Mr Sadler's Committee," was a report written in 1832 by Michael Sadler, the chairman of a UK parliamentary committee considering a bill that limited the hours of work of children in textile mills and factories. In committee hearings carried out between the passage of the Reform Act 1832 and Parliament's subsequent dissolution, Sadler had elicited testimony from factory workers, concerned medical men, and other bystanders. The report highlighted the poor working conditions and excessive working hours for children working in the factories. Time prevented balancing or contrary evidence from being called before Parliament was dissolved.
The committee report was published early in 1833. A mid-20th-century historian described it as "a mass of evidence, constituting a most formidable indictment of factory conditions... It is impossible not to be staggered by the revelations of human misery and degradation – impossible not to be moved by the dreadful stories of children and young persons who were bullied and cursed and tormented, pushed around and knocked about by those placed in authority over them." There was widespread public outcry at the conditions depicted by the testimony heard. Parliament declined to legislate on the basis 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. Instead, Parliament voted for a fresh inquiry through a Factory Commission, which visited the principal manufacturing districts and took evidence on oath.
The report of the commission did not set out to directly refute testimony presented by Sadler, but it reached conclusions at variance with Sadler's report on many points. However, it concluded that children were working excessively long hours and government intervention to regulate child labour in textile trades was therefore called for. This required both restrictions on hours of work and a new organization for enforcing them. The consequent Factory Act 1833 and its establishment of the UK Factory Inspectorate is often taken to mark the start of modern factory legislation in the UK. The report of Sadler's Committee therefore indirectly led to an important advance in factory legislation.
History
On 16 March 1832 Sadler proposed the Second Reading of a Bill to limit the workday for textile workers under the age of 18 to ten hours. 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.
Sadler attempted 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 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 overwork, 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 22 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 ; when trade was brisk work had started an hour earlier and finished an hour later. He had lived about 2 miles from the mill:
| Question | Answer |
| During those long hours of labour could you be punctual; how did you awake? | I seldom did awake spontaneously; I was most generally awoke or lifted out of bed, sometimes asleep, by my parents |
| Were you always in time? | No |
| What was the consequence if you had been too late? | I was most commonly beaten |
| Severely? | Very severely, I thought |
| In those mills is chastisement towards the latter part of the day going on perpetually? | Perpetually |
| So that you can hardly be in a mill without hearing constant crying? | Never an hour, I believe |
| Do you think that if the overlooker were naturally a humane person it would still be found necessary for him to beat the children, in order to keep up their attention and vigilance at the termination of those extraordinary days of labour? | Yes; the machine turns off a regular quantity of cardings, and of course, they must keep as regularly to their work the whole of the day; they must keep with the machine, and therefore however humane the slubber may be, as he must keep up with the machine or be found fault with, he spurs the children to keep up also by various means but that which he commonly resorts to is to strap them when they become drowsy |
| At the time when you were beaten for not keeping up with your work, were you anxious to have done it if you possibly could? | Yes; the dread of being beaten if we could not keep up with our work was a sufficient impulse to keep us to it if we could |
| When you got home at night after this labour, did you feel much fatigued? | Very much so |
| Had you any time to be with your parents, and to receive instruction from them? | No. |
| What did you do? | All that we did when we got home was to get the little bit of supper that was provided for us and go to bed immediately. If the supper had not been ready directly, we should have gone to sleep while it was preparing; which took its toll the morning after. |
| Did you not, as a child, feel it a very grievous hardship to be roused so soon in the morning? | I did. |
| Were the rest of the children similarly circumstanced? | Yes, all of them; but they were not all of them so far from their work as I was. |
| And if you had been too late you were under the apprehension of being cruelly beaten? | I generally was beaten when I happened to be too late; and when I got up in the morning the apprehension of that was so great, that I used to run, and cry all the way as I went to 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.
| Question | Answer |
| Were there any extra hours to those children at that time? | At that time they had not begun extra hours. |
| Then it is presumed there was no beating or chastising? | Not at that time, because Mr. Gott kept what is called a billy set of children: that is, three children more than was wanted: and if any one was ill, another was put in its place |
| The children were rarely chastised? | By order of Mr. Gott they were only chastised with a ferule if they would not obey, but no man was allowed by Mr. Gott to do more than use that: but he did not know the extent to which they carried even that sometimes |
| Did you think it did any harm to your children's health putting her in this mill? | No, I do not think it did her any harm, because when the child had been a few hours at the billy set she went out to play |
Gott's had then started working longer hours.
| Question | Answer |
| Did you not send another child to the factory after the extra hours had begun? | Yes |
| Did you not think that would be injurious to its health? | I did not perceive any injury that had taken place at that time; and besides the relief, children were still kept on at that time to assist the weaker children: the extra hours were performed at that time by the extra hands at their leisure, and the weaker children left the employment at the usual time |
| Did the strong children at the same time work the extra hours and the usual hours too? | Yes |
| And it did not hurt them? | No |
| Is there anything in the way in which the mills are conducted that makes it worse at the present time than it was then? | That extra set of children has been for some years done away with entirely |
One other point about Gott's emerged during questioning about other mills: "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."