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Many parents were unwilling to allow their children to work in these new textile factories. To overcome this labour shortage factory owners had to find other ways of obtaining workers. One solution to the problem was to obtain children from orphanages and workhouses. These children became known as pauper apprentices. This involved them signing contracts that virtually made them the property of the factory owner.

One of the first factory owners to employ this system was Samuel Greg who owned the large Quarry Bank Mill at Styal. Greg had difficulty finding enough people to work for him. Manchester was eleven miles away and local villages were very small. Imported workers needed cottages, and these cost about £100 each.

By 1790 Greg became convinced that the best solution to his labour problem was to build an Apprentice House and to purchase children from workhouses. The building for the apprentices cost £300 and provided living accommodation for over 90 children. At first the children came from local parishes such as Wilmslow and Macclesfield, but later he went as far as Liverpool and London to find these young workers. To encourage factory owners to take workhouse children, people like Greg were paid between £2 and £4 for each child they employed. Greg also demanded that the children were sent to him with "two shifts, two pairs of stockings and two aprons.

The 90 children (60 girls and 30 boys) at Styal made up 50% of the total workforce. The children received their board and lodging, and two pence a week. The younger children worked as scavengers and piecers, but after a couple of years at Styal they were allowed to become involved in spinning and carding. Some of the more older boys became skilled mechanics.

The Apprentice House at Styal

 

Child Labour Debate Activity (International School of Toulouse)

Child Labour Simulation (Spartacus Educational)

 

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(1) John Birley was interviewed by The Ashton Chronicle on 19th May, 1849.

We then worked till nine or ten at night when the water-wheel stopped. We stopped working, and went to the apprentice house, about three hundred yards from the mill. It was a large stone house, surrounded by a wall, two to three yards high, with one door, which was kept locked. It was capable of lodging about one hundred and fifty apprentices. Supper was the same as breakfast - onion porridge and dry oatcake. We all ate in the same room and all went up a common staircase to our bed-chamber; all the boys slept in one chamber, all the girls in another. We slept three in one bed. The girls' bedroom was of the same sort as ours. There were no fastenings to the two rooms; and no one to watch over us in the night, or to see what we did.

 

(2) In his book, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe John Brown recounts Blincoe's first experience of the factory apprentice house.

The room in which Blincoe and several of the boys were deposited, was up two pair of stairs. The bed places were a sort of cribs, built in a double tier all round the chamber. The apprentices slept two in a bed. The governor called the strangers to him and allocated to each his bed-place and bed-fellow, not allowing any two of the newly arrived inmates to sleep together. The boy whom Blincoe was to chum, sprang nimbly into his birth, and without saying a prayer, or anything else, fell asleep before Blincoe could undress himself. When he crept into bed, the stench of the oily clothes and greasy hide of his sleepy comrade, almost turned his stomach.

 

 

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