Reading about this on Wikipedia, and it says that the law prohibited children under 9 from working in factories–except in silk mills. Why would there have been an exception for that one industry?
WAG silk mill owners had enough clout with TPTB to get the exception made.
According to this…
Children as young as seven years old could be found working fourteen hours a day in the region’s mills. Being small and nimble, they were given dangerous jobs such as climbing underneath moving machinery to remove any cotton pieces that had fallen below - this role was called being a ‘scavenger’.
Reminder, this is Factual Questions, not WAG-city.
But why would that be seen as a problem in a cotton mill, but not a silk mill?
That doesn’t explain why the Silk industry got the exception. What you posted is true for most mills and specific to cotton in this case which did not get the exception.
I have to find the cite for it, but the silk industry convinced the powers that be that the silk industry in the UK could not continue without tiny hands to tie the knots whenever the silk threads broke is what I recall. Maybe someone else can find the cite?
The record of debate on this issue here FACTORIES. (Hansard, 1 July 1839) explains:
It should not be forgotten that employment in the silk mills was not as unhealthy as that in cotton mills. The temperature was much lower, but still, from what had been stated by the inspector, he was not inclined to oppose their being included in the present bill, so far as respected hours, but not as regarded age; for he thought there were good grounds for believing that children of nine years of age might be allowed to work in silk mills without any disadvantage to them.
Thanks.
And yet some in that debate point out that the work was fine and performed by gaslight, which damaged the children’s eyesight so badly that they couldn’t read their bibles. Seems like not everyone engaged in that debate agreed about the safety of silk mills for children.
The importation of silk-based textiles was prohibited by Henry IV, and made into a perpetual edict by Henry VIII, so silk was even more at a premium in Britain and the country was desperate to have a viable domestic industry, even trying (with futility) to cultivate silkworms. Most silk mill workers and owners were expatriate French Huguenots who had considerable wealth, and thus significant political power in Regency Era Britain. I can’t speak to how they specifically got an exception to the 1833 Factory Act but @Joey_P’s WAG—as inappropriate as it may be for Factual Questions—is likely correct.
I don’t have any readily available online references but the silk industry in Great Britain has been written about extensively in histories of the early Industrial Period because even though it was a comparatively small part of the textile industry it was a showpiece of how Britain could be successful in any field of endeavor (in addition to regicide and the global narcotics trade, of course). Here is a common reference but I don’t have time to go through and cite specific pages.
Stranger
Your regular reminder that “England” was not the area covered by this act, but the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, an area more than twice the size of England.
Late medieval English law does not apply in Scotland (I also think it would not have applied in Ireland). As you can infer from Smuggling Silks into Eighteenth-Century Britain: Geography, Perpetrators, and Consumers | Journal of British Studies | Cambridge Core those laws would have needed replacing once Great Britain/the UK became a single nation state.
No, they just pass additional laws covering Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scottish law has always been separate from the law of England and Wales, even when passed by the same parliament.
Are you serious? Do you think that when people in Scotland start a new job and attend training on the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the organisers are making a mistake by talking about a law which doesn’t apply in Scotland?
The Factory Act 1833 applied to the whole of Great Britain and the whole of Ireland. You don’t know what you’re taking about.
Sorry, replied to wrong post. I was agreeing with you - that English and Welsh law had been separate from Scottish law, not that later legislation didn’t apply to both.
Ok, I’m still not sure what you meant, but sorry.