Chapter L: Women’s Labour in Aerated Water Works

In the year 1896 the Dangerous Trades Committee appointed by the Home Office reported on the manufacture and bottling of aerated waters. As a result of this report this industry was scheduled as a dangerous trade, and Special Rules were imposed. The danger--for minimising which regulations have been framed--in this manufacture is not, as is the case with the majority of those to which Special Rules are applied, a danger to health, but to life and limb. The danger is the risk of cuts, more or less severe, from the glass fragments of bursting bottles filled under pressure. The number of such accidents is enormous, inflicting every degree of injury from a skin graze to a cut artery, or the loss of an eye. The number of accidents reportable to the Home Office has been greatly reduced by the wearing of faceguards and gauntlets prescribed by the Special Rules, but it is still very large. Four classes of workers are specially mentioned in the Special Rules as requiring protection by wearing guards--these are bottlers, wirers, sighters, and labellers. The first of these four are exposed to most danger; the bottles frequently burst while in the machine, or more often while being removed from it, but if suitable faceguards and gauntlets are worn no serious injury results. Unless the bottling machines are, in accordance with the Special Rules, carefully fenced off, the danger is very great to all persons in the room; the broken glass, sent by the explosion with enormous force to a considerable distance, has been known to rebound with terrible effect from an object struck in its course, and to hit persons who seemed quite safe. Women and girls are largely employed as bottlers in London, Birmingham, and a few other large towns, but elsewhere this work is done almost exclusively by men; boys are generally employed outside London and Birmingham as wirers, sighters, and labellers, in place of girls. Wiring has disappeared from most aerated water works, the patent stoppers having taken the place of corks in all but a few kinds of aerated waters. Sighters, those who examine the filled bottles to detect specks by holding them up to the light, wirers (where these are employed), and labellers, are the classes of workers who most frequently discard the prescribed guards, or wear them under protest as interfering with their work. The sighters complain that the wire mesh of masks or goggles prevents their seeing the specks in the water; wirers and labellers find that the knitted woollen mittens, which are the kind of gauntlet commonly supplied, impede the movements of the hands; in the one case the handles of the pliers used to twist the wire catch in the worsted, and in the other the mitten becomes stiff and hard with the paste with which the labels are smeared. A satisfactory gauntlet has yet to be invented; the conditions required are that they should be of a material impenetrable to flying glass, soft and pliable, close-fitting, of a size and shape to keep in place over the palm of the hand and up above the elbow; these have not yet been found combined. Objection on the part of the women and girls to wearing faceguards is only met with where the guard supplied to them is unsuitable. The faceguards for girls should be of a smaller size and lighter make than those for men, sufficiently bowed out not to press upon the nose, and long enough to cover the whole chin, throat, and neck; they must be clean, and must be provided with buckle and strap, or some other means of keeping them firmly in position on the head. A mask that presses against the face, or weighs heavily on the head, or shifts from side to side with every movement, or of which the wire mesh is clogged with rust and dirt, is sure to be thrown aside whenever supervision is relaxed.

Another class of workers employed in aerated water factories who are mentioned in the Special Rules as needing to be protected from the danger of bursting bottles are the washers. These women, although handling the empty, not the filled bottles, generally work in the bottling rooms, and unless the bottling machines are well guarded, do meet occasionally with serious accidents, such as the loss of an eye, or an arm cut open. But this is a risk quite apart from the nature of their employment, to which it is most unreasonable that washers should be exposed. A far more serious risk, a risk to health, is incidental to their work; it is that of being constantly wet. No special rules are imposed to protect them from such injury to health arising from their employment, as is the case in wet spinning factories, where women are exposed by their occupation to being constantly wetted. In wet spinning factories the occupier must, unless splashboards are provided, supply to all the workers waterproof overalls or aprons, and floors must be kept in a sound condition, so as to prevent retention or accumulation of water. The bottle-washers stand in great need of protection of the kind specified in these rules. They stand at large tanks full of water, in which the bottles, returned empty by customers, are washed before being refilled for sale. From the point of view of the public health, the history of the water used for this purpose would be of interest--its source, the frequency with which it is changed, and the steps taken to cleanse the tanks. The appearance of the water in the tanks is not, as a rule, attractive, and the notices to washers to reject bottles smelling of paraffin suggest strange uses to which the bottles may be put by customers before they are returned empty. But it is the wetness and coldness of the water, and not its purity or impurity, which affect the washer. Bending over the tank to lower into it or raise from it the bottles being washed, she is very early in the day wet to the skin; the water splashes up from the tank and drips from the wet bottles, and it is no wonder that the usual description given by the washers of their condition is, “We are sopped through to the skin soon after we begin in the morning until we get home at night.” As a consequence, rheumatism, colds, coughs, aches and pains, are the bottle-washers’ constant complaints, and not infrequently one and another of them is laid up for some weeks with more serious results of their wet condition. The wearing of a waterproof apron seems such a simple means of protecting the clothing from getting wet that it is surprising how seldom it is adopted, but such aprons are too expensive for the washers to provide for themselves, and in the few cases where the occupier has supplied them, a small sum has been deducted weekly from the wearer’s wages until the article has been paid for. Usually the only kind of protection is a number of old sacks tied on as an apron; these are better than nothing, but they soon get saturated. In the larger aerated water works the bottle-washing tanks are fitted with automatic means of lowering the bottles into the water and raising them again, and with revolving brushes to cleanse the inside. This labour-saving apparatus also reduces the amount of wetting to which the washer is exposed, and if a splash-board is fitted to the tank, as has been done in a few cases, the women need scarcely get wet at all. Where there is no mechanical contrivance to aid the washer, a splash-board is impracticable, as she must bend low over the tank to reach deep down into it. Grids and boards to stand upon are usually provided, but even where the women have these to stand upon it is of importance that the floor should be properly paved and drained, and kept in good condition. Where this is not done the feet are constantly wet in moving backwards and forwards across the pools of water standing in the broken, uneven floor. Clogs should always be worn in aerated water works, and are in most large factories provided by the employers at the expense of the workers, who pay 3d. or 4d. a week towards them. It would be well if occupiers were to supply all such necessary articles as part of the equipment of the works.

ROSE E. SQUIRE.