Chapter II

THE WOMEN WORKERS AND THEIR APPEAL; EXCESSIVE HOURS, INSANITATION, AND
OTHER UNCIVILISED CONDITIONS

“‘It’s gey handy to have the likes o’ you,’ a Scottish mother said
when consulting Miss Vines on the effects of employment on her
daughter’s health.”[9]

The outstanding characteristics of the working women of our country that immediately appealed to the Women Factory Inspectors were their courage and their endurance, their ready trustfulness, and their loyalty. Instances of timidity, or fear of losing employment—hard to get and easily lost—by evidence necessary to establish infringements of the law, these did but throw up, in high relief, the dominating traits of the majority. The exceptions were only natural in the days of severe competition for poorly paid work, especially before the organisation in 1898 of the Industrial Law Indemnity Fund[10] for aiding workers dismissed by employers after giving evidence that led to proof of breaches of industrial laws.

A few months after my appointment to the Factory Department I went into a factory just as a girl of fourteen years had been carried to the local infirmary suffering from a compound fracture of her leg and other injuries. “She had been at work at a card[11] for several weeks and was esteemed as a careful, clever, and good worker. In the endeavour to keep her card in good order by steady cleaning, her skirt had been caught in the driving band and the mischief was done.... She had kept perfectly clear and conscious, and had been chiefly concerned that no one should alarm her mother, who was ill at home.”[12] The managing foreman was much moved as he told me of this Lancashire girl’s serenity and unselfishness under the sudden shock and suffering. Instances as strong and stronger could be given by any Inspector of the way that a high and fine spirit predominates when accidents and casualties occur in a factory. Other examples in 1913, eighteen years later, may be compared with that one. “Of a girl partially scalped,” Miss Martindale says: “Her pluck and bravery were noteworthy; in fact, the qualities show themselves in a remarkable degree in working girls when they meet a severe physical shock;” of another, whose hand had to be amputated after vain attempts to save it, she says that the girl mastered her disappointment, and in two or three days after the operation began to practise writing with her left hand, and in a month had become almost as proficient as with the right. Or again, Miss Tracey says of fifteen cases of serious lead poisoning among women employed in a workshop, where they were “heading” yarn (dyed with a chromate of lead dye), “I visited these workers at their homes and found them in different stages of illness and convalescence. Their pluck will always remain fixed in my mind; although many of them were unable to put into words the suffering they had gone through, yet not one of them but was eagerly wishing to be well enough to go back to work.”[13]

This is a spirit that is one with that we saw in the innumerable “substitute” women and munition workers in the War. And before that movement had well begun, an American employer in London had said in my hearing that British women’s labour was the “best in the world,” versatile, patient, and uncomplaining.

What were the characteristic features in the earlier days that the Inspectors saw—drilling and testing the women? _First_, a mute sense of industrial inferiority, outside the great textile industries, though even of them a “mill girl” could write: “Mill girls need a sensible and educated woman to further their cause.... How many of our women are there that have to spend most of their lives in unhealthy, badly ventilated and unsanitary mills, and must go on and tolerate the condition of things silently, not daring to complain, and even if they have courage they shrink from telling a man. A Woman Inspector would often see irregularities without being told. Her own instinct would enlighten her: I think that is one thing in her favour.... In cases where the law had no power to enforce alterations, frequently the Woman Inspector has by gentle arguments and reasoning caused the employer to see that it was to his own advantage as well as the workers’ comfort to effectuate the improvement.”[14] _Secondly_, an absence in the great majority of factories of any woman in a position of authority. _Thirdly_, in spite of protective laws, a working day and week in which the standard hours worked by women frequently exceeded those for which men, in certain great trades, had by means of trade unions secured recognition from employers. _Fourthly_, a frequent lack of suitable or even decent and sufficient sanitary accommodation, of cleanliness of a domestic nature, and of other hygienic requirements, sometimes injuriously affecting conduct and morals. _Fifthly_, not only low average and individual wages, but on the part of pieceworkers an intolerable uncertainty as to what their rates really were; and, for all, a liability to arbitrary deductions for fines and alleged damages to work, which often brought earnings below subsistence level.

These are all evils that specially and peculiarly weighed upon women, in a haphazardly evolved factory system over which they had absolutely no control. They shared with their fellow-men other frequent, though certainly not universal, ills: excessive heat in active, and cold in sedentary, occupations; exposure to inadequately controlled dust, steam, fumes; badly drained or damp floors; handling of dangerous or injurious materials; often poor and sometimes very bad general ventilation; lack of washing conveniences, and means of preparing and taking meals. The great matters in which men’s risks far exceeded women’s lay in injury by accidents from dangerous machinery, explosion, and other causes, and these remain still the largest risks to be reduced by guidance of a thoroughly skilled Inspectorate, combined with safety control through workers and employers.

A single illustration may bring home the roughness and irresponsibility of supervision of girl workers, sometimes associated in the nineties with all the hardness of factory life. The circumstances were in some features exceptional, but by no means solitary, in roughness and even barbarity, as will appear in later pages of this book. It was found, on investigation of a complaint from an onlooker, that in a large textile factory an incompetent managing foreman had, nominally as a means of discipline, turned a great fire-hose on to a large group of young tenters and weavers. The water, drawn from the mill pond and filthy, was directed over a partition upon them while they were jammed in a narrow vestibule in which they took refuge. The girls (of whom forty were examined by the Inspector) were then turned out on a cold March day, dripping, to walk in some cases several miles to their homes. The whole matter was outside the Acts and nothing could be done by the Factory Department beyond visiting the head office of the mills and drawing attention to the circumstances.[15] A reprimand to the foreman and his apology was so far satisfactory, but many years passed by before the idea of supervision by a woman was considered in textile mills at all. It required the shock of the Great War to secure provision in a broader way, as through the Act of 1916, which first brought welfare supervision and conditions of welfare within administrative control.

The great majority of the earlier complaints related, year after year, to hours of work and sanitary matters; the former predominated, especially in the London area, and until the year 1912 complaints of legal and illegal overtime led in numbers. Complaints relating to uncertain wages under the Truck Acts and lack of piece-rate particulars steadily mounted, but this distinct subject merits a separate chapter, as do also the employment of mothers and dangerous trades. The totals of all kinds of recorded written complaints (in addition to many verbal that we received annually) rose from 381 in 1896, to 729 five years later, and to 2,025 in a further ten years. Confidence grew steadily and rapidly, until in 1919 a woman organiser could say that women working in factories of every kind of industry, in the north as in the south, strongly and “passionately” call for visits of Lady Inspectors.

Long hours of work, then, at the outset of our career were the greatest trial for working women—with home duties claiming much of their strength in most instances. The ordinary working day generally took what the Factory Acts allowed, and in the main still allow, although for at least the past ten years hours of employment have fallen to reasonable limits, not through amendment of the law, but through movement of public opinion, growing strength of women’s organisation, and commonsense of many employers. In textile factories for young persons and women these hours were, from Monday to Friday, ten, and on Saturday six and a half. In non-textile factories the hours might be respectively ten and a half, and seven and a half on Saturday.[16] A spell of work in textile factories could not exceed four and a half hours, and in non-textile factories five hours, without at least half an hour for a meal. In the latter case firms often found it convenient to work two five-hour spells with a break at midday of one hour, and on Saturday an unbroken spell of five hours. The heavy burden of labour on this basis was a perennial source of complaint from women and girls for which there was no remedy in the Factory Acts, and was a cause of anxiety and regret to the Women Inspectors, until the pressure of wartime production proved its ineffectiveness for increasing output.

We must also bear in mind that the legal hours in unorganised industries were frequently and widely exceeded.

A liberal allowance was made in the Acts for overtime in many non- textile industries and processes.[17] In such cases overtime could, if notified to the Inspector, be used on forty-eight occasions in the year (reduced in 1901 to thirty occasions) for an additional two hours. This applied, until amended by the Act of 1895, to young persons as well as women. From 1896 onwards, the scandalous length of a fourteen-hours’ day on forty-eight days in the year no longer legally overtaxed young workers of fourteen years and upwards.[18] Elasticity in the law for the causes allowed appeared reasonable at first sight, but what was authorised as an exception became under stress of competition a principle, and one has sympathy with the young woman who said, with a chorus of approval from her fellow-workers, to the first Woman Inspector, “The overtime exception just spoils the Factory Act!” Equally readily did a fellow-feeling rise for the workgirl who asked, “What sort of half-holiday it was that began at four o’clock in the afternoon?” In _illegal_ overtime the bad habit was continued for years, and many raids and devices were necessary to overcome it. Dual employment of women in a combined retail shop and workshop was for long a source of excessive hours. Thus, when they had finished the legal day in the workshop, they might have to serve in the shop until late at night. This dual employment was not limited to the normal daily period lawful in a workshop for women until after the passing of the Act of 1901. Inspectors had to watch overstrain of this kind helplessly for years— where they could not move an employer to see the harm it was doing. The case of the little thirteen and fourteen-year-old “matchers” in dressmaking establishments had to wait for effectual remedy from another source.

A complaint we received in 1903 brought to light extreme, but by no means unprecedented, overstrain of a little girl of fourteen, legally a young person. She “was engaged to clean and sweep the workrooms, run errands, match ribbon and silks at shops, and generally do work required of young apprentices in the trade; in addition, however, she cooked the occupiers’ meals, including supper; did the work of the house; arriving at the workshop first in the morning to light fires and ‘tidy up,’ she did not leave till 11 p.m., and appeared utterly worn out.”[19]

In the early years the impetus of our endeavours to repress excessive hours was, at times, almost checked by a possible consequence. Portable articles of manufacture could easily be, and often were, sent home with the worker at the close of the legal day, and all the more easily in trades and quarters where there was legal and legitimate “outwork” by non-factory workers. This evil grew to considerable proportions, until the law was strengthened so as to make this evasion more difficult. It was really rooted in starvation wages, and eventually the advent of Trade Boards removed most of the incentive to this insidious mode of “sweating.”[20] It was often extremely difficult for the wage earner on a narrow margin to risk losing an immediate addition to her wage (even if earned by excessively long hours), through co-operating with the Inspector by giving evidence as to long hours at home. This co-operation was essential, as the Inspector’s entry into the home did not rest on the same powers as entry into the factory. Yet many successful prosecutions were taken in serious cases. For example, in 1911, a girl of fifteen, working for a feather manufacturer, after working 8.30 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the workshop, took work home, and worked 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.; or a girl knotted “lancer” feathers, taken home, from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., and from 5 a.m. next morning until she went for her day in the factory.[21] Here and in many other places the girl was compelled to do extra work in order to earn enough to live.

In certain processes (making preserves from fruit, preserving or curing fish, making condensed milk) overtime was legal to the extent of a fourteen-hours’ day on no less than ninety-six days in the year, until the Act of 1895 reduced the figure to sixty days. The “gutting, salting, and packing of fish immediately on arrival in the fishing-boats” was altogether outside regulation by the Acts, whether for hours or sanitation—for all workers, not excepting children. By the Act of 1901 children received the protection of the Acts as regards hours of employment in this industry as in others. In 1910 at Lowestoft some women attempted a revolt against late night hours, but without success. Again, at Grimsby in 1911, a group of very young women struck against hours that were usually sixteen in the twenty-four. They were obliged to return to work, as the employer, who also employed them at other stations on the East Coast, pointed out that they had broken their contract and could claim neither wages nor return fares to their homes. At length, when a record catch of herring at Yarmouth had brought the workers’ endurance to an end, a limit of daily and weekly hours was negotiated by the Factory Inspectors and voluntarily agreed to by the leading fish-curers. This has, since 1913, lessened the trials of the hardy fish-curing girls and men. The hours, unlimited during the summer months—June to September, of workers engaged in the “process of cleaning and preparing fruit, so far as necessary to prevent the spoiling of the fruit,” have also been brought within a certain degree of legal control by an Order of the Secretary of State.[22]

Regulation of hours in laundries followed a tangled course too long to be told fully here. There was, in 1895, within and without that trade, great opposition to any control whatsoever on account of the special character of the work and its relation to the community, only half- developed as it was from domestic to factory status, and closely dependent on conservative household arrangements. This led to a loose and ineffective form of limitation of hours in the Act of 1895. The elasticity of the governing section immediately appeared to give sanction to the late hours and long days of work, “hitherto regarded as unnecessary evils tolerated in an unregulated industry.... The fourteen- hours’ day met with outbursts of indignation from women, who would ‘like to see how men would stand fourteen-hours of this work in heat and steam.’”[23] Packers and sorters alone benefited by a net reduction in a weekly total of hours that had for them often exceeded seventy hours. Sixty hours became the normal legal period, augmented, however, in seasons of pressure by permissible overtime to sixty-six hours. And these hours might be compressed into five instead of six days in the week, and could even extend, on a single day, from 8 a.m. to 11.30 p.m. The amending and consolidating Act of 1901 made no improvement in these hours, but in 1903 I was able to give the first account of a new and hopeful feature, in the “steady growth of a strong section of employers who have set their minds on inaugurating a more rational system of employment in conformity with ordinary factory hours.”[24] This alone, the employers claimed, in views ably expressed in a new periodical, _The Power Laundry_, would raise the standards of work and workers. Very considerable improvement followed from the Act of 1907. Thus, in laundries, as in textile factories a hundred years earlier, the first determined efforts towards reform sprang from an enlightened section of employers—in this instance, however, encouraged by the Inspectors. In 1899 and 1900 they gave much time to discussing these problems with directors at the head offices of multiple laundries, run by companies. Efficient management has no doubt found that it could in course of time compete successfully on shorter hours with less efficient management working the full legal hours. There has been high social value in the experiments in hygiene and welfare made by leaders in industry fitted by their position to secure an effective trial—in the interests not only of the worker, but also of the whole community.

Without more study of details, so much may suffice to indicate the public outlook in past days, as expressed in the law so hard to amend, on the working capacity of human beings in manufacturing industry; and it may serve to measure the change that has come about in ideas and habits in these matters.

The movement within industry itself has almost sufficed to bring the whole problem of hours out of the region of compulsory regulation into that of a reasonable, voluntary control that ought to be the natural birthright of workers in a factory system possessing unlimited capacity for large-scale production by applied power. Christian, after much suffering with his friend Hopeful in the dungeon of Giant Despair, remembered the key in his bosom that “could open any lock in Doubting Castle.” And so they came out to “The King’s Highway” and fared on to the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, whose names were “Knowledge, Experience, Watchful and Sincere.”

While the illusory belief in a need for exceedingly long hours lasted, it bore most severely on the weakest manual workers—women and girls. Although the best hours for any kind of industry can only be reached by skilled scientific study, the rough-and-ready, if slow, method of amendment by complaint has had effect. After the Acts of 1891 and 1895 had increased the means of control of illegal overtime, and when an increased Inspectorate came into activity, the first step was to enforce the legal limits. Nowhere can a more vivid account be read of the immense evil of excessive illegal employment, and of the protean forms of evasion of law, with connivance of intimidated “sweated” workers, than in the pages by Mr. Lakeman, in the Annual Reports of 1893 and 1894—published at the very time that the tide of complaints began to flow to Women Inspectors. They also said much to substantiate Mr. Lakeman’s contentions that “overtime is an evil, socially, morally, commercially,” weighing upon “a vast aggregation of people slavishly earning a poor living from hard taskmasters,” particularly in the East End tailoring trade, where one sweating employer oppressed another below him, and the worker at the lowest end of the scale was utterly helpless. The Women Inspectors were the first to be free of a certain handicap in dealing with the evasion and obstruction that led to concealment of girl and women workers in lavatories and bedrooms, and they were the first to be able to unravel tangled threads of evidence by confidential visits to the women’s own homes. Even in a very extreme case of evasion by locking of outer gates and darkly shaded windows, a Woman Inspector has been known to enter the premises before closing time and wait in a dark corner of the yard, in order to arrive in the workrooms at a suitable moment for a complete personal observation of the extent of overtime.

So marked was the gain in detection of hidden evils that a proposal was made in 1895 by some Members of Parliament to bring bedrooms in the same building with a workshop, used by women or girls, within the scope of the Factory Acts, and to give the Woman Inspector special power of entry and inspection. Fortunately, however, the proposal was not accepted, and peculiar power was not allotted to the Woman Inspector. She was able by quick observation and action, and use of the Inspectors’ ordinary powers of entry and investigation, to achieve what was needful in such cases of concealment; exceptional powers would have been fatal to that intangible, yet potent, personal influence of an Inspector, which rests largely on having no more distinction from the ordinary citizen than is just necessary to effect the work required. Inspectors have always been able to investigate matters not strictly breaches of the law and yet needing regulation. In tentatively sending a complaint of such matters, the Secretary[25] of the Women’s Industrial Council once wrote: “I know how very much can be done by the tact and personal influence of an Inspector, and even if the Inspector effects no change, her visit does afford the workers a sense of protection which is very soothing when they are feeling aggrieved.”

In manifold ways similar testimony was afforded by communications from officers of the Women’s Trade Union League, the Legal Advice Bureau for Working Women, the Industrial Law Committee, and, above all, by the late Miss Mary MacArthur.

As the work grew in publicity through press reports of prosecutions, confiding supporters sprang up in many unexpected directions. They appeared among customers of dressmaking businesses, clergy and district visitors, club leaders, schoolmistresses of half-time child workers, doctors, and many others, not to speak of parents anxious to save a daughter’s health without risking loss of her employment. One of our longest and most tangled enquiries sprang from a communication from a casual reader of the _Star_ newspaper.

“Immediately on receipt of a complaint”—from one or other of such sources, once wrote one Inspector to another—“we made a raid on Saturday afternoon between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.,[26] and had a splendid catch, three rooms full. The man set in the yard to watch for the Inspector _offered_ to let us in ‘to see the housekeeper’; I merely remarked that ‘that would do very nicely for us,’ and he did not realise his mistake until we were half-way up the narrow staircase!” The Inspector momentarily “felt a pang” for the watchman—but a prosecution followed in due course, and the firm, of European and Transatlantic reputation as modistes and furriers, were convicted.

The theatrical costume industry, though not large, was one that for many years exercised the ingenuity and taxed the vigilance of Women Inspectors—complaints being perennial. Excessive hours, Sunday employment, illegal homework, overcrowded workrooms, and obstruction of the Inspector, were reported in 1902–03[27] and at intervals in a succession of years. In 1911 there was evidence of a deliberate and organised breaking of the law in the matter of overtime that did not appear in any other industry. One London occupier, who was prosecuted twelve times in ten years, was found on three separate occasions in 1911 seriously contravening the law, a typical instance of long hours being: Friday, 8 a.m. to 12 midnight, followed by 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, with some Sunday employment following. Penalties of £20 and costs on conviction were evidently not deterrent.[28] In the great majority of their concentrated attacks upon illegal hours of employment in other industries Inspectors found that most occupiers tended to capitulate, in the end, to firmness and persistence in enforcing the legal limits.

Seaside laundries, busy in the summer season, offering residential employment to laundry girls from inland towns, presented another serious problem in suppression of evasions of the law.

Suppression of “time-cribbing” (that is, exceeding legal limits by small instalments)—during prescribed pauses for meals and just before 6 a.m.— in many textile mills in the North was a task of a detective character, on a large scale, beyond the small numbers of Women Inspectors, but one in which they at least took their proportionate share with their men colleagues. Undoubtedly women’s services in bringing home to the employer contraventions of legal limits were more peculiarly needed where proof turned not so much on the exact moment of starting a huge engine driving machinery in a large mill, but rather on patient examination of witnesses in their homes as well as the workplace.

By the year 1912 an increasing number of complaints showed a growing determination on the part of women workers to secure such limitation of hours as was enforceable under the Factory Acts. One complaint of excessive hours in a fancy stationery factory disclosed quite an ordinary, and _legal_, state of affairs: “Fifty girls over eighteen years of age had been working weekly from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on three days, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on two days, and from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, as they were expected to do for from six to eight weeks in the busy season.” For young pieceworkers the resulting fatigue can easily be imagined.[29]

In our earlier years of service, complaints of defects in general sanitation in the factory and workshop were, as already said, fewer than complaints of excessive or illegal hours of employment. Later on, especially after voluntary improvement in hours had begun, the workers’ help in matters of general sanitation in the workplace grew in volume and understanding. The value of these complaints, in bringing the Inspector to the spot for observation of the concrete facts, was more direct and immediate than in complaints of hours where evidence was requisite from the workers. Even a vague complaint such as: “Please I would like you to call and see what sort of a place the women have to work in, as it is in an awful condition,” was good, provided the correct address of the shop was given.

There were many and increasing complaints of lack of messrooms, wholesome drinking water, seats, cloakrooms, and washing conveniences, which were outside the Act until 1916. Underground and ill-lighted workrooms were also the subject of complaint, and these still, in 1921, await full hygienic control by the Factory Acts. Until the year 1901 even general ventilation of such places could not be secured, and the result may be seen in a description in 1900 of a low underground workroom, packed with machinery, the narrow window slits at street level being the sole means of ventilation, admitting dust from the street, just where the gas engine was placed. “In the back part, where pallid women stand at the machines, gas light is always burning. Here again we are powerless to order means for introduction of tolerable air.”[30]

Ill-ventilated, badly drained, uncleanly or otherwise defective workrooms, were the subjects of many complaints on hygiene of the workplace, yet complaints on defects in sanitary accommodation[31] and extremes of temperature were even more numerous. Lack of means of heating or failure to use means of heating was increasingly a subject of complaint down to 1914. Many recalled the words quoted by Miss Abraham in the Annual Report of 1894: “Is it not possible to compel Mrs. —— to give her workgirls a fire?... It may really mean death to some of the girls. I do not know what it will be like to-day, when they get there with their skirts and feet wet after the snow.” The problem shifted, in that as in other matters of health, after successive amendments of the Act had given Inspectors power to intervene more effectually. Increased stringency of the Acts appeared to extend the number of employers anxious to improve the conditions of factory life beyond the statutory minimum. It was not only the employer, but, sometimes even more rapidly, the workers who found enlightenment in seeing standards improved or strengthened by legal requirements. At first all the weight and mass of complaints helping our administration came from the most elementary needs. And, even there, too many workers were mute, until awakened by proof that improvement was _possible_. It was only later that the natural intelligence of the worker could co-operate in building up larger and more specialised conditions of welfare. Speaking of a great step onwards in sanitation, Miss Paterson wrote, in 1902, that the indifference of the employer had resulted in a corresponding indifference on the part of the worker, who, “acquiescing at first in conditions which she feels powerless to improve, gradually ceases to feel them an offence to her. There is no doubt one loses sensitiveness to indecent arrangements just as surely as to impure air, but the moral effect in the one case is much the same as the physical effect in the other.”[32]

Ten years earlier some working men representatives of the Yorkshire textile industries gave it in evidence before the Royal Commission on Labour that mill life under the then existing conditions and organisation of work was “not conducive to ideas of propriety, gentleness, and nobility.” Against such conditions the Women Inspectors never ceased to strive, by varied and vigorous attack on insanitary conditions that blunted perceptions of suitability, and by friendly appeals to employers that sometimes met with excellent response. Sometimes, again, action had to be taken against indescribably bad conditions that were obviously a legacy from mediæval standards, by the indirect method of laying an information against the occupier of the factory for effluvia in hot spinning rooms, before the law provided for direct attack on the ground of the unsuitability of the provision made. In a case that I took, in 1896, against a Limited Liability Company in Lancashire, after repeated written warning to the management, one of the directors appeared in court to say they had not realised the state of affairs in the mill. After a long hearing, the magistrates asked me to meet the directors out of court, with their solicitor, which I did (the Inspector in charge of the district accompanying me), in the gilded council chamber of the municipal authority. The dignified group of directors asked me then to “take the chair,” and we rapidly came to a conclusion, as to the necessary constructive work, that satisfied the local sanitary authority as well as myself.

Sometimes a local authority would act vigorously on receipt of notice of such defects from a Factory Inspector, one asking for more notifications, another inviting conference as to other mills, and they were most ready to move where they had not themselves to take the primary initiative against fellowtownsmen. A single illustration may be given in the case (by no means the worst of its kind) of a large old textile mill, where local authorities, acting on our notice, took up such matters with increasing thoroughness. “Dark, unventilated conveniences, used indiscriminately by men and women, opened directly off hot spinning rooms.... No attempt to secure privacy was made, the doors were without fastenings ... the whole connected, not with a drain, but a huge cesspool—a state of things more injurious to morals and health can scarcely be imagined. The amount of accommodation was seriously inadequate, besides being unsuitable and unhealthy.”[33] There was an element of hope in spite of the overwhelming amount of work to be done, in that most of the very worst conditions of this kind were found in the oldest industries and factories, such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire Potteries, and the Black Country, where the blunting of perceptions had been longest at work. This factor checked our occasional feeling of despondency at often finding the most barbarous conditions where trade union organisation was at its highest strength. Incidentally it at once confirmed the Women Inspectors in thinking that they really had a new mission as well as a more enduring place in the guardianship of women in industry. Even although this matter of sanitary conveniences was but an elementary one, yet it was fundamental, and the Women Inspectors were only too anxious to clear the way for their more progressive and difficult work in respect of health and physical fitness of the women and girls expressly allotted by the Home Office to their care.

The legal provisions for the sanitation of the workplace are complex; the meagre basis of law on which we had to build at first, and a few of the results secured, can only be slightly indicated.

When we began our work there was no definition in the law of what constituted overcrowding of a workroom, and only on proof (a difficult matter) of actual danger or injury to health of the persons employed could any abatement of overcrowding be enforced. Some of the worst examples were found in country towns and in attic workrooms, often used as bedrooms. Miss Paterson cited a case in 1894 where only 91 cubic feet of space was allowed per person in a room with a roof 6 feet 4 inches in height. Overcrowding was always rare in factories, however, and complaints chiefly led us to cases of crowded floor space, not definitely illegal. For general _ventilation_, as distinct from mechanical exhaust for dust, gases, vapours, and other impurities generated by the work, there was no legal provision before 1901, and to this question in its connection with lighting, heating, and cleanliness I will presently revert. There was no provision at all touching maintenance of a _reasonable temperature_ before the Act of 1895. The provision then made was quickly found defective, and we had to wait until 1901 for powers to enforce means of heating that did not interfere with purity of the air. _Drainage_ of workroom floors liable to become wet could not (except under a special clause in the Act of 1895 affecting laundries only) be enforced before the Act of 1901. Power to determine what was _sufficient and suitable sanitary accommodation_ by an order of the Secretary of State was first provided for by the Act of 1901. This had no legal force where local sanitary authorities—with widely varying standards—had adopted certain powers to regulate the matter under the Public Health Acts. In 1903 such an order was first made, based on the experience and recommendations of the Women Inspectors. This order gradually set the standard frequently adopted by local authorities, but still, in 1921, this remains merely a voluntary matter in the majority of sanitary districts outside Scotland. “The new rules are just coming into force here,” said one working woman correspondent to an Inspector, in 1903; “they give us just what we need.”[34] In the previous years “a rain of resolutions and petitions” reached my office from organised working women, which demonstrated that working women were, to use their own words, “most ardently favourable in respect of the draft order of the Home Secretary” just referred to, “so that decent and satisfactory arrangements may be completed and the hands of Inspectors strengthened in the discharge of duty.”[35] As regards _cleanliness_ of the workplace, that universal need, there has been since 1878 an absolute requirement in the forefront of the Act that every factory shall be “kept in a cleanly state.” The duty of periodical cleansing by lime-washing (or other prescribed methods) of walls, ceilings, etc., has too often been read as covering the whole ground, and methodical and regular cleansing of floors and benches, by moist as well as dry methods, has always been a subject to which Women Inspectors have had largely to devote their powers of persuasion.

The provision of _drinking water_—a fundamental need of human beings engaged in physical labour, and a subject of frequent complaint from 1894 onwards—was left solely to regulation by local sanitary authorities, until an order was made in 1917, under powers given by the Factories and Miscellaneous Provisions Act of 1916. This secured, at last, that an order requiring a conveniently accessible supply of wholesome drinking water could be enforced in every factory or workshop employing twenty-five or more workers. The _lighting_ of factories and workshops, whether natural or artificial, has never yet been generally regulated by any of the Acts from 1878 to 1916, although there are many references to it in our published reports from 1897 onwards. In 1911 the special Report on “Illumination in Factories,” by Mr. D. R. Wilson,[36] ultimately brought the matter under general review, and in January, 1913, a Committee was appointed by the Home Secretary; this was to enquire into and report on the conditions necessary for the adequate and suitable lighting (natural and artificial) of factories and workshops, having regard to the nature of the work carried on, protection of the eyesight of workers employed, and the various forms of illumination.[37] Miss Squire, who had given much attention and study to defective lighting and its remedies in factories, was made a member of this Committee in November, 1920.[38] The bearing of this problem of lighting on safety and accident prevention as well as on health has been long in receiving the attention that it deserved from the British legislature. In 1897, I drew attention to its recognition by French, Belgian, German, and Austrian legislatures. That the workers felt an intense need of skilled attention to the question is evident from a letter of complaint in 1909 which besought an Inspector to “give a call unawares and see the black holes of workrooms we have to try and work in, with scarcely any light.... Please say nothing about receiving this letter, but act on its contents, and do for us what we need in the way of proper light and ventilation.”

Probably the most important of the early contributions of Women Inspectors to improved sanitation in the factory lay in their insistence, year after year, on the close relation between good general ventilation, cleanliness (including freedom from dirt, dust, effluvia, and organic impurities), lighting and temperature, and on the value of exact tests and standards in these matters. Time after time phthisis was found to be rampant in particular factories where anæmic, poorly nourished girls worked long hours, in light sedentary work, and at dainty white work, under combined defects in cleanliness, ventilation, lighting, heating. In such places, before the days when canteens and playing-fields were considered suitable adjuncts to factory life, the steady undermining of health that went on was really greater than in many a factory under special rules for dangerous processes, or supplied with good exhaust ventilation for injurious dust. In such instances the co-operation of local Medical Officers of Health under the Public Health Authorities, both directly and in their reports, was invaluable. As Dr. Niven in his Annual Report for Manchester in 1902 observed: “Unless the workshop is free from dust no mode of ventilation can be quite satisfactory. The first requisite, then, is cleansing, carried out in a proper manner. Ventilation must be considered in reference to each individual case, but cleansing is a universal requirement as to which definite rules can be laid down ... it is imperative in the interests of health that cleansing should be by wet sweeping.”

The extra need of fresh, pure air for maintenance of their efficiency at work is a marked constitutional feature in women and girls, and their sensitiveness to cold and draughts is proportionate also to the sedentary character of much of their work. The Women Inspectors were thus rapidly brought up against the interdependent problems of artificial lighting and heating. Fine garment-making and embroidery call both for good lighting and for freedom from presence of coal-dirt and smuts in the air, whether admitted by open windows or by combustion inside the workroom. When we began our inspection, closed windows and absence of fire in the grates was the rough-and-ready way of securing “clean” air for delicate fabrics, while warmth had to be secured chiefly by using gaslight burners of the bat’s-wing type, as a means of maintaining a temperature in which nimble fingers could carry on their skilled work. Later, from January 1, 1896, the unhooded gas stoves—some of the crudest type—fitted in many workshops and smaller factories in consequence of the first legal requirement in the Act of 1895 that “adequate measures shall be taken for securing and maintaining a reasonable temperature in each room in which any person is employed” constituted strong new arguments for powers to require good general ventilation. Even so dangerous a gas as carbon monoxide, produced in appreciable quantities by some of these stoves, not being an impurity “generated in the course of the manufacturing process,” could not be held legally subject to the provision for exhaust ventilation.[39] Nor was there any legal remedy until the Act of 1901 embodied a requirement that the measures taken for securing a reasonable temperature should not interfere with the purity of the air.

A great deal of work by the Women Inspectors in support of cleanliness has directly furthered maintenance of good natural light in workplaces. Not only have they pressed for regular cleansing by wet methods of floors, but also for the same treatment of windows and skylights; and the attention of occupiers was constantly drawn to the value of such aids as reflectors, luxfer prisms, and the like, in mitigating darkness or prolonging natural light in underground workrooms. Innumerable confidential complaints from workers furthered our activity in this direction. “In all the rooms of one badly lighted factory the windows were so dirty that ... artificial light had to be used during the day.... The gas with old flickering bat’s-wing burners being always in use, large numbers of the girls complained of headache and weariness. This they attributed to the bad light more than to the impure air.”[40] It was about 1903, after the amended provisions regarding temperature and ventilation had had time to work, that women began to send increasingly definite complaints: “Nearly all the workers suffer from colds ... now the present gas fire, whenever there is a down draught, drives into the workroom poisonous carbonic acid gas.”

The discomfort of low temperatures was intensified in some occupations, such as aerated water works, where floors, usually of concrete or stone, are liable to be very wet, and bottles and siphons alike cold to handle. Bottle washers got some comfort where the water was hot, but liability to soaked garments aggravated suffering from cold rooms in wet places.

Extremes of temperature in the workplace at the other end of the scale, rising to 100° F. or 110° F., or even higher, are specially connected as a rule with the nature of the processes, and sometimes increase the risks of dangerous and injurious industries, especially where lead is present, as in certain pottery processes. There the problem is to limit the heat without injuring the process. In other cases the heat results from the work, and can be mitigated without injuring it. In laundries, for example, as a mother once put it, young girls can get “all faded” through unregulated heat and laborious work; and sometimes sunlight streaming through inadequately shielded skylights, say, in pressing- rooms of clothing factories, or in jam factories, causes temperatures of 96° F. and numerous cases of fainting amongst the girls. Painting or whitewashing of such skylights, where blinds are not practicable, was advised in mitigation of the discomfort.

It is mournful to contemplate the amount of slow injury to the human system, insidiously at work and showing its effects in disturbed physiological functions and malnutrition, sometimes with resultant desire for stimulants. This must have long handicapped not only the workers—vainly appealing for removal of half-understood defects—but also the efficiency in industry and the prosperity of manufacturers. The old British neglect of scientific control of ordinary hygiene in the workplace has to answer for much. Even when the nation was apprised of the relation of disease to dirt, in environment, including air, and lack of means for maintaining personal cleanliness—how slow-moving was action to apply the knowledge effectively, through laws for protection of the health of the industrial workers! The relation of disease and accidental injury to darkness and to unnecessary use of defective artificial lighting, an old problem, is only beginning to come into serious consideration at the close of the period covered by this book.

Along with recent advance in these matters we have to reckon the benefits accruing from the recent rational reduction in hours, and from development of other fundamentals of welfare—before all, the means of partaking of good food in many works.

It was significant that the Women Inspectors, as a branch of the Factory Department specially charged with the duty of interpreting and responding to the needs of women workers, received throughout their service certain appeals and complaints on questions of conduct, or conditions in the factory essentially affecting morals. These appeals on matters not directly under the Factory Acts were never numerous, though markedly increasing in the last few years before the War, when women workers were growing bolder in self-expression and self-help. The relative smallness in their number was balanced by their intensity.

From about 1896 onwards, the mere possibility of the visit to any factory of a Woman Inspector coming from headquarters in Whitehall— strongly bent on sanitary reforms connected with increased cleanliness, fresh air, light in the factory, physical fitness of the worker, suitability in lavatory arrangements—had a wide and marked effect. She gave a new meaning to the technical requirements of the law by her steady insistence on the value of responsible superintendence of working conditions. The very concentration of the Women Inspectors in a team- work that could be applied in any area or centre, or to any particular problem in any industry, tended to co-ordinate the work of the whole Department in these technical things, as well as to unify the outlook. Employers, sympathetic to advance, were helped to come into contact, sometimes at their own express wish being put in communication with each other. Undoubtedly this whole movement, linked as it was with a little united band of enthusiasts, moving up and down the very dusty ways of industrial life, did much to hasten improvement also in things affecting manners and morals.

“Why have I never had a visit from a Lady Inspector before?” was a question from an employer that indicates a sentiment expressed more and more frequently as the Women Inspectors increased in weight of experience. Nothing, however, excelled in importance the confidence engendered between the woman worker and the woman Factory Inspector through the successful steady rooting out of abuses. In 1902 a girl, who had given evidence for Miss Squire two years earlier in a prosecution for illegal employment, wrote to her of a criminal assault made on her by a fellow-workman on a dark winter morning in the factory, and she got help and advice, though not under the Factory Act. At such wide intervals as 1900, 1904, 1907, 1912, I see in our published reports records of complaints of brutal conduct by managers, foremen, overlookers, towards young girls. Even an employer in a spinning mill was implicated in one of the earliest of these. “It seems scarcely credible that nowadays (1900) little doffers should be knocked down by grown men, violently struck on head and shoulders ... yet there was evidence of little half-starved, undersized creatures who had suffered at the hands of a burly overlooker and a tall imposing member of the firm ... too strong to be doubted. When tackled with such conduct and warned, neither denied the charge.” Another complaint, in 1912, disclosed similar conditions. The visiting Inspector, again Miss Squire, chanced while half-screened by a pillar in a workshed, to witness an example of such brutality, when a foreman seized, shook, and flung from him a young girl. She brought this, with various serious contraventions of the Act that she found in the factory,[41] before the managers, and “shamed them into taking action to bring about real improvement in the conditions.” Cases of drunkenness and abusive language and complaints of immorality were similarly dealt with and improvements secured. In some cases the police, investigating immorality of an employer towards workgirls, sought our aid. In other directions, employers would seek our guidance in controlling moral risks. All such occasions afforded a welcome opportunity to the Inspector for giving information to the occupier about the well-attested gain of wisely chosen, trained women’s superintendence in matters of hygiene and welfare in the factory. In one noteworthy instance the discovery by Miss Martindale of some oppressive treatment of little half-timers in a great textile mill in Belfast led the active-minded manager to ask her whether he could find a trained woman to carry on, daily, in the mill such work as she had done at a single visit. The woman was found, and she did much for the health and welfare of men, women, and children there.

In 1896 it was first recorded that letters of thanks from workers for improvements effected by the Inspectors were coming in, sometimes without any clue to the writers. And an Inspector would be stopped in the street by a group of girls, who had previously complained verbally during an inspection, to say how much better things were going since “fining had been reduced”; or a railway porter lifting an official bag into the train would give a word of thanks on behalf of a sister or friend whose overtime had been reduced. Or one workgirl confiding a hardship in her workplace to another girl casually met outside, would be told to “come along to the Lady Inspector who helped me a year ago,” and, investigation and prosecution following, would set in train a similar series of remedial activities.

Ireland had, as in so many other things, special ways of her own in appealing to and thanking the Inspector for aid needed and rendered: “Please ... would you kindly see to the heating of our Room ... the stitching department is not ventilated, it is terrible fusty you would never want a headache if you had to work in it ... thanking you in anticipation. We have proved your worth before, every worker knows you are a lady.” Another hopeful set of complainants, who wrote of lack of any means of heating in a draughty finishing loft, signed themselves, “Yours expectant,” and the Inspector, Miss Martindale, on her arrival was greeted with: “Thank God, you’ve come.” Or, again, another wrote thanks and pled for continuance of her watchfulness: “Thank you, mem, for coming to X. They are doing what is right since you were here if you only knew how much good you done ... please mem be sure and watch them.”[42]

In England the expression of such thanks was generally more impersonal, but not less grateful and confident. One letter I received stands out in my memory always, in its prompt response to investigation of a complaint of overtime by Miss Paterson. “It is no use to send an Inspector to ask the girls questions, for they depend on their living and dare not say much; but I must say that the lady sent was just the sort of friend a dressmaker requires.”[43] Miss Tuckwell wrote in 1897, as Honorary Secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, that the confidence of the factory women was “based on the fact that their representations are received and distributed by a woman, and by women enquired into and redressed”; “Our Women Inspectorate has adapted itself exactly to English needs, and, as a Yorkshire workgirl remarked, ‘We are well suited by the Lady Inspectors.’”[44]

In all this part of the history of administration of the Factory Acts one sees conclusive evidence of the very great need there was of intuitive insight and extraordinary persistence in probing or tracking down ills peculiarly affecting industrial women and girls that, as a whole, were never laid bare until the women had access to a woman in authority armed with legal powers to initiate the remedies. These ills afflicting women formed in some respects a parallel to the earlier though grosser abuse of child labour at the opening of the nineteenth century, and recall the words of Mr. Cooke-Taylor:

“It is of great and increasing importance that that story be kept in memory; that it should never be suffered to become extinct; as a pitiful ... warning against the preposterous doctrine ... that human affairs can be entrusted to impulses of mere cupidity without shocking and degrading consequences.”[45] It is difficult now, even for the Women Inspectors, to reconstruct in the mind the barbarous and grinding conditions that they were called to disclose and to help to transform. The woman worker was “subject to” mechanical power, and it needed a labour of love to help her to free herself.

In nothing does this appear more clearly than in the sphere of wages, touched on in the following chapter.