Chapter IV: Dangerous and Injurious Processes; Accidents and Safety (2)

In 1897 I first reported on investigation of complaints of an injurious pressure upon girls and women in factories to lift or carry heavy weights. I had to point to the fact that such complaints must be classified as “outside the scope of the Factory Acts,” and that our “action has been confined to noting the conditions, and, where it appeared possible or likely to lead to good results, we have drawn the attention of the employer to them.” I suggested that the system of preliminary examination as to physical fitness for the work to be done should be a possible way of partly meeting the difficulty in the care of young workers.[132] In the Factory Act of 1901 a provision was included empowering the certifying surgeon to qualify his certificate of fitness of young workers entering a factory by conditions as to the work on which a child or young person under sixteen is fit to be employed. At the suggestion of the Factory Inspectors this power was frequently used by certifying surgeons in many different industries to limit the weight that might be lifted, moved, or carried by these young workers—and with great effect in the Staffordshire Potteries.[133]

It was in 1900 that I quoted a view, expressed with some prescience by Miss Squire, on the probable effect of introduction into the English law of a requirement (such as there was then in the French law) specifically limiting the weights that might be lifted, carried, or moved by young workers and women. It has special interest in view of wartime experience, in national factories, of State control of labour-saving appliances to prevent overstrain of women and girls.

“We should probably see,” she said, “a speedy increase in mechanical
means of lifting and carrying in factories and workshops, such as
hoists and cranes, trollies, endless bands, and other contrivances,
now so conspicuous by their absence.... The introduction of such
apparatus would not mean displacing of women and girls, it would only
increase their remunerative work, for most of these affected are
pieceworkers, and the time now taken up by journeys to and fro,
fetching and carrying their materials or work, would be occupied in
manufacture, and increase both their wages and the output of their
departments.

“It is pitiable to see young growing girls employed as beasts of
burden, staggering under loads that men hesitate to lift—yet in some
trades this is an ordinary sight.... In brick-making, in tinplate
works, in iron hollow ware, and in warehouses in hardware trades, I
have found girls aged thirteen to seventeen carrying loads which
weighed from 30 pounds to 111 pounds in the ordinary course of their
employment. Many are the complaints of weariness and overstrain made
to me by girls and young women—some of them mothers—who are too poor
or too unskilled to leave an employment which is making too great a
demand on their physical powers, and which in some instances has
caused serious injury.”[134]

I myself saw in a hollow ware works, and had weighed on the spot, a weight of upwards of 50 pounds, consisting of piled-up galvanised iron buckets, that a young girl had carried across a yard and up a steep ladder steps without handrail. Yet even that seemed to me less serious than the heavy loads of damp clay carried by thirteen-year-old boys in Staffordshire Potteries, with strained looks and beads of perspiration on their brows. This matter has been carefully regulated, thirteen years later, by the special regulations for potteries.

In tinplate works girls of fourteen and fifteen years were found to be carrying loads of sharp-edged plates, weighing 100 pounds and over: one particularly small and slight girl of fourteen years was carrying 107 pounds with difficulty. Complaints were made of pains in the side and of swellings and bruises from the heavy weight on the hip. In one tinplate works boys with trollies were fetching and carrying the loads for the girls, a measure said to be impossible in other tinplate works.

“Women are very much at the mercy of their foremen and of the men with
whom they work in such matters ... girls in a wire-bound hose factory
were slowly heaving up large coils of iron wire weighing 108 pounds
from stair to stair up a steep ladder staircase, resting at intervals
to take breath, while the foreman stood by and the rope for elevating
the coils to the girls’ machine-room hung idle.... The employer gave a
sharp reprimand when he was made aware of it.... An obligation not to
‘allow’ the lifting and carrying by young persons and women of weights
above a certain standard would probably best effect ... the adjusting
of work or the wages, the increased vigilance to protect the weak from
being imposed upon, or the provision of labour-saving appliances ...
required to remove the evil.”[135]

Remarkable examples were given by Miss Martindale between 1902 and 1904 of weights, and aggregate material, handled or moved in a day, in potteries and brickworks—_e.g._, quarry bricks weighing 50 pounds each were carried by a woman or girl to the kiln and handed up to a man to place; girls wheeled barrows containing forty bricks weighing 9 pounds each; a girl handled 55 tons of clay a day in lifting bricks from a machine;[136] a boy of fourteen years weighing 77 pounds fetched clay for a moulder who worked in a shop up a steep flight of stairs, the weight of the piece of clay he was carrying was 69 pounds;[137] a delicate girl of fourteen years fetched on an average three to five lumps of clay an hour for the moulder, and was found carrying 67 pounds; a girl of seventeen fetched clay for eleven moulders, bringing them each four lumps a day, each lump weighing ½ cwt. The mother remarked to the Inspector on the exhausted state in which her daughter returned home after doing “men’s work”;[138] a boy of thirteen years was found struggling up a steep flight of stairs carrying clay weighing 78 pounds.

Patient observations of this kind went on in numerous industries year after year, and the mass of material in the published Annual Reports is great. Ventilation of the question led to its inclusion in various Home Office Orders of Regulations (_e.g._, fruit preserving works in 1907, potteries in 1913). The most important step, however, was the passing of Clause 3 (4) in the Employment of Children Act, 1903: “A child shall not be employed to lift, carry, or move anything so heavy as to be likely to cause injury to the child,” and “child” was defined as a person under the age of fourteen years. In due course the Factory Inspectors took cases into court under this clause, and penalties were obtained. Public opinion awakened to the evil, and much good was done by the Inspectors when they simply called the attention of many employers to the need of limiting weights lifted and carried by young growing workers. When Miss Lovibond, for example, drew the attention of employers in Burnley to heavy cloth carrying by children, they made no objection to discontinuing the practice. In 1909 in the glass factories of Sunderland women were working in pairs carrying large iron trays piled with flint glass dishes weighing up to 120 pounds, cumbersome as well as heavy to carry. “The difficulty could be overcome by suitable mechanical means, and it is satisfactory that in these cases the danger had only to be pointed out to have it remedied, although we were told that for forty years the women had thus been beasts of burden.”[139] In 1912 in the Staffordshire Potteries the employment of men instead of boys for carrying, together with the increased use of trollies, is mentioned as a consequence of the action of the Inspectors in drawing attention to the subject of injurious weight carrying, and particularly to the prohibition in the Employment of Children Act, 1903. In Manchester “making-up” warehouses many instances were found of girls and women carrying pieces of cotton cloth weighing from 60 to 70 pounds, a great strain and a continual grievance; serious cases of overstrain resulting in absences from work, unnoticed by employer, were traced by Women Inspectors visiting their homes. In answer to the employers’ plea that the women were themselves to blame, the Inspectors pointed to the systematic laying of pieces weighing 70 pounds by men on the shoulders of women (slight, city and slum dwellers, and undeveloped girls), who filed past the men to receive the cloth delivered by a chute from a room above. Similar and greater overstrain was found by Miss Squire and her staff in Lancashire among weavers lifting loom weights at the back of their looms. The injury caused is “often not noticed until later in life.”[140] Improvements in both these classes of cases were reported in 1913.

Of all the various ways of using a part of the human body in a disproportionate or unsuitable manner to perform an industrial operation for which a mechanical contrivance should be used, I may mention here the one that appears most frequently in my Annual Reports. The “licking of labels” by girls or boys instead of moistening the gum on the labels by pads or a machine was brought to my notice by a thoughtful employer in a country thread mill, in the first year of my service with the Factory Department, as a very undesirable practice specially injurious to the health of young workers. I investigated this practice, and finding it in fact frequent, and associated with signs such as swollen glands in the neck, I reported the matter for further enquiry by the Dangerous Trades Committee. They found that this was a practice not only in thread mills, but also in silk and aerated water industries, and probably in other trades also, and that in a large Lancashire thread mill the tickets for bobbins were almost entirely moistened by twelve full-time young workers, licking up to fifty gross labels, and thirty- five half-timers, licking up to twenty-five gross labels a day, while a woman managed to lick forty-five gross a day. As the firms concerned abandoned the practice in favour of a damper when attention was drawn to the subject, no regulation was recommended, and the Committee merely laid stress on their opinion that such a practice could not but be prejudicial to health, particularly at an age when growth is active and the system requires all its digestive secretions, even if the gum used were perfectly pure. More serious injury might be done if infective organic material or poisons were present on the labels.[141]

Many years’ pursuit of this subject by the Inspectors showed that the effective cause of the continuance of the undesirable, and sometimes injurious, practice was the pressure for rapid output; under a system of piecework remuneration a young worker could, by use of tongue and saliva, acquire a rapidity exceeding the speed obtained from the use of any available hand-damper. By persistent work the Women Inspectors tracked down factory after factory where the method continued, and got the practice stopped. The last bad instances reported on were by Miss Whitlock, M.B., in 1912, in an Irish mill, where she found girls fixing blue labels to a bronze band wrapped round balls of thread. They had to lick the whole surface of the blue label, and although not continuously engaged on the work, a girl would label as many as 960 balls in a day. They suffered from soreness of lips and tongue and bad taste in the mouth, while a mother seen at home said her daughter had lost her appetite and “failed terribly” while at this work. She took her away from it, and the girl had quite recovered her health when employed as a spinner. Not only did the manager abolish the licking by providing and enforcing use of dampers, he also raised the labellers’ piece rates by one-third. It is a valuable example, for it is not seldom that introduction of improved methods of working may cost the workers more in immediate loss of wages than it is possible for them to afford.[142] Among the industries other than thread-spooling where licking was checked by the Inspectors, were packeting of sweets (in gelatine bags closed by licking), siphon-labelling, tin-labelling, and cigar-banding. In 1903 I was able to give an account of a good power-driven machine for punching labels and pasting them on to thread-spools which I had seen that year at work in silk mills in the Grand Duchy of Baden, a health and time-saving machine doing the work very efficiently.[143]

Accidents causing bodily injury or loss of life, and problems of safety connected with fencing of machinery[144] moved by mechanical power, and other special safeguards against explosion, escape of steam, falls, etc., involve highly technical questions. In factory industry as a whole they affect male workers in a far higher degree than female workers; in 1920 there were more than thirty times as many fatal accidents to men as to women, and more than nine times as many accidents non-fatal as well as fatal to men as to women.[145] Thus the first concern of the Women Inspectors, lacking as they did at the beginning knowledge and experience in these matters, was to refer risks of accident, observed by them in connection with unfenced machinery, to Men Inspectors in charge of districts. These then took the action or gave the instruction to the occupiers, and we were thus left free for concentration on the urgent questions already touched on, to which we could bring new and indispensable contributions.

The Women Inspectors, however, took great interest in complaints made to them by the women of dangers and of accidents actually occurring. They soon gathered useful facts by their own observation, and the interest rapidly grew as they began to see the close connection of accidents with conditions of labour—other than fencing of danger points—including pressure for output, long hours, and very low rates of pay under the piecework system, as well as methods of lighting the factory.

It soon appeared to them probable that the effectual prevention of accidents rested not only on skill in fencing, but on detailed study of conditions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, on responsible supervision of all conditions by good management in the factories and workshops. The knowledge they steadily acquired, through following up complaints, of the immense suffering and loss to individual workers and through them to national production, by preventible maiming and injury, led them to give increasing time to study of the subject.[146]

The important amendment of the code governing notice of accidents in the workplace and their investigation by the Inspectorate, that came into operation on January 1, 1896, brought them new opportunities of acquiring information. It became compulsory for every occupier to keep a register of the accidents occurring in the factory or workshop of which notice had to be sent to the Inspector for the district, and to enter particulars in the register regarding such accidents within a week of their occurrence. Immediate access to this register certainly increased the value of an inspection. It acted as a finger-post to special causes of accidental injury to workers in the particular workplace. Much more important, however, for practical knowledge of broad means of preventing accidents was access to a general review of dominating risks in an industry as a whole. This opportunity came to me and my staff as an unforeseen consequence of the devolution in 1898 upon a Woman Inspector of district charge of a “special” district containing a particularly large number of all kinds of power-driven and hand laundries,[147] as well as factories and workshops in which the making of wearing apparel was carried on. It was soon discovered that, so far as practical prevention of accidents went, the Inspector in charge of the special district, by receipt of notices of accidents, by thorough investigation of their circumstances and of the complaints of the workers, by conferences with laundry and other engineers and study of safety appliances, largely made up for her initial lack of training as an engineer. Lack of engineering training was not confined to Women Inspectors; and, as laundries first came under the Factory Act after the Women Inspectors were appointed, a special opportunity arose for them of acquiring useful new knowledge which was then available for the whole Factory Department. This opportunity was seized, the sympathies of a considerable number of laundry occupiers and engineers were aroused, and fruitful experiments were rapidly begun in this small special district in development of guards for the prevention of extremely painful and frequently maiming accidents—chiefly to fingers, hands, and arms, and largely to young workers—on ironing machinery, wringers, hydro- extractors—in fact, on the most dangerous machines in laundry plant. The comparatively recent development of specialised power-driven machinery in laundries, and the incidence of the most painful accidents on young girl workers, tended to melt away opposition (on the part of occupiers) to the Inspectors’ zeal for encouraging early trial of automatically acting guards for preventing such accidents. An ingrained habit of regarding accidents as somewhat unavoidable was not, in laundries, a legacy from the past, nor had it been acquired by the industry, and the presence of women as manageresses and owners (as well as their being the great majority of the workers) led to a ready acceptance of a Woman Inspector as one likely to know something about the subject. The systematic tabulation of classified causes of all serious accidents in laundries soon brought to their notice, further helped to a reasonable outlook on the problems of fencing.

During the first two years of responsibility for this special district, with so many laundries in it, we studied the conditions, the machines, the time, and other circumstances in the occurrence of the accidents, but I soon felt that a wider body of statistical information, from all over the country, was needed to strengthen our demand for use of good guards on the dangerous machines.[148] I therefore examined every report by a certifying surgeon to the Chief Inspector on an accident in a laundry from every part of the United Kingdom, and tabulated these according to source or causation of the injury and according to age and sex of the workers. The results were published in the Annual Report for 1902, and the work of tabulation was thereafter carried on for me by Miss Tracey down to 1914. At first the reporting of the accidents was incomplete, and the total annual number gradually rose from 289 in 1901 to 435 in 1908, after which, in spite of great increase of employment in factory laundries, and in use of dangerous power-driven ironing machinery, the total number of accidents in the industry annually on the whole declined, the average for the five years 1909 to 1913 being 391·4. In all these years the classification of sources of accidents was unchanged, the material risks had been rightly inferred at the outset from close examination of the machines and from investigation of individual accidents. The stress we laid on the value of automatic guards for stopping indrawing rollers (risk arising from feeding all kinds of articles in between the rollers) was justified by the proportionate decline in number and severity of these accidents. Probably in few other industries were accidents so predominantly caused by definite danger points in power-driven machines. Out of a total during twelve years of 4,235 accidents reported on by certifying surgeons (including scalds and burns, which numbered 379), 2,648 were caused by indrawing rollers of ironing and wringing machines, and an abnormally high proportion affected girls under eighteen years of age— who were so largely employed in machine-ironing.[149] These facts were brought out at a conference of the Department with the laundry trade in 1910, at an interesting exhibition of laundry machinery, where the latest developments in machinery and guards could be studied. After this conference a memorandum standardising fencing of laundry machinery was issued to the trade.[150] Definite steps in this direction had been made possible by the concentrated work of the Women Inspectors on the industry, first when they were definitely instructed to follow up fencing in laundries throughout the kingdom, and secondly when, from 1908, all accidents affecting women and girls in laundries were referred to the Senior Women Inspectors in the various divisions for investigation and the necessary action.

The industry was not one in which the general risks of accident were high; the total accidents and the accident rate were small compared with those of other industries. Without such concentrated team-work on the question, the predominant risks would probably long have escaped effective observation and control, and the painful and maiming accidents to many young girls would have been obscured by the greater roll of accidents in other industries; they would have failed to receive the effectual check that they in fact did receive in consequence of the assignment to this branch of the Inspectorate of a special opportunity and responsibility in relation to the trade. It is an interesting illustration of the value of special work on selected trades, and raises the question whether such special work is not an adjunct that is indispensable for efficiency in a system of administration by area or territorial districts.

Important prosecutions were taken from time to time, and repeatedly penal compensation was obtained and applied to the benefit of workers injured through neglect of the occupier to provide or maintain good guards. In 1913 an unusually interesting prosecution, of importance for Scottish laundry workers, was taken by the late Miss Vines in the Edinburgh Sheriff Court, for a failure to fence securely the intake of a calender in consequence of which neglect a young girl had lost the use of her hand.[151] It was keenly contested, and Miss Vines’s account of the hearing may well be remembered here:

“A plea of ‘not guilty’ was tendered, and evidence was led at
considerable length—I had eleven witnesses—as to the question of
secure fencing. At the time of the accident the feed of the calender
was fenced only by a fixed bar guard, while our contention was as to
the necessity of the provision of an automatic guard. We had expert
evidence from two witnesses, one the member of a large firm of laundry
engineers, the other Miss Perry, whose evidence, owing to her
university degree in engineering, carried considerable weight. The
advocate for the respondents also had two expert witnesses. In my
argument I referred to the case of Schofield v. Schunk (1855) 24 L. T.
(o.s.), 253, in which it is laid down that the machinery must be
fenced according to the best method known at the time, not merely in
the manner usual in the best regulated factories in the district.
After a hearing of some hours the Sheriff convicted, saying that he
thought it clear from the evidence that the fence consisting of a
fixed bar was not of a satisfactory nature, and that an improved type
was now largely used.”

A similar responsibility and opportunity arose in the wholesale clothing trades, but the accident risks were far smaller and chiefly due to “transmission machinery”—_e.g._, shafting, driving bands and pulleys to sewing machines, found also in many other trades—these risks being already well known. The one really new contribution there made by the studies of the Women Inspectors lay in needle-puncturing accidents with septic results, from the use of power-driven sewing machines driven at a very high speed, 2,000 to 3,000 stitches a minute. Analysis of reported accidents showed that in 1907 35 per cent. of the total accidents to women and girls in clothing factories arose from this cause, and of these not far short of one-fifth resulted in septic poisoning and consequent great loss of time. Often the needle has to be removed surgically, and sometimes X-rays applied. A needle may enter the finger several times before the hand can be withdrawn, and serious injury sometimes results. So far no guard had been devised to prevent these accidents. Next year over 40 per cent. of the accidents to women and girls in clothing factories were due to this cause, and in relation to these and other injuries the importance of skilled first-aid was brought out. In 1909 again the very great loss of working time and health through these accidents, at first classed as “slight,” was illustrated, and the extra urgency of first-aid where invention of preventive safeguards against the accidents was still lacking was further pressed home. In one large clothing factory seven out of twelve accidents were of this nature, and in even the slightest of them the workers had been absent from work several weeks.[152] Enquiry of a systematic kind was made into the arrangements provided by the employers for rendering first-aid at the works from this time on by the Women Inspectors—not only when investigating these, but all kinds of accidents. It was found that the very enquiry and the recording of results on the point stimulated employers already doing good work in this direction, and that it aroused others to a new interest in the matter. Miss Whitlock’s investigations showed how greatly lack of knowledge of first-aid increased suffering to the injured person. For example, “a child’s head was badly scalded with boiling starch, and the wound made worse by the forewoman immediately bathing it in cold water. When a young woman was scalped in a clothing factory, time was lost in getting her attended to, for no one knew the quickest way in which to get in touch with the ambulance authorities; neither did anyone think of removing the scalp from the overhead shafting until an hour after the accident, so that by the time it arrived at the infirmary it was too cold to treat in the usual way in such cases.”[153]

Tin cutting, pen-making, metallic capsule making, bottle washing, and many other processes furnished for our observation cases of septic poisoning, following relatively slight accidents, which strengthened our appeal for systematic development of first-aid in industry. It was wartime pressure for output that ultimately clinched our argument as to its value from the standpoint of production as well as of humanity.

One example out of many may be cited to illustrate how guards preventing accidents were secured systematically on a machine when its danger was brought to our notice. Teazle-brushing machines in hosiery factories thus arrested the attention of Miss Squire and Miss Tracey almost simultaneously. Miss Squire was interested in complaints of dust, Miss Tracey was engaged in tabulating accidents affecting women and girls in the hosiery trade for my information. The former saw the points of danger apparent in the machine which was new to her, and heard of severe accidents from the indrawing teazle-covered rollers for the brushing of hosiery. Miss Tracey presented the fact that seven out of the fourteen reported accidents from this machine in 1906 were “severe.” Guards were asked for through the District Inspector, and in 1909 I was glad to see that accidents had been consequently reduced to three for the year.[154]