CHIMNEY SWEEPERS BILL. (Hansard, 4 April 1854)

§ THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY

, in moving that the Chimney Sweepers Bill, which he had laid upon the table of the House, be referred to a Select Committee, under Standing Order No. 175, said that he regretted to have to state that the system which he had been endeavouring to amend, so far from having been got rid of, had become in many respects actually worse. It appeared that there were no fewer than 4,000 children still consigned to this disgusting and unnecessary employment; and in order to illustrate the evils which resulted from it, he would quote the particulars of a case with which he had been furnished by the Mayor of Nottingham, which came before the public court of that town on the 25th of November, 1853. It 365 was a case of ill-treatment of a child of between five and six years of age, and was a sample of the cases which were continually occurring in every part of the country. The witnesses deposed as follows:— Ann Cox sworn: I fetched the little boy (Hart), a very small boy, who appeared to be about six years of age. The grate of my chimney was quite cool half an hour before. The boy hesitated, and then went up. The defendant closed it. The boy did not go forward. The defendant asked me for a brush, and I gave him a sweeping brush. The defendant undid the cloth (which covered the fireplace), and used a bad expression. He said, 'I'll make the——go.' The defendant drew his cap over his face. He pressed up the chimney half his person. I heard the boy cry. The defendant did something, and the boy cried a second time. I wont out and returned shortly, and the defendant came from the chimney and closed it. He did not go forward, and he dragged the boy down the chimney by the legs, and took and scuffed him. He hit him repeatedly on the head with a hand brush. The boy did not cry much. He hit him on the side of the the face with his open hands, shook him, and said, 'I'll make you suffer, you——,when I get you out.' He put the boy between his legs, and then thumped him three times on the pit of his back with his fist. He lowered the child and beat him on the back part of his person with a brush. He took him by the head, and jumped him up and down. I have seen the boy at his mother's this day in Sandy-lane. William Phillimore Stiff, on his oath, says: I am one of the medical officers of the Nottingham Union. On the 21st instant, I saw the boy James Hart. He was in a most deplorable state. He had ulcers on his elbows, both his knees, back, fingers, toes, instep, and other parts of his body, swelling at the back of his head, ulcers arising from burns, which appeared to have been produced by putting him up a hot chimney. Those burns must have been done more than four or five days. He had scratches on his back and contusions on his head, produced by blows. Cross-examined by Mr. Cope (the defendant's attorney): If I hadn't known he had been a sweep's boy I should have thought he must hare been pushed up the chimney to murder him. I think the burns must have been produced since the 12th of November instant. There is danger to be feared from the state he is now in. Elizabeth Hart sworn, says: I am a single woman, and the boy James Hart, aged between five and six years, is an illegitimate child, and lived in Smith's-yard, Sandy-lane. The boy has been six weeks in defendant's service as a sweep. He came home every Sunday for the first month, and he has never been home since. On Monday last he was brought home ill. The shirt appeared to have been dipped in blood. A fortnight on the Sunday previous the seemed quite well in health. In the middle of the week the defendant brought the boy home and said he had been ill. The boy told me the defendant had made a fire at his own house, and put him up the chimney, and burnt his feet. He told him he would put him in a puncheon of cold water and would drown him, if he did not do as he ought to do. He told me he 366 had beaten him with a brush several times. This was at Carrington. Now, this was the state of things with which he was anxious to grapple. The most enormous atrocities were daily perpetrated, and they were unable to get at them unless they were so extreme that they came before the coroner or before the authorities of the Union. The case which he had quoted was only one example of what was going on extensively in the various large towns throughout the country. These were days in which there was a good deal of talk about the necessity of education, and in which there was a good deal of zeal professed about bringing up children in the way in which they ought to go; but this system was as destructive of the soul as of the body. It had been ascertained, by an inquiry instituted at his request, that out of 480 boys employed in this trade, in 170 places, only 21 had the common rudiments of reading, and only two had the rudiments of writing. It was manifest, therefore, that the employment of children in this way was opposed to all education, and was wholly incompatible with the admitted necessity of moral and religious training. What said the master chimney sweepers themselves upon the subject? Sixty of them had met at Manchester, and had borne their testimony to the evils of the present system, in the resolutions which he would read to the House:— 1. That the business of a chimney-sweep, as at present followed in Great Britain, is one of unnecessary degradation and humiliating servitude. 2. That in carrying on the business of chimney sweeping a practice exists of buying and selling, for various periods, the services of helpless infant children, orphans, and others, who, by such contracts, are rendered liable to be cruelly treated and to be denied the blessings of education and religious instruction. 3. That the evils which have been specified result from the practice of employing climbing boys in the place of machines—a practice which, in the majority of instances, leads to a life of confirmed ignorance and vice, from which the unhappy victim finds it impossible in after years to emancipate himself. 4. That machines have been constructed, and are now in use, by which all chimneys constructed as the law directs can be effectually swept without the aid of climbing children; that the chimneys of the vast metropolis of London, the largest and most smoke-producing city in the world, are at the present time almost entirely swept by such machines. He need make no comment upon this. there could be no pretence for saying that a continuance of the present state of things was necessary, or that that which had been found applicable to a population of two 367 millions and a half was not equally applicable to the population of the whole country. He would not detain their Lordships by dwelling on the abominable degradation and suffering which the system entailed on its victims, and which he now made a second attempt to remedy. He trusted, therefore, that he might rely with confidence upon receiving their Lordships' support to this Bill.