Time, work and leisure by Hugh Cunningham

Author:Hugh Cunningham [Cunningham, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Modern, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, Health & Fitness, Work-Related Health, Social Science, Holidays (Non-Religious), Business & Economics, Labor, Workplace Culture, Sports & Recreation, Cultural & Social Aspects, Economics
ISBN: 9781526112286
Google: gXC5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-05-16T00:44:47+00:00

Work in the life course

Reduction of working hours, as we have seen, first focused on children, and children remained at the centre of attention up to the 1970s. From the mid-nineteenth century the concern became less that they were put to work too young and for too long hours, and more that they needed education. Preventing children working at a young age was never easy and never fully accomplished, but from the mid-nineteenth century there was general agreement as to the means by which it could be achieved. George Smith, who in the 1860s and 1870s campaigned vigorously on behalf of children working in brickyards, expressed a common opinion when he urged that such children needed to be brought under ‘the benign aegis of LAW’.72 If trade unionism secured a reduction of daily working hours and fought for holidays, legislation played a much more significant role for children, both legislation forbidding them from working and legislation enforcing school attendance.

Work and school, however, were often at odds, and work seemed to many the priority. This was true not only of working-class parents, who were fully aware of the contribution that children’s earnings could make to family budgets, but also to middle- and upper-class commentators. The Newcastle Commission of the late 1850s argued that ‘if the wages of the child’s labour are necessary, either to keep the parents from the poor rates, or to relieve the pressure of severe and bitter poverty, it is far better that it should go to work at the earliest age at which it can bear the physical exertion rather than it should remain at school’. Forty years later, Seebohm Rowntree’s study of Poverty in York at the turn of the century demonstrated all too clearly how children’s wages or the absence of them determined the category within the working class to which a particular family would belong. Those who advocated compulsory schooling or a raising of the school leaving age knew that there would be opposition from the parents and often children who would be affected by it, and saw the need, as Helen Bosanquet put it, to ‘proceed slowly’ in extending protective legislation.73

The half-time system remained for many years the preferred solution to this tension between work and school. Educationists, however, began to question the impact of half-timers on school, and were looking to keep children in school longer, at least up to ten in the 1870s.74 The 1880 Education Act, which made schooling compulsory, did so from the ages of five to ten. Education Acts and Factory Acts were often thereafter in some disharmony if not conflict, no one quite certain which held priority, but the effect of Education Acts, with exceptions and numerous local variations, was to raise the school-leaving age from ten in 1880 to fourteen in 1918. It was, on the face of it, a decisive lengthening of childhood, a reshaping of the time of childhood.

In practice, however, the shift from work to school was much less clear-cut than the introduction of compulsory schooling suggested.

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