Child Labour
Quarry Bank Mill is notable for its use of unpaid child apprentices, a system that continued until 1847, with the last child to be indentured starting work in 1841. Greg employed Peter Holland, father of the Royal Physician Sir Henry Holland, 1st Baronet and uncle of Elizabeth Gaskell, as mill doctor. Holland was responsible for the health of the children and other workers, and was the first doctor to be employed in such a capacity. The children lived in a separate building near the factory called the Apprentice House. Most children came from workhouses. They would work long days with schoolwork and gardening after coming back from the mill. The work could sometimes be dangerous, with fingers being occasionally lost. However, most children were willing to work in the mill because life at a workhouse would be worse. Today the Apprentice House is open to the public with timed tours being conducted by costumed interpreters.
Read more about this topic: Quarry Bank Mill
Famous quotes containing the words child and/or labour:
“Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding—and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (20th century)
“Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labour required to produce it; its price, the quantity of labour which its possessor will take in exchange for it.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)