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  In offering him office, Peel told Ashley that his moral standing was what recommended him. Ashley replied that if he swallowed his principles on the Ten Hours’ Bill, his moral standing would be impaired. His religious views had hardened as he became older: by the 1840s he was convinced there would be a second coming, a belief that underpinned the fanaticism and occasional apparent absence of rationality that characterised his political activity. His refusal of office, which he made known to the Leeds operatives (and his motivation for doing so may only be surmised), enhanced his standing in the labour movement.

  He wrote to Peel in January 1842 asking him ‘whether you have made up your mind to insist or concede the prayer of the operatives for the further limitation of the Hours of Labour between the ages 13 and 21.’53 Ashley said the time had come for Peel to ‘remove the suspense’ concerning his policy. Peel replied on 22 January that ‘I am not prepared to pledge myself or other members of the Government to the support of a Bill limiting the hours of labour to ten for all persons between the ages of 13 and 21.’54 He added that Graham had a bill under consideration affecting the education of factory children ‘and I am confident that he will, if you will allow him, be glad to have an opportunity of conferring with you.’ Ashley told Peel that he would do his ‘duty’ of talking to Graham; he termed it so because ‘various feelers’ had already been ‘put out’ to him ‘to ascertain whether I would abate any part of what I require for the benefit of the factory-people. I steadfastly refused.’55

  Peel wrote back, angered, protesting that ‘I was putting out no feeler as you suppose others to have done.’56 He added: ‘I had not the remotest wish, in referring to communications with you on that subject, to impose the slightest restraint either on your opinions or your practical course of proceeding.’ Ashley, complaining that Peel had ‘misunderstood the word feeler’, and assuming the government would, as he had feared, oppose a Ten Hours measure, broke with the Tories.57 He was not a natural party man: Gash calls him ‘an exasperating and unpredictable individualist’.58 No vestige of party loyalty would stand in the way of Ashley’s principles. He wrote to his supporters in the factory districts on 2 February 1842 announcing Peel’s refusal to support him, saying that ‘I shall persevere to my last hour and so must you; we must exploit every legitimate means that the Constitution affords in petition of parliament, in public meetings, in friendly conferences with your employers; but you must infringe no law and offend no proprietors. We must all work together as responsible men, who will one day give an account of their motives and actions.’59 Showing his flair for publicity, he sent a copy of the letter to The Times. The Tory-supporting Morning Post denounced it as ‘peevish’ and his tone as ‘sanctimonious’.60

  He spoke in the Commons on 7 June 1842 on the report of the Commission into conditions for women and children in the mines. He had been in low spirits since February, though he and Peel had resumed cordial relations. The report gave him an opportunity to show he was motivated by an aristocrat’s desire to improve the lot of the people, and not by naked political consideration. In a speech that lasted two hours he said that ‘it is not possible for any man, whatever be his station, if he have but a heart within his bosom, to read the details of this awful document without a combined feeling of shame, terror, and indignation.’61

  He shared with the House details of how ‘the extent to which the employment of females prevails varies very much in different districts’, but how in most coalfields there were children as young as seven, and quite often as young as five, at work. ‘Near Oldham, children are worked as low “as four years old, and in the small collieries towards the hills some are so young they are brought to work in their bed-gowns”.’62 He spoke of small, naked boys dragging carts while crawling on their hands and knees, injuring themselves and being thrashed if they complained. They would routinely work sixteen-hour days. Worse still was what happened to girls. ‘The girls are of all ages, from seven to twenty-one. They commonly work quite naked down to the waist, and are dressed—as far as they are dressed at all—in a loose pair of trousers. These are seldom whole on either sex. In many of the collieries the adult colliers, whom these girls serve, work perfectly naked . . . Any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work. No brothel can beat it.’63

  Ashley capped this with the observation that ‘if this is bad for children and young persons, the case is far worse for pregnant women. For them it is horrible.’64 He quoted: ‘A woman has gone home, taken to her bed, been delivered of a child, and gone to work again under the week.’ He believed that ‘every principle of religion’ dictated the removal of women from mines.65 Many men were disabled by forty, and dead at fifty. There were also frequent instances of sheer brutality by men towards children. In one case a boy was regularly hit with a pickaxe, including, once, on his head. Mutilation was routine. One woman had said: ‘My boy, ten years old, was at work: about half a year since his toe was cut off by the bind falling; notwithstanding this, the loader made him work until the end of the day, although in the greatest pain.’ A boy said: ‘Boys are pulled up and down by the ears. I have seen them beaten till the blood has flowed out of their sides. They are often punished until they can scarcely stand.’ Ashley claimed that ‘about Halifax girls are beaten as severely as boys. They strike them in the face and knock them down.’

  The debate that followed is worth pursuing in detail, because it reveals so much about the very different stances that Ashley’s upper-class contemporaries adopted. Some were broadly sympathetic; some were self-interestedly dismissive; some noted that reform might stop abuses but would also threaten employment among families who desperately needed every penny; some were suffused with a long-standing commitment to laissez-faire – believing it was wrong to interfere and that the best systems regulated themselves. At one extreme was Hedworth Lambton, the MP for Durham, younger brother of the Earl of Durham, and a mine-owner, who denied that females worked in the mines in his county or in Northumberland. Lambton said he employed no boys under eight; if such children went into the mines it was the fault of their parents ‘cupidity’.66 Nevertheless, he added: ‘In the Lambton collieries there is established, and is establishing, at the expense of the coal-owner, three great schools. An able schoolmaster is carefully selected for each. He is allowed £40 a year, a house and fuel; and his school house is found. One of these schools is in full operation; and he (Mr. Lambton) had taken great pains to make it as effective as possible, by framing the regulations according to the best and most approved methods of teaching.’

  However, children would not attend, because their parents sent them underground. ‘Now’, he continued, ‘if you will pass a law to prevent the child from going down so very young, you will do an infinity of good in promoting the education of that population. Education is the great instrument and engine by which you must strike at the root of this evil; and I hope and trust that, before long, there will be no colliery establishment where the coal-owner will not have established effective schools at his own expense. It is a duty he owes to his God and his country so to do.67 However, in saying that, and in calling for legislation, Lambton urged that the House proceed ‘cautiously’, and be not affected by ‘some exaggeration’ on the part of the compiler of the report.

  Graham said he was ‘delighted’ by the unanimity in the House towards what had been said, and that he had found Ashley’s arguments ‘convincing’.68 He agreed females should not be employed in mines, for to do so was ‘degrading to the country’, and ‘an employment which, if persevered in, would invoke a great moral retribution – which would have a prejudicial effect on the manly bearing of the people, and be attended with great ultimate degradation and loss of national character.’ However, Graham stressed Lambton’s point about children, and blamed not the largely Tory-voting mine-owners for this abuse, but parents; and, although a believer in the ‘sacred’ principle of ‘non-interference with parental control’ he felt that in instances s
uch as those so shockingly outlined by Ashley ‘the intervention of the Legislature was indispensable’. He assured Ashley that ‘Her Majesty’s Government would render him every assistance in carrying on the measure’.69

  Peel congratulated Ashley for his work against the ‘mining abominations’.70 He told him that ‘I admire equally the good feeling and the ability – the qualities of head and heart with which you have forced this matter upon public notice.’ Not everyone was convinced. In the Lords on 24 June 1842 the Marquess of Londonderry presented a petition from mine-owners in Northumberland and County Durham protesting about the ‘exaggerated impressions’ of the commissioners’ report Ashley had quoted.71 He ‘denied that such inhuman practices as had been stated prevailed’, at least in his area. He urged the Lords, before legislating, to root out ‘exaggeration’; and think, instead, of the damage they might do to the coal industry – including, one must suppose, to Lord Londonderry – if they were to legislate ‘injuriously’. He claimed the commissioners had come straight from inspecting factories ‘with all the prejudices which that commission was likely to excite’ and had been looking for ‘similar oppressions’ among the miners as they had found among the manufacturing classes. They had communicated with ‘artful boys and ignorant young girls’ and asked them leading questions to elicit the desired answers. Londonderry also claimed there were numerous charities working in the coalfields, and dismissed the need for education, saying that working in collieries was the only employment available to most youths there. He then read a letter that he said illustrated ‘the superior advantages of a practical education in collieries to a reading education’.72

  He refuted claims that any child under eight worked in a colliery in the north-east, except some taken into them ‘clandestinely’ by their parents.73 He denied the virtual enslavement of apprentices through the system known as ‘binding’, under which they were forced to work for years at low pay and at tasks for which they, as boys, had insufficient strength. He claimed most of the young ‘trappers’ worked only ten hours a day, though conceded some worked more; and they spent much of their time ‘generally cheerful and contented’ and were found often to be ‘occupied with some childish amusement – as cutting sticks, making models of windmills, waggons etc’. This roseate picture of life in the mines was complemented in the Commons on the same day by Lambton, who intervened when Ashley moved the report stage of the Mine and Collieries Bill to say that the mine-owners of his (and Londonderry’s) district had nothing to fear from the bill, given the superiority of their practices.

  That view was not unanimous: Peter Ainsworth, the MP for Bolton, said he would object to clauses restricting the labour of boys, given the ‘great misery’ they would cause in Lancashire and Yorkshire coalfields because of the ‘discharge of great numbers of persons’.74 Ainsworth had a point: this was the summer of serious civil unrest in the north, and any measure that restricted the earning potential of families could have serious consequences. When, the following week, petitions were presented to the Lords about the need to relieve distress in the manufacturing districts, Londonderry said the Mines and Collieries Bill would, if enacted, make all this worse.

  Ashley feared the failure to ban women from mines altogether, rather than just stop them working in them, would open up loopholes: ‘any number of female children may be introduced, and the supply of female labour may thus be kept up’, helped by the fact that ‘the transactions are all under ground’.75 Peel said the original wording, amended in the Lords, was (according to the advice of the Attorney-General) too restrictive and would, for example, punish mine-owners for allowing a woman to bring a meal to the pit for her husband. Also, ‘suppose a man employed should have a serious accident, preventing his removal from a pit. Would it not be hard to prevent by law the access of his wife and daughter to him?’76 These objections were rubbished, it being pointed out that it was almost unheard of for a woman to go ‘200 or 300 fathoms below the surface of the earth’ to deliver her husband’s food, or tend him if he was injured.77

  The pressure continued for the bill to be diluted. Ainsworth presented ‘fifteen or sixteen petitions’ to the Commons on 5 July 1842 ‘from the working classes of the neighbourhood of Bradford’ on the removal of restrictions on boys working in mines.78 He even said that, while he had no objection to the removal of women from mines, he did think it would add to distress; but the removal of boys would cause ‘hundreds of children’ in the Bradford area to ‘be thrown out of employment, and hundreds of families would be driven into workhouses’. He said Ashley’s proposals about restricting hours were ‘wholly impracticable’, which also compromised the educational proposals. He dismissed the notion that the children had been in poor health because of their work, or had been poorly fed. He described their state as far superior to that of the ‘factory children’.79 In the Lords, Londonderry abandoned any pretence to the contrary, and on 14 July made it clear that the issue was the protection of ‘property to the amount of £10,000,000’.80 When Londonderry tried to have the bill postponed for six months no one would second him.

  Graham then decided to take out the educational clauses. Ashley objected, saying Graham’s interpretation of the effects were ‘incorrect, nay, I think, unfair.’81 He added: ‘surely you cannot withdraw the Bill now on the table – such a step would be a departure from what is due to the House, to the operatives, and, I may say, to myself.’ He felt Graham had broken faith; and told Peel: ‘I cannot believe that you will allow such a wanton abuse of power, for such it would be.’ Ashley admitted that ‘I have no following in the House’, but still hoped ‘that some consideration will be shown, not to myself, but to those wretched people.’

  Peel felt there would be ‘no advantage to the cause of religious education in trusting to the co-operation of the Dissenting Body in the measure we proposed – and that our abandoning it is preferable to failure after religious strife and contention.’82 When the Lords amended the bill in July – Londonderry in particular was bitterly opposed to it – Ashley wrote an emotional letter to Peel announcing that ‘few things in public life have ever given me more pain.’83 A note in Peel’s papers quotes Ashley as having said: ‘I have thought for some years that Peel and John Russell are the most criminal of mankind’ and that Graham was ‘so thoroughly odious that I cannot find one human being who will speak a word on his behalf.’84

  When the bill came back to the Commons, on 6 August 1842, Ashley said the amendments had ‘invalidated the principle of the Bill and made it inoperative’.85 Women and young children could still be admitted into pits, and it would be hard to safeguard against their being employed; the apprentice system remained in place, with no alternative educational provisions. Ashley was outraged not least because he was able to produce letters from mine-owners in support of what he had tried to do. Palmerston spoke from the Opposition benches in support of Ashley; Graham contended that the ‘great principles’ for which Ashley had fought still stood, and that he personally supported the original bill ‘reserving his judgment as to a few details’.86 The bill was enacted without its educational clauses; even then, there was an unsuccessful attempt by Scottish mine-owners in the following session to gain exemption, so bad had been the effect on their business of the restrictions on child labour. However, while it remained unthinkable for the State to intervene to supplement the incomes of families in mining districts, or to ensure there was schooling for young children, some of the objections raised to the bill held some force. Stopping a child from working in a mine was also taking bread from his – or her – family’s mouths.

  The business of factory conditions remained unfinished, surfacing again throughout the 1840s. When Parliament debated it again in 1844 Ashley noted he found Graham’s opposition to a cut in hours – based on the loss of earnings to industrialists and to the country – ‘mean, false and hard hearted beyond himself’.87 Graham told Peel he ‘pledged himself to resign if the 10 hours are carried’ because it would reduce output, profits
and wages.88 There were other issues at stake: Graham also told his Cabinet colleagues that ‘he did not think [the Corn Laws] would survive it [the ten-hour amendment] 12 months’.89 So serious did the government’s predicament appear that informal discussions were opened between intermediaries of both parties to see whether Ashley might compromise. Ashley replied that he could not have cared less about the Corn Laws, but cared very much about being painted as a hypocrite. During the debate on this new attempt to cut the hours, Ashley had a scrap with John Bright, the incarnation of the type of middle-class industrialist he most despised. Bright saw the limitation on working hours as a limitation on the earning power of the operatives (not to mention the profit margins of his employer). He also stuck to the classical liberal view that the State had no right to interfere in the bargain struck between master and man. He and Ashley also quarrelled about the case of a Bolton mill operative named Dodd, who had lost his hand in an industrial accident. For Ashley, it was indicative of the horrors of industrial life. For Bright, it was an example of what our century would call ‘media manipulation’.90

  The 1844 bill was eventually withdrawn, but Ashley was defiant. He told the Commons: ‘I declare, for myself, no earthly consideration shall turn me from the course I have endeavoured to pursue; and, so far as I am concerned, I care not what personal consequences may fall on my own head.’91 Graham introduced a new measure limiting the hours of children under twelve working in silk mills, and those under fourteen working elsewhere, to six-and-a-half hours. Gash says that Peel’s hard line was not anti-humanitarian, but because he saw Ashley’s proposal ‘as a threat to the economic recovery of the country with a further probability that the working classes themselves would be the first to suffer.’92 There were rallies and protests in the north against the failure to pass the bill, but fears that unrest on the scale seen in 1842 would be repeated came to nothing. Eventually Ashley and his supporters would have what they wanted, as the ruling class and the owners of capital were shamed into action, but it would take decades.