How did the living and working conditions affect the lives of the parish apprentices at Styal in the 1830s?
Rajveer Athwal
8 Stivichall
How did the living and working conditions affect the lives of the parish apprentices at Styal in the 1830s?
Styal is near Manchester. The map section below explains. In the 1830s Quarry Bank Mill was a cotton spinning factory.
Samuel Greg was seen as a good employer in the 1830s because then, the other employers were much harsher on their workers. The age that Greg let his workers work was older than other employers as well. Samuel Greg was a nice man compared to other employers. Other employers didn’t feed their workers much. Also their workers living conditions were very poor.
The parish apprentices were children from work houses from near and far. Parish apprentices were part of the labour force at Styal. Children were used because if they weren’t paid sufficiently they couldn’t complain because they were too small. There were no parish apprentices that were adults. A parish apprentice was someone under the age of 21 that was learning to work.
Living in an apprentice house was hard. The sleeping arrangements were cramped. When the girls went to sleep it were 2 to a bed. There were 60 girls all together in the apprentice house, and there were 30 beds all cramped in one small room. They had to go up a ladder to get to their room. But at nights the ladder was moved so they were trapped in their room. If they need to go to the toilet they had to do it in a bucket. But if you slept next to someone who wet the bed there would have been a horrible smell. They slept on sacks full of straw and they were only changed once a year. Above the girls room was the attic. That’s were bad behaved girls were sent to solitary confinement. Once a girl died at Styal and she was put in a coffin and then in the attic, waiting to be buried. Then one day a girl was sent to solitary confinement for 2 days with the dead body next to her. In the attic were stairs leading down to the medical room. In the medical room they used leeches for the workers eyes because when they worked there was loads of dust in the air so their eyes used to swell up. In the medicines one main ingredient was vinegar. There were stairs leading down from the medical room to the boy’s room. There were 30 boys all together. Their sleeping arrangement was less cramped than the girls. It was still 2 to a bed but the bed were bigger and there were only 15. Below the boys room was the kitchen. Their main food was porridge. The had bread, porridge and porridge and onions. Sometimes at Christmas they might have had bacon. On Christmas it was like any other day, the only thing different was that they got to finish early from doing their work. Most of the children didn’t have a birthday because they didn’t know when it was. Also quite a lot of vegetables were eaten because they had their own vegetable garden. They only ever drank water. Greg and his family had wine to drink, turkey chicken and other food. For pudding they had a custard tart. Also in the kitchen was a stove to bake the bread, a sink and a big table in the middle for preparing the food. Also in the kitchen was a door leading outside. Outside was the vegetable garden and there was the lavatories. There were two cubical with door and in them were two pieces of wood with a hole in the middle of them. There was no light so when it got dark quickly in the winter they could see where the hole was. Below the girls room was the schooling area. The children did reading and writing there. There were three long benches, a fireplace, a window and a door in the school. The first bench had sandboxes on. This was for children that were beginners at writing and for children that weren’t that good at it. If they made a mistake all they had to do is shake the sandbox. The next bench was for intermediate writers. They wrote with a piece of slate and slate tablet. If they made a mistake they could just wipe it off. The third table was for the best hand writers. They wrote with a quill and a piece of paper. Paper was expensive so Samuel Greg made sure only the best handwriters used it.
