Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Olivey and we've reached the end of our inquiry, this is our final lesson on Industrial Britain, I'm so delighted that I got to teach you this topic 'cause it is by far my favourite one in the 19th century, and I think one of the most interesting and strange and just brilliant periods of history imaginable.

Now, to be able to answer our inquiry question, you will need to do a few admin things, first, can you make sure you got a pen and some paper to write with, if you haven't got those, pause the video now and go and get them.

Okay, second thing, can you make sure you're in a reasonably quiet space, so you can really focus and think about the answer we're going to write.

Good, I can't wait to get started, so let's just, let's get straight into it.

This is lesson four of a four lesson inquiry, and the topic for today's lesson is popular protest, from 1850 to 1900.

And our inquiry question that we're going to answer at the end of today's lesson is, how far did working conditions improve during the 19th century? So to be able to answer this question, we're first, before we move on to some of our final couple of stories we're going to learn, we're going to then going to need to recap everything that we've done so far.

So the story so far, let's go through it one more time.

So we started off in 1800 and we saw that a lot of the time there was very hard work that people had to do, like children who would work underground in coal mines.

And we saw that some people like the poet, William Blake, very unhappy with the kind of changes being brought by the Industrial Revolution, because we saw that Britain, between 1750 and 1850 was transformed from a largely rural country where most people lived in the countryside, to a largely urban country where most people lived in towns and cities.

We saw that the population of the country boomed from around 6 million in 1750 to over 21 million in 1871, and we saw that huge numbers of people moved from the countryside to the towns.

We considered what caused this Industrial Revolution, we thought about the role of the Agricultural Revolution that came before, the role of coal, the role of inventions and the role of empire and slavery in making Britain rich.

And then in lesson two we came across this idea of a class system, and we realised that in our big question, in our inquiry question, the group we're really talking about are the people at the bottom of the class system, the working class.

And we realised that this class system, people or at least some people in the 19th century didn't just think that this was some sort of random thing that had just appeared, they thought it was something that had been put in place by God.

And finally in that lesson we considered the kinds of changes that the government brought in to try and improve working people's lives.

We realised that changes like the Factory Act and the New Poor Law, didn't actually necessarily make people's lives any better, in fact in some instances one could argue, people's lives were actually made a lot worse by these changes.

And then in the third lesson we looked at how patterns of popular protests changed over time.

So we started off with the Food Riots that were typical of pre-industrial Europe and pre-industrial Britain, and about how these were a way of people protesting food prices that they deemed unfair.

We then considered Luddism and the Swing Riots, and we saw how new technology, while on one level it may seem like it was making people's lives better, was sometimes very unpopular because it made people's jobs, well, it made their job seem redundant, they were no longer needed, so sometimes people protested against these, and they even had fictional figures like Ned Ludd and Captain Swing to represent their fight against these new machines.

And then finally, we ended that lesson with the story of Chartism, this first national working class movement where people tried to get political power, but they wanted this political power to improve their working conditions or at least in part to improve their working conditions.

And we saw this idea from E.

P.

Thompson of the idea of a moral economy of the crowd, the idea that popular working class protest was governed by ideas of fairness, wasn't about revolution, it wasn't about killing the elite or anything like that, it was all about keeping things fair, playing by the rules of the game, so to speak.

So that's the story of the first three lessons, now to check that you've understood that story, I'd just like you to tell me which of these changes did not happen during the Industrial Revolution? It was number four, adults actually weren't given the vote until much later, in fact, that was the reason why the Chartists were protesting because they wanted political power to be able to represent the concerns of working class people in parliament.

All these other changes did happen though, so coal did become an important fuel, England's population did grow enormously and the government did pass acts to try and improve working conditions.

But in order to answer our question of how far did working conditions improve during the 19th century? We need to look at some of the protests that took place in the second half of the 19th century.

'Cause we've seen Luddism, we've seen Captain Swing, we've seen Chartism, we don't know what happened after 1848, so that's what we're going to do this lesson.

And the first event I'm going to teach you about is the Lancashire Cotton Famine, I think this story is truly remarkable and it shows how interconnected the world was in Victoria in England.

So, the Lancashire Cotton Famine began in the 1860s, and in the 1860s, Manchester was sometimes also called Cottonopolis, and this is because the city of Manchester had boomed and had grown really rapidly, and it was now full of cotton mills where people were making cheap clothing and cheap cotton fabric using cotton that was imported from America.

Manchester became incredibly rich over the 19th century because of the booming cotton industry.

Now this raw cotton was not grown in England 'cause it can't grow there, it was actually grown by enslaved people in the United States.

So slavery still existed in the United States up until 1865 and most of the cotton that the mills in Manchester used was grown by enslaved Africans, and enslaved black people in the United States, and it was shipped over as raw cotton to England where it was then turned into cotton cloth.

But in the United States there was a growing movement in some of the Northern States to abolish slavery, they decided that slavery was wrong, it was unfair, and also slaves themselves were resisting slavery and were trying to get it abolished, people like Frederick Douglass and other slave revolts on plantations, and eventually this led to an all out war within the United States between the Northern States who were represented by their flag of Union that USA still has and the Southern States, they're represented by what's called the Confederate flag, which is this red, blue and white flag with a sort of cross down the middle.

Now this war completely disrupted the cotton trade, because obviously it's very difficult to be sort of growing and trading cotton when you are busy fighting an enormous war in your own country.

And because of this, the cotton industry in Manchester was completely destroyed and in other parts of Lancashire in England.

And this led to something known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine, where huge numbers of cotton workers were made completely unemployed by this, their livelihoods were destroyed and the industry never really recovered.

However, despite the cotton workers of Manchester decided to support, the side fighting for the Union, the side fighting to abolish slavery, they decided to not support the people that wanted to keep the slave trade and grow the cotton in the Southern States, instead they wanted to support the North in the war to abolish slavery, and they wrote this rather remarkable letter to the president of the Northern States, Abraham Lincoln, I'm just going to read it to you now, "The progress you have made fills us with hope that every stain on freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot on civilization and Christianity slavery during your presidency, will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity." So this public meeting in Manchester at 1862 of workers, is quite remarkable because despite the fact that the lack of cotton coming into England was making them poorer, they decided that they would support the anti-slavery cause, and they did this for a variety of different reasons, some of which we will probably never know, but I think it's a remarkable story of ordinary people choosing to put the interests of other people, the enslaved people in America above their own immediate self-interest.

And president Lincoln was so amazed by this letter and this public degree of support that despite the fact that he was fighting an absolutely massive war, he chose to write back to the cotton workers and this is what he said, "I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working people of Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis.

I regard your decisive utterances as an instance of sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country." And eventually, after a few more leap years, Lincoln and the Northern States won the Civil War and slavery was abolished in America, in part thanks to the support of the cotton workers at Manchester, who refused to support the Southern States and refused to support the pro-slavery cause.

Now one of the consequences of the Cotton Famine was that loads of people had to leave places like Manchester to seek work elsewhere, this is a very famous painting, it's actually my favourite painting, pretty all of my favourite Victorian paintings average by Ford Madox Brown, and it's called, "The Last of England." And it shows a man and a woman emigrating to Australia on a ship, so they're leaving England behind forever, and loads of people left Manchester and other parts of Lancashire because of the Cotton Famine.

Okay, so, what caused the Lancashire Cotton Famine in 1862? Read through the options, pause the video and pick the correct one.

Okay, let's find out the answer, it's number one, the American Civil War disrupted Britain's cotton supply.

It wasn't the case that people stopped buying cotton because it was grown by enslaved people, or that a cotton disease caused all the cotton plants to rot and die, or that nylon was invented, nylon wouldn't be invented for nearly a 100 years, it was that the American Civil War disrupted Britain's supply of cottons, they didn't have the raw materials required to make cotton cloth and cotton clothing.

So that is the story of the Lancashire Cotton Famine.

And how does that fit into our big question then? Well, I think the way it fits in is it shows us that sometimes people's working conditions didn't improve and they got worse during the 19th century, now working conditions for cotton workers were actually much worse in 1865 than they were in 1860.

They were so much worse in fact that people had to emigrate, they had to leave Manchester to try and find work elsewhere.

So I think it's important to see that working conditions don't just universally get better and better, there is a lot more complexity to our story than that, sometimes things go backwards for reasons that are, seem unusual and kind of outside of anyone's control or what anyone could have predicted.

Okay, the final example then is this event called the Matchgirls Strike.

Now, the Matchgirls Strike is remarkable because it's an example of women in the 19th century showing an enormous amount of sort of political involvement to campaign to improve their conditions, it wasn't simply that the suffragettes or the suffragists were the only groups of people who existed in terms of women exercising a say in politics as a bit of an oversimplification, women were also involved in all politics in all kinds of other ways, and one of them was in going on strike to try and improve their conditions, because large numbers of women and young girls worked in a factory, the Bryant and May match factory in London, but some of the conditions they faced were incredibly dangerous and they were exposed to a very toxic chemical that led to a condition called phossy jaw, 'cause they were having to use a chemical called white phosphorous to make the matches so that they could spark and start a little flame, but this led to horrible swellings around people's jaws and this led to really awful illnesses that a lot of these women and girls were starting to face.

So they started to demand better pay, safer conditions, they didn't want to have to eat their food near this white phosphorous that was making them sick.

And so in 1888, the Matchgirls from the factory went on strike.

This is a photo of some of them on strike, and actually if you look really carefully, what's quite sad about this photo is you can see that some of their jaws have started to be really badly affected by this white phosphorus that will eventually cause a condition like this.

So they went on strike, they wanted better conditions, they wanted to be able to work in safe conditions.

And what's quite remarkable about it just before we do our question is that they actually succeeded, they were given slightly better working conditions and their factory owners agreed so that they could eat their lunch in a separate area of the factory to where this white phosphorus was, which was later banned a few years later.

So who went on strike because of working conditions at the Bryant and May factory? Was it one, two, three or four? Pause video now and pick the right one.

It was number two, women and girls who worked there known as Matchgirls, it wasn't Matchy Mac Matchmakers, Matchlads or people who wanted cheaper matches, it was women and girls who worked that known as Matchgirls.

So how far did working conditions improve during the 19th century? Well, given that this is right at the end of the 19th century this strike, does it seem that conditions have suddenly got much better than they were at the beginning? Or does it seem that perhaps conditions have actually stayed relatively similar to how they were before? Well, you'll get a chance to think all that through when we answer our inquiry question, but before you do that, please could you pause the video, read the slides on the next page and answer the comprehension questions, and resume once you're finished.

Right, let's go through those answers.

Question one, when we're working class people given the vote? The correct answer is most working class men won the right to vote in 1884, women could not vote until 1919, the better answer would be, most working class men won the right to vote in 1884, women could not vote until 1919.

Despite not being able to vote, ordinary men and women were still involved in politics in the 19th century.

Question two, what caused the Lancashire Cotton Famine? The correct answer is the US Civil War, but a better answer is, the Lancashire Cotton Famine was caused by the fact that cotton imports were disrupted by the US Civil War, workers of Manchester chose to support Lincoln's anti-slavery cause.

Question three, why did the Matchgirls go on strike in 1888? The correct answer is because it's a terrible pay and dangerous conditions of the Bryant and May factory, but a better answer is, the Matchgirls Strike took place in 1888 because of low pay and dangerous conditions at the Bryant and May factory.

Workers were unhappy about having to work with chemicals like white phosphorus.

Okay, so that's how comprehension question is done, we're now ready to actually answer our inquiry question to pull in all of the knowledge that we've learned over the last four lessons and produce a really good answer to this question, how far did working conditions improve during the 19th century? Now what I've done here is I've come up with a sort of recipe or structure that you could use to answer this, because I think you could probably do this with two paragraphs, in the first paragraph, you could discuss changing laws and changing types of work.

So that would basically be everything we looked at in the first two lessons about the Industrial Revolution and about changing government legislation, 'cause that really is a story with lots of change and we've got the change of the Industrial Revolution, got the changes to the law.

And then in paragraph two, I think we should deal more with the continuities in working conditions, the things that stayed the same or the problems that remained for the entire 19th century, and to do that, you'd have to look at workers thought and did about their own working conditions, so what that would mean is you would need to draw on everything from the past two lessons so the Food Riots, Luddism, Captain Swing, Chartism, the Lancashire Cotton Famine and the Matchgirls Strike.

Now, if you feel super confident and ready to write that answer, please just go ahead and pause the video and use that structure to write it now, and then play on the video to compare it to the answer that I've written.

If you would like a little bit more help however, keep watching the video, go through the model answer that I'm going to give on the next couple of slides and then go back to this page and then have a go at writing it, so if you're ready to write, pause the video now, if you're still here and you haven't paused, let's go through the answer I wrote.

How far did working conditions improve during the 19th century? The 19th century was a period of change, improvement and growth.

England's population grew from 5.

9 million in 1750 to over 21.

4 million in 1870.

People moved from the countryside to towns and cities, with this movement came a shift in the work people did from farming to manufacturing.

In 1800, the working conditions for working class people were awful, Blake's poetry shows how awful life was for some working people, various governments passed acts to try and improve working conditions.

These reforms were not always successful.

In fact, the Whig's Factory Act and New Poor Law actually made working class people even poorer.

To understand the continuity in the conditions and challenges that workers faced, we need to look at the actions of working class people.

In Luddism and the Swing Riots, workers resisted new technology because new machines made many workers unemployed.

Chartism was a much more national movement, but even there historians can see elements of the moral economy of the crowd still intact.

From 1862 to 66, the workers of Manchester chose to support Lincoln's anti-slavery cause in the US Civil War, clearly, they did not just care about improving their own conditions.

Finally, the Matchgirl's Strike shows conditions remained very dangerous for many people at the end of the 19th century.

Okay, so that's the answer I've done and I've not included everything so if yours is different to mine don't worry, there's lots of stuff I've cut out that I could have put in.

But that brings us to the end of our inquiry, well done for all of your hard work.

If you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

Thank you for all your hard work, I've thoroughly enjoyed teaching you about changing working conditions over the 19th century.

Good luck with the rest of your history studies this year.