Newbottle Collieries continued.....
The Mines act 1842 – no female or child labour in mines.
In 1842 a commission, set up largely as a result of Ashley’s agitation, published it’s report on female and child labour in the mines. It shocked the country When it was revealed that the employment of children as young as seven was common and that in some pits, children were as young as six or even five years old.
The smallest children were often employed as trappers- operating the trap doors that controlled the ventilation of the mine. The safety of the mine was down to them. Many of them worked sixteen hours a day, in the darkness and damp and always alone. In some mines small children were harnessed to trucks and made to drag the coal to the shaft bottom. There the woman was expected to carry the coal in baskets to the surface by climbing ladders.
The act would be policed by inspectors, who were appointed to see that the new law was carried out.
(Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1801-1885, Philanthropist, and Earl of Caernarfon)