Richard Oastler’s campaign for Yorkshire’s slaves

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 15:18:00 GMT

New book reappraises a renowned movement to curtail child labour in Britain’s dark, satanic mills

ONE of the most revered of all Yorkshiremen, William Wilberforce, is famous for his key role in Britain’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.  Another Yorkshireman, Richard Oastler, also became a renowned campaigner – after turning his attention to what he controversially dubbed slavery within the county itself.

Oastler, who was born in Leeds and lived from 1789 to 1861, was outraged by child labour in Yorkshire’s mills and factories and he used the county’s newspapers to launch a campaign that eventually resulted in legislation which restricted the number of hours that adults – and therefore their children – were allowed to work.  It resulted in Oastler – a powerful orator – being hailed by his legions of supporters as the “Factory King”.

Now a new book by some of Yorkshire’s leading historians has re-examined Oastler’s impact and drawn parallels between the campaign to abolish transatlantic slavery and the fight to curtail child labour within Britain.

Entitled Slavery in Yorkshire; Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution, it is edited by Dr John A. Hargreaves and E.A. Hilary Haigh (pictured right) of the University of Huddersfield.  The book is the final chapter in the University of Huddersfield Archives’ Heritage Lottery-funded Your Heritage project, designed to commemorate the victims of what Oastler termed ‘Yorkshire Slavery’ and to celebrate our local heritage and the leadership of Oastler and others in the national campaign to reduce the hours worked by children in the mills to ten per day.

Activities in the project included a play based on 1830s sources devised and delivered by the Lawrence Batley Youth Theatre and work with the University of the First Age, but the major public event was a conference on Yorkshire Slavery, attended by over 100 people, the talks at which form the basis of this new book.

“Scenes of misery”

Oastler was the steward of Fixby Hall, near Huddersfield, and it was there, in 1830 that he penned his famous Slavery in Yorkshire letter.  It was published by the Leeds Mercury on 16 October.  In it, Oastler hailed the campaign to abolished slavery, but then directed attention to what he called “scenes of misery, acts of oppression and victims of slavery, even on the threshold of our homes”.

He went on: “Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town... are this very moment existing in state of Slavery more horrid than are victims of that hellish system – ‘Colonial Slavery’.  These innocent creatures draw out unpitied, their short but miserable existence, in a place famed for its profession of religious zeal... The very streets which receive the droppings of an ‘Anti-Slavery Society’ are every morning wet by the tears of innocent victims of the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled not by the cart-whip of the negro slave driver but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the overlooker, to hasten, half-dressed but not-half fed, to this magazine of British Infantile Slavery – the Worsted Mills in the town and neighbourhood of Bradford!”

Oastler’s letter alleged that “thousands of little children, both male and female, but principally female, from seven to fourteen years of age are daily compelled to labour from six o’clock in the morning to seven in the evening with... only thirty minutes allowed for eating and recreation.”

The letter launched what would be one of the most celebrated but often controversial campaigns of the nineteenth century, propelling Oastler to national fame and notoriety.

Yorkshire-based historians

The new Slavery in Yorkshire book, which contains large numbers of illustrations, has seven chapters by six historians – Dr Hargreaves provides the scene-setting introduction and concludes with a major new assessment of Oastler and his impact.

The other Yorkshire-based historians who contribute are:

• Professor James Walvin (University of York), on William Wilberforce, Yorkshire and the campaign to end transatlantic slavery
• D. Colin Dews (Secretary of the Wesley Historical Society, Yorkshire) on Richard Oastler’s Methodist background.
• Dr John Halstead (University of Sheffield) on the Huddersfield Short Time Committee and its radical associations between 1820 and 1876
• Professor Edward Royle (University of York) on Oastler’s Yorkshire slavery campaign in the early 1830s
• Dr Janette Martin (University of Huddersfield - pictured right), on Richard Oastler’s triumphant return to Huddersfield in 1844, after he had served more than three years in jail for debt

The book is introduced by University of Huddersfield historian and Pro-Vice Chancellor Professor Tim Thornton and the foreword is from the Methodist minister Revd Dr Inderjit Bhogal OBE, who chaired the initiative Set All Free, which marked the bi-centenary of the act to abolish the Transatlantic slave trade.

• Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution (rrp £24) is published by the University of Huddersfield Press – Queensgate, Huddersfield HD1 3DH (press@hud.ac.uk).  ISBN 978-1-86218-107-76. The book is available at £20 from www.store.hud.ac.uk.