John Keith Atkinson's Life aa a Child Laborour

John Keith Atkinson was the son of former agricultural labourers James and Mary Atkinson. They moved to Holmeside to work in Outcote Mill when their agricultural employer’s farm was sold by the landowner to another landowner to make his holdings bigger and more profitable. With their jobs gone and their tied home lost, they followed other migrants into the town. John was an infant when they moved.

In Holmeside the Atkinson family, including five children, lived in the fusty cellar of an already crowded house that gave rude shelter to four families besides them. Two families occupied two upstairs bedrooms, and another two lived in a single ground floor room. The parents of all five families and the older children worked at Staithes’ mill. An eight-year-old girl stayed home to care for eleven small children, including John Atkinson.

One Sunday morning as the families rested at home, John and some of the neighbours’ children played out in the filthy street. Without warning, the whole terrace rumbled and fell down in a heap of flying bricks and dust killing everyone inside. John and seven other children were orphaned. Subsequently they were confined in an institution along with two hundred other orphans and pauper children. They were kept until they could be sold as apprentices to clothiers and factory owners. Under the Apprentice Act, they were obliged to labour without pay or care until they reached the age of twenty-one years.

John Atkinson did not live long enough to understand the apprentice system. He took his own life when he was still young. This act was his condemnation of the English child slave system. He remembered little of his father or mother or sisters, all of whom had perished in the collapse. He often wished he ha...

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...ildren off their hands as quickly as possible by finding places for them. So great was the need for places in orphanages and asylums that the policy was to keep children no longer than was necessary. If they sent out under age children, well, no one cared a fig.

A hundred and sixteen orphans and paupers left a London orphan hospital on a single day to supply the demands of northern textile mills. While the best orphan institutions made reasonable efforts to ensure that only good masters received children, there was no follow up on the progress and treatment of the infants, and their welfare was unknown to the disinterested that farmed them out. Men altogether unfitted for the care of children were given helpless innocents. Some masters obtained certification of good character by dishonesty, and treated children with barbarity and, in many cases, murderous cruelty.