Joseph Rayner Stephens
Joseph Rayner Stephens was a troublemaker of the most useful kind. . Born in 1805, the son of a Methodist minister, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School and the Leeds Methodist School. A teacher, minister and missionary, Joseph was passionately concerned with injustice and the lot of England’s working classes. It led to his being sacked from a succession of posts within the Church, and he was even imprisoned at one point, for advocating the separation of Church and state (it still hasn’t happened).
By 1849, Stephens was gathering first-person accounts of the lot of working people, for his publication ‘The Ashton Chronicle’ (he was now running his own, independent chapel in the Lancashire town of Ashton-under-Lyne. The stories make harrowing reading today, but none more so than the shocking story of factory worker John Birley. When Stephens sat down with pen and paper to take down John’s tale, he assumed he was talking to a much older man, albeit one ‘little more than the size of a boy’. Birley’s condition was due to years of malnourishment coupled with back-breaking 100-plus-hour weeks. To Stephens’ amazement, John turned out to have been born in the same year as the preacher-journalist, and was in early middle age. ‘Sunken, worn and haggard, he might easily have been taken for sixty’.
John recalled his early years. Born in Hare Street, Bethnal Green he had seen his father die when he was just two, his mother following three years later, after a lingering stay in the London Hospital. John and sister Sarah were orphans and entered the Bethnal Green Workhouse. Things apparently weren’t so bad (though the appalling later events may have lent these days a rosy tinge). ‘We had good food, good beds and liberty two or three times a week. We were taught to read and in every respect treated kindly’.
Things changed dramatically when a Derbyshire mill owner came recruiting apprentices. The pressure on the Workhouse Guardians to reduce costs was great, and the opportunity to turn burdensome children into useful and productive workers must have been strong. The view of Mr Nicholls, master of the workhouse, on life ‘in the country’ seems optimistic at best though. ‘He used to tell us what fine sport we should have amongst the hills, what time we should have for play and pleasure. He said we should have plenty of roast beef and get plenty of money, and come back gentlemen to see our friends.’
So when John and 40 friends were called into the Guardians room and asked if they would like ‘to go into the country’ the naive boys and girls agreed. Being a group of six and seven year olds they were hardly equipped to make a choice. Twenty of them were picked and carriages came to take them to a canalboat at Paddington. If the children were unaware of what awaited, a clue was given by the weeping women who flanked the workhouse door, crying “Shame on them, to send poor little children away from home in that fashion.” One advised the children to make a break for it.
A long trip to Buxton and the first shocks awaited. Though starving, the children couldn’t stomach the food - vinegary tasting Derbyshire oatcake. The children were pressed into 17-hour days, Saturday and Sunday too. Meals of gruel, oatcake and milk were taken standing at the machines. Any dissent or drop in the pace of work was rewarded with a beating from the master and his sons, armed with staves. John’s elbow was shattered as he raised his arm to defend his face. Others were less lucky, with one girl, Sarah Goodling being repeatedly knocked to the floor by an overseer, James Birch. She was carried to the Apprentice House (the dormitory where the children were locked in each night) and there she died.
Birley and another boy, John Oats, wrote a letter and managed to get it to the local post office at Tydeswell. It told the Bethnal Green guardians what was really happening at the mill. The letter was opened, shown to the master, Needham, and the boys’ reward was such a beating that ‘we could scarcely crawl’. In truth, the guardians were only too ready to be deceived. They visited a few weeks later and were treated to a group of hastily spruced up children reciting lines they had been taught, about how happy they were. ‘Needham and his sons were in the room at the time. They asked us questions about our treatment, which we answered as we had been told, not daring to do any other, knowing what would happen if we told them the truth,’ recalled John.
Miraculously it seems, John did survive, though a beaten and broken man. Joseph Rayner would continue his fight, eventually dying in 1879 at age 74. But of his contemporary, John Birley, there is no record after that day in 1849.