I have recently been reading an
interesting article on this subject (Katerina Honeyman: The Poor Law,
The Parish Apprentice and the Textile Industries in the North of
England, 1780-1830 in Northern History, XLIV: 2, September 2007).
Children were assumed to be amenable to the discipline, monotony and
unrelenting pace of work in the textile industries, and they were cheap.
Often this labour was found locally. Where this was insufficient to meet
the demand for labour, the search went further afield and this often
meant advertising in the newspapers of the most populous towns. However
this did not always bring satisfactory results as there were often
problems of control and discipline, and the constant turnover was a
problem for employers.
It was this that led employers to engage Parish Apprentices. They also
came without interfering parents and there seemed to be an endless
supply. At the same time it eased the finances of parishes by reducing
the number of paupers they were housing/feeding. This was a relatively
stable workforce, because although absconding was not uncommon, it
difficult to move between employers.
The paupers were mainly drawn from parishes in the big cities,
particularly London, but also Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool. They
were usually a supplement to, rather than in preference to local
It might have been thought that the pauper apprentices were mainly used
in isolated water mills, but evidence shows that this was not
necessarily the case. It is particularly interesting to see that we have
an example of pauper apprentices in a local mill. This was the Euxton
Mill producing cotton twist that was run by Harrison and Leyland (no
relation!). They are thought to have had 40 pauper apprentices, but it
is not known from where they came.
The experience of paupers in their factories varied widely with some
atrocious living and working conditions. The paupers in Harrison and
Leylands Mill seem to have had a mixed experience, working 13-14 hours
per day; education, diet, clothing, accommodation, health, medical
treatment and welfare assessed as adequate. Presumably Harrison and
Leyland needed to employ Parish Apprentices because there was
competition for local labour with other employers in the Chorley and
John Harrison of Euxton, Cotton Spinner, was named as the son of John
Harrison, gentleman of Chorley, formerly a cotton twist manufacturer,
who died in 1819, and had been a friend of Thomas Chadwick of Chorley
Moor (and member of the Burgh/Birkacre family). The Harrisons and
Leylands, like the Chadwicks were Catholic families.