Open Writing

John Keith Atkinson was the infant son of former agricultural labourers James and Mary Atkinson. The family moved to Holmeside to work at Outcote Mill when their employer lost his farm as small tenanted farms were clawed back by landowners to make bigger and more profitable farms. Their jobs gone, their rented cottages taken from them, they followed other migrants into the town.

Atkinson’s family of seven, father, mother, and five children, of which John was the youngest, lived in the cellar of a crowded badly built house in Holmeside that was shelter to four other families. John’s family occupied the dank sub-basement. Two families occupied two upstairs bedrooms, and another two lived in the two ground floor rooms. The parents of all five families and their older children worked at the mill. An eight-year-old girl from one of the upstairs families stayed home to care for eleven small children, including John.

One Sunday morning as the parents of the five resident families rested at home, John and some of his neighbour’s children played out in the filthy street. Without warning, the whole terraced row fell down killing everyone inside. John and seven other children were orphaned by the disaster and subsequently confined in an institution with two hundred orphans and pauper children. They were held there until they could be apprenticed to clothiers where, under the Apprentice Act, they would be obliged to labour without pay and care until they reached their majority at twenty-one years.

Young John didn’t live long enough to understand the apprentice system. He took his own life when he was still a child in his personal condemnation the of English child slave system. He remembered little of life with his father, mother, and sisters, all of whom perished when the houses collapsed.
What he did remember was the orphanage where life was brutal, burdensome, and devoid of human affection. He and his fellows were constantly reminded that they were paupers with no one to care for them, and that they were to be grateful that Providence had ordained the Institution to care for them. The currency of their thanks was uncomplaining compliance with the harsh rules and regulations that confined their minds, bodies, and souls within its walls. They learned through stripes and fear to yield to the tutors that directed their labours, tormented their minds, abused their bodies, and determined every aspect of their existence. As many others did, John became sad and sullen, lacking the spontaneity commonly associated with children. He lived in permanent dread that another tragedy would crush him.

He remembered the day he and sixty other children were ordered to make paper parcels of their belongings. Brown paper and string were provided. They were packed into the back of two horse drawn caravans and trundled over rough roads for six days before arriving at Outcote Mill. Their bodies were bruised and pained from being confined with no room to stretch during the journey. Jumping down from the carts at journey’s end sent shafts of pain through their joints and muscles.

From the moment he arrived in the care of Reynold Walkden Staithes, young Atkinson was nothing but a factory apprentice, one of many whose individuality and needs were disregarded. This was his introduction to the apprentice system that was allegedly governed by strict laws. However, the provisions of the law were not applied, with the result that appalling cruelties were routinely visited upon vulnerable children.

When manufacturing industries got into their stride as the 17th century eased its way into the 18th century, the demand for apprentices could barely be satisfied. Not because there was a shortage of paupers and orphans, for it is their misfortune that there were many more than there ought to have been, but because burgeoning industries needed progressively more of them. The attraction was that apprentices did not have to be paid.

A London orphan hospital that supplied industrial apprentices received as complaint that, “The eighty children you have ordered to be sent to us from Shrewsbury will not serve for one day's apprenticing!”

It is recorded that 166 orphans and paupers left that hospital in one day bound for north country textile mills. While the best orphan institutions made reasonable efforts to ensure that only those considered good masters were allotted their wards by insisting that persons who could not satisfy the hospital as to their good and kind characters by references from ‘responsible persons,’ since there was no follow up on the progress and treatment of the infants, their welfare was not visible to those that had farmed them out on trust.

The Apprentice System outgrew all expectations and reached a magnitude that rendered impossible the control of the care of orphan apprentices that was supposed to be mandatory under the terms of most institutions. Men wholly unfitted for the confidence reposed in them for the care of children were granted innocents to work in their mills. Some acquired certification of good character through dishonest methods. They treated children obtained by false depositions and bogus references with barbarity, and in some cases, with murderous cruelty.

Children were usually apprenticed at the age of seven, although it is known that many were much younger. Masters agreed to accept the responsibility to have children educated civilly and spiritually. The principal object of governors in orphanages and similar institutions was to get as many children as possible off their hands as quickly as possible by finding places for them. So great was the pressure for places in orphanages and asylums that the policy was to keep them no longer than was necessary. Such children were bound by law to their masters until the age of twenty-one.