Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

BRITAIN AT WORK. 196 numerous and the output the greatest. Twenty years ago the lot of the brickmaker was even worse than it is to-day. Around the huts in the brickfield “ sunburnt men, whose scanty clothes were of much the same colour as their skins, desperately ran their top-heavy barrow-loads hour after hour, under a perhaps almost tropical sun; there the barrow-loader ceaselessly swung himself from leg’ to leg- as he lifted his tale of bricks on the barrow; while that other worker, who by her length of draggled skirt should be a woman, claimed no exception on account of her sex, but rough-shaped the rough clay and supplied the moulder next to her as if he were an insatiable machine and not a creature of flesh and blood.” The wealthy son is said to be “ born with a silver spoon in his mouth.” There is a clumsy variant of the saying, the clay worker ruefully confessing that his boy is “ born with a brick in his mouth.” Any- how, his offspring, boys or girls, are impelled or drift into his occupation. In many of the large brickfields machinery has ousted child labour, but brickmaking in the Black Country is still carried on to a great extent by hand— and feet. The moulder is paid by the thousand bricks. To see him handling the clay one might imagine that he was away in Egypt, hurrying at the command of Pharaoh’s taskmaster. He is not only a worker but a taskmaster himself, inasmuch as he has to engineer his gang, usually members of his own family, to a profit. The clay is wheeled to the “ pug mill,” which, worked by steam or horse power, is self-delivering, and, if built to economise time, is within reach of the moulder ; but if at a distance from his working place, the clay, cut in lumps to make three or four bricks, is passed on by the flat-walker to the moulder. He flings it into the mould, empties it, shaped, on the pallet board, and from thence it is carried away singly, or placed on the barrow-loader for transit to the hack to dry and to the kiln for burning. The introduction of brick- making machinery has dispensed in some fields with both the flat-walker and the pug boy; but in the Black Country many women are still employed in the brickfields, not only in the manipulation of bricks, but in brick burning, dressing, and loading. The Legislature has restricted female employment to some extent, but the “ clay dabber chicks ” —the women workers in clay—have been allowed, like the pit-brow lassies at the Wigan collieries, to continue their toil. They are not so bedraggled as formerly. They work with naked feet, but their gowns are tucked up more or less neatly, and they wear a handkerchief head-covering, less glaring in tint, but tied something after the picturesque style of the girls who grind out barrel-organ tunes in city street. The men brick moulders make good wages, if they are persistent and temperate. The women are sooner fatigued, clay being a heavy and very unyielding material to handle ; but, according to physique and conditions of employment, they earn from six shillings to twenty shillings per week, the latter sum, however, being considered quite a lucky wage, for though the female moulder, like the knight in the age of chivalry, is attended by a “ page,” who systematically carries away the product of her toil, she works in such intense heat and under such other disabilities that she seldom moulds more than eight hundred or one thousand bricks daily. The report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the sweating system, commenting on the industrial condition of the nailmakers and the chainmakers of the Black Country, admitted that a hard week’s work of twelve hours a day provided no more than a bare subsistence for the men and women engaged in the work, and particu- larly deprecated the treadling by women of the “ oliver,” the heavy sledge-hammer, as altogether too great a strain on the female organism. Wages are, perhaps, a trifle higher than when the report was issued, and there has been some little improvement in the industrial conditions of women’s work in the Black Country : in fact, there is a more evident disposition to reduce, and even to abolish, female work in the brickyards. But the pre- vailing servitude is painfully reflected in the social life of the people. They are spoken of scoffingly as “ peaky blinders,” and are no freer than any other labouring section of the com- munity from the rougher element ; but in the main they are a hard-working, patient, endur- ing folk, especially when it is remembered that in their daily struggling the scriptural doctrine that riches are the root of all evil